Seminars

It’s easy to say that the savagery and surprises of King Lear defy the norms of tragedy but harder to pinpoint the formal and generic maneuvers by which Shakespeare upends this ancient literary kind. Toward the harder end, and with the help of disability theory, I argue that King Lear revolves around a collision of (at least) two sorts of pity. The first harkens back to Aristotle’s proper outcrop of tragedy: pain felt for another, who suffers something one can imagine suffering oneself; this something is frequently located within the body. The second presages an affect more familiar to us now: plaintive condescension to another’s ill-fortune, which one does not, in fact, imagine enduring firsthand. Such pity often radiates from ablebodied subjects to disabled others, sometimes under the guise of care but really in the name of cure—and elimination. Audaciously, Shakespeare dramatizes how the first of these easily suppurates into the second—and in any case, how elusive it is from the jump. For his part, an aged Lear tries to manufacture Aristotelian pity, ominously, at the start of the play; Goneril and Regan, for theirs, respond with the other pity to justify a sort of wardship. Division only deepens from there, as characters more desperately—but aggressively and fecklessly—chase their affective goals. In the process, they reveal a corporeal imagination tragically incommensurate to the embodied realities of life—most of all when glossing disability in others with rhetoric that will eventually redound upon them. In Lear, Shakespeare brings this cycle—a career-long experiment—to its most horrifying proportions. Tracing them offers several interpretive pay-offs. It clarifies the stuff of Shakespeare’s iconoclastic tragic vision: that is, how he rejuvenates tragedy by thwarting the pity that the genre should effect. It also foregrounds an unacknowledged ethical insight of Lear, which both suggests that disabled folks actually need an affect we’ve long despised and reveals, by negative example, how we might ethically achieve it. The affect, of course, is pity, though a kind more complicated than any we’ve observed: a helpful third term in the sympathy/empathy binary, not based in power differentials, but in uncoerced, mutual, recognition of bodymind fragility—before it’s warped to solipsistic ends.

This paper leverages recent scholarship in trans studies toward a new understanding of Petrarchism’s construction of gender in early modern English poetry. Petrarchism might seem a fundamental forge of naturalized and strictly binary gender categories; the symbolic transformations endemic to its literary mode, however, open up possibilities for nonbinary or transitional readings of embodied gender in the Petrarchan. My primary evidence will be Henry King’s lyric “The Double Rock,” a poem which opens on the hoary Petrarchan conceit of the stone-hearted woman only to explode it by having the speaker follow in the lady’s rocky footsteps. Riffing on the Ovidian myths of Medusa, Pygmalion, Narcissus, and Diana and Actaeon, the poem flicks through a series of models for imagining gender outside of a naturalized and immutable sexual binary. By the end of the poem, the two lovers share not just a material quality but also a form, as each comes to resemble the other’s “monument.” This convergence in form, then, suggests a sort of gender transition in which the Petrarchan object transforms into the material and formal image of the male speaker. Drawing on (trans)gender theory by Jack Halberstam and Colby Gordon and rethinking some of the classic psychoanalytic criticism of Petrarch Scholars (Lynn Enterline, Nancy Vickers, Carla Freccero), I will contend that this willful overextension of the Petrarchan topos—one of so many we encounter in seventeenth-century English verse—may offer critics a new ground upon which to unsettle the strict gender binaries of early modern lyric. In doing so, I hope to reopen the question of Petrarch’s reception in England with a particular focus on how Petrarchism participated in the early modern construction of cisnormativity.

The sonnet currently seems to be experiencing something of a Renaissance among Black American poets. While there are many notable examples, in this essay, I focus on recent collections by Jericho Brown and Terrance Hayes, both of which self-consciously innovate with the sonnet form. I read sonnets of Brown and Hayes through Shakespeare’s to consider the form’s long history of engagement with societal norms regarding Blackness. Despite Shakespeare’s resistance of his society’s negative evaluations of Blackness, the Sonnets ultimately retreat from resistance, both in language and in the reproductive imperative of the sequence—the white young man, not the Black woman, is encouraged to reproduce and the Sonnets seek to provide him a legacy. By reading the work of Brown and Hayes through Shakespeare’s, we see they are pushing the inherent resistance in the sonnet form further, both in reevaluating Blackness and in focusing on Black reproduction and legacy. Their formal poetic innovations provide a means of reproducing Blackness, not whiteness. When writers use received forms, they are always, to some extent, engaging in a dialogue with their history. Sonnets, in particular, are exceptionally malleable and thus ideal for discussing change.

This essay highlights a strain of thinking that has proven oddly underexplored in theatre scholarship: the philosophy of action. In particular, I propose reviving interest in the question of intentional action: when is behavior intentional? How can we evaluate one’s intentions, and how can we judge our own? The early modern theatre gives us particularly rich terrain for this kind of inquiry. The dramaturgy of the era capitalized on instances of communal or individual intention clashing with misapprehension, chance, and other obstacles. The same set of conditions might apply to the theatre today—indeed, “intention” supplies a key word for contemporary Western acting theory—but for a key difference: in the spiritual landscape of premodern Europe, one’s intentions were always enmeshed with a form of Providence, a higher power whose intentions could be obscured at best. And in post-Reformation England, the belief that divinity’s intention had a role in individual action was taken as an act of faith. How then did this relinquishment of individual intention play out in scenes of early modern theatricality? And how could this vulnerability be misread by others as passivity or even nihilism? My paper takes up scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to suggest that acting in early modernity functioned less as a secular craft and more as a form of prayer—or, to twist Aquinas’s notion of practical reasoning, a form of “practical faith.” My primary interlocutor, alongside early modern theological and theatrical sources, is the work of G.E.M. Anscombe. Anscombe’s work, engaged as it is with blurring the line between mental preparation and physical embodiment, supplies us with a bracingly apposite framework for rethinking Shakespeare’s words. I propose a model of early modern intention not reliant on assured individual action nor complete abstraction but instead on an embodied, shared, tenuous desire for a futurity out of one’s hands. The talk will conclude with a consideration of the ethical dimensions of practical faith, in light of Anscombe’s own peace activism.