Monday Madwoman: Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco

I originally discovered Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco as the author of an essay on Vittoria Accoramboni of The White Devil in her collection Lombard Studies (1902).  (Her picture at left is from that collection.)

Her full name is given as Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo Cesaresco, an Englishwoman encountering Italy in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe or John Webster, in fact an Englishwoman who writes apparently exclusively about the country.  In the early 1880s she came to the palace at Salo as a bride, her father-in-law Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco.

Webster, the Comedian

Comedies and collaboration.  Alliterative, but do they indeed go together?

For John Webster, the answer seems to have been yes.  His various comedies, such as Anything for a Quiet Life, A Cure for a Cuckold, Northward Ho!, etc., are considered to have been co-written with fellow dramatists such as Middleton and Rowley.

Although I do, of course, most admire the Duchess, it's worth noting a few points that often are glossed over in discussions of Webster:

Attending to Early Modern Women 2012 - Thoughts and Notes

Just some thoughts, notes, ideas, and impressions from an amazing conference:

If you've never been, I highly recommend it, especially if you'll be in the Midwest. It's now located at UW-Milwaukee. What a wonderful privilege to hear from so many senior female scholars. I'm grateful for the kindness of several who took time to speak with me -- including Bernadette Andrea!

This was not my first time at a conference, but this was no ordinary conference. The attendance was mostly female, along with a handful of men including Brian Sandberg, who's also from NIU (History), and who sits on the organizing committee. Loved seeing senior scholars knitting and embroidering in the audiences at the plenary talks. Interesting to watch the differing affects across the levels of power and the way networking was performed. Nerve-wracking to see some of these incredible women in the same room. I learned a lot about the profession just from observing their performances, especially the language and linguistic structures used. There are several plenary sessions where papers are read, and five panel sessions that are workshops in nature, with brief introductions and orienting statements by the panelists and then discussion beginning with some pre-circulated selected texts. My Friday afternoon workshop was particularly interesting to me (at the end).

Deep apologies in advance for the condition of these notes, especially the spelling and capitalization. (Typing on an iPad's touch screen hasn't gotten any easier for me, plus I was working furiously to get it all down.)

From Elizabeth Lehfeldt's plenary talk on Thursday:

Lack of enclosure necessarily transgressive? Male writers of the time would say so, but we don't need to leave that unquestioned. Live in "open reclusion" or "chosen reclusion" -- leave convent or enclosure for business when needed. Convents had secular interests like manners, business, etc. What did that mean? How shape convent as social institution? What was the lived experience?

CFP: Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: Contemporary Jacobean Film (deadline: Nov. 1, 2012)

We invite essays from interdisciplinary perspectives that respond (directly or otherwise) to Pascale Aebischer’s discussion of the “preposterous contemporary Jacobean” in discussion of early modern source texts (ca. 1500-1800 – not, for this journal issue, limited to the Jacobean era). Examination of the “contemporary Jacobean” in films might include the use of anachronism, narrative disjunction, radical or extreme subject matter, and irreverence toward their early modern source material. Approaches might include adaptation studies, art history, reception history, genre studies, and historical and theoretical approaches to early modern works and the materials and production of adaptations.

Accepted essays will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Theory and Criticism (Pennsylvania State University Press).

Please send essays no longer than 7500 words to Elizabeth Kelley Bowman, Northern Illinois University (ebowman@niu.edu). The deadline for receipt of essays is November 1, 2012.

My forthcoming article on Mary Wortley Montagu

This essay examines Mary Wortley Montagu's self-representation in her letters, in the context of literature, history, and culture, especially her literal and metaphorical translations of a Turkish love lyric in Letter XXX, to Alexander Pope, in the spring of 1717. Beginning with a survey of recent feminist and postcolonial criticism in Montagu studies, I continue beyond those perspectives to study Montagu's own words as she presents herself and her purpose in the letter, and as she makes use of tropes of foreignness, literary tradition, and artistic merit. Along with a consideration of feminist interpretations of Montagu, this essay contributes a historical and cultural approach to the poet’s role, and the political resonance of her choice to translate this Turkish lyric.

