William N. West

What's the Matter With Shakespeare?: Physics, Identity, Playing

During the religious reforms of the sixteenth century, traditionalists and reformers debated the physical nature of the Eucharist—which seemed to require two bodies to occupy the same place, or a single body to be in multiple places, at one time—within a shared framework of Aristotelian physics. In this tradition, any “thing” was a combination of underlying matter and a form which gave it shape and identity. Transubstantiation was of course the miraculous substitution during the mass of Christ’s body for the matter of the bread and the wine, while their outward forms remained the same as before. But many reformers challenged transubstantiation on the grounds not simply of theology, but of physics—that it was physically nonsensical. In the second half of the century this conundrum within theology and physics emerges as a quintessentially theatrical problem, embodied onstage in the recurring tropes of disguise, or of indistinguishable twins, even of the ordinary staging practices like the doubling of parts or the transvestite playing of women by boys. The plays of Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and their predecessors, West argues, both drew on and contributed to these debates by producing experiments in what we could call a “physics of performance.” The idea that one body might assume multiple identities was of particular interest to players, which of course their occupation required of them daily. Shakespeare’s plays show no clear allegiance to any particular physical theory of the world, instead displaying a readiness to make use of whatever world picture offered the most dramatic force in any situation. The character of Richard III, however, West argues, provides a sustained engagement with Aristotle’s physics, in particular the possibilities that open in a world made of unformed matter that can be repeatedly reshaped into multiple identities.

But this will be a mere confusion: Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage

In Elizabethan England, play after play took confusion, disguise, or madness as a central subject. This thematic interest in confusion followed a concern, prevalent during the 1570s, 1580s, and early 1590s, that drama was genuinely confusing to its audiences. Whereas plays and interludes from the middle decades of the sixteenth century frequently expressed a desire to make their performances clear to their audiences, performances of the later decades began to suggest that confusions are an unavoidable part of the experience of playgoing, and even perhaps a necessary part of theatre’s ability to inform and instruct. Accounts of early performances, like a 1594 Inns of Court Comedy of Errors, also hint that a play’s impact could be enhanced through a deliberate attempt to produce confusion among audiences and actors. Uncovering a dramaturgy of confusion implicit in Gascoigne’s Supposes and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, this essay argues that during this period, a practical recognition that drama relies on disorder to affect its audience supplemented a theory of didactic drama. By the late 1590s, though, the thematizing of confusion familiar from later plays replaced this real confusion.

'No endlesse moniment': Artificial memory and memorial artifact in early modern England

Part I - Believing the Body Part II - Propping the Subject Part III - What Memory Forgets: Models of the Mind Part IV - What History Forgets: Memory and Time Part V - Memory Beyond the Modern

Talking the Talk: Cant on the Jacobean Stage

IN 1610 “S.R.,” the author of Martin Markall, Beadle of Bridewell, curtly explained the function of cant in mainstream sixteenthand seventeenth-century English society: “If you can cant, you will never work.” Cant, also called “pedlars’ French” or misidentified as “Gypsy,” was supposedly the argot of the criminal subculture of London’s vagabonds and beggars, a patois that simultaneously distinguished this underclass and made them dangerously incomprehensible to the law-abiding citizens they preyed upon. According to S.R., cant is a language defined by its negation of other social practices—the use of standard English and work. It is opposed to work, work’s alternative. But S.R.’s compressed formula reveals several different attitudes of mainstream London toward the supposed existence of a parallel canting underworld.

Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Space (in)dividable: locus and platea revisited

The Prologue and Chorus to Henry V had confidently asserted the theatres ability to “digest” the “distance” in space between the absent imaginary landscape represented in the written text and the material site of its performance by visible, audible actors in front of living audiences. But the two different modes of cultural production, writing and playing, implicated not only nonidentical premises of articulation and response; they were partially at least predicated on differing concepts and conventions of space and its uses in and for entertainment. In fact, the nonidentity between them was contiguous with the difference between the newly expanding space in (imaginary) representation and the recently institutionalized, material space of its performance. On the Elizabethan stage the difference between the imaginary landscape inscribed in the story and the physical, tangible site of its production was of particular, perhaps unique, consequence. Since there was both continuity and discontinuity between these two types of space, the drama in production, drawing on both the products of the pen and the articulation of voices and bodies, could through their interactions constitute at best an ‘indifferent boundary’ between them. In fact, the boundary between the inscribed matter and the performing agency of theatrical representations appears altogether fleeting; no matter how deep (or how deeply submerged) the cultural difference between them was, it never constituted a rigid division, let alone a binary opposition in either the semiotics or the semantics of theatrical space.

