Shakespeare Studies最新文献

{"title":"Shakespeare's Demonology: A Dictionary","authors":"D. Willis","doi":"10.5040/9781472500403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472500403","url":null,"abstract":"Shakespeare's Demonology: A Dictionary By Marion Gibson and Jo Ann Esra London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Marion Gibson and Jo Ann Esra's dictionary of Shakespeare's demonological language is part of the topic-centered Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries series, edited by Sandra Clark, which also includes such works as Shakespeare's Medical Language, Shakespeare and the Language of Food, and Music in Shakespeare, among others. Though called a dictionary in its subtitle, Shakespeare's Demonology is in some respects more like an encyclopedia, with many longer entries that include not only definitions and examples from the plays but also extensive analytic commentary and selected references to scholarly work on each topic. A lengthy and useful bibliography is provided at the end. The dictionary covers a field with porous boundaries; as the authors point out in their introduction, demonologists of Shakespeare's time were interested in a variety of phenomena in addition to demons and devils, including ghosts, spirits, angels, astrology, witchcraft, magic, divination and prophecy. Indeed, the boundaries between the \"demonic\" and the \"natural\" or \"divine\"--and hence between demons and other types of beings--were exactly what was in dispute and required investigation. Gibson and Esra rightly take an inclusive approach in their dictionary, with richly satisfying results. There is, of course, no particular reason to think that Shakespeare's works were grounded in a distinct and internally consistent demonology, given the range of genres he worked in and the varying cultural and historical settings of his plays. Shakespeare does not offer us one cosmology or a single ideological stance; the Macbeth world is very different from the world of The Merry Wives of Windsor or of Henry IV, Part I, or for that matter, of most of the other tragedies. Nevertheless, this dictionary helps us identify some of Shakespeare's characteristic themes and tendencies and see more clearly the cross-currents of early modern thought that engaged his imagination. In so doing, it very successfully fulfills the authors' wish to provide \"both a useful reference point and a stimulus to further scholarly work on key terms and ideas\" (6). What, then, are some characteristics of the Shakespearean supernatural that can be teased out from this book? One thing stands out clearly: Shakespeare embraces diversity in his conceptualization of the spirit world, in contrast to the more polarized views of Calvinist contemporaries and indeed, most demonologists, whatever their doctrinal affiliation. As the authors put it in their introduction, the \"oversimplifying binary structure\" of demonological thought \"may perhaps be seen as going against the grain of most of his work\" (5). Hence, this dictionary calls our attention not only to demons and angels but to a range of intermediate or indeterminate beings, from the relatively familiar (the fairies of Midsummer Night's Dream, Ariel, the ghost of Hamlet's father) to ","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70510031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare on the University Stage","authors":"J. Loehlin","doi":"10.5860/choice.190462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.190462","url":null,"abstract":"Shakespeare on the University Stage. Edited by Andrew James Hartley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 Andrew James Hartley's collection Shakespeare on the University Stage brings together sixteen essays that examine the phenomenon of campus Shakespeare from a range of historical, cultural, aesthetic and theoretical perspectives. As Hartley points out in his introduction, such performances provide the primary experience of live Shakespeare for many people around the world (and especially in the United States), yet they are remarkably evanescent and understudied. This impressive book helps to fill what Hartley has elsewhere called \"one of Shakespeare criticism's singular blind spots\" (Shakespeare Survey 65 [2012], 194). Shakespeare on the University Stage asks a range of searching questions in an attempt to understand the complex variety of university Shakespeare: \"How does it uniquely manifest larger cultural concerns, assumptions, and prejudices, and how is it shaped by the pedagogical dimension of its academic context? How do such productions subvert or confirm ideas about theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular that are disseminated through the larger culture in complex and unexamined ways, and what is the relationship of those ideas to their equivalents on the professional stage?