{"title":"Introduction: Early Modern Affective Ecologies","authors":"Piers Brown, A. Deutermann","doi":"10.1086/727172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727172","url":null,"abstract":"he Tempest begins, famously, with a shipwreck that isn ’ t. As a “ tempes-tuous noise of thunder and lightning [is] heard, ” a boatswain and his fellow mariners contend with wind and weather while the ship ’ s passengers complain and interfere. 1 The ship splits, and all are lost — except it doesn ’ t, and they aren ’ t, because the whole scene has been an elaborate piece of what the play will call Prospero ’ s “ art. ” The ship ’ s passengers emerge unscathed and even (if Gonzalo is to be believed) dry, their “ garments . . . as fresh as when [they] put them on fi rst in Africa ” (2.1.70 – 71). First performed in the enclosed space of Blackfriars Theatre, rather than in the open-air Globe, the play repeatedly contrasts containment and exposure. The fragile, leaky wooden ship suggests a porous vessel not unlike the theater in which the action is being staged: Gonzalo, cursing the boatswain, insists that the ship is “ no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench ” (1.1.45 – 47). 2 As the ship appears to sink, the mariners within and without let out cries of “‘ We split, we split ’ — ’ Farewell, my wife and children! ’ — / ‘ Farewell, brother! ’ — ’ We split, we split, we split! ’” (1.1.60 – 62). This splitting open is paralleled by a similar description of an opening of the heavens insuf fi cient to save the helmsman from hanging, even “ Though every drop of water swear against it /And gape at widest to glut him ” (1.1.58 – 59). Together, these moments underscore how the theater and real life open onto each other: the play ’ s","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"1 1","pages":"151 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139346649","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":"Thick and Thin: Changes of State in Macbeth","authors":"David Landreth","doi":"10.1086/727186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727186","url":null,"abstract":"t his essay attends to the rich sensuousness of Macbeth : fi rst as the play generates an affectively polyvalent atmosphere in which to immerse its audience and characters, and then as bodily changes overtake those characters. Those changes mark the threshold between affect and emotion as a change in state for the characters ’ embodiment — from liquid to solid, or solid to gas — and the vividness with which those changes are realized in staged bodies ’ transactions with the atmosphere guides the audience ’ s emotional engagements with that atmosphere. In this way, Macbeth generates a model for the interrelation of material, social, and preternatural causes upon human feeling and of feelings upon each other — or, in fact, two interlocking models. Through the dynamics be-tween choler and fear, the play offers a model of individual agency, and through those between envy and trust, it offers a model of social agency. The two pairs interact complexly, but the question of priority between them is left irresolute — as a matter of inchoate feeling rather than of solid certainty.","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"103 1","pages":"175 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139346694","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":"Female Masquers and Ambiguity in Timon of Athens","authors":"E. Kolkovich","doi":"10.1086/727041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727041","url":null,"abstract":"s","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"1 1","pages":"135 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139344293","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":"Imaginary Puissance: Historicizing “Setting” and Discourses of Control","authors":"Kristen Poole","doi":"10.1086/727185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727185","url":null,"abstract":"t his essay takes up a literary concept that is so familiar it might seem trite: the idea of setting . Over the last century or so, setting has migrated from a relatively new literary term that was introduced to high school and college students to a concept that is taught to beginner readers at the start of literacy education. (That has been the trajectory of the term in the United States, at least.) Taught to us at a very young age, setting has become so ingrained in our processing of narrative that we most likely take this awareness for granted. But as with most concepts that have become naturalized to the point of invisibility, setting is not value-neutral. The idea of setting emerges from a particular historical moment and discourse, and it carries forth certain assumptions — ideological, aesthetic, narratological — about the workings of story. A survey of educational materials about setting suggests that one of its implied values is stability, or a distinct sense of location and emplacement. We might consider, for example, this de fi nition from the online source Literary Devices: “ Setting is a literary device that allows the writer of a narrative to establish the time, location, and environment in which it takes place . . . . The setting of a narrative or story helps the reader picture clear and relevant details. In addition, setting enhances the development of a story ’ s plot and characters by providing a distinct background. ” 1 The modern concept of setting is about clarity of image in the mind ’ s eye. And it is not just that a story ’ s background is distinct in itself; there is an implied distinction between characters/agents and background/environment. Characters exist within a setting but are ontologically","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"69 1","pages":"159 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139344671","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":"Tamburlaine, Able-Bodiedness, and the Skills of the Early Modern Player","authors":"E. D. Gainey","doi":"10.1086/727039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727039","url":null,"abstract":"t his essay highlights the idealization of able-bodiedness in early modern playing, a crucial topic in the growing scholarship on disability and early modern drama that has developed in recent years. