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.

Early Modern Carnivalesque - March 2011

Welcome to the March 2011 Carnivalesque blog carnival!  

Thanks to Sharon Howard for the opportunity to be your host for this roll-call of early modern studies online from the last two months.  It's been a pleasure to sift through so much richness.

Enjoy.

(Above: Pieter Balten's Grand Kermesse of St. George in the Village)


Visual Culture

A forthcoming exhibition at Duke University on flap anatomies inspired a post at diapsalmata on these meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations with unfolding parts -- and a dissection of the coy, somewhat exhibitionist poses of the figures.  (Related: modern-day codexical carver The Book Surgeon) Parallel to the January 2011 PMLA featuring Juan Carreno de Miranda's less naked portrait of young Eugenia Martinez Vallejo (1680), who has suffered the retrospective diagnosis of Prader-Willi syndrome, Alberti's Window has a post and lively discussion of Lavinia Fontana's lycanthropic portrait of young Antonietta Gonzalez (c. 1595).  Res Obscura examines some quite youthful drinkers and smokers in portraiture of the Dutch Golden Age. For more on Lavinia Fontana, see Monica Bowen's thoughtful post on Fontana and female self-portraiture at Three Pipe Problem, complementing the attention Titian's Venus with a Mirror receives from both Bowen at Alberti's Window and Hasan Niyazi at Three Pipe Problem.

(Below: the two portraits commissioned by Charles II of Eugenia Martinez Vallejo, La Monstrua Vestida and La Monstrua Desnuda)

Crime and Politics

Maddy's Ramblings surveys the history of Malabar Hill in Mumbai and reconsiders the "Malabar pirates" -- navy, brotherhood, resistance collective, pilgrims . . . Caravaggio's spectacular rap sheet is on display at The History Blog. Felicity Henderson at the Royal Society weighs evidence, motive, and opportunity for Isaac Newton's alleged destruction of a portrait of Robert Hooke. Conversion Narratives sniffs out the 1587 execution of Jesuit priest Thomas Pilchard, and the fishy code of his name as used in later testimonies. Tim Abbott at Walking the Berkshires investigates the case of Frances Dongan and transatlantic rape culture. Executed Today commemorates the forced suicide of a former imperial favorite, 1799.


Science and Technology

Sixteenth-century typographical errors dance a grand kermesse of their own at Wynken de Worde. Ptak Science Books examines a sixteenth-century "wooden internet" and celebrates a Galilean 400th anniversary (March 24, 1611). The Renaissance Mathematicus charts the descension of astrology in the mid-1600s. The Chirurgeon's Apprentice prepares a dose of corpse medicine.


Fashions in Dress

A guest post by Giles Milton (Nathaniel's Nutmeg) at Georgian London looks at the curious case of that original eonist the Chevalier d'Eon.  (Related: The Chevalier d'Eon and His Worlds: Gender, Espionage, and Politics in the Eighteenth Century, Continuum, 2010)

(Above: The Chevalier [at right] in a duel, from John Coulthart's blog)

Nick at Mercurius Politicus unfolds the history behind a metaphorical insult based on types of cloth in his post "Tongue of Saye." Kendra Van Cleave at Demode Couture catalogues a vast array of eighteenth-century ladies' riding habits and redingotes in a two-part series.


Zoology and Travel Narratives

BibliOdyssey plays Linneaus with Buffon's Beasts and follows La Perouse to farther shores. Res Obscura takes us on a Noachian voyage to the moon. Sundry Translations and Other Tangentalia translates a record of Alessandro Malaspina's 1789 expedition, an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Finally, the Contemporary Jacobean Society read up on witches and their familiars in the confessions of the Flower sisters.