\" (8-9). The diverse essays in Shakespeare on the University Stage provide an array of answers to these and other questions, and they certainly encourage sustained future scholarship on this neglected topic. The book begins and ends with two leaders in the Shakespeare performance field, Peter Holland and W. B. Worthen, who provide, respectively, a historical context for campus Shakespeare and a theoretical interrogation of it. In between, essays explore the development of Shakespeare performance in a range of international educational traditions. Many consider the cultural status of Shakespeare and the politics implicit in his role in education; several note how campus Shakespeare performances provide a laboratory for current concerns about ideology and identity (especially gender identity). Hartley's concern is not with how performance is used in classroom teaching, a topic much discussed elsewhere, but with actual productions: both those formally mounted by university departments as part of their teaching mission and cultural calendar, and those put on by ad hoc student groups for creative expression, intellectual enrichment, or simply fun. The essays in Shakespeare on the University Stage are not subdivided into labeled sections, but there is a meaningful arc to their organization. The book begins with the history of university Shakespeare in the Anglo-American world, then branches out into a consideration of different global traditions, and ends with a consideration of some of the challenges, and new potentialities, for educational Shakespeare performance today. Holland begins the historical section with a series of snapshots of early campus Sha","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71027750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Try what repentance can\": Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority","authors":"P. Stegner","doi":"10.1057/9781137558619_4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137558619_4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58223102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature","authors":"J. Boro","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2517","url":null,"abstract":"The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature By Barbara Fuchs Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 What would the discipline of Anglo-Spanish literary relations look like if the lost play Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote, were discovered? As Barbara Fuchs explains in the introduction to her exceptional book, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, Cardenio is the Holy Grail and the \"absent presence\" (1) of Anglo-Spanish culture. The Poetics of Piracy is, in many ways, a response to the surge of high-profile interest in this \"absent center\" (1), as seen in endeavors ranging from Stephen Greenblatt's The Cardenio Project (2003) through Gregory Doran's rewriting of Cardenio for the RSC (2011) to an Arden edition of Lewis Theobald's Double Falsehood (2010), an eighteenth-century adaptation of Cardenio. In the introduction and final two chapters of the book, Fuchs engages directly with the textual history of Cardenio, offering sustained critiques of recent bibliographic, academic, and creative approaches to the play in order to question its centrality to the discipline and to demonstrate how its prominence is rooted in both Hispanophobia and good, old-fashioned Bardolatry. Yet, Fuchs's project is much more than an intervention in the debate surrounding the absence of this lost play; The Poetics of Piracy skillfully and cogently exposes \"the Spanish connection that makes sense of Cardenio\" (1), the vibrant, sustained, and often paradoxical networks of relations between English and Spanish culture. The early modern period represents an era of tension between Spain and England, with especially strained feelings mounting at pivotal moments such as the hostilities culminating in the Armada; piracy, privateering, and the feud for wealth and power in the New World; the failed courtship of Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta; and the Thirty Years' War. These incidents affected the reception of Spanish texts in surprising ways. As a Catholic superpower, Spain posed significant political and ideological threats to England. English racial bigotry impacted the perception of Spaniards, who were feared not only for their Catholicism but also for their supposed Moorish or Jewish heritage. Essential to the national imagination and to the self-construction of Englishness was a differentiation from Catholic continental Europe and a perception of England as a strong, unique Protestant nation. Paradoxically, despite the abundance of documented hostility towards Spain, readers continued to enjoy Spanish literature throughout the period and steadily increasing numbers sought to learn the language. As Fuchs explains, \"The cultural fascination with Spain never waned, even when it was most inconvenient in military or religious terms\" (9). Spanish literary genres, forms, and plots inspired myriad Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, including many studied by Fuchs","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71143655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England","authors":"Carla Mazzio","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-3713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-3713","url":null,"abstract":"Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England Edited by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 Shakespearean Sensations joins an ongoing conversation in the field of early modern studies about the logic of the senses, the affects, and conditions of embodied subjectivity in and around the plays and poems of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume offers ten new essays by distinguished and innovative scholars that