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 that his daughter is “an...
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 from the body. As...
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 to the execution of Mary...
[5-7 minute read] Last week, I discussed Hamlet’s metatheatrical play within a play, The Murder of Gonzago, in an attempt to discuss what Hamlet’s attitudes towards acting could tell us about the relationship between theater and audience. This week, I would like to shift gears and discuss a different moment of metatheatricality in Shakespeare: the performance of The Most Lamentable Tragedy of...
[5-7 minute read] During Act 3 of Hamlet, while preparing the travelling players for the evening’s performance, Hamlet provides the actor’s company with a lengthy speech concerning the proper methods of acting he would like them to employ. During the speech, he makes a note on clowns, saying “and let those that play/ your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;/for there be of them that...
[5 minute read] In last week’s post, I talked about the public reaction to a 2017 performance of a 1599 play featuring the execution of a Roman Consul who had been made-over to look like a contemporary politician. This week, I will be looking at the performance of a 1597 play that took place in 1601, similarly featuring the execution of a monarch perceived to look like a contemporary politician...
[5-7 minute read] During my last month writing for Metathesis, I talked about the contemporary desire to find political meaning in Shakespeare’s plays. Then in June, Shakespeare in the Park staged a performance of Julius Caesar in which the actor playing Caesar consciously invoked the image of President Trump, mimicking his vocal affectation and his mannerisms. This performance was met with...
“Bearing in mind all the matters previously discussed, I ask myself whether the present time is appropriate for welcoming a new ruler in Italy, and whether there is matter that provides an opportunity for a few-seeing and able man to mold it into a form that will bring honour to him and its inhabitants.” -Machiavelli As we’ve been considering the seemingly timeless quality of the figure of the...