Catherine Belsey

Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece

Lucrece tells a story about possession and dispossession. The woman at the centre of the narrative is treated as the proper possession of her husband – or perhaps her father: propriety evidently defines women as property in Shakespeares Rome. But possessions can be expropriated and property owners may be dispossessed. Tarquin takes improper possession of the faithful wife of his comrade-in-arms on the basis of an irresistible desire and, thus possessed, in the distinctive sense that he is impelled to act against his own judgement, Tarquin loses his self-possession and, as a result, his identity as friend, kinsman, prince, Roman lord. At the last, publicly exposed, shamed by Lucreces suicide, and driven in consequence from what was his proper place in Rome, along with the entire royal family that has taken possession of the city, Tarquin is doubly dispossessed by a womans constancy. Recent criticism is divided on the sexual politics of the poem. Reacting incisively against those male readers who had followed St Augustine to find Lucretia guilty of vainglory or, worse, colluding with her own rape, critics influenced by feminism have predominantly seen Shakespeares Lucrece as, instead, the victim of patriarchal values, whether the passive object of a struggle between men, or complicit in her suicide with masculine misogyny. A minority of other equally feminist arguments, however, powerfully defend her as an exemplum of female virtue, or hold her up as a model of resistance to patriarchy.

Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond

In discussing Shakespeare’s verbal accounts of pictorial representations, scholars have tended to presuppose a conflict between the two modes, where Shakespeare describes pictures in order to affirm the triumph of words. If, on the other hand, we look in his writing for cooperation between the sister arts, it becomes apparent that each in a different way seeks to make present to consciousness the matter it portrays. Early modern writers value the illusions images can create; Shakespeare’s invocation of visual representation generally praises the skill of the artist and seeks to co-opt for his own work the ability to show a simulated reality. Sadly, his writing also recognizes the impossibility of the project: the substance, reality itself, remains beyond the reach of representation, whether in words or pictures. Shakespeare’s ekphrasis tests the powers of the signifier to their limits, to reveal that presence is not an option. At the same time, it shows what the signifier can do when it acknowledges those limits. In fiction to name is to evoke possibilities that exceed the reality we already seem to know.

The Myth of Venus in Early Modern Culture

Venus represents all that is complex and contradictory in the early modern periods perception of love. Unsurpassed as she is, the goddess remains enigmatic, partly concealed behind a series of surrogates, by the veils that draw attention to the beauty they mask, or by the mystery of her own desire for successive objects. The fact that, as the origin of love, she intervenes only to lead more often to sorrow than to happiness indicates an anxiety about the sexual pleasure the period at once relishes and reprehends. Love conducted under the aegis of Venus commonly suffers from misalignment. But while the goddess so frequently withholds gratification, what she offers instead is pleasure at the level of the signifier, as she takes part in the stories, plays, and poems which enable the period to find ways of defining a passion that generates both civilization and its discontents. (C. B.)

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

The legacy of Terence Hawkes

Imagine a world without research assessment, with no obligation to produce on demand, no panels to be appeased and no hesitation to peer over the parapet for fear of antagonising our judges. Hard as it is to believe, such a world is within living memory. In the 1970s, we were free to publish as and when we had something pressing to say, and to risk taking outlandish positions. New theories were arriving from overseas by the minute and we could not wait to follow up their implications. If such ideas challenged customary, settled assumptions, so much the better. The Robbins expansion of the universities had brought into being a new generation of young and energetic academics, ready to reconstruct the world as they found it. Naturally, such a dangerous project had to be brought under rigid control and Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s saw the walls of the academic prison house begin to close. But not without resistance: some of our gasps of dismay did not, in the event, prove to be our last. The first Research Assessment Exercise was conducted in 1986 but a year later Textual Practice came into being under the editorship of Terence Hawkes. Although research assessment, currently known by the Orwellian name of Research Excellence, now has its fingers firmly on the windpipe of intellectual enquiry, nearly three decades later Textual Practice lives on as the outstanding international journal for English departments of theory and practice, or theory-in-practice. No one could accuse the first editor of naı̈ve optimism. ‘It is never a good time to start a new journal’, begins his initial editorial gloomily. ‘Even so, 1987 seems unpropitious to a remarkable degree.’ He did not, we might now reflect, know the half of it. ‘The Humanities in particular feel marginalized and underfunded.’ Yes, indeed, and any change since then has only Textual Practice, 2015

Narrative magic: Stories and the ways of desire

Fictions that include an account of how stories are received show narrative as enlisting the desire of the reader or hearer. While fiction demonstrates what the magic of the signifier can do to allay desire when language is set free from reality, in the end narratives withhold satisfaction of the desire they engender, since the worlds they create must eventually be relinquished. To that degree, narrative fiction brings to light the condition of the speaking being as Lacanian psychoanalysis conceives it, at once empowered and deprived by access to language, and in quest of a presence language cannot deliver. In so far as they are ungrounded, stories are able to exceed cultural orthodoxies, conjuring into being desired possibilities, aspirations, and corollary fears. Supplementary in that sense and dangerous, in consequence, to the orthodoxies they supplement, fictional narratives can therefore bring to light the inadequacy of customary assumptions. Located in time, stories offer a knowledge – of cultural difference, as well as of the laws of desire that underlie it.

Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance.

Combining historical and theoretical sophistication with close readings of major Renaissance texts, this book argues that late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth- century writers were far more vulnerable to the secular and ecclesiastical authorities on whom they depended for their livelihoods than were writers of an earlier era. The book also explores the creative strategies that the vulnerable authors developed to protect themselves from those authorities. Particularly striking is the fact that writers increasingly turned in the course of their careers to alternate sources of legitimation and protection in the form of various peripheral communities such as the convent, the artisanal society, the acting company, the theater-going public, and circles surrounding but not synonymous with the Renaissance court. In fact, this book shows that these protective communities ultimately enabled writers to produce a disturbing and distinctive literature in an era when authorship conceived in terms of literary property or individual genius was as of yet nonexistent.

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.

Part 1 Transvestite logics: dress codes, or the theatricality of difference cross-dress for success the transvestites progress spare parts - the surgical construction of gender fetish envy breaking the code - transvestism and gay identity. Part 2 Transvestite effects: fear of flying, or why is Peter Pan a woman? Cherchez la Femme - cross-dressing in detective fiction religious habits phantoms of the opera - actor, diplomat, transvestite, spy black and white TV - cross-dressing the colour line the chic of araby - transvestitism and the erotics of cultural appropriation the transvestite continuum - Liberace-Valentino-Elvis.