consider, collectively, the \"sensations aroused by imaginative literature\" (3) or more concretely, how Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have understood the impact of drama and poetry on audiences and readers. The editors, who have each produced sustained studies of literature and forms of sensory response, Katherine A. Craik (Reading Sensations in Early Modern England) and Tanya Pollard [Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England), seem an ideal team to open up new directions in this field. Indeed, in the company of several thoughtful edited collections in recent years, including Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, edited by Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (2010), Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, edited by Laurie Johnson, John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble (2014), and the earlier Reading the Early Modern Passions, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2004), Craik and Pollard's volume offers a timely contribution to scholarship on intersecting histories of literature, affect, and embodiment. Shakespearean Sensations, however, sets itself apart from this developing body of scholarship by calling for an intensive focus on \"literature's effects,\" or imagined effects, on early modern audiences and readers. \"How did early modern writers,\" ask Craik and Pollard at the outset of the Introduction, \"imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies, and souls?\" (1). They further refine the scope of the volume by asking their contributors to consider, or reconsider, \"the period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling\" (1). While re-familiarizing readers with early discourses concerned with both literary impact and \"the physiology of affect,\" including classical and renaissance rhetoric, philosophy and medicine, debates about religion, and treatises on the powers and dangers of theater and poetry, Craik and Pollard ask their contributors to consider early modern discourses of literary impact in new ways. For in light of both the \"affective turn\" in a number of disciplines within and beyond the humanities and the need for scholars to articulate the value of literary study, the editors stress the importance of historicizing \"literature's shaping impact on audiences\" in order to deepen our understanding of \"the period's beliefs about how and why literature mattered\" (25). By emphasizing the urgency of excavating \"the historical specificities of the period's vocab","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71145406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England","authors":"A. Shapiro","doi":"10.5860/choice.188141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.188141","url":null,"abstract":"Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England By Miriam Jacobson Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 Early in Miriam Jacobson's impressive new study of Eastern imports and English poetry, she contrasts our contemporary approach to the reading of poetry with the early modern approach: Although poetry is always drawing attention to its sinews and musculature, today we are supposed to wrestle through this infrastructure to arrive at a poem's meaning ... But early modern language was neither transparent nor fixed in meaning, nor was composition distanced from the physical exertion of writing and printing as much as it is in our digital age. Though this could be said about all poetry, early modern writers and readers in particular demonstrated a heightened awareness of the \"thingness\" of words, not only as building blocks of text but also as marks on a page and as imports from other countries and cultures. (15) Barbarous Antiquity examines the nature of early modern English poetry--above all, its semantic flexibility and \"thingness\"--at a crucial moment in its development. In the late sixteenth century, Jacobson argues, the growth of English trade with the Ottoman Empire coincided with a waning in the authority of Greek and Roman literary models. The fruits of this trade (new goods from Constantinople, Persia, and India) furnished English poets with new words and images that they, in turn, imported into their representations of classical antiquity. In the poetic imagination, then, the eastern Mediterranean became a kind of palimpsest, with visions of the classical world bleeding through at one moment and visions of the Ottoman world blotting them out at another. Although English writers generally found the growth of Ottoman power disturbing, many also found this double vision of the East useful as they progressed from close imitation to freer adaptation of classical literary models. \"In this way,\" Jacobson writes, \"the classical antiquity represented in early modern English poetry became newly barbarous\" (1). In each chapter, Jacobson \"reorients\" a central text by focusing on the imported words and images that helped its author to \"remediate\" the classical past. Chapter 4, for instance, explores Shakespeare's descriptions of Arabian horses and Turkish bulbs in Venus and Adonis, images that mark the poem's main points of departure from its Ovidian source. Other chapters uncover connections between George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie and sugar, Ben Jonson's Poetaster and inkhorn terms, Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and the lately introduced concept of zero. In the final chapter, Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman's Hero and Leander oozes with pearls, dyes, and ink. Tracing the etymology of key words, the origin of imports (e.g., sugar from Crete, the concept of zero from India), and their presence in English life, Jacobson develops a rich picture of a cosmopolitan literary culture eage","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71026828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Mingling vice and “worthiness” in King John","authors":"R. Weimann, Douglas Bruster","doi":"10.1017/CBO9780511481437.