{"title":"Shakespeare and Chess Again: A Proposal for an Alternative Reading of pawn(s) in King Lear, King John and The Winter’s Tale","authors":"José Luis Oncins Martínez","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.2","url":null,"abstract":"commented on and annotated. However, there still remain quite a few obscure passages and complex words which continue to puzzle and cause debate as to their precise meanings. One such word is pawn, glossed as a pun in some editions of King Lear, and passed over in silence in other plays where it appears in similar contexts. This essay proposes an alternative reading of the word in King Lear, King John and The Winter’s Tale. The hypothesis put forward is that Shakespeare was indeed hinting at the various senses of this word and exploiting its punning potential in these three plays. This suggestion is supported by a series of examples of similar rhetorical exploitation of this polysemic word as found in several contemporary authors. These examples will demonstrate that the various senses of the word were indeed very much alive in Elizabethan England – and quite probably in Shakespeare’s mind.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"2015 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86877933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defrauding Daughters Turning Deviant Wives? Reading Female Agency in The Merchant of Venice","authors":"Nicoleta Cinpoȩs","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.7","url":null,"abstract":"Brabantio’s words “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:| She has deceived her father, and may thee” (Othello, 1.3.292–293) warn Othello about the changing nature of female loyalty and women’s potential for deviancy. Closely examining daughters caught in the conflict between anxious fathers and husbands-to-be, this article departs from such paranoid male fantasy and instead sets out to explore female deviancy in its legal and dramatic implications with reference to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. I will argue that Portia’s and Jessica’s struggle to evade male subsidiarity results in their conscious positioning themselves on the verge of illegality. Besides occasioning productive exploration of marriage, law and justice within what Morss (2007:183) terms “the dynamics of human desire and of social institutions,” I argue that female agency, seen as temporary deviancy and/or self-exclusion, reconfigures the male domain by affording the inclusion of previous outsiders (Antonio, Bassanio and Lorenzo).","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91172003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester’s Spanish-Speaking Secretariats","authors":"H. Crummé","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.1","url":null,"abstract":"Whilst the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is itself filled with problems of representation, I will argue in this paper that the greatest misrepresentation of all did not occur in fiction but rather in the English court. During Elizabeth’s reign Lord Burghley, working with his secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, systematically misrepresented Spanish culture, deliberately obscuring the English perception of Spanish Golden Age and casting over it a veil of fear. The Earl of Leicester, by contrast, working only to improve his own reputation as a literary patron and man of letters, inadvertently increased English access to Spanish literature as he patronized a coterie of Spanish-speaking scholars at the University of Oxford. These Spanish secretaries translated Spanish literature and created Spanish dictionaries. By analysing the propaganda created under Burghley and the dictionaries created under Leicester, I will show how the English perception of the Spanish Golden Age developed. How, one might ask, was Antonio del Corro’s arrival at the university tied to the printing of the first Spanish books in England at the university press? Why did both Leicester and Burghley eventually sponsor Spanish-English dictionaries? How did these different media and dictionaries mediate the English perception of Spain? These are some of the questions my paper will address through examination of the Atye-Cotton manuscripts (now housed at the British Library), a series of pamphlets sponsored by Lord Burghley, and several English-Spanish dictionaries created in the late 16th century.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89081873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing Shakespeare in a Conflicting Cultural Context: Othello in Francoist Spain","authors":"Elena Bandín Fuertes","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.6","url":null,"abstract":"The present article reviews the stage history of Othello in Spain and, in particular, it focuses on two performances of the play staged at the Español theatre during Franco’s dictatorship, in 1944 and 1971 respectively. Othello was one of the Shakespearean plays programmed by the regime to give cultural prestige to the “national” theatre. By comparing both productions, this paper explores how the performance of Othello evolved during the dictatorship. Furthermore, it shows how the repressive force of state censorship was exerted to promote certain theatrical conventions and to prevent theatre directors and translators from offering new readings and updatings of the plays, in the case of Othello, for almost thirty years.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76212829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Space of Identity and the Identity of Space in The City Wit by Richard Brome","authors":"C. Paravano","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.4","url":null,"abstract":"My paper examines The City Wit (1629-1632), a city comedy by Richard Brome revolving around the unscrupulous trade world, where all the characters aim at social recognition, even trampling on feelings and moral values. My objective is to investigate the play as one of the earlier examples of strategic use of space in Brome’s dramatic production. Firstly, I will consider the function of space in relation to the identity of the single characters. Secondly, I will show how space can be manipulated for the re-fashioning of a new identity, as in the case of Jeremy, a male servant disguised as a widow, who builds up a fictitious Cornish identity. Finally, I will analyze the geography of the play focusing in particular on the scene set in the Presence Chamber of Whitehall.