Tag: Early Modern
Excess Emotion and Queer Subjectivity in Pericles
Pericles (1608), one of Shakespeare’s and co-author George Wilkins’s romances, dramatizes the tumultuous life of Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. Over five acts, it stages his acquisition of love, its tragic loss, and its ultimate rediscovery. Strikingly, the play opens with incest—Antiochus, the king of Antioch, instructs Pericles to solve a riddle whose answer reveals
Revelatory Liminality in the Metamorphoses’ Myrrha Episode
[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire, which she ultimately consummates . She does so
The Nurse’s Repertoire in Romeo and Juliet
What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate
Utopia and Mapping the Imaginary
In something of a loose association with my previous post, I’ll be writing and thinking this week about another interesting intersection between images and text. In particular, I’ll be exploring both old and new attempts to map Thomas More’s seminal text Utopia. Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major
Hell’s Black Intelligencers: Shakespeare and Our Current Fears of Surveillance
In July 2018, the United States government formally pressed charges against Maria Valeryevna Butina for operating as an unregistered foreign agent operating in the service of the Russian state, a term that the news media quickly collapsed into the more provocative and instantly recognizable designation of “Russian spy.” Coupled with the revelation that the Russian
“Millions of false eyes”: Responding to Surveillance
Surveillance culture doesn’t crop up overnight. It is the result of social and political processes, which humans creatively adapt to and undermine. Last week, I looked at the ways in which early modern audiences and playwrights reacted to the increasing sense that their government was using spies to monitor their actions in and around the
They Come Not Single Spies: What Surveillance Meant to Shakespeare’s Audiences
After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572,[1] the English government, particularly Principle Secretary Francis Walsingham (often credited as the father of English espionage), greatly increased the scope of their intelligence networks. This resulted in the foiling of a number of plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, most notably the Babington Plot, which led
Cloaked in Eyes and Ears: Reading Surveillance Culture Through the Early Modern Stage
In our contemporary social moment, the American public has come to possess a fairly blasé attitude towards the degree to which governments and corporations collect our data and monitor our actions. It has become almost an unfunny joke to acknowledge that, yes, Amazon and Google do monitor our internet habits and listen in upon our
Coda: Converting Art — Literature During Political Repression
I went to the Early Modern Conversions Symposium at the Folger Shakespeare Library with a hypothesis about the role of conversion in some of my own research. In the process of reading for my qualifying exams, I’ve noticed that Mary Magdalene keeps showing up in Early Modern literature — especially poetry or devotional prose written
Legalizing Repression: “Muslim Registries” and English Recusants
On my last day at the Early Modern Theatre and Conversion symposium — blissfully unaware that nazis were meeting just down the Washington Mall — I spent part of my lunch break with the Folger’s rare books and manuscript collections. I didn’t have long to submit my request the afternoon before, so I did a