From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’... more From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s. The Lover’s Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck’s subtitle ‘A Strange Truth’ and the word ‘strange’ appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells.
In Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), the heroine Cassandra is asked by her sister Rose, ... more In Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), the heroine Cassandra is asked by her sister Rose, ‘Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice.’ So too have many other writers, adapters, and fans of Jane Austen in a variety of circumstances and contexts, but they have not confined themselves to the beginning of Austen’s most famous novel: they have ranged over almost everything she wrote. There seems to be no end to the ways in which readers, viewers, and the general public want to engage with Jane Austen, be it Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless, which transplants Emma to Los Angeles, or the annual Regency ball at Chatsworth, for which guests are invited to dress as Austen characters. It is true that Pride and Prejudice dominates, particularly as it was brought to the screen in the 1995 BBC adaptation written by Andrew Davies. For instance, in Pride and Platypus, billed as being by ‘Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian’, Mr Darcy is a platypus so often that he has a wet shirt, a clear reference to the iconic image of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerging from the lake. Mr Darcy has told his own story at least three times, the Bennet family’s servants have had theirs told in Jo Baker’s Longbourn, and the central love story of Pride and Prejudice has been co-opted for various dubiously erotic retellings. Both Austen’s characters and Austen herself have turned detective, and Austen has also become an action figure and a vampire, while Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does what it says on the tin. Even such a list as this, various and multifarious as it is, by no means exhausts the reuses and reworkings of Austen on screen and in print, and there are also numerous self-published fan fiction responses to Austen and her novels. I do not think she has been to outer space yet, but it is surely only a matter of time.
Abstract: This essay argues that Othello’s and Desdemona’s imaginations work in different ways, w... more Abstract: This essay argues that Othello’s and Desdemona’s imaginations work in different ways, with his drawn to the mythopoeic and hers to the practical and personal. This difference finds expression in the play in a tension between women’s lived experience and a culturally validated urge to see the feminine in terms of the abstract and symbolic, embodied in its setting on Cyprus, the legendary home of the goddess Venus. The essay traces how the connection to Venus is explored not only in Othello but also in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), which like so much of Ford’s work builds on and responds to Othello, and which helps us understand the importance of Venus’ island both to Ford’s own play and to Othello.
This essay explores the politics of the colour scheme in John Webster’s tragedies The White Devil... more This essay explores the politics of the colour scheme in John Webster’s tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. On the face of it, we are offered a clear and absolute opposition between black and white in which black, predictably, is bad, and white, equally predictably, is good. We argue, however, that it is actually white which is represented as the more sinister of the two colours, for reasons connected to the plays’ interest in the bodies and behaviour of rulers, specifically James I’s scheme for the annexation of Russia and his reburial of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.Reading the plays in relation to these two contemporary events, we argue that in his two great tragedies Webster prises open the instability of the term “white” to lay bare a tension between the spiritual and the material which reveals the darker side of whiteness.
The two terms of this book's title-'culture' and 'myth'-map the territory of its contents, which ... more The two terms of this book's title-'culture' and 'myth'-map the territory of its contents, which span more or less a decade of work (1984-94) in a particular area of Shakespeare studies. The subtitle derives from a collection of essays by various hands, published in 1988 as The Shakespeare Myth. The term 'myth' was derived from Roland Barthes' Mythologies i was an attempt to identify a powerful cultural institution, constructed around the figure of Shakespeare, that could be analysed to some degree separately from the person of the Elizabethan dramatist, and the texts of his works. Traditional Shakespeare criticism, as it is still very widely practised, consists of reading and interpreting the plays and poems; seeking to unlock their intrinsic meanings by reference to the author's assumed 'intentions' or to the historical context in which he wrote; analysing the plays in relation to their origins in the Elizabethan theatre and so on. The Shakespeare Myth sought a different approach:
This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays befor... more This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays before the Protestant Reformation, remained a presence in drama and popular entertainment long after one would have expected him to have disappeared. It notes his importance in the agricultural calendar, his strong association with fireworks, his popular designation as a specifically English saint, and some of the customs traditionally observed on his feast day of 23 April. It then moves on to consider some of the plays in which he is mentioned or alluded to, including works by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, as well as a romance by Richard Johnson that was later dramatized, and culminates with references in three plays produced by members of the Cavendish family of Bolsover and Welbeck. It argues that referring to St George offered a way of talking about Englishness even when (perhaps especially when) that concept was contested, and also suggests that t...