Be delighted to receive any feedback from my readers / fellow blogizens.

Citation: Elizabeth Kelley Bowman, “The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric," Comparative Literature Studies 49 (2012): 28 MS. pages. [Issue number to be determined.]

On Mike Figgis's film Hotel

"Hotel’s cannibalism is theoretically based on the ravening act of adaptation. Its sexuality, including prostitution and necrophilia, is far more graphic than its violence, which tends to be sleek and hidden by night, as one of the duchess’s brothers says, 'I’ll goe hunt the Badger, by Owle-light: / “Tis a deed of darkenesse' (4.2.360-61). The sexual resurrection of the director in Hotel recalls not only the Winter’s Tale-influenced resurrection in The Fatal Secret but Webster’s own brief resuscitation of the duchess through the medium of Bosola’s love-struck repentance: 'Upon thy pale lips I will melt my heart / To store them with fresh colour' (4.2.370-71). She awakens: 'her Eye opes, / And heaven in it seems to ope, (that late was shut) / To take me up to mer[c]y' (4.2.373-75). Bosola speaks in the language of Petrarchan poetry, itemizing the beloved’s lips and eyes. This verbal anatomization recalls Nancy J. Vickers’s discussion of the Petrarchan disarticulation of the beloved, 'an obsessive insistence on the particular' and the 'individual fragments of the body' (266). For Vickers’s study of Petrarch, this dismemberment is misogynistic, but here it is matched by Bosola’s linguistic excisement of his own heart to nourish the duchess. Both are broken into pieces, collapsed, lost. The duchess cries for Antonio, whose dead body had been presented to her in waxwork alongside waxworks of their children slain, and Bosola assures her, '[Antonio] is living, / The dead bodies you saw, were but faign’d statues' (4.2.377-78), foreshadowing Theobald’s radical reversal of monument into living body. She cannot live, however, though she has proven resilient enough to come back from the dead. Dying, she cries out forgiveness in an echo of Bosola’s word, 'Mercy!' (4.2.381). Not only is this scene unabashedly sentimental, it contains the resurrection trope within Webster’s own text."

Citation: Bowman, Elizabeth. “Gender Memory in the Adaptation History of The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: Webster, Theobald, Figgis.”  Philological Research. Chapter 9. Ed. Almitra Medina and Gilda M. Socarras. Athens: ATINER, 2011.

Excerpt from my new chapter

Citation:

Bowman, Elizabeth. “Gender Memory in the Adaptation History of The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: Webster, Theobald, Figgis.”  Philological Research. Chapter 9. Ed. Almitra Medina and Gilda M. Socarras. Athens: ATINER, 2011.

Excerpt:

"Monuments of memory, laurels of self-reflexive immortality, and other symbols of posterity display Webster’s ambitions for the future of his work but also his fundamental skepticism of any ability to control his posthumous reputation and work. As events have shown, that skepticism was valid. Webster himself, in memorializing the sensational death of an Italian duchess in 1518, had revised and updated his source material, most notably in giving his female protagonist both a Stoic strength of will and indomitable virtue, a combination almost unique in early modern drama. While the play [The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy] was performed and admired at intervals for the next century, attended by Charles II and Samuel Pepys, the next major staging was a version written and directed in 1733 by Lewis Theobald, known for his meticulous 1726 edition of Shakespeare. His Dutchesse, however, did not so closely follow the original Webster text but was highly revised, even to impose a happy ending, and retitled The Fatal Secret. Its performance was a commercial and critical failure, although Theobald had done his best to appeal to the neoclassical mores of his age by imposing the Aristotelian unities on the structure of the play. For example, the events of The Fatal Secret all take place in one day. After that, Webster fell out of favor until, in 1850, the actress Isabella Glyn spearheaded a revival based not on the merits of the play, for critics denounced its graphic nature, but on her own personal popularity. In the twentieth century, the Modernist revival returned attention to Webster, and since the Second World War the play has been staged near-continuously across the globe, with a straitlaced fidelity to the original text that represents the long history of critical and commercial disdain for Theobald’s revisionist approach.