Humanism and the Resistance to Theology

‘Theory’ has taken long aim at theology, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead … And we have killed him!’ to Roland Barthes’ ‘We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God).’1 This thin description hardly establishes a theology that fifteenth- or sixteenth-century thinkers would have recognized, although they might well have been interested in some of the questions that poststructuralism raised. Robert Markley, for instance, claims that in the seventeenth century ‘Theology … marks the contested territory of what literary and cultural critics and some historians call theory’, differently represented but similarly directed.2 In the discourse of ‘theory’, all too often citing theology has served as little more than a signal of disparagement, but the overt rejection — resistance is too moderate a term — of the theological from ‘theory’ is recurrently tempered by reappropriations of its projects, or perhaps attempts to recover conceptual territory from it. For Nietzsche proclaims not God’s disappearance, but the mode in which God’s anxious absence continues to work; Barthes announces the death of the author-God with a line from ‘Sarrasine’, but his S/Z on the same story relies on a version of Christian allegoresis; in his later works Derrida turns toward both thinking religiously and thinking within the religious traditions of Judaism; and in his final interview, the prophet against metaphysical thinking Heidegger laments that ‘Only a God can save us now.’3

Understanding in the Elizabethan Theaters

In a tour the autumn of Europe, of 1599, went Thomas to see a Platter, play about a Swiss Julius medical Caesar student at one on of Londons playhouses. Another day he saw a play in which suitors from several countries wooed a young woman (the English suitor ran off with her, Platter notes plaintively, after the victorious German suitor got drunk and fell asleep). He seems to have been as intrigued by the layout of the playhouses as by the performances:

Mercutio’s Bad Language

It does not take Juliet’s explicit demand ‘What’s in a name?’ (2. 2. 43) to alert us to the importance Romeo and Juliet attaches to names and their relations to things. In plot as well the play is organized into dyads; the Verona it represents is composed of binaries internally defined by their mutual exclusivity, such as the strife between of ‘Two households both alike in dignity’ with which it opens (1. Prol. 1) — fundamentally, to be a Montague is to be the opposite of being a Capulet, and vice versa; to participate in civil and familial duties is not to be in Petrarchan love, and vice versa. Criticism often follows the play’s lead. Combining a sense of its violent actions and its gorgeous language, Mark van Doren called Romeo and Juliet ‘furiously literary,’ and critics have continued to follow him in exploring the play’s divisions.2 The rift in rhetoric identified by van Doren can be translated into a generic one, for Romeo and Juliet is traditionally identified as one of Shakespeare’s most lyrical plays, rhetorically for its use of highly marked and often static, monologic poetic language; literary-historically as part of a mid-1590s group of similar tone; and structurally and thematically in its adaptation of the conventions of sonnet sequences to the stage.3

Introduction: Shakespearean Emergences: Back from Materialisms to Transversalisms and Beyond

In the last quarter-century, the study of Shakespeare has proliferated explosively and multifariously across disciplines, classes, cultures, and media. The Bard’s plays now comprise most of the university and professional theater productions in the United States, and there have been over three hundred English-language film adaptations of them distributed worldwide, including one Academy-Award winning film about him, Shakespeare in Love (1998).1 More books on Shakespeare are published than ever before, some becoming bestsellers, such as Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999) and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004). More students than ever before are enrolled in classes on Shakespeare. But what, or who, is this Shakespeare?

Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Performance and authority in Hamlet (1603)

Although Hamlet , as Anthony Scoloker noted in 1604, was perceived as a play that “should please all,” its textual history tells a different story. If, as Philip Edwards observed, the “study of the early texts of Hamlet is the study of a play in motion” (8), the element that is most in question (and in motion) is the circulation of cultural authority itself. At issue is the fluid, composite source of this authority, its unsettled and dispersed locations between the writing and the production of the play. The unstable linkage between the texts and the performances of Hamlet can perhaps best be explored at the point of its own intervention in the forms and functions of playing. At this crucial point – rare in the entire history of the Elizabethan theatre – the actual circulation of authority in the performed play appears revealingly at odds with what in Q2 and F is taken to authorize in no uncertain terms the “purpose of playing” (3.2.20). In the so-called ‘bad’ quarto Hamlet , relations of writing and playing find themselves in a state of entanglement and differentiation that has a more subdued echo in the difference between the authorial amplitude the Second Quarto (1604) and the more theatrical qualities of the Folio text (1623).