Paper Session 2

On to the next paper session. Dr. Gretchen Shultz from Emory University will be moderating this session.

Genevieve Love: Shoemaker's Holiday Pedophobia

Love finds a mystery in Ralph's missing leg. Nothing seems to take advantage of the missing limb in a textual. Dekker's play is uninterested in literary prosthesis, and thus calls attention to the absence of Ralph's missing leg. Ralph clearly possesses the means of creating his own prosthesis, and we are to understand his trade a shoemaker to be a compliment to his missing limb rather than a supplement.

The "dissability is both important and unimportant." Ralph (and Dekker) use it as a crutch; when it is useful, character and playwright call attention to it, when it is not, the missing limb is ignored. Ralph's entrance in a morris dance calls attention to the theatrical convenience of the missing limb: no stage directions or other actions call attention to his lame or crutch dancing.

"Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread though he has but three fingers on a hand." The shoemaker does not need his foot. The absence of a foot creates a distance between the shoemaker and his shoe. Even where characters do not pay attention to the missing leg, this distance puts it ever in the mind of the audience.

The stage property itself inherits this absence. The shoe itself is incomplete without a foot to put it on. The empty space of Ralph's missing leg forces the shoemaker to create works reliant on an external other for completion. It "presses upon us the shoe that is missing a foot."

Andrea Stevens: Blackface, Women Actors, and Walter Montagu's Shepherds' Paradise

Very notably, Shepherds' Paradise defied all known conventions of the early modern stage. It employed female actors, took eight hours to perform, four months to rehearse, and was performed on a stage designed by Inigo Jones. Stevens suggests that, in the late-early 1600s, there was a vogue of female blackface productions, citing several plays, including one by the King's Men in 1637.

The Shepherds' Paradise uses blackness as a means of "temporary refuge." The convention of the female actors that start as white, turn black, and end as white may allow for a greater sense of liberty. I wonder: Would audiences have been more accepting of female actors in blackface? Was it a cause or a symptom of something else?

Stevens sees a connection between male actor's distrust of women on stage as being a motivation for the trope of female blackface. The purification that follows represents a return to classic, safe, femininity.

William Proctor Williams: "Behold the Child": Aaron's Baby in Text and Performance.

Williams emphasises that Aaron's child, as the sole surviving member of the previous royal family, is more important than most productions will acknowledge. The importance of the child changes when Aaron barters for its safety with Lucius as a condition of providing information to to Titus' avenging son. Once Lucius swears the oath, the child becomes the ward of the future emperor of Rome, and thus a gauge of Lucius' honor.

Williams continues to point out that the child is, in many modern productions, reduced to the object of late act conjuration. To avoid this, the child should have a greater stage presence than he is typically accorded. Given his argument of the child as an icon of Lucius' honor. Williams has cited a production where the show concludes with Lucius murdering the child, and thus giving the audience a clear sign that Rome is damned to barbarism.

Given Love's talk on the missing limb in Shoemaker's holiday, I can't help but think of the effect of the missing baby in Shepherds' Buried Child. Clearly Shakespeare is going for a very different effect. Aaron's baby is a presence, not an absence, and I cite Shepherds' play here to make the contrast clear.

If you're in town and reading this, I heartily recommend stopping by the ASC performance of Titus tonight to see how they handle the child.

Joe Folocco: An Ideological Defense of Early Modern Staging

Folocco warms up with some ideological critiques of early modern staging practices. Does early modern staging support a colonialist philosophical and intellectual imperialist view of the world? Judging by the laughs he's getting, probably not.

Early modern staging attempts to bypass modern cultural materialism by what seems to amount to a very close reading of the text. This style of production seems to honor the perceived intentions of the playwright through the literal words he has used.

Folocco cites our own Ralph Alan Cohen in his estimation of early modern practices as a way of engaging the audience and making them "an active participant in performance." It seems pretty clear to me (and I dare say anyone else who has seen a show at ASC) that this performance technique is more engaging than "fourth wall" staging practices.

Still, in this humble theatrician's experience, more and more theatres are exploring staging techniques that are more deliberately engaging (such as thrust staging, general, or more-general lighting). Early modern staging seems to have gained more traction out in the practical world than I think some of the early critiques of it Folocco cited would suggest.

Lars Engle: Middleton Performing Morality

As the title of his presentation suggests, Engle explores Middleton's moral structure. We assume that Middleton was influenced by Shakespeare, but Engle proposes that Middleton, or at least Middleton's moralization, had influenced Shakespeare. He cites the example of Middleton's Phoenix, which he sees as having several clear influences on Measure for Measure.

His actors explore Middleton's dramatization of a virtuous woman set against the male bond of her husband and his friends. The Captain, under the weight of his own sense of personal and sexual inadequacy, can only violently repudiate his wife. The relationship between Phoenix, the Captain's wife, prefigures the relationship between Desdemona, Othello, and Iago. The process by which social institutions like marriage have a transforming effect on individuals "may have caught Shakespeare's attention."

Matthew Davies: The Caesura in Action

I'm trying to make a joke out of pausing for a moment, but they're all falling a little flat right now, so just imagine your own. Davies introduces the difference between a caesura in speech and one in print, or rather the lack of actual difference between the two. He observes that epic caesuras seem to occur more often in the presence of feminine endings.

He cites Cicely Berry in the feminine ending providing the line with a pause for thought at the end. Such an extra unstressed syllable may call into question the entire metrical order of the line. The caesura, in theory, is "born of its own anxiety." It is not a pause, it is either a "hiatus" or a "halt." It should not interrupt the current of the sense of the phrase.

While the implications for this in a single line might be a little more obvious, Davies' actors go on to explore the effect of the caesura using one of John Barton's exercises in exploring Twelfth Night. It is not only the placement of the caesura in a conversation that the actor must consider, but who has it. Davies argues that the caesura can function as a spotlight: the actor who takes it is the one who draws focus.

Davies also calls attention to caesuras that are built into the text. First his actors demonstrate when a pause is necessary after Romeo's line "give me my sin again." Davies then proposes a very interesting rhetorical device tat Shakepeare uses in Julius Caesar. Brutus has tried to sway the mob with prose and failed, and when he dies, he returns to a verse structure "affording him the dignity of dying on a rhyming couplet," and thus demonstrating a return to the order of the rest of the play. The caesura in this line, of course, comes when Brutus dies.

Since we were missing a presenter for this session, we've adjourned a little bit early. At 5 well go to various breakout sessions, and since I can't be in three places at once, I'll be back a little bit later this evening with a report from one of those.