This essay argues that Webster was more than just the dramatist ‘much possessed by death’ depicte... more This essay argues that Webster was more than just the dramatist ‘much possessed by death’ depicted by T. S. Eliot but a bold and innovative writer. Taking advantage of the emergence of an exceptionally gifted boy actor, he brought a new and more realistic type of woman to the English Renaissance stage, and also two unusually disturbed and psychologised male characters, one who thinks he is a wolf and one who looks into water and sees a monster. He also benefited from the King’s Men’s move to an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, when the Globe burned down soon after the first performances of The Duchess of Malfi, not least because one of those who lived near the new theatre had been Lady Arbella Stuart, whose story chimed very closely with that of the Duchess. Finally he astonished by the richness of his imagery, which together with his recurrent use of sententiae (pithy sayings) creates a sense that the play has a language all of its own. Eliot was right to identify Webster as violen...
In March or April every year since 2013 there has been another kind of convening on Cyprus, that ... more In March or April every year since 2013 there has been another kind of convening on Cyprus, that of ‘Othello’s Island’, an annual conference on mediaeval and Renaissance art, literature, social and cultural history (http://www.othellosisland.org/), held in 2013 and 2014 at the Cornaro Institute in Larnaca and in 2015 and 2016 at the Centre for Visual Arts Research in Nicosia and inspired and guided by Dr Michael Paraskos. This special issue brings together selected essays from these first three years of the conference, and I have not attempted to erase in the editing process the sense of place with which many of them are charged: it is part of the point. It is also notable that although almost all the essays speak specifically of Cyprus, they do not speak of the same Cyprus, not only because they reflect two different conference venues but more fundamentally because Cyprus is rarely the same as itself. In the opening essay, Roger Christofides points out that ‘from the perspective of...
From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’... more From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s. The Lover’s Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck’s subtitle ‘A Strange Truth’ and the word ‘strange’ appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells.
In Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), the heroine Cassandra is asked by her sister Rose, ... more In Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), the heroine Cassandra is asked by her sister Rose, ‘Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice.’ So too have many other writers, adapters, and fans of Jane Austen in a variety of circumstances and contexts, but they have not confined themselves to the beginning of Austen’s most famous novel: they have ranged over almost everything she wrote. There seems to be no end to the ways in which readers, viewers, and the general public want to engage with Jane Austen, be it Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless, which transplants Emma to Los Angeles, or the annual Regency ball at Chatsworth, for which guests are invited to dress as Austen characters. It is true that Pride and Prejudice dominates, particularly as it was brought to the screen in the 1995 BBC adaptation written by Andrew Davies. For instance, in Pride and Platypus, billed as being by ‘Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian’, Mr Darcy is a platypus so often that he has a wet shirt, a clear reference to the iconic image of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerging from the lake. Mr Darcy has told his own story at least three times, the Bennet family’s servants have had theirs told in Jo Baker’s Longbourn, and the central love story of Pride and Prejudice has been co-opted for various dubiously erotic retellings. Both Austen’s characters and Austen herself have turned detective, and Austen has also become an action figure and a vampire, while Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does what it says on the tin. Even such a list as this, various and multifarious as it is, by no means exhausts the reuses and reworkings of Austen on screen and in print, and there are also numerous self-published fan fiction responses to Austen and her novels. I do not think she has been to outer space yet, but it is surely only a matter of time.
Abstract: This essay argues that Othello’s and Desdemona’s imaginations work in different ways, w... more Abstract: This essay argues that Othello’s and Desdemona’s imaginations work in different ways, with his drawn to the mythopoeic and hers to the practical and personal. This difference finds expression in the play in a tension between women’s lived experience and a culturally validated urge to see the feminine in terms of the abstract and symbolic, embodied in its setting on Cyprus, the legendary home of the goddess Venus. The essay traces how the connection to Venus is explored not only in Othello but also in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), which like so much of Ford’s work builds on and responds to Othello, and which helps us understand the importance of Venus’ island both to Ford’s own play and to Othello.
This essay explores the politics of the colour scheme in John Webster’s tragedies The White Devil... more This essay explores the politics of the colour scheme in John Webster’s tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. On the face of it, we are offered a clear and absolute opposition between black and white in which black, predictably, is bad, and white, equally predictably, is good. We argue, however, that it is actually white which is represented as the more sinister of the two colours, for reasons connected to the plays’ interest in the bodies and behaviour of rulers, specifically James I’s scheme for the annexation of Russia and his reburial of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.Reading the plays in relation to these two contemporary events, we argue that in his two great tragedies Webster prises open the instability of the term “white” to lay bare a tension between the spiritual and the material which reveals the darker side of whiteness.
