Gina Bloom

Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England

Introduction: From Excitable Speech to Voice in Motion 1. Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor 2. Words Made of Breath: Shakespeare, Bacon, and Particulate Matter 3. Fortress of the Ear: Shakespeares Late Plays, Protestant Sermons, and Audience 4. Echoic Sound: Sandyss Englished Ovid and Feminist Criticism Epilogue: Performing the Voice of Queen Elizabeth Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

“Boy Eternal”: Aging, Games, and Masculinity in The Winter's Tale

This essay draws on a range of early modern writings on games and male development to examine aging mens nostalgia for boyhood play in Shakespeares The Winters Tale. In contrast to the psychoanalytic critical tradition, which presumes masculinity to be produced in conflict with women and/or femininity, I demonstrate masculinity to be a function not only of gender, but of age. The Winters Tale explores the consequences of the early modern conception of boyhood as lying on a continuum with manhood, a conception reinforced by early modern views of the role of games in male development. I suggest that Leontes and Polixenes turn to games to affirm their connection to boyhood but that the drama problematizes this strategy by depicting these characters as collapsing boyhood and manhood, with pathological results. Whereas Leontes ultimately progresses toward normative early modern manhood—using recreation to recommit to his marriage and accept old age—Polixenes regresses, remaining fixated on youth and boyhood games. In this way The Winters Tale questions as it produces a linear narrative of male development, folding back on itself to portray the cyclical nature of the aging process. (G.B.)

Manly Drunkenness: Binge Drinking as Disciplined Play

Shakespeare’s The Turning of the Shrew opens with what appears to be a straightforward condemnation of the vice of excessive alcohol consumption, as a lord, finding a drunken tinker passed out before an alehouse, exclaims in disgust: “O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!”1 The lord’s outrage is not surprising from the perspective of early modern moralist discourse, which, associating drunkenness with idleness and disorder, figures it as dehumanizing and, thus, emasculating. Thomas Young defines drunkenness as “a vice which stirreth up lust, griefe, anger, and madnesse, extinguisheth the memory, opinion, and understanding, maketh a man the picture of a beast, and twise a child, because he can neither stand nor speake.”2 Excessive consumption of alcohol compromises reason and bodily control, traits thought to distinguish men from beasts as well as from other ostensibly less rational creatures, such as children, women, and men of low status. Sir Walter Raleigh’s advice to his son triangulates drunkenness, beastliness, and emasculation when it warns that wine not only “transfer meth a man into a Beast” but also “wasteth the naturall heate and seed of generation.”3 For those who aspire to the kind of “patriarchal manhood” Raleigh espouses—where manhood is achieved through the demonstration of self-control, power over dependents, and ability to produce heirs, among other things—drunkenness is necessarily unmanly.4

Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater

Introduction: Gaming the Stage; One. Gaming History; Material Objects and Practices of Play; Attitudes toward Gameplay; The Politics of Gameplay; Spectatorship, Performance, and History; Two. Cards: Imperfect Information and Male Friendship; Imperfect Information in Gammer Gurtons Needle; Cards, Theater, and Male Friendship at Cambridge University; Imperfect Friendship in A Woman Killed with Kindness; Wagering on Theater; Three. Backgammon: Space and Scopic Dominance; Theater Space and Scopic Dominance; Navigating Space and Place in Arden of Faversham --

Shakespeare and Performance Studies: A Dialogue

The collaboration that led to this special issue began in 2013, when we happened to meet up at the PSi (Performance Studies International) conference at Stanford University and were struck by the realization that we were among the very few attendees who were also members of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Why was there so little crossover between these organizations? One reason is that SAA and PSi, and the disciplines they represent, have little overlap in terms of historical focus: Shakespeare Studies is primarily focused on the early modern period, while Performance Studies is largely uninterested in much before 1968. The disjunction between the two fields stems also from their histories of development. As W. B. Worthen points out, Shakespeare Studies was “constructed through centuries of textual scholarship and interpretation” whereas Performance Studies has been “engrained with a disciplinary suspicion of the regulatory work attributed to writing, textuality, and the archive in performance, and so perhaps constitutively dismissive of dramatic theatre” (2). To be sure, there have been exceptions to these rules in both the SAA and PSi conference programs, but we found it odd, given our shared interests in Shakespeare and in Performance Studies theory, that these worlds seemed to be missing opportunities for exchange and engagement. That conversation led to our decision to co-lead a seminar at the SAA conference in 2016 that would bring the two fields into a more sustained and focused dialogue. As it turned out, Shakespeareans were

A whole theater of others: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave

Abstract:This essay uses the case study of the digital game Play the Knave to unpack the historical and theoretical value of declamatory acting to Shakespeare performance. Analysis of the game as a digital object and observations of people playing it when installed in Shakespeare theaters and arts venues reveal continuities between the material practices of acting in Shakespeare’s day and our own, as players adopt a declamatory style of gesture when they play. We maintain that much as the declamatory style functioned in the early modern period as a sign of and a means for amateur performance, so this style can facilitate and mediate communal, collaborative Shakespeare theater today, helping to develop among a wide public new pleasures and competencies in Shakespeare performance.

Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (review)

One of the admirable characteristics of this volume is Lamb’s scrupulous attention to the scholarly conversation and a precise location of her place within it. Her analysis draws from the full spectrum of early modern cultural studies, from political theory, contemporary histories, Shakespearean scholarship, and early modern texts; her acknowledgment of all of these is generous and precise. However, since Lamb is dealing with issues of embodiment and with physical practices, additional illustrations would have been welcome. Giving the reader access to the image of Robin Goodfellow increases the impact of her reading, for example. Other discussions, such as that of the painting The Thames at Richmond, with the Old Royal Palace (ca. 1620; Fitzwilliam Museum [Cambridge, uK], accession no. 61), would likewise benefit from some visual support. Additionally, Lamb’s punctilious engagement with recent scholarship and theory, while a distinct asset for specialist students, seems like a slightly self-conscious homage to critical conventions. However, although the density of her critical apparatus addresses Lamb’s work to her peers rather than to the general or the broadly cultivated reader, the latter will be equally impressed with the complexity of her project and her important and refreshing insights into the production of popular culture.