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511481437.004","url":null,"abstract":"WITH THE ADVENT OF MARLOWE the aims of representation in the Elizabethan theater were sharply redefined. As the prologues to Tamburlaine suggested, the dramatist literally felt authorized to \"lead\" the theater to a new horizon of legitimation, one against which the hero could more nearly be viewed as a self-contained \"picture.\" Such a portrait would \"unfold\" the scene \"at large\"; the character \"himself in presence\" would dominate the performance. This at least is how the Prologue to The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great proceeded to elucidate the uses of \"this tragic glass\" in the earlier Prologue: But what became of fair Zenocrate, And with how many cities' sacrifice He [Tamburlaine] celebrated her sad funeral, Himself in presence shall unfold at large.(1) As promised on the title page, the heroic character's \"presence\" continued to be felt in \"his impassionate fury.\" As Richard Jones, the printer, assumed in his Preface to the Octavo and Quarto editions of 1590, these fruits of a literary imagination would have appealed \"To the Gentlemen Readers and others that take pleasure in reading Histories.\" Moving easily from stage to page, these eminently readable representations, forthwith available in print, recommended themselves in terms of what \"worthiness\" the \"eloquence of the author\" could profitably deliver to a gentle preoccupation with \"serious affairs and studies.\" The flow of authority now seemed to be not simply from text to performance, but--an even closer circuit--from the dramatic writing--via the printing--into the studies of those familiar with \"reading Histories.\" Or so at least Jones, a not entirely unbiased observer, would have it. London theater audiences, even when hugely thrilled by Edward Alleyn's portrait of Tamburlaine, appeared to take a different view, even when what they \"greatly gaped at\" did not find its way into the printed text. Here, to recall the partisan position ]ones betrays in his Preface provides us with an illuminating foil against which to read the treatment, between Marlowe and Shakespeare, of how comic or grotesque \"jestures\" were mingled, or otherwise, with the \"worthiness of the matter itself.\" In Marlowe's plays it was possible, at least in print, to view serious matter as incompatible with such \"graced deformities\" as performances on public stages entailed. Participating in the countermanding flow of authority, even snatching part of it for himself as a discriminating reader, the printer, apparently without intervention on the part of the dramatist, saw fit radically to cancel out the most gaped-at elements of performance. Since, obviously, the latter were viewed as having no authority of their own, the tragical discourse was not to be contaminated by \"some fond and frivolous\" traces of mere players; these needed to be refined out of existence, as befitted \"so honorable and stately a history.\" Unfortunately, we can do little more than conjecture Marlowe's perspective on the issue of this cultural diff","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57049512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare and Women","authors":"Valerie Wayne","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-4538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-4538","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71111435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ben Jonson's Head","authors":"J. Masten","doi":"10.1093/nq/s6-ii.30.75d","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s6-ii.30.75d","url":null,"abstract":"I'M TRYING TO IMAGINE what it might mean to buy a book \"at the Ben Johnson's Head in Thredneedle-street\" in 1656. I stumble upon this shop sign in reading a list of plays available in print--a list published at the end of The Old Law, a play attributed on its title page to Middleton, Rowley, and Massinger. Advertised as \"An Exact and perfect CATALOGUE of all the PLAIES that were ever printed; together, with all the Authors names; and what are Comedies, Histories, and Interludes, Masks, Pastorels, Tragedies,\"(1) and running to sixteen pages and 622 titles, this list groups plays alphabetically by title and includes a column noting the genre of each play--comedy, tragedy, interlude, masque--by abbreviation (C, T, I, M), and a column that sometimes attributes authorship. \"All these Plaies,\" the catalogue promises, \"you may either have at the Signe of the Adam and Eve, in Little Britain; or, at the Ben Johnson's Head in Thredneedle-street, over against the Exchange.