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood ’ s foundational work on early modern disability studies has helped frame disability as not an anachronism to early modern England but an “ operational identity category ” in the sense that mentally and physically impaired bodies are quite familiarly stigmatized, devalued, and othered across a vast array of period drama, prose, and poetry. 1 Elizabeth B. Bearden has similarly interro-gated the “ norming effects ” that period literature ’ s frequent deployment of categories like “ natural ” and “ ideal ” institute — categories that, for Bearden, mark mentally and physically impaired bodies as deviant from an able-bodied standard. 2 More recent work on disability and early modern drama presents the stage","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"35 1","pages":"111 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345364","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":"Against Editing “Whitely”: Restoring Shakespeare’s Interracial Comedic Couple to Love’s Labour’s Lost","authors":"Scott Maisano","doi":"10.1086/725195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725195","url":null,"abstract":"t his essay shows how anti-Black prejudice, especially misogynoir, led to the editing out of a Black woman — or rather, a fi gure racialized and gendered as such — from the Shakespearean canon of characters and subsequently to the loss of what would have been the playwright ’ s most visible, if not only, interracial comedic couple. 1 The signi fi cance of an interracial comedic couple becomes apparent when we consider how this couple is featured in","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"51 1","pages":"55 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45424123","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":"Networks and Dramatic Form in Arden of Faversham","authors":"Jeffrey S. Doty","doi":"10.1086/725177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725177","url":null,"abstract":"ikely first staged in 1589 or 1590, and first printed in 1592, Arden of Faversham comes in the wake of the theaters’ shift away from the abstract or symbolic characterization typical of morality plays and Tudor interludes. Characters like Virtue and Envy have no backstories: universal rather than particular, they exist outside of history, in an eternal unchanging time that medieval and early modern audiences regarded not as a lesser but rather as a greater state of reality. Such characterization, which “involves a fundamental rhetorical separation between the play world and the real world,” was nearly ubiquitous in professional drama until the mid-1580s. David Bevington writes that “almost all pre-Marlovian plays in the sixteenth century which bear convincing evidence of popular commercial production are in fact moralities or hybrids.” According to the data compiled in British Drama: A Catalogue, roughly half of the plays for which we have extant scripts or reliable evidence from 1567 to 1584 feature allegorical characters. But from 1584 to 1590—or from John Lyly’s Galatea to Arden of Faversham—only two of thirty-five plays incorporate personified characters into the main action.","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"51 1","pages":"1 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44220907","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":"Botched Labor and Secondhand Craft in Arden of Faversham","authors":"Margo Kolenda-Mason","doi":"10.1086/725175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725175","url":null,"abstract":"chival research in this essay was made financially possible by the Rackham Graduate the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at the University of Michigan. I wish ate Kelsey Staples, Steven Freeth, Matthew Davies, Jane Malcolm-Davies, Robin Neilliam Ingram, and Rebecca Chung for generously sharing their knowledge of the botchggesting potential sites of inquiry to help bring them out of the shadows. I am also grateael Schoenfeldt, Linda Gregerson, PeggyMcCracken, and Catherine Sanok; participants 1 Renaissance Society of America, 2021Modern Language Association, and 2020 Shakeociation of America conferences; andWilliamWest and the anonymous reader atRenaisa for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Downame,A guide to the godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life (London: Printed by Felix [and William Stansby] for Ed: Weuer & W: Bladen at the north dore of Pauls, 1622). n of Faversham, ed. Catherine Richardson (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2022), 1.24–29.","PeriodicalId":53676,"journal":{"name":"Renaissance Drama","volume":"51 1","pages":"29 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41566870","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}