Bleargh

About a month after my last post here... and pretty much everything is still as it was.

The Ohio Shakespeare Conference went quite well, actually, and I discovered - much to my surprise - that The Maid's Tragedy is somehow quite popular. I'm still sick of it and, if my advisors are to be believed, I'm going to get much, MUCH sicker of it before this whole dissertation thing is over. Ugh. Yup, I've been ordered to write a chapter on the bloody thing. *sigh* Ah, well. It could be worse. At least I've also been ordered to write one on Edward the Second... Oh, wait. I'm going to be sick of that, too (show is March 7-9 for those of you in or who will be in the Boston area). Hopefully Marlowe has a bit more staying power than Beaumont and Fletcher.

And no, I haven't really moved past the "re-do this" part of my life. Except now it's really more of "this is too big, cut out most of it and then fill in the rest." Ack. Ah, well, at least someone (i.e. my advisors) is still excited about this project. And I can stop reading about portraiture. Oh, wait. I was done reading about portraiture. Maybe next post I'll be able to say "this will do." Maybe. (I'm not holding my breath, and I suggest you continue respirating, as well.)

I think I need some cake and ice cream. But I should probably eat dinner first.

I am so remiss...

It seems to have been an eternity since I actually said anything here...

Well, that's mostly true. Part of the issue is that I've reached that point in my life where my work - the prospectus and all - has become something to safeguard, rather than share. In other words, I have to be careful about the places in which my ideas appear, as intellectual theft could wreak havoc with an academic career. Hence my silence.

This does not mean, however, that I intend to abandon this poor little blog.

Rather, the updates will be less detailed and perhaps less academic in nature. They may begin to contain rougher ideas, conference updates, and (maybe) some of my more creative rather than intellectual ideas.

I may also be feeding this to my lj, so that those readers need not check two places and (the more motivating reason) so that I don't have to type the same thing twice.

That said... The Update.

I will be going to the Ohio Shakespeare Conference in early November - entitled "Violently Shakespeare" - and presenting a paper on Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. I'm still debating a little whether or not to wear my t-shirt from last year's production. I think I'm just this side of that dorky.

I'm also slogging through the proverbial brick wall that is my prospectus. Maybe one of these days I'll actually get it back with "this will do" written on it, instead of "re-do this part." *sigh*

The Eroticization of the Actor

More dissertation thoughts... these about the gendered issues of the actors playing women on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage.

Part of performing gender on the Elizabethan stage is, as Mary Bly argues, the eroticization of the male player by virtue of his performance of a female character. While Bly concentrates predominantly on the Whitefriars plays, her point about the self-aware nature of erotic language is valid for any actor crossing the gender boundaries: “One consequence of a female character’s ribald wordplay is that the body of the cross-dressed actor is aggressively eroticized.”[1] The “aggression” upon which Bly focuses is particularly significant in terms of the masculinized female character – Lady Macbeth, Joan de Pucelle, Margaret of Anjou, Goneril, Regan, the Duchess of Malfi, etc. – who wields military or pseudo-military power. Their eroticization occurs in a disturbing rather than humorous way; references to being “unsexed” or martial, the adoption of the phallic sword, knife, or dagger, refocus the sexual gaze from the “female” body just as bawdy jokes do, but with a terrifying rather than comic intent. To darkly eroticize the bodies of these tiger-women (both Margaret of 3 Henry VI and Evadne of The Maid’s Tragedy are referred to as tigers) is to grant power to both the women and to the male actors who portray them, reminding the audience that such figures are transgressing transgression, not by playing women playing men, but by presenting women who feel no need to play at masculinity because they already are men; like Elizabeth, they already have the “heart and stomach of a” man, though they put on “the body of a weak and feeble woman.”[2]

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[1] Bly, 23.

[2] Elizabeth Tudor, “Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury,” Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus et al (Chicago, 2000), 326.

Disseminating performativity

Here is one of the thoughts that has recently been driving my ideas about my dissertation - just an exerpt that talks about how I see early modern theater functioning with relation to certain methods of performance and the spread of popular concepts of gender and treason.

The implications of theatrical marginality provide a space from which the possibilities of performance disseminate from stage to state. Both the place of the stage and the body of the actor provide a malleable surface upon which the doctrines of the dominant ideology may be inscribed, and often – though not necessarily overtly – subverted. However, both stage and body also serve as vehicles for a kind of performative contagion; performance – particularly in early modern England, and on both the theatrical and political stages – enables the transference of performative modes (gender, social position, etc.) in an often decidedly transgressive and subversive manner. The performance of certain modes – that of femininity, witchcraft, treason, and monarchy in particular – was especially threatening in relation to the dominating ideological paradigms of the English state, enabling their dissemination by virtue of performance acts functioning as a contagion capable of spreading that which is performed not only from the acted to the actuality of the actors’ bodies, but to the bodies of the populace and even to the body politic of the nation itself.