Abstracts
Abstracts
"Wise Handling and Faire Governance": Spenser's Female Educators.
Sarah Plant, Macquarie University.
The Politics of Persuasion: Measure for Measure and Cinthio's Hecatommithi.
Caroline Roberts, University of Toronto.
Nicky Hallett, University of Kent at Canterbury
The Influence of Spenser's Faerie Queene on Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.
Frank Ardolino, University of Hawaii
Hamlet as The
Christmas Prince: Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, Revels,
and Misrule
"Wise Handling and Faire Governance": Spenser's Female Educators.
Sarah Plant, Macquarie University.
Several of Spenser's most significant female characters play important and somewhat extraordinary roles in the dissemination of spiritual knowledge within The Faerie Queene. In appearing to take part in the ritual life of the Church, they seem to be out of step with contemporary definitions of women's roles. Spenser is careful to draw attention to the role of women in the education of youthful characters in particular, emphasising the youth and inexperience of the Red Cross Knight as he enters into an educative relationship with Fidelia. He is also careful to distance such spiritual learning from the more traditionally male-dominated world of the Church and the University. His placement of the spiritual teachings offered by the women in the House of Holiness in a domestic rather than ecclesiastical setting indicated a gendered subtlety to his religious allegory. While there is no reason to suggest that Spenser is advocating a female ministry, the significance of his allocation of such important educative roles to women merits further attention. These women, who are praised by the poet for their "wise handling and faire governance" (II.i.54) as they seek to educate, are the focus of this paper.
The Politics of Persuasion: Measure for Measure and Cinthio's Hecatommithi.
Caroline Roberts, University of Toronto.
Rhetoric in Shakespeare's plays has been well canvassed, but as Brian Vickers observes, there have been fewer studies of the nature of persuasion in Shakespeare's plays, of "the attempt by one character to change the way another character thinks or behaves." The aim of this paper is to examine the nature of persuasion in Measure for Measure and in one of its probable sources, the story of Epitia in Cinthio's Hecatommithi. In Cinthio's story, rhetoric functions as the basis of women's power. Rhetoric has a similar function in Measure for Measure, but in Shakespeare's play, whatever power Isabella's rhetoric lends her is stripped away by a competing rhetorical mode. In Measure for Measure one sees the copresence and interaction of different kinds of rhetoric: forensic rhetoric, the language of the law courts, is delimited and controlled by deliberative rhetoric, or hortatory rhetoric, which is inappropriately used by Angelo but ultimately monopolized by Duke Vincentio. Deliberative rhetoric ultimately dominates in Cinthio's story as well, but it does so in Epitia's usage, rather than in the Emperor's. Shakespeare departs from Cinthio's assignation of deliberative rhetoric to a female character. Instead, Angelo and Duke Vincentio battle for control of the deliberative style, reflecting a political struggle in James I's government at the time when Measure for Measure was written. By reflecting this contest, Measure for Measure deviates from the inherent feminism of Cinthio's story.
"as if it had nothing belonged to her": the Lives of Catherine Burton (1668 - 1714) as a Discourse on Method in Early Modern Life-writing
Nicky Hallett, University of Kent at Canterbury
The Life of Catherine Burton (1668 - 1714), a Carmelite nun living in Antwerp, displays signs of continuities in women's spiritual autobiography between the medieval and early modern periods. However, it is also occupied with Cartesian philosophy, so that it represents an early excursion into theological and philosophical questions that are at the very root of Autobiography itself.
This article discusses the cultural and community conditions in which Catherine Burton wrote, and which shaped her self-construction. Like many women mystics, she calls upon various spiritual and divine authorities to justify her composition. Yet, in her description of the autobiographical endeavour of self-distancing, she also embraces Cartesian notions of mind/ body (and soul) division, a disengagement from, and re-engagement to, a protean conception of self. Spiritual experiences are mapped on her body and are described in the light of contemporary theories. Her life, and Life, is, in effect, shaped by notions of self that are available to her, and her self-realisation is accordingly gendered within and beyond the body.
Both Catherine Burton's spiritual director, who edited her work, and Burton herself, display Cartesian anxiety in the face of spiritual revelation. The Life is patterned by the paradox of on-going suspicion of female mysticism and inspiration provided by a Teresian confidence to self-write. It is revealed to be a significant text, at the interface of medieval and early modern philosophies of self, and exploring the effects of early modern thought on the shape of female spirituality.
The Influence of Spenser's Faerie Queene on Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.
Frank Ardolino, University of Hawaii.
It is my argument that The Faerie Queene exerted an important influence on Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Generally, scholars date The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, but I contend, as I have developed in my book Apocalypse and Armada in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, that the play is, on its political subtext, a celebration of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Thus, it was written sometime after 1588 and before its first performance and publication in 1592. Kyd and Spenser were schoolmates at the Merchant Taylors' School from 1565 to 1569, and they could have developed a relationship which resulted in Kyd being influenced by The Faerie Queene, either in manuscript or after its 1590 publication.
Although scholars have noted similarities between Spenser's epic and Kyd's revenge study, the extent to which Spenser's work influences The Spanish Tragedy has never been established. Spenser and Kyd share a number of ideas and motifs which they use to depict the destined victory of Protestant England over Catholic Spain. Both authors view literature as a mystery or allegory with hidden meanings which can be understood only by elite audiences of interpreters. Within this context, Spenser and Kyd use three motifs in similar ways to establish their overall sense of destiny working itself out: Empedoclean discord/concord, justice being accomplished through acts of revenge, and "Truth, the daughter of Time."
Hamlet as
The Christmas Prince: Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, Revels,
and Misrule
Steve Roth
In the first of his series of EMLS articles discussing the chronology of Shakespeare's plays (on Hamlet, King Lear, and Julius Caesar), Steve Sohmer has offered the first systematic analysis of the chronology of Hamlet since the work of Harley Granville-Barker. Sohmer's speculations on Hamlet--in the EMLS article, in the revised discussions in Shakespeare's Mystery Play, and in a followup note on Hamlet in EMLS--demonstrate a convincing and coherent pattern of references and allusions in Hamlet to the Elizabethan liturgical calendar. He argues that this "calendrical design...is integral to Shakespeare's structure for the play's three 'movements.'" This article revisits Sohmer's underappreciated analysis, both to point out some difficulties with that analysis and to expand upon and support it with further evidence.
Sohmer finds in Hamlet's chronological design "theological dimensions" relating to Martin Luther and the reformation, and to the Catholic/Protestant debate over the institution of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. Without discounting the validity of those assertions (both Sohmer's and his predecessors'), I suggest that these speculations lead to faulty analysis of the play’s chronology, and that the chronological structure is more directly related to the dates of revels-season performances at court, the inns of court, the universities, houses of nobles, and elsewhere throughout Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan England, and to the "lords of misrule" tradition associated with those revels. I also suggest that the chronological structure alludes to important events from Shakespeare's life.
© 2002-, Lisa
Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).