Peter Stallybrass

Subject and object in Renaissance culture

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia 2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker 3. Spensers domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel 5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers 6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan 8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson 9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass 11. The Countess of Pembrokes literal translation Jonathan Goldberg 12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber 14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore Index.

The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays

Although Q1 Hamlet is usually seen as a performance text, we argue that it is in fact Shakespeare’s first literary drama. Not only is it the only professional play in the entire period that claims on its title page to have been performed at a university, but it is also the first play of Shakespeare’s to be printed with what was rapidly becoming a distinguishing feature of plays for the learned or scholarly reader: sententiae or commonplaces, signaled by commas or inverted commas at the beginning of each line or by a change in font. Q1 Hamlet participated in an emergent convention, beginning in 1600 with the publication of Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, fully forty percent of printed professional plays included these commonplace markers. But this practice was preceded and inspired by John Bodenham, who published five vernacular commonplace books from 1598 to 1600, the last two of which included a number of professional plays. Among Bodenham’s circle was stationer Nicholas Ling, who went on to publish Q1 and Q2 Hamlet. Bodenham was ridiculed for treating vernacular poetry on a par with the classics; Q1 Hamlet participates in this struggle over whether “Moderne and extant Poets,” writing in English, could produce literature. This initial attempt to treat Shakespeare as a literary dramatist, however, was something of a dead end. By the mid-seventeenth century, Shakespeare was beginning to be canonized, but for precisely the opposite reasons: not for his commonplaces but for his genius.

Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe

Focusing on Portuguese traders in the areas inhabited by the Akan people, Pietz traces the word fetish to the pidgin Fetisso, which can in turn be traced to the Portuguese feitifo, meaning magical practice or witchcraft. The fetish, Pietz shows, came into being above all as a term of religious abuse, by which Europeans rejected objects that were attributed with animating powers. African amulets, for instance, used for protection against disease or sorcery, were demonized by Portuguese Catholics, who

Of Busks and Bodies

Despite the chorus of scorn that followed “Camillagate,” Charles and Camilla’s notorious 1989 telephone conversation was one of their finest moments, in which they revealed themselves as the unabashed imitators and creative perverters of themes in Catullus and Donne. Camilla imagines Charles as the knickers that she can perpetually wear. Charles imagines himself as the man forever inside the woman, endlessly erect. But no, in this wonderful perversion of a perennial heterosexual fantasy, he is soft and, alas, disposable after all. Camilla rescues the fantasy (“what a wonderful idea!”) only to be met by Charles’s self-mocking “my luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on, forever swirling round on the top, never going down.” An eternity of activity, but never even going down (the lavatory) — let alone into Camilla. But again, Camilla rescues the fantasy, picking up on Charles’s ambiguous “until the next one comes through.” The next tampon? And through what? The lavatory? Camilla? Camilla turns it into the latter. Charles may not be endlessly in her, but, like a box of tampons, he can multiply himself so as to be in her again and again and again: “you could just keep going,” “repeating yourself.” Like the best of fetishes, this is repetition without a difference: more of the same, a same that is wanted obsessively, repetitively, but now. “Oh, darling I just want you now.” An impossible now for two people separated by the distance of a telephone call or a letter or a poem. Or rather a now that can only be achieved prosthetically. Othello away, Desdemona still kisses him in the form of the handkerchief that was his first gift to her. Catullus imagines himself as his beloved Lesbia’s pet sparrow.

La matérialité du texte shakespearien

Dieser Beitrag will zeigen, das die Konstruktion des Skakespearschen Textes in den Editionen und in der modernen Kritik implizit auf vier Kategorien beruht, die der Zeit nach der Aufklarung angehoren : das einzigartige Werk, das bestimmte Wort, die einheitliche Person und der eigenstandige Autor. Untersucht man die ersten Editionen der Stucke, die im Shakespearschen Kanon entstanden, so stellt sich heraus, das jede dieser Kategorien unzeitgemas ist. Was heute als ein einmaliges Stuck betrachtet wird, resultiert in Wirklichkeit aus einem Amalgam zahlreicher Texte der Renaissance. Was reproduziert wird als bestimmtes Wort, resultiert aus einer Streichung lexikalischer Ubergange, die moderne Handschriften der Zeit sowie die fruhen Drucke kennzeichnen. Was als Einheit der Person interpretiert wird, setzt eine Psychologie voraus, die den bescheidenen Anmerkungen in den ersten Drucken fremd ist. Schlieslich gestattet es die dem Autor zugeschriebene Souveranitat nicht zu verstehen, wie sehr die Produktion von Theatertexten damais das Ergebnis mehrfacher Zusammenarbeit war. Das Ziel des Beitrags ist, die Kennzeichen der Renaissance-Drucktexte nicht anhand moderner Kategorien, sondern diesen entgegengesetzt zu entwickeln.