Christina Wald

“Medieval Shakespeare?”: Introduction

Medieval Shakespeare, the title of this volume, is far from self-explanatory. Shakespeare usually is considered the epitome of the Renaissance or of early modernity in England two terms with rather contradictory implications. While ‘‘Renaissance’’ understands the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a refashioning of the distant past, ‘‘early modern’’ marks them as the beginning of something new. In both cases, the Middle Ages serve as a contrast: either as the time gap between classic Antiquity and its reanimation by Renaissance humanists or as the premodern past with little or no continuity to our present. This volume aims to question such a partition. Even though (literary) history depends on divisions which help to structure and to understand the past (as Fredric Jameson emphasised, ‘‘We cannot not periodize’’ [29]), it is worthwhile to challenge these boundaries, especially if they have such eminent consequences as the one between the Middle Ages and modernity, which often functions ‘‘less as a historical marker than a massive value judgement’’ (De Grazia 453). Rather than insisting on the insurmountable differences between the ages, then, it is much more productive to shed light on how the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are a product of each other (McMullan and Matthews 3); as Brian Cummings and James Simpson have pointed out, ‘‘the humanists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries conceptualized their own place in history not so much by inventing the modern as by inventing the ‘medieval’’’ (4). Even though Shakespeare, as far as we can judge from his oeuvre, did not have a clear sense of the ‘‘Middle Ages’’ or of other periods of the past such as ‘‘Antiquity’’ (see Morse), his plays, in particular his histories, were part and parcel of the early modern vision of the time span that came to be considered the Middle Ages. The plays shaped the understanding of the medieval not only for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, but also for audiences and readers in subsequent centuries. At the same time, of course, notions of the Middle Ages and early modernity are a product of our approaches and projections today. As Valentin Groebner has recently shown in his book with the programmatic title Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf (The Middle Ages Don’t Stop), each time constructed its own version of the Middle Ages. Carolyn Dinshaw’s equally programmatic Getting Medieval shows with what she calls ‘‘a queer historical impulse’’ (1) how contemporary texts and films have (mis)appropriated medieval tropes, in particular with regard to questions of community and sexuality. On a similar trajectory, the collection Shakespeare and

British Literary History

The following chapters offer an overview of English literary history, which we have divided in seven parts: the Middle Ages, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century, Romanticism, the Victorian Age, modernism, and postmodernism. As we have emphasised in the general introduction to Literary Studies, this division has become a standard in literary studies that helps us structure our knowledge of the past and present, but it is by no means absolute. The boundaries between the periods are permeable, and the chapters often comment on authors and works which continue earlier developments or anticipate later strands of literary history. For example, prominent authors of the early modern period like Edmund Spenser drew on medieval literature and deliberately employed an archaic language and a traditional genre to develop a specifically English form of writing. This endeavour also shows that English literature always has to be investigated with a view to its sources and branches outside the British Isles. For instance, in the early modern period, English literature was strongly influenced by Italian, French and Spanish texts; the legacy of ancient Greek and Roman authors persisted into the twentieth century, though it decreased in importance; and ever since the eighteenth century, English literature has been closely associated with American literature and the ‘new’ English literatures that began to thrive in England’s colonies. Accordingly, many of the prestigious Booker Prizes for the best novel of the year have been awarded to Indian, South-African, and Australian authors.

Introducing Literary Studies

Literary studies is a discipline with a long history, during which it has been influenced by fields that we would no longer regard today as central to literary studies, chiefly by biblical exegesis. Hence, the question arises as to what we consider as literature—we instantly would include written imaginative texts such as novels, poems and plays, but what about song lyrics, rap or performance poetry? In the context of increasing interest in psychological and sociological texts, the term could also be extended to, for instance, essays, political speeches, magazines, or newspapers. Scholars have proposed competing notions of literature, and today we can differentiate between a narrower and a broader understanding of (literary) texts (the latter would include rap lyrics for instance). The chief quality that helps us distinguish literature from other text sorts is the question of its pragmatic use.

Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction

‘Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?’ This statement, which had been ascribed to Aristotle for a long time, can be regarded as the foundation of the long-standing cultural history of melancholia.1 It shows that the phenomenon was regarded as more than an illness already in ancient times. In 350 BC, melancholia is understood as an epiphenomenon of, or even as a prerequisite for, outstanding cultural and political achievements and deep philosophical insight, although Pseudo-Aristotle at the same time acknowledges the pain caused by melancholia. In its interrelated medical and cultural histories, melancholia has maintained such a complex denotation: it has frequently been understood as a painful condition which opens up an avenue to deeper insight, to judiciousness and to creativity. Such a ‘nobilitation’ constitutes the main difference between melancholia and today’s category of depression. Despite the fact that traces of melancholia’s history can be found in the current psychiatric definition of depression, the cultural status of the phenomena differ decisively.2 The ‘nobilitation’ of melancholia and its association with philosophy, science and art is emblematically captured in Albrecht Durer’s engraving Melencolia I, an image with an immense iconographic influence on later visual representations of melancholia (Fig. 1.1), including Alberto Giacometti’s cube that is reproduced on the cover of this book. Here, as elsewhere in the visual arts, the representation of the melancholic makes a psychological state of mind correspond with the outside world; the personification of melancholia is situated in allegorical or symbolic spaces.