The two terms of this book's title-'culture' and 'myth'-map the territory of its contents, which ... more The two terms of this book's title-'culture' and 'myth'-map the territory of its contents, which span more or less a decade of work (1984-94) in a particular area of Shakespeare studies. The subtitle derives from a collection of essays by various hands, published in 1988 as The Shakespeare Myth. The term 'myth' was derived from Roland Barthes' Mythologies i was an attempt to identify a powerful cultural institution, constructed around the figure of Shakespeare, that could be analysed to some degree separately from the person of the Elizabethan dramatist, and the texts of his works. Traditional Shakespeare criticism, as it is still very widely practised, consists of reading and interpreting the plays and poems; seeking to unlock their intrinsic meanings by reference to the author's assumed 'intentions' or to the historical context in which he wrote; analysing the plays in relation to their origins in the Elizabethan theatre and so on. The Shakespeare Myth sought a different approach:
This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays befor... more This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays before the Protestant Reformation, remained a presence in drama and popular entertainment long after one would have expected him to have disappeared. It notes his importance in the agricultural calendar, his strong association with fireworks, his popular designation as a specifically English saint, and some of the customs traditionally observed on his feast day of 23 April. It then moves on to consider some of the plays in which he is mentioned or alluded to, including works by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, as well as a romance by Richard Johnson that was later dramatized, and culminates with references in three plays produced by members of the Cavendish family of Bolsover and Welbeck. It argues that referring to St George offered a way of talking about Englishness even when (perhaps especially when) that concept was contested, and also suggests that t...
This essay argues that Webster was more than just the dramatist ‘much possessed by death’ depicte... more This essay argues that Webster was more than just the dramatist ‘much possessed by death’ depicted by T. S. Eliot but a bold and innovative writer. Taking advantage of the emergence of an exceptionally gifted boy actor, he brought a new and more realistic type of woman to the English Renaissance stage, and also two unusually disturbed and psychologised male characters, one who thinks he is a wolf and one who looks into water and sees a monster. He also benefited from the King’s Men’s move to an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, when the Globe burned down soon after the first performances of The Duchess of Malfi, not least because one of those who lived near the new theatre had been Lady Arbella Stuart, whose story chimed very closely with that of the Duchess. Finally he astonished by the richness of his imagery, which together with his recurrent use of sententiae (pithy sayings) creates a sense that the play has a language all of its own. Eliot was right to identify Webster as violen...
In March or April every year since 2013 there has been another kind of convening on Cyprus, that ... more In March or April every year since 2013 there has been another kind of convening on Cyprus, that of ‘Othello’s Island’, an annual conference on mediaeval and Renaissance art, literature, social and cultural history (http://www.othellosisland.org/), held in 2013 and 2014 at the Cornaro Institute in Larnaca and in 2015 and 2016 at the Centre for Visual Arts Research in Nicosia and inspired and guided by Dr Michael Paraskos. This special issue brings together selected essays from these first three years of the conference, and I have not attempted to erase in the editing process the sense of place with which many of them are charged: it is part of the point. It is also notable that although almost all the essays speak specifically of Cyprus, they do not speak of the same Cyprus, not only because they reflect two different conference venues but more fundamentally because Cyprus is rarely the same as itself. In the opening essay, Roger Christofides points out that ‘from the perspective of...
This new series, co-edited by Lisa Hopkins and Tanya Pollard, offers fresh approaches to the play... more This new series, co-edited by Lisa Hopkins and Tanya Pollard, offers fresh approaches to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, or studies that put Shakespeare in dialogue with other playwrights of the period. The series does not seek to privilege any particular theoretical position but accommodates a range of new perspectives on how these plays work and why they still matter. Above all the series makes available new writing, including from emerging scholars, which is energised by the insights produced by recent editorial work on the plays and by enquiries and experiments into how they can work on the stage and what the effects of original performance conditions might be
This edited collection aims to pull together new research on early modern British/European litera... more This edited collection aims to pull together new research on early modern British/European literary or historical perceptions of ‘the road’ and its cognates. Such research might ask questions of how the road contributes to British identity, and/or might include any or none of the following: post-Reformation views of pilgrimage or the sense of Christian journeying in texts such as Pilgrim’s Progress, perceptions of Roman or pre-Roman road heritage, of the winding nature of England’s ‘rolling roads’, of the mail and post-horse network, the idea of speed in ‘post-haste’ or of news travelling the highroads via itinerant merchant-newstellers or informers. It might consider the traditions of ancient church-way paths, cursuses, crossroads both physical and metaphorical, the roadside gallows or the place of the inn. It might reflect on the nature of travelling communities or the relation of characters like Autolycus, Ariel, or Puck to masterless wanderers and devils. It could include accounts of perceptions of mobility, both literal and figurative. It might also consider the representation of roads on maps and early modern surveying and mapping practices. These suggestions are indicative rather than prescriptive.
Table of contents for Journal of Mediterranean Studies 25.1 (2016), special issue on 'Othello and... more Table of contents for Journal of Mediterranean Studies 25.1 (2016), special issue on 'Othello and his Islands: Papers from the First Three Othello's Island Conferences'
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