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73112918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In a Minor Key: Visual Effects in Shake-Speare’s Sonnets","authors":"A. Hickman","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.8","url":null,"abstract":"Students of the sonnets are no doubt aware that they abound in wordplay that rewards multiple readings. They may be less aware, especially if they are unfamiliar with the original 1609 Quarto edition, that the poems may have been arranged to have a visual impact as well. The sonnet form itself is emblematic of a number of familiar referents, including an escutcheon, a “glass” (mirror), a leaf, and a seal. One might even see in the poems, as did Lady Mary Worth and John Donne in their “crowns” of sonnets, the links in a chain, or necklace. The sonnet form is roughly the poetic equivalent to the portrait miniature (a fad of the day) in art. I shall be pursuing these analogies in my paper. The most striking visual effect occurs in Sonnet 126, the last of the “fair youth” sonnets, which consists of six rhymed couplets followed by two empty sets of brackets. Katherine Duncan-Jones and others have, in recent years, argued authorial intent for this alleged “printer’s error.” Duncan-Jones suggests that the open parentheses may signify the poet and the fair youth’s “failure to couple,” while John Lennard sees in them “the silence of the grave.” I hope to demonstrate that, by thinking in visual terms, we might one day be able to unlock the story behind the most enigmatic verse sequence in English poetry.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88844091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Film and the Uncanny, Shakespeare Making Possible Things Not so Held, Communicating with Dreams","authors":"Martin R. Orkin","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.3","url":null,"abstract":"This essay supports the view that present day cinema as an art form in its own right – rather than film always as adaptation of a literary text – provides an additional pedagogic and comparative opportunity for the analysis of aspects of Shakespeare’s early modern texts. The essay takes as point of departure aspects of the uncanny as evoked in the cinematic experience. It then focuses upon aspects of experience and growth, as well as upon problems attached to language and narrativity as these are explored both in film-texts by Pedro Almodóvar and by Eytan Fox, and also in plays by William Shakespeare.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84713067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning to Scrawl: The Evolutionary Strain in Titus Andronicus","authors":"J. Sell","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2011.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2011.5","url":null,"abstract":"Much has been written on the semiotic obsessions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, less on their relationship with matters of theme. This paper argues first that the play’s engagement with the mutual relationships between language, labour and society draws on classical and early modern accounts of the symbiotic evolution of language and civilised society. It then suggests that the play’s particular rhetorical and kinesiological focus on hand and tongue anticipates the metonymies deployed in Darwinian accounts of human evolution. Key to this reading is the well-known scrawl/scrowl crux: far from opting for a definitive, exclusive meaning, the paper proposes that the semantic uncertainty unleashed at the crux mimics the play’s representation of Rome’s and, in the last resort, humanity’s hesitation between literate civilization and creeping barbarism. No longer a merely lexical quibble over the competing, variously obsolescent and emergent, notions of crawling, gesticulating and scribbling, the crux becomes the touchstone of an evolutionary reading of the play. Just as scrawl/scrowl debates endlessly between different stages on the human evolutionary scale, so Titus Andronicus leaves its readers and audience in uneasy contemplation of Rome’s¬ – and their own – perpetual teetering on the brink of degradation.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"871 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86519979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Baubles on the water: sea travel in Shakespeare’s time","authors":"A. Gurr","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2010.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2010.3","url":null,"abstract":"The technical features of travel by water, on sea and up rivers, are not registered as strongly as it should be in studies of the Shakespearean period. In his great edition of The Spanish Tragedy Philip Edwards mocked the author’s assumption that the Portuguese Viceroy would have travelled to Spain by sea rather than overland, since the play also notes that the two countries have contiguous boundaries. He did not know how tortuous travel overland from Badajoz to Lisbon could be. A similar ignorance of the routine use of travel by boat around the coast of England and up its main rivers is evident in the studies of playing company travels in the many Records of Early English Drama. Its editors take too little notice of the likelihood that the professional playing companies used London’s shipping to carry their personnel and properties on their journeys round the country. The official records of the Privy Council and other state papers show how important access by river was for all bulk transport through England’s rivers. Shakespeare could well have travelled from London home to Stratford upon Avon by water. John Taylor the Water Poet wrote several verses about his own travels from London by water that amply demonstrate the ease and the familiarity to travellers of going anywhere by sea and river. But it was never an easy business. Shakespeare himself twice used the word “bauble” or “bubble” in different plays to describe the fragile nature of the vessels used for sea travel.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80811278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"The king has killed his heart\": The Death of Falstaff in Henry V","authors":"R. Fraser","doi":"10.34136/sederi.2010.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2010.7","url":null,"abstract":"Even with the multitude of religious, political, social and gendered readings of the character, critics have invariably (and understandably) tended to focus most often on the events leading up to and including the rejection scene in 2 Henry IV, and have given far less attention to the report of his death in Henry V. In light of criticism concerning the relationship between Falstaff and the actor Will Kemp, as well as the roles of the stage Vice and clown, this essay will focus on the report in an attempt to reinterpret it and its importance for the play as a whole. As will be seen, in performance it actually formed an integral part of an iterative process that would have served to problematize the presentation of kingship in Henry V on the early modern stage.","PeriodicalId":41004,"journal":{"name":"SEDERI-Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78810195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}