Mark Thornton Burnett

Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience

Acknowledgements - Abbreviations and Conventions - Introduction - Apprenticeship and Society - Crafts and Trades - Carnival, the Trickster and the Male Domestic Servant - Women, Patriarchy and Service - The Noble Household - Bibliography - Index

'From the Horse's Mouth': Branagh on the Bard

In the space of an extraordinarily productive career, Kenneth Branagh has rapidly established himself as one of the twentieth century’s foremost Shakespearean interpreters. His major directed cinematic productions span the whole range of the dramatist’s oeuvre, from comedy to history and tragedy. Henry V (1989) offered itself as a seminal demythologization of a work traditionally read as a celebration of the English heroic endeavour; Much Ado About Nothing (1993) breathed new comic life into a ‘problematic’ representation of male-female rivalries; Hamlet (1997) served up the ‘whole text’ in a sumptuous widescreen format; and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) merged music from the 1930s and spectacular set-pieces in a bold revision of the play. As well as directing Shakespeare, Branagh has also been busy in being directed, chiefly in Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995), in which he played Iago. These film versions of single plays can be supplemented by a body of related work which bears a Shakespearean theme. In the Bleak Midwinter (1995), the tale of a beleaguered repertory company struggling to mount a production of Hamlet, announced Branagh’s continuing interest in the play from a simultaneously farcical and melancholic perpective.

Crafts and Trades

Once the apprentice had successfully passed through training, a new phase in his career presented itself. Most often, he was immediately employed as a journeyman, a member of a livery company qualified to earn wages but disallowed from setting up as a master or a householder in his own right.1 Only through the accumulation of capital could the journeyman eventually employ servants and gain admittance to the senior positions of his company. As the only writers in the English Renaissance who gave imaginative expression to the journeyman’s conditions, Thomas Dekker, who worked mainly within the drama, and Thomas Deloney, who confined himself to prose fiction and ballads, occupy a unique place.

Apprenticeship and Society

Apprenticeships were usually arranged between a boy’s father and a prospective master, and once contracted the apprentice left the parental home to learn a particular craft or trade.1 The apprentice undertook to work hard, to conduct himself soberly, to keep his master’s secrets and not to marry until his terms had been completed; in return, the master offered accommodation, maintenance and technical training. Instruction in skills was accompanied by moral lessons, since masters, guardians in loco parentis, were obliged to ensure that their apprentices observed saints’ days and attended divine service.2 This was, then, an essentially familial mode of organization through which the apprentice would ideally be elevated to the positions of established citizen, freeman of the livery company and respected adult member of society.

Marlovian Imitation and Interpretation in Heywood's 'The Four Prentices of London'

Thomas Heywood has traditionally been passed over or given slight treatment by critics and his dramatic ability, with the exception of A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), has not been singled out for particular praise. More recently, however, his plays have attracted the attention of historians of popular culture; unresolved ideological contradictions, it is argued, are revealed in Heywoods depiction of an emergent bourgeoisie. Laura Caroline Stevenson suggests that dramatists such as Heywood presented citizens, artisans and tradesmen in terms of the ruling elite as there was no existing literary tradition within which they could be described. 1 In this essay, I will argue that Heywood, in borrowing material from Marlowes Tamburlaine the Great (1587-8) for his first play, The Four Prentices ofLondon (c.1592-4), unwittingly created for himself a different set of problems.? It is generally agreed that Heywoods main source for The Four Prentices was William of Tyres Godeffroy of Boloyne, OR The Siege and Conqueste of Jerusalem, translated from the Latin and published in 1481 by William Caxton. But the major studies of Heywood are deficient in that they have not recognized or examined in detail Marlowes influence on the play.3 Marlovian echoes are heard when Guy, the apprentice son of the Earl of Boulogne, is wooed by the French princess. He claims he loves

Not that Cheapo China Con-Job: Alterity, Race and Same-Sex Desire in Jarum Halus, a Malaysian Film Adaptation of Othello

Abstract:This essay discusses Jarum Halus (dir. Mark Tan, 2008), a Malaysian film adaptation of Othello, in terms of interlinked figures of difference and alterity. In particular, the essay argues that the film “translates” Shakespeare in such a way as to understand race and same-sex desire as urgently linked thematics. As Chinese, Daniel/Othello functions as the central figure of alterity, with the film highlighting the extent to which his non-Malay status reflects back on discourses of race inside contemporary nationalism. Manifesting the animosity directed against Daniel is Iskander/Iago, who functions as the film’s spokesperson for Malay values. Complicating any neat binary of Malay-Chinese relations, however, is the homoeroticism which shapes Iskander/Iago’s interactions. While Jarum Halus hints at the Shakespearean idea of an ultimately unknowable Iskander/Iago, it combines this with a reliance on a queer aesthetic that privileges scopophilia and attempts to establish a physical rapport between men. Part of the eloquence and impact of Jarum Halus inheres in its suggestiveness. Jarum Halus mediates the institutional underpinnings of its own possibility, operating in concert with the Malaysian censorship structures that inform cinematic representation. It also embraces “difference,” both at the level of what is deemed acceptable as part of a film product and in terms of the racial and sexual investments of the contemporary Kuala Lumpur scene. In this way, the film revivifies Othello, mobilizing the play as a necessary part of Malaysia’s “cultural background” and as a stimulus for reflection, debate and critique.

