Lucy Munro

Ages and Stages : the place of theatre in the lives of older people

ABSTRACT Despite the growing interest amongst gerontologists and literary and cultural scholars alike, in arts participation, ageing and the artistic outputs of older people, comparatively little attention has yet been paid to theatre and drama. Likewise, community or participatory theatre has long been used to address issues affecting marginalised or excluded groups, but it is a presently under-utilised medium for exploring ageing or for conveying positive messages about growing older. This paper seeks to address this lack of attention through a detailed case study of the place of one particular theatre – the Victoria/New Victoria Theatre in North Staffordshire, England – in the lives of older people. It provides an overview of the interdisciplinary Ages and Stages project which brought together social gerontologists, humanities scholars, psychologists, anthropologists and theatre practitioners, and presents findings from: the archival and empirical work exploring the theatres pioneering social documentaries and its archive; individual/couple and group interviews with older people involved with the theatre (as audience members, volunteers, employees and sources); and ethnographic data gathered throughout the study. The findings reaffirm the continuing need to challenge stereotypes that the capacity for creativity and participation in later life unavoidably and inevitably declines; show how participation in creative and voluntary activities shapes meanings associated with key life transitions such as bereavement and retirement; and emphasise the positive role that theatre and drama can play as a medium for the inclusion of both older and younger people.

Shakespeare and the uses of the past: Critical approaches and current debates

This review article looks at the ways in which criticism in recent years (2005–9) has engaged with the topic of Shakespeare and the uses of the past. It examines the varying approaches that scholars have taken in analysing Shakespeares own uses of the past: studies of the interrelations between the medieval and early modern periods; approaches focusing on the workings of memory and trauma; materialist approaches; approaches that seek to interrogate or “queer” notions about temporality; and “presentist” approaches, which seek to understand the past primarily in terms of its impact on the present day. It also considers the uses to which Shakespeare – as a figure from our past – has been put, and the ways in which current political and cultural pressures might be influencing scholarly trends. A series of interrelated questions underlie the account. What is at stake in the ways in which we approach Shakespeares works? Why does it matter whether we examine the plays and poems primarily in terms of their “original” moment of production or in terms of their meaning or afterlife in the twenty-first century? What is the influence of period divisions – between the “medieval” and “early modern” in particular – within English literary studies? What influence might broader institutional, economic and political debates have on the development of scholarship?

Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674

Ranging from the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton to those of Robert Southwell and Anna Trapnel, this groundbreaking study explores the conscious use of archaic style by poets and dramatists between 1590 and 1674. It focuses on the wideranging, complex and self-aware uses of archaic linguistic and poetic style, analysing the uses to which writers put literary style in order to re-embody and reshape the past. Munro brings together scholarly conversations on temporality, memory and historiography, on the relationships between medieval and early modern literary cultures, on the workings of dramatic and poetic style, and on national history and identity. Neither pure anachronism nor pure nostalgia, the attempts of writers to reconstruct outmoded styles within their own works reveal a largely untold story about the workings of literary influence and tradition, the interactions between past and present, and the uncertain contours of English nationhood.

Infant Poets and Child Players: The Literary Performance of Childhood in Caroline England

In an essay, ‘Of Myself,’ published posthumously in 1668, the poet Abraham Cowley reflects on his early development as a writer. Attempting to pin down the origin of his poetic vocation, he writes: I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such Chimes of Verse, as have never since left ringing there: For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my Mothers parlour (I know not by what accident, for she her self never in her life read any Book but of Devotion) but there was wont to lie Spencers VVorks [sic]; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the Stories of the Knights, and Giants, and Monsters, and brave Houses, which I found every where there: (Though my understanding had little to do with all this) and by degrees with the tinckling [sic] of the Rhyme and Dance of the Numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a Poet as irremediably as a Child is made an Eunuch. (Cowley, Works S4v) Although other early modern writers trace their early reading in a similar fashion, Cowley is unusual — although not unique — in having presented in print the early products of his fascination with poetry. His first collection of verse, Poeticall Blossomes, was published in 1633 when he was 15, and according to his later testimony it contained poems written when he was 10 and 12 (Poeticall Blossomes. The Second Edition A4r).

