Diana E. Henderson

The sonnet, subjectivity and gender

The sonnet is a little poem with a big heart – and at its core lie subjectivity and gender. Both words are grammatically basic yet surprisingly slippery. Although people usually think they know what gender means, subjectivity is a more specialized term, a word that puns on the tensions it captures: whether or not one is familiar with the subject–object split (a basic philosophical problem associated with epistemology since Descartes), the essence of the matter is that the subject of a sentence is also ‘subjected’ to forces beyond itself. Moreover, the human grammatical subject, the self that is supposed to be ‘one’, also knows itself to be multiple and unruly – if ‘one’ is inclined to a modicum of introspection, as poets are wont to be. What does it mean poetically, then, to express one’s own subjectivity, to speak (metaphorically) in one’s own voice? The sonnet form originated in an age when poets were also political ‘subjects’ to princes, when emotions were perceived as external forces pressuring internal spirits and when earthly experience was deemed subject to heavenly will; the sonnet allowed poets a fourteen-line space in which they could at least articulate, if not exert, their own wills. As Europeans in a hierarchical world that presumed male superiority even if exceptional virgins were subjects of veneration, writers of the first love sonnets expressed the cultural and social paradoxes their desires engendered, as well as their personal experiences of emotional contradiction. Out of this maelstrom arose the split personalities that would become models of great art, and the richly expressive vocabularies that would allow centuries of poetic followers – including women and non-Europeans – to make the sonnet their own, adapting it to capture vastly different perspectives, needs, values and definitions of selves.

Shakespearean Comedy, Tempest-Toss’d: Genre, Social Transformation, and Contemporary Performance

Shakespearean comedy—like all comedy—works by bending the norms of the world in which it appears. Those norms range from expectations for the artistic form itself (in the case of an Elizabethan stage play, for instance, the use of music and visual spectacle, conventions of theatrical plotting, or the casting of male youths in women’s roles) to the assumptions organizing the off-stage life that stage fictions express (such as social hierarchies, local pride, respect for law and order, and sexual desire). In every dramatic performance, these two layers or poles of an imaginary continuum jostle for attention: the actors and craftspeople who put on a show wish that their technical expertise and artistic efforts would be acknowledged as such, even as they hope to transport their audiences into an alternative world of story, character, sound, and spectacle. Theories of drama around the globe from Aristotle to Brecht have wrestled with the proper relationship between the performative and fictive dimensions of theatrical experience, just as jurists, scholars, therapists, and moral arbiters of all stripes have debated the effects of fictional representations in shaping subsequent behavior—for good, ill, or neither. What remains indisputable is the dynamic presence of some such interplay between the levels of actual performance and virtual reality if a play is to hold its audiences at all and the corollary fact that Shakespeare’s comedies have managed to keep holding them for centuries. As “for the form: in some form,” to quote his clown Costard from Love’s Labour’s Lost (1.1.204–205)—there’s the rub.

Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (review)

rial studies, nonetheless, his title too simply reifies as primary the opposition of author and actor, solitary pen and common man’s voice. Just as there are more positions on the early modern social spectrum than the high and the low, so there are more social actors involved in the production of plays than writer and clown. Whatever limits this book may have, however, it is still a remarkable achievement. If there are other accounts of Shakespeare and his theater on offer, few give us a playwright of greater generosity or a theater of greater inclusiveness.