Day 6: Reading Group, Neighbours and the Theatre
I: Reading Group III: Klein (2001) [Erica Artiles, Sharon Emmerichs, Sophia Li, Wendy Weise] 
Some Suggested Reading
II: Kristin Lucas: ‘Social Space and Moral Space: Neighbours and Proximity in Early Modern Literature’
The main objective of my workshop paper on moral and social space is to introduce a theoretical framework that will invogorate a discussion of the neighbour. I bring together some slightly unusual bedfellows, and although I don't suppose to reconcile them entirely, I do suggest that together they form meaningful ground from which to approach relations of proximity. I focus on communitarian philosophy (especially Taylor and MacIntyre), and argue that an emphasis on the socially embedded self is apt because it provides a language through which to evaluate neighbourliness as a constitutive good and one of the building blocks of civic life. If philosophy provides a means to comprehend a life filled with the pleasures and struggles of worldly obligation, a theoretical approach to the very idea of the neighbour (as posited by Reinhard, Levinas, Santner, Agamben, among others), rooted in both political theology and psychoanalysis, offers a constant reminder of the fraught relation harboured within the commandment to love. In this view, the neighbour is other, at best indifferent, at worst hostile and murderous, yet always to be loved--and as oneself, no less. The difficult other may appear to be a burr under the saddle of the communitarian, but is perhaps better seen as an outlying case: he is a necessary prompt to the nature of the commendment itself, and helps shed light on a play such as Measure for Measure, where even the most reprobate of characters is released. Though the paper engages mainly with theoretical points, I draw on some plays and religious instructional writing to help ground/test ideas, and demonstrate applicability.
Some Suggested Reading
Bossy, John. ‘Moral Arithmetic’, in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern England, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: CUP, 1988).
Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).
Green, Ian. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).
Reinhard, Kenneth. The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006)
III: Matthew Hansen: ‘Marketed License and the Licensed Market: The Location of the Theatres in Early Modern London’
In his seminal study on the location of the theatres in and around early modern London, Stephen Mullaney (The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Chicago UP, 1988) established the relevance of the marginalised location of the theatres, in the Liberties and suburbs, as a signifier of the theatres’ role as a force for subversion against centralised authority. Mullaney’s argument was later significantly challenged (by Douglas Bruster in Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Cambridge UP, 1992) principally on the grounds that the economic factors that drove the theatres as an industry ingrained them into the centralised power structure of late-Tudor and Stuart London, effectively making the theatres a party to the maintenance of that power structure.
This paper argues that these two perceptions about the theatres, particularly in relation to the actual, physical location of the early modern London theatres not only need not be considered oppositional, but are in fact complementary.So true is this union that the playwrights, players, and other theatre entrepreneurs clearly made capital of it, presenting plays that deliberately highlighted the subversive and holiday ‘otherness’ that became the principal product of both the theatres and the surrounding businesses with which they shared space in the Liberties and suburbs on the edge of the city and its centralised authority structure.
I interpret the signs embedded in the plays themselves as metaphors for this true marriage of license and the market. This paper explores the historical records of early modern London to reveal the familiarity and frequency with which both entertainment providers and consumers openly acknowledged the happy union between location and product and further explores exemplary play texts that distinctly reveal the capital playwrights and theatre entrepreneurs made of their peripheral location, turning what might have initially been a status of authoritarian banishment or exclusion into a reinforcement of the otherness that was the theatres’ principal product.
Some Suggested Reading
Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought 1550-1750. Cambridge: CUP, 1986.
Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: CUP, 1992.
Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. London: Routledge, 1985.
Kastan, David Scott. ‘Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’. Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 324-37.
Kinney, Arthur F., ed. ‘Markets of Bawdrie’: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974.
Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1988
IV: Jonathan Walker: ‘Cleaving the General Ear’
This paper is one of four chapters in a book project about “offstage action” in the popular drama of the English Renaissance. In the book I argue that offstage action—such as Ophelia’s drowning—opens up a discursive dimension of theatricality through the performance of onstage storytelling; that the conjunction of drama and narrative on the stage places different kinds of rhetorical and epistemological demands on playgoers; and that this theatrical situation (what I call the obscæne) compels playgoers to arbitrate between dissimilar forms of knowledge and belief, thereby inviting them to participate actively in the construction of dramatic meaning.
Having discussed in other chapters the role of offstage action in classical dramatic theory and in various plays of the period, I turn in “Cleaving the General Ear” to examining the offstage space of the auditoria in early modern amphitheaters like the Rose and the Globe. If onstage storytelling introduces indirect dramatic action into the direct or immediate practice of performance, then the geometry of the amphitheaters functions as a material analogue to the indirections and dilations of dramatic stories. The shape and fluidity of the amphitheaters’ interior architecture confer upon playgoers a great deal of control over the reception and meaning of performance events. I claim that the playgoing conditions of the auditoria are at once material and rhetorical. These conditions situate theatergoers within multiple physical and interpretive positions in relation to the stage, ones which are composed of oblique angles and indirect perspectives, much like the situation that obscænic storytelling produces. In order to formulate the relationship between spectatorial and theatrical spaces in London amphitheaters, I draw on research in theater history and archeology, on Renaissance emblem books, and on period descriptions of the actor’s spellbinding craft. I argue, finally, that the freedom of movement and the radically disunified sightlines in early modern amphitheaters cleave playgoers’ aural and visual sensibilities, but that it is precisely such divisions that cleave or fasten their attention and interpretive energies to the action on the stage.
Some Suggested Reading
Andrew Gurr, with John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989).
_____. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds. Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, adv. ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
John Orrell, The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
I. A. Shapiro, “The Bankside Theatres: Early Engravings,” Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948): 25-37.
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
William N. West, “The Idea of a Theater: Humanist Ideology and the Imaginary Stage in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 28 (1997 [1999]): 245-87.
Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300-1660, 4 vols. in 5 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959-2001).