Abstracts

Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys: Old and young bodies in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Ian MacInnes, Albion College

"To stand upright will ask thee skill": The Pinnacle and the Paradigm.

Carol Barton, Averett College.

The Healthy Body: Desire and Sustenance in John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis

Mark Dooley, University of Teesside

Jonson's Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in Volpone.

Alizon Brunning, University of Central Lancashire.

"Subjected Thus": Plague and Panopticism in Richard II

Nick Cox, Leeds Metropolitan University

Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys: Old and young bodies in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Ian MacInnes, Albion College

Many twentieth-century critics have been willing to admit that Shakespeare's depiction of the self in the Sonnets is historically specific, but most of their interpretations assume that this self is either unique or at least highly distinctive. I am challenging this assumption. Drawing on works such as Thomas Wright's Passions of the Minde in General , Ficino's De Triplici Vita, and other medical texts of the period, I explore the Sonnets as part of a larger body of work on the status and value of the passions. I focus in particular on the way Shakespeare connects the subject positions of the three main characters (young man, dark lady, and poet) with their humoral bodies. Many have struggled to assign these roles to real historical characters, but I argue that the three way drama of young man, young woman, and older poet would have been considered an appropriate subject for any Renaissance author interested in the passions. Ultimately, I want to suggest that what is often perceived as the poems' mental pathology is really an expression of the relationship between early modern physical regimes of health and the aging body.

"To stand upright will ask thee skill": The Pinnacle and the Paradigm.

Carol Barton, Averett College.

Paradise Regain'd was considered inferior to the diffuse epic even in Milton's time (though Phillips says the poet "could not hear with patience any such thing"). Criticized for its dramatic austerity, its Spartan furniture, and its placidly static hero, the poem has remained largely unsung for centuries, its true merit and its function (with Samson Agonistes) as a gloss on Paradise Lost almost completely ignored. This article sees Jesus's imperturbability during the temptations of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil as a necessary demonstration of his rejection of Satan's power over him, resulting from his recognition that obedience to the Devil in any form is by definition disobedience to God (a truth which, if Adam and Eve had apprehended it, would have obviated the need for the Incarnation). It posits that the moment of Redemption occurred, not at Golgotha as the crucified Messiah breathed his last on the Cross, but in Gethsemane, when the obedience implicit in Jesus's acceptance of the cup (Matthew 26:42) atoned for the disobedience implicit, first in Eve's, and then in Adam's, acceptance of the forbidden fruit. And it emphasizes the fact that is Jesus (and not Christ) on whom Milton focuses his attention in because it is emulation of Jesus's acts of obedience and faith that will lead us to rediscover that "paradise within us, happier farre."

The Healthy Body: Desire and Sustenance in John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis

Mark Dooley, University of Teesside

John Lyly's play Love's Metamorphosis is described on its title page as "A Witty and Courtly Pastoral" and was first performed around 1590 by the Children of Paul's. This essay argues that Love's Metamorphosis is one of a series of plays by Lyly which explore the tension between erotic desire and chastity but, unlike the earlier plays which, it is argued by critics, celebrate chastity as a form of praise for the cult of virginity promoted by Elizabeth I, this play critiques virginity and promotes an active sexuality as chastity. The central concern of Love's Metamorphosis is the relation between the corporeal body and its material and emotional/social requirements, and this, I shall show, is a relation which structures the entire narrative of the play.

Jonson's Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in Volpone.

Alizon Brunning, University of Central Lancashire.

This paper considers that Ben Jonson's 1606 play Volpone contains a level of Anti-Catholic discourse. It argues that the play's profaning of the mass is specifically a parody of the Catholic Eucharist. The paper goes on to suggest that Jonson's use of the Bestiary Fox figure also draws on a history of association of the fox and his parasitic associates with corrupt clergy, particularly Jesuits. Jonson's own Catholicism is considered as problematic for such a reading but the paper argues that his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot and his previous incarcerations might have led Jonson to outward conformity. However Jonson's own refusal to attend Anglican communion suggests that this conformity might be equivocal. The paper argues that the ending of the play which has Volpone sentenced to punishment in the stocks, and set free by the audience parallels Jonson's own mortification and absolution. Jonson, like his equivocal trickster fox is both sentenced and liberated.

"Subjected Thus": Plague and Panopticism in Richard II

Nick Cox, Leeds Metropolitan University

This essay seeks to read Richard II from within a theoretical framework constituted by the work of Michel Foucault, specifically the analysis offered in Discipline and Punish of the development of disciplinary strategies in the regulation and policing of the plague-stricken town. These mark one of the earliest manifestations within early modern culture of those mechanisms of surveillance and the techniques of subjection from which Foucault traces the development of panopticism. The essay argues that precisely these strategies of disciplinary power can be traced in the Elizabethan orders for the governance of the metropolis during a visitation of the plague. In these regulations it is possible to discern the progress of a molecular revolution in practices of subjection which signals a shift from the spectacular modality of power which has for so long been associated with the exercise of sovereignty in Early Modern culture and the installation of techniques of coercive confinement which signal the onset of modernity. The reading of Richard II offered by the essay suggests that the play figures the emergence, in the receding shadow of the spectacular corporeality of Renaissance absolutism, of a disciplinary technology and temporality that is associated with the figure of Bolingbroke. Richard's deposition and incarceration signal his subjection to a carceral modality of power and the displacement of the spectacular corporeality of the sovereign by a penitent interiority discloses the play's importance as an early textual trace of the process Foucault describes as leading to the formation of the "modern soul."

© 2000-, Lisa Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).