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This book discusses early modern English drama as a part of visual culture. It concerns the ideas about 'making and unmaking' that Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have known and formulated, and how these ideas relate to the author's own critical assumptions about early modern aesthetic experience. The study of drama as a part of visual culture offers the perfect context for an exploration of pre-modern aesthetic discourse. The book expounds the author's approach to plays as participants in a lively post-Reformation visual culture in the process of 're-formation'. It then focuses on the social meanings of patronage of the visual arts in a discussion of Paulina as patron of Hermione's image in The Winter's Tale. The discussion of The Winter's Tale pivots around the play's troubling investment in patriarchal notions of 'perfection'. The book also explores image-breaking in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This play presents an instance of onstage iconoclasm in the supernatural destruction of a demonic brazen head, a quasi-magical figure that had been depicted in English literature since at least the twelfth century. In focusing on the portrayal of invisibility in The Two Merry Milkmaids, the book explores early modern preoccupation with processes of visual construction in a play in which there is very little artisanal activity.
the more crucial. It emphasizes the extent to which Spenser, and the Spenserian literary tradition, has so suffused the ideologies of English colonialism that it becomes a kind of shorthand for them. While the focus of this poem is political critique, Atkinson was nevertheless an active participant in the Anglo-Indian literary scene for many years. 8 This group of writers, journalists, and publishers
revolutionary action. This was because ‘O’Casey wrote mainly from the perspective of civilians, of ordinary people and of flawed participants’. Pašeta proceeded to assert that ‘The Easter Rising was in many ways a highly intimate and parochial event, but its implications and legacies have been experienced and analysed over the last hundred years across the country and the world’ (Pašeta
illusion. The Winter’s Tale provides a famous and pertinent example, as the figure of Time, serving as Chorus, tells the audience to ‘imagine me, / Gentle spectators, that I now may be / In fair Bohemia’ (4.1.19–21). Depictions of spectatorship in plays frequently figure viewers as participants in processes of making; again, in The Winter’s Tale , the awed inset spectators who behold Hermione’s statue
: spectators as ‘makers’ The prologues and epilogues performed on the commercial stages of early modern London frequently draw attention to the significance of spectators as participants in the construction of meaning. For example, The Travels of the Three English Brothers , by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins, first performed and published