\"(2) The Jonson's Head was the sign for Robert Pollard's shop from 1655 until at least 1658;(3) a later list, published in 1661 by Francis Kirkman, advertises as one of its locations for the buying and selling of plays \"the John Fletchers Head.\"(4) I want to ask what it means to place a playwright's head on a shop sign--to sell under its sign, or to read it, in an advertisement or in the street. What kind of sign do these head signs represent? Part of an answer lies in the formatting of the play catalogues themselves. As they emerge in the 1650s, '60s, and '70s, the catalogues seem to me to trace the rising (though still tentative) importance of authorship as a visible category for organizing printed drama. To the extent that they engage authorship (and they do so to different degrees), the catalogues seem not as interested in consistency with even the other available printed attributions as they are in promoting a growing interest in plays associated with recognizable names.(5) The first extant list, published with The Careless Sheperdes in 1656, is organized to facilitate locating plays alphabetically by title, with occasional authorial identifications following in italics. There is no separate column for authors.(6) The Old Law catalogue likewise lists plays alphabetically by title, with a column for genre, and then a column with more frequent notation of authorship in italics.(7) A 1661 list--Francis Kirkman's initial effort, published in an old interlude--places an author column first (\"Names of the Authors\"), but continues to arrange/group the plays alphabetically by title (\"Names of the Playes\").(8) In the layout of Kirkman's page, authorship is thus marked more prominently than in the earlier catalogues, but title remains the organizing principle. Kirkman's second list, published with a translation of Corneille's Nicomede in 1671, uses the same column arrangement, but in its \"Advertisement to the Reader,\" the publisher bestows great attention on what he calls \"the placing of names,","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/nq/s6-ii.30.75d","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61352877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Words as Things","authors":"M. D. Grazia","doi":"10.1887/0750305711/b639c6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1887/0750305711/b639c6","url":null,"abstract":"IS A WORD A THING? It depends, of course, on what is meant by thing. If sensible properties constitute thingness, then a word is certainly a thing. It exists either as a sound to be heard or a mark to be seen. There is a long tradition, however, of denying words the status of things. In the short essay that follows, I will suggest that this tradition begins when words are required to represent things or matter. If words are to give a clear representation of things (empirical or notional), they must forego their own thingness. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Bacon draws a strong line between words and things. To emphasize the inferiority of words to things, he compares words to three forms of representation:(1) a flourish on the initial letter of a patent or limned book; the statue Pygmalion fell in love with; a painting like Zeuxis's famous still life of grapes that looked so real a blackbird tried to peck them.(2) This mistaking of the unreal for the real is what Bacon terms \"Pygmalion's frenzy,\" a madness like idolatry that fixates on the image rather than the thing the image represents. In all three instances, the forbidden graven image is imagined as being itself immaterial. It offers up nothing of its own to read, to embrace, to eat. But, of course, all these forms of representation do have substance of their own, though it is not the same as that of the thing they represent. The flourish is made of ink on paper, the statue of stone, the painting of canvas and pigment. If these images were granted materiality, they would themselves become things worthy of the desire (to study, love, eat) that is the due of what they represent. Their pursuit then would be impelled not by a mad \"frenzy\" but by perfectly reasonable interest. If words are to serve as transparent representations of things, their own thinglike or sensible properties must be overlooked. Or else remade in the image of what they represent. Thus Bacon hinted at an alternative system of notation that would work \"without the help or intervention of words.\"(3) Its characters, he speculated, would resemble the things they represented, either physically as pictographs or conceptually as ideographs. In the second half of the century, Bacon's suggestion materialized in the project sponsored by the Royal Society to devise an artificial language. John Wilkins, for example, in his 800-page An Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) describes a set of characters intended to represent directly the objects or notions common to all men.(4) Each character stands for a thing or an idea, and when properly distributed and combined they are to correspond with empirical observation or philosophical ordering. In these attempts, characters are designed in the likeness of the things they represent; their own material attributes are forged to match what they stand for. Words, it might be said, have been phased into things. Indeed it is not much of a leap to Swift's sat","PeriodicalId":39628,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67687085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}