Shakespeare and Contemporary Latin American Cinema

T discipline of Shakespeare and film has suffered from a widespread critical and pedagogical tendency to concentrate on Anglophone films at the expense of their non-Anglophone equivalents.1 As a result, a genuinely international sense of Shakespeare’s plays on film is lacking—worldwide depth and diversity have yet to be properly acknowledged.2 In part, the networks of distribution and exhibition through which films are identified are to blame: as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan state, all too often a “cultural flow” is unidirectional and travels only “from the ‘west’ to the ‘rest.’”3 Yet at a moment when our sense of the Bard as an icon performed in a variety of media is expanding, a more nuanced and ambitious sense of the multifarious ways in

We are the makers of manners

This essay concerns itself with the development of Kenneth Branagh as a Shakespearean film director, producer, performer, and interpreter. It addresses all of Branaghs Shakespeare films to date, arguing that they can only be properly understood when discussed as a corpus and in relation to the cinematic work of his predecessors and contemporaries. Like Henry V, his alterego, Branagh is distinctive for having made (or created) the manners (or fashions) that have revitalized “Shakespeare” for a postmodern clientele. At the same time, however, Branagh has become the victim of these manners; although he has exorcized himself of the ghosts of previous luminaries of the establishment, he has now to compete with a host of related Shakespearean filmic interpretations, treatments that he himself has been instrumental in popularizing. In the same way that Frankenstein, another role reinvented by the auteur, is plagued by his creature, so has Branagh come to be haunted by his own screen progeny. As a result, Branaghs cinematic renditions of the Bard for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal a movement from an entrenched, establishment-bound veneration for the dramatist to a much freer, more playful engagement with the “Schlockspearean.” Through Branaghs career in miniature, then, we can glimpse the contours of a development that has marked Shakespearean studies in general, a critical position that begins with serious adaptation and ends with appropriation, kitsch, and even pastiche. More generally, the desire to bring Shakespeare to as broad a community as possible has involved Branagh in the production of “schlock” outside the strictly demarcated classical forum, the release of Mary Shelleys “Frankenstein” (1994), with its deployment of horror and slasher movie motifs, being but one example.

Tamburlaine and the renaissance concept of honour

Honour was widely discussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, in drama, pamphlets, conduct books and popular literature. Esteem accorded to one of high rank, an exalted position or a reward for services to the state—these, and other meanings, were part of the traditional definition of honour. Virtue, a closely associated concept, could refer to moral worth or excellence, physical strength, valour or power. Critics have recognized that honour is a major thematic concern in Shakespeare, but have failed to notice that it is as important an issue in Marlowes plays. In Tamburlaine the Great (1587-88), individual codes of honour determine the lives of all the characters. The conflict that arises when these codes come together accounts, in part, for our difficulty in directly engaging with the play and for the contradictory critical responses that it has provoked. Tamburlaine can be seen as an exploration or anatomization of honour at a time when the concept, affected by the processes of social, economic and political change, was undergoing a transformation, loosing old meanings and acquiring new associations and importance. Honour is constantly alluded to in the speeches and protestations of Tamburlaines enemies. On being crowned by Ortygius and Ceneus, Cosroe vows:

Re-reading Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, a Japanese film adaptation of Hamlet: content, genre and context

In this article, I understand The Bad Sleep Well according to a schema of content, genre and context. First, the film takes the plays content – namely, the murder of Old Hamlet – as its point of departure, seeing this as one of a series of crimes that illuminates the dangers of a culture of deference and widespread corporate corruption. By mimicking the start of Hamlet, I argue, The Bad Sleep Well magnifies the mysteries at the heart of the play, thereby elaborating Shakespearean themes of false appearance and hidden reality. Integral to the process, I suggest, is a deployment of film noir and detective film genres, which are enlisted in such a way as to conjure the contexts of a disillusioned Japan struggling to find a coherent identity in the post-occupation period. The result is a richly multivalent film whose rewriting of Hamlet in bits provides a blueprint for a subsequent generation of filmmakers.