Abstracts
Abstracts
Alarums and Defeats: Henry VI on Tour
Stuart Hampton-Reeves, University of Central Lancashire
The Lunar Calendar of Shakespeare's King Lear
Steve Sohmer, Lincoln College, Oxford
"In a dark world and wide": Samson Agonistes and the Meaning of Christian Heroism
Carol Barton, Averett College
Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis
Gary Kuchar, McMaster University
Utopia and the 'Pacific Rim': the Cartographical Evidence
Romuald I. Lakowski, University of British Columbia
Alarums and Defeats: Henry VI on Tour
Stuart Hampton-Reeves, University of Central Lancashire
The importance of provincial touring to early modern performance culture has undergone a substantial re-assessment in recent years, opening up the possibility of touring as a new context for criticism. Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI is thought to have been toured by Pembroke's Men in the early 1590s. This paper suggests that the play was written to be toured and attempts a reading of the play's treatment of regional and social identity which is located in a provincial, touring milieu. The English Shakespeare's Company's late 1980s tour of the play (the first tour since the 1590s) affords an opportunity to explore how the play 'works' in a touring context.
The Lunar Calendar of Shakespeare's King Lear
Steve Sohmer, Lincoln College, Oxford
From his reading of Hall, William Shakespeare knew the historical King Leir had flourished before the founding of Rome.This paper suggests that the playwright conformed the action of his King Lear to a pre-Roman lunar calendar which he found in Plutarch. Further, the writer demonstrates that Shakespeare drew upon his knowledge of Ovid's Fasti to memorialize several important Roman festivals in text of Lear. Finally, the paper detects a connection between the Roman Terminalia and Saint Stephen's night, and suggests that Shakespeare wrote (or extensively revised) the Q1 Lear for performance before King James on 26 December 1606.
"In this dark world and wide": Samson Agonistes and the Meaning of Christian Heroism
In this essay, I argue that Samson Agonistes is an integral part of Milton's ultimate definition of Christian heroism, the second of a trilogy of works that begins literally at the pinnacle of human achievement with the Nazarene of Paradise Regained, descends from that unattainable height to the still numenous but theologically problematic Old Testament Nazarite, and finds its most satisfying resolution in the everyman of Adam and Eve. Emanating from the poet's misgivings over the failure of the Good Old Cause and the concomitant taunt that his blindness was punishment "for the transgressions of [his] pen", Samson Agonistes thus constitutes Milton's initial examination of the mechanisms of self-seduction and self-entrapping sophistry that "with words cloth'd in reason's garb" will lead Samson to marry Dalila, Eve to reach forth her rash hand in evil hour, and Adam to resolve with her to die.
Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis
Gary Kuchar, McMaster University
Recent articles by Catherine Belsey, Richard Halpern, and James Schiffer have shifted the critical focus of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis from questions of what the poem means, to how it means, from its moral allegory to its erotic and literary effects. Although these recent readings have deepened our understanding of how the poem "prompts in the reader a desire for action it fails to gratify" (Belsey), I do not think adequate attention has been paid to the rhetorical and intertextual elements that give rise to the reader's experience of "frustration." This paper aims, then, to demonstrate that the poem's frustrating effects are largely a product of its rhetorical design, the fact that a substantial portion of the narrative's comic-tragic trajectory is constructed through patterns of opposition, resolution, and subsequent disunion. Through a close examination of the poem's imagery, gender reversals, rhetoric, and its variations on Ovidian myth, I demonstrate that Shakespeare's poem undermines a reader's expectation for closure, choosing instead to tease the reader's desire for resolution by sustaining, rather than dissolving, the oppositions upon which it is constructed.
Utopia and the 'Pacific Rim': The Cartographical Evidence
Romuald I. Lakowski, University of British Columbia
This article examines the influence of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Geographical accounts (Ptolemy, Macrobius, Sacrobosco and the Cosmographiae introductio) on More's Utopia, especially with regard to theories about the five climatic zones and the Antipodes. It also draws on contemporary maps to argue that More's geographical understanding was not modern, and that he thought of the island of Utopia in primarily Antipodean and Asian ("Indian"), rather than American terms. In support of this a number of major cartographical discrepancies in maps are pointed out: South America is shown as close to Asia, North America does not appear on most maps, the Earth's Circumference is underestimated by 20-30% and the size of Asia greatly exaggerated, and a number of important geographical features (India, Ceylon, the Malaysian Peninsula and Indonesia) are incorrectly placed well South of the Equator. An appendix discusses More's knowledge of Macrobius.
© 1999-, Lisa
Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).