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien,Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature

most powerful warmonger” und gleichzeitig “the most powerful wordmonger” (260) der elisabethanischen Bühne (“Solo Performances in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlain the Great”, 249–268). Tamburlain inszeniert sich in seinen Monologen nicht nur als absoluter Alleinherrscher, sondern auch als “scourge of God” (252) – und scheint damit die literarische Projektion elisabethanischer Ängste bezüglich des ottomanischen Türken zu sein. Doch Hertel weist unter Einbezug zeitgenössischer Quellen sehr einleuchtend auf die Ambivalenz dieser Darstellung hin. “While propagating anti-Turkish stereotypes based on the conception of a united Christendom, in reality it [England] followed a policy of rapprochement dictated by the logics of realpolitik” (267). Tamburlaine steht dem Stereotypen vom monologisierenden Türken sehr nahe, doch Hertel erkennt in den solo performances Tamburlaines bereits Ambivalenzen, die diesem Bild entgegenwirken. Der in diesem Band vertretene Ansatz der solo performance erweist sich als sehr fruchtbar. Die Beiträge liefern eine facettenreiche Beschreibung der privaten, literarischen, theatralischen und politischen Selbstdarstellung in der Early Modern culture. Indem sie dabei den performativen Aspekt der Darstellung betonen, verleihen sie der Diskussion des self-fashioning eine neue Dynamik.

Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler

The essay collection Early Modern Prose Fiction is itself as a contribution to the cultural history of early modern England, which has in recent years been increasingly examined from the perspective of prose fiction, thus adding to the more established and long-standing academic work on the poetry and drama of the day. The authors of the anthology, all eminent scholars in the field, share the assumption that prose fiction was shaped in turn influenced early modern sociocultural, political, and economic fields, and each of them reconstructs particular instances of such an interaction. The subtitle The Cultural Politics of Reading at the same time announces the fundamental methodological difficulty of such a project: The politics that coined and stemmed from early modern acts of reading can hardly be proven with hindsight. Luckily, the contributors compensate for this lack of early modern reader responses with their own fascinating and witty acts of reading. In her introduction to the collection, Naomi Conn Liebler charts the cultural situation of the early modern period and pays particular attention to questions of class distinctions among authors and readers, the development of romance fiction, and the gradual establishment of a professional book market – issues that recur throughout the essays. Liebler explores the important role that prose fiction played in the shaping of both middle class identity and an emerging sense of national identity in early modern England: Anxieties and wishful fantasies of the emerging middle class, such as women’s property, courtship, and eroticism, were played out in the romances

“But of Course the Stage has Certain Limits“? : The Adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Shakespeare's Plays

Abstract Stage adaptations of the physical transformations as evoked in Ovids Metamorphoses have been deemed impossible or at least deficient in literary criticism, in particular with regard to Shakespeares plays. My paper critically engages with this assessment and explores the ways in which metamorphoses can be staged in the theatre. Focusing on moments of transformation in Titus Andronicus, The Winters Tale and A Midsummer Nights Dream, it examines actual theatrical realisations of different epochs as well as staging options of the scenes and argues that critics examining Shakespeares metamorphoses have tended to neglect the mobility and polyfunctionality of theatrical semiosis in favour of an implicitly verisimilar notion of theatrical representation. Rather than exclusively aspiring to a verisimilar staging of bodily metamorphosis, the scenes self-reflexively comment on the double vision of theatre audiences, who witness both the intradiegetic moments of shape shifting and the incessant metamorphoses of theatrical signs, including the bodies of actors, which constitute and distinguish theatre as an art form.

The Drama of Hysteria

The Drama of Hysteria stages a phenomenon for which both medical research and cultural criticism have offered contradictory definitions and assessments: hysteria is multiple, it is uniform; hysteria does not exist; it is a disease, a disposition, or a simulation; it is true and false, organic and mental (Wajeman 2003: n. pag.). Observing that both the medical concepts and the symptoms of hysteria have always adapted to the prevailing ideas and mores in a given historical, social, and cultural context, critics note “the extreme, almost obscene interpretability” (Micale 1995: 103) of the “chameleon” hysteria (Mentzos 2000 [1991]: 13). Not only is hysteria modelled ‘stylistically’ on its surrounding culture, but it might also be a consequence of the tensions, conflicts and crises of a specific culture, as Stavros Mentzos and others have argued (Bronfen 1998b, Mentzos 2000 [1991], Roudinesco 2001).