Introduction: Shakespeare and Fletcher, Fletcher and Shakespeare

Summer 2009 saw the premiere of For All Time, a play by Rick Thomas which imagines the collaboration on The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613 of an irascible William Shakespeare and a John Fletcher mourning his break-up with partner Francis Beaumont. In the words of Daily Telegraph reviewer Dominic Cavendish, ‘‘it presents us with the sorry sight of the Bard on the bottle: bereft of inspiration, tired of London, and bitterly resentful of the new theatrical fashions’’. Such jaundiced views of Shakespeare’s late career are not uncommon on the stage Edward Bond’s Bingo (1987) is perhaps the best-known example. While scholars have occasionally endorsed this view, they have often preferred sunnier narratives the handing of the dramatic baton from Shakespeare to Fletcher, for instance or have downplayed or simply ignored the Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration and the ‘‘late, late’’ plays that it produced: Cardenio (now lost), Henry VIII or All is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Despite the best efforts of Gordon McMullan, Lois Potter and others, a recent book can state that ‘‘Shakespeare’s dramatic career and the original Globe had ended together, with the fiery debut of Henry VIII’’ (Marino 138), eliding both the collaboration on Henry VIII and the composition of The Two Noble Kinsmen, premiered after the first Globe’s destruction. Controversy over Double Falsehood a play presented as Shakespeare’s by Lewis Theobald in 1727 28, and which may preserve fossilized remnants of Cardenio has drawn fresh attention to the Fletcher-Shakespeare collaboration and its products. We know less than we would like about their working habits: we do not know how the two men put the plays together (although many scholars have tried to take them apart again), the precise division of labour, or how they came upon their sources and plots. Indeed, although seventeenth-century documents describe The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio as the work of Fletcher and Shakespeare, we lack external evidence for the contribution of the two men to Henry VIII, which was published under Shakespeare’s name in the 1623 First Folio (unlike the other two plays) and was first identified as a collaboration only by Edmond Malone in 1790 (McMullan 187). Moreover, as several contributions to this Special Issue suggest, many established critical narratives about Cardenio are open to question. These plays are only, however, the most obvious example of the broader interconnection between the Shakespeare and Fletcher canons. Fletcher notoriously wrote a mock-sequel to the older man’s The Taming of the Shrew, titled The Woman’s

Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children’s Drama

This chapter explores the “queerness” of children’s performance, focusing on the capacity of plays originally performed by early modern boys’ playing companies to render social and behavioral conventions malleable and ambiguous. Exploring three plays dealing with sexual transformation, The Maid’s Metamorphosis, George Chapman’s May Day and Thomas Randolph’s Amyntas, it argues that children’s drama presents both femininity and masculinity as contingent and subject to malfunction or glitch. Moreover, the unstable gender identities of individual characters spill out into broader aspects of social life, such as age and class. These plays may indulge in fantasies of bodily integrity, but the ubiquitous presence of the boy actor means that they also demonstrate the arbitrary relationship between gendered and sexed bodies, subverting and complicating normative hierarchies and structures.

Family Politics and Age in Early Modern England

Early modern England had a heavy social and psychological investment in hierarchies of age, which interacted with other hierarchies—notably those of gender, nationality and class—to structure the politics of both family and state. Age was both a source of authority—parents govern their children in part because they are older and more experienced—and a process that might undermine that authority through the physical or mental weakness caused by an individual’s increasing age. This chapter explores the interaction between the politics of the family and what Paul Griffiths has termed a ‘politics of age’, focusing on three plays in which the family’s hierarchies of age are transformed, exploited or disrupted: Nathan Field, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Queen of Corinth (c. 1617), Fletcher’s The Humorous Lieutenant (King’s Men, c. 1619) and Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches (1634). In depicting relationships in which children take on the authority of parents, guardians abuse their authority, and fathers attempt to take the place of their sons, these plays not only explore the social and emotional impact of dysfunction within the family, but also acknowledge the contingent aspects of kinship bonds, the instability of age-related hierarchies, and the capacity of family relationships to shape the destiny of the state.

Young Shakespeare/Late Shakespeare: The Case of Pericles

Once viewed as the first play composed by a young Shakespeare, since the late nineteenth century Pericles has instead been viewed as the first of the ‘late’ plays. This essay explores the processes through which this occurred, and their implications for our understanding of recent editorial and theatrical interventions. By paying attention to the old tradition that Pericles is an early work, we can perceive some of the manoeuvres that are required to make it fully ‘late’.

Skeltonics: Jonson, Shakespeare, the Literary Past and Imagined Futures

ABSTRACT Focusing on King Lear, The Gypsies Metamorphosed and The Fortunate Isles and their Union, this essay explores the uses to which Jonson and Shakespeare put a shared stylistic resource: the archaic verse-form of the Skeltonic, named after and strongly associated with the Tudor poet John Skelton. It argues that the Skeltonic is a point at which questions relating to aesthetics, performance, identity and politics collide, and that Jonson and Shakespeare use it to complicate temporal schema, to establish fresh connections between past and present and to imagine alternative futures. Furthermore, it asserts that exploring the uses of the Skeltonic in the Jonsonian masque and Shakespearean tragedy points to potential ways of liberating current criticism, in which historicist and presentist approaches have often been unhelpfully opposed.

Renaissance Women's Performance and the Dramatic Canon: Theater History, Evidence, and Narratives

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Renaissance Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon’, sets out and places in context the concerns with which the remaining essays engage. Opening by discussing uses of the term ‘actress’ by Thomas Kyd, Lording Barry and Philip Massinger, it describes the special issue’s engagement with the work of Natasha Korda, Robert Henke, Rachel Poulsen and others. It argues that criticism of the canonical drama of the professional stage should not overlook women’s performance, suggesting that by doing so scholarship will gain an increased understanding of the ways in which commercial plays responded to an important aspect of theatrical culture.