Staging Traditions

Chair: Edward Taylor

“Humanism, Capitalism and Uncertainty- Attitudes to wealth and society in early Tudor drama” by Charlotte Markey

The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the early modern period has provided a useful lens through which scholars have viewed late sixteenth seventeenth century dramas. However, what has received relatively little attention to date is the interplay between humanist political and economic theory and drama in the fifteenth century. My paper focuses particularly on the ways early and mid-Tudor humanists tried to come to terms with the rapidly developing English economy. Why it became necessary to reinvent concepts of governance and citizenship and what influence these intellectual developments had upon the early secular interlude dramas written by members of the ‘More circle’ of humanists.

In this paper I shall explore the ways in which John Heywood, John Rastell and Nicholas Udall, all playwrights with connections to Erasmus and Thomas More, used the stage as a means of interrogating questions pertaining to the economy and social hierarchy. How did dramatists appropriate the playful dialogue form used in non-dramatic humanist texts to expose and catechize issues of labour and the effects of trade upon the moral integrity of the common wealth?

“Negotiating the Possible: Rhetoric on the Shakespearean Stage” by Samir Al-Jasim

The paper aims to bring together findings in modern narratological theory and classical and Renaissance rhetoric to shed light on Shakespeare’s use of the probabilistic thinking and how that was reflected in the structure of the plays. From narratology it builds on the new developments in ‘possible worlds’ theory to explore the modal notions of possibility and probability that are the cornerstone of rhetorical practice as well. Given the thriving of rhetorical teaching in the Renaissance, the kind of teaching that Shakespeare acquired, and the affinity between rhetoric and modality, it is not surprising that the Renaissance is a period characterized by the proliferation and opening of possibilities in culture, science, geography and literature.

This proliferation is best reflected in judicial thinking in Shakespeare’s plays. From the earliest plays Shakespeare was keen to explore this kind of quantitative reasoning which is rooted in piling up pieces of evidence and weighing them against each other to work out a more probable result. In all of this certainty is nowhere to be sought. This paper is also aimed as a contribution to the increasingly flourishing field of literature and law. These ideas will be applied to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

“The Changeling, Thomas Middleton, and the stage: Reading not-Shakespeare for performance" by Nora Williams

In a 2007 interview with Time, Gary Taylor commented that ‘we don’t, as a culture, have a sense of how to read Middleton. You can’t read Middleton as though he were Shakespeare’. It is a familiar problem in early modern drama. Many actors and academics read any play written between 1580 and 1642 according to the guidelines set out in handbooks for reading and acting Shakespeare’s texts, despite crucial poetic differences between the Bard and his contemporaries.

Working from the hypothesis that textual variation, poetic structure, and page layout can impact performance practice, this paper will consider the benefits of reading Middleton and Rowley's 1622 play The Changeling for performance on its own terms. Using Rokison's Shakespearean Verse Speaking and the Young Vic’s recent productions as starting points, I will challenge the assumptions made about early modern play texts as a result of Shakespeare’s dominance within the field and thereby begin to build a separate set of guidelines for reading one of his most famous contemporaries, Thomas Middleton. Operating on the boundaries between literature, history, and drama, I will engage in close readings of Shakespearean texts as well as scenes from The Changeling, with attention to how these textual findings might translate into performance.