British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Subjects and histories
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 9.30-11.00am,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 3
Participants
Chair - Allyna Ward, University of Newcastle
Richard Meek, University of Reading
‘The Rest is History’: Cymbeline
and the Limitations of Contextual Readings
Jennifer Ailles, University of Rochester
Queen Mab and The Embodiment of Dis/ease
in Romeo and Juliet
Anna Fahraeus, Gothenburg University
“Language and the Constitution
of Subjectivity in Macbeth”
Helena Agarez Medeiros, Catholic University of Louvain
"Caesar's Travels"
Abstracts
‘The Rest is History’: Cymbeline and
the Limitations of Contextual Readings
Richard Meek, University of Reading
Using Cymbeline as a test case, this paper will offer an assessment of the current status of new historicist criticism of Shakespeare. Several commentators have noted Cymbeline’s preoccupation with the idea of history, while historicizing critics from Emrys Jones to Leah Marcus have argued that the play is inextricably bound up with its political and historical contexts. This paper will argue that Shakespeare’s sceptical treatment of narrative and history in the play—in which he suggests that history is something that can be retold, reappropriated, and rewritten—both anticipates and goes beyond both old and new historicist approaches. At the end of the play, Cymbeline demands a narrative account of the play’s events, and Shakespeare depicts the various characters’ attempts to piece together a narrative account of what has happened. However, the resulting narrative is chaotic and fragmented: Cymbeline himself describes it as a ‘fierce abridgement’ (5.6.383). To hear a ‘complete’ history of the play’s events, Shakespeare suggests, would take as long as the play itself, if not longer. I will suggest that Cymbeline’s own sophisticated historiography might be better served by recent narrative theory than by our attempts to read the play in relation to its ‘non-literary’ contexts.
Queen Mab and The Embodiment of Dis/ease in Romeo
and Juliet
Jennifer Ailles, University of Rochester
Images of sickness and disease are casually interspersed in Romeo and Juliet.
The textual elements of sickness reflect the reality of the Elizabethan world
invading Shakespeare’s work. The most invasive image of disease in the
play “comes / In shape no bigger than an agate stone” (1.4.55-6).
Mercutio’s extended diatribe on Queen Mab shows that she is a daemonic
midwife who propagates disease in all those she comes in contact with. Mercutio’s
narrative description of Queen Mab is often seen as being at odds with the rest
of the text and it is subsequently dismissed as a whimsical tangent. Joan Ozark
Holmer notes that “the witty Mercutio’s Queen Mab ! speech [is]
his most imaginative flight” (49). E. Pearlman goes further to claim that
“[i]rrelevant in content, the speech is inessential to plot” (120).
I argue that Mercutio’s speech is an important part of the play-text that
is more than decorative and that in addition to a blatant discourse on the origin
of dreams, the Queen Mab speech provides a discourse of disease. Furthermore,
the disease propagated by Queen Mab is polyvalent and involves metaphorical,
physical, and social disruption of the personal and cultural body. Ultimately,
Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, backed by the larger narrative of civil discord
in Verona, offers the audience a vicarious exemplar of a corporal state that
has been penetrated by social dis-ease.
Works Cited
Holmer, Joan Ozark. “No ‘Vain Fantasy’: Shakespeare’s
Refashioning of Nashe for Dreams and Queen Mab.” Shakespeare’s “Romeo
and Juliet”: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation. Ed. Jay L. Halio. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1995. 49-82.
Pearlman, E. “Shakespeare at Work: Romeo and Juliet.” Critical Essays
on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Ed. Joseph A. Porter.
New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1997. 107-130.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet.
“Language and the Constitution of Subjectivity
in Macbeth”
Anna Fahraeus, Gothenburg University
Modern cognitive research posits that metaphors organize how we see the world by forming part of the collective cultural knowledge that remains mostly outside of consciousness (Lakoff). I will argue from this basis that rather than functioning as imaginative formulations of an empirical reality, the metaphors in Shakespeare’s Macbeth can be (re)conceptualized as a significant constituting feature of that reality. Part of my argument will focus on discourses on the feminine and the masculine in Renaissance culture that relate to images of war and witchcraft in the play. Another part of my argument will focus on Roman Jakobson’s proposition that metaphors work by substitution, subordination and suppression, and the relevance this has for the constitution of subjectivity in the text. I will specifically look at the blurring that occurs within the metaphoric language of the ‘natural’ categories of plant-animal-humans and the supernatural-natural, and explore how this effects Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s conscious and projected selves.
Helena Agarez Medeiros, Catholic University of Louvain
In a short text entitled "Traducciones", Marío Benedetti tells the story of a Spanish poem that undergoes a series of translations the last of which takes it back to its original language. My paper proposes to illustrate this ficcional account of a text's journey through time and space with a case study involving two English authors and a French one --Shakespeare, Voltaire and Aaron Hill. The present journey starts in 1599, when Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was (presumably) written. Our next stop is 1736 - the publication of Voltaire's first authorised version of La Mort de César, an adaptation of Julius Caesar and one of the very first instances of the reception of Shakespeare in the continent. This neoclassical version of the drama aimed at offering French audiences and readers a few "pearls in Shakespeare's dung". This journey ends in 1753, when the English author Aaron Hill translated La Mort de César back into English (The Roman Revenge). This paper will use these texts to bring to the fore some aspects of the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century and to explore the ways in which translation conveys the nature of literary and ideological exchanges accross the channel.
