Kristine Steenbergh

Gossip's Mirth : Gender, Humor, and Female Spectators in Ben Jonson's The Staple of News (1626)

The theaters in early modern London have long been considered a male bastion: not only were the playwrights who wrote for the commercial stage exclusively male, the playing companies were also all-male, with female roles performed by boys or men. An antitheatrical polemicist even warned women to keep away from the theaters as spectators, since entering a public playhouse would ruin their reputations. All the evidence, and indeed the fact that this writer felt the need to urge women to avoid the theaters, suggests that female spectators made up a considerable part of the audience in London’s commercial playhouses. This was especially the case in the seventeenth-century theater of Blackfriars, an indoor theater located in a former monastery. Several plays performed in this theater cater especially to a female audience, addressing women in their prologues and epilogues. What can a perspective on gender and humor tell us about these women’s playgoing experience? This chapter focuses on a comedy that satirizes the role of newsbooks and gossip in the early modern English public sphere, and which features four female spectators as characters within the play, who return in between the Acts to comment on the action.

Emotion, Performance and Gender in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

This chapter examines the relations between the performance of emotion and the experience of self in Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a gender perspective. It argues that the revenge tragedy contrasts two different models of the relation between the outward performance of emotion and the inward experience of it. On the one hand, the prince makes an often-quoted distinction between the external signs of grief and the inner self. On the other hand, the play also problematizes the effeminizing effects that the performance of emotion and the imitation of signs of anger have on the self. This chapter relates the play’s representation of the relation between the performance of emotion and the self both to early modern debates about the effects of acted passion and to current (cultural-historical) theory on the transmission and effects of emotion.

Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

its flaws. Anderson uses a plethora of examples to illustrate certain episodes in Beowulf, but often does not return to the Anglo-Saxon poem to highlight the examples’ relevance. Consequently, the reader could find himself lost, reading about the sculpture of David of Sassoun riding his wonderhorse Jelaly installed at Yerevan Railway Station Square in 1959 (pp. 14–15) without having a clue of how this statue relates to Beowulf. A second flaw is Anderson’s inaccurate use of the term ‘‘Indo-European’’: although the bulk of his examples indeed derive from IndoEuropean sources, such as Armenian, Greek and Germanic epics, others stem from Semitic and Mongolian epics, such as Gilgamesh and the Secret History of the Mongols. As a result, the type-scenes Anderson identities in Beowulf come across as universal, rather than Indo-European. A more profound weakness of the book is Anderson’s complex discussion of his methodology, which he calls ‘‘a philosophical journey’’, which is ‘‘arduous, and not for everyone’’. These sections will likely scare off any but the highly motivated readers; the average reader had, therefore, best follow the author’s own advice: ‘‘the reader might want to skip my analysis’’ (p. 59). Nevertheless, Anderson’s Understanding Beowulf is a thought-provoking book, which will inspire many readers to reread Beowulf with invigorated interest and renewed understanding.

Gender Studies – Emotions in Jeptha (1659)

Vondels play Jeptha of Offerbelofte ( Jephthah or Promise of Sacrifice , first published in 1659) has invited critical attention to the issues of its literary poetics as well as its representation of women. This chapter analyses the representation of the emotions in the context of the plays poetics from a gender perspective. It argues, an analysis of the plays gendered representation of the emotions shows how Jepthas management of his emotions is explicitly contrasted with that of his daughter and wife to suggest that the rehearsal of strong passions in a theatrical context has a therapeutic effect. The chapter provides the gendered representation of emotions in the context of the plays religious subject matter as well as conflicting early modern views on the operations of emotions. Keywords:emotions; Jeptha of Offerbelofte ; Joost van den Vondel

[Review of: Achsah Guibbory (2006) The Cambridge Companion to John Donne]

the meaning, the two poems present their readers with comprehensive catalogues of moral cases and possible outcomes in given circumstances in order that they can apply them to their lived experience. Mitchell’s evidence is that authorial encouragement to make use of the narratives in this manner is frequently found within the poems, and the Canterbury pilgrims’ reactions to each other’s tales exemplify their application further. This being so, the contradictions among the Confessio stories become secondary (Chapter 3) as does Griselda’s morality or monstrosity; the ‘‘Clerk’s Tale’’ can be read as being about the moral dilemma itself rather than its resolution, as being a critique of the genre (Chapter 7). Mitchell reads the narratives of the Wife, Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner, though not that of the Monk, in this light too (Chapters 5 and 6), and his conclusion rehearses the point. This conclusion is a disappointing two pages in length, and this structural imbalance is accompanied by a few presentational glitches, especially in the later chapters: for example, the name Žižek appears as ‘‘i ek’’ on page 138 of this reviewer’s copy and in the wrong font in the index, and page 103 contains a reference to the volume as a ‘‘[doctoral] thesis’’. Mitchell’s linguistic sophistication may appeal most to the literary-minded, as will his argument, though its presentation presupposes the reader’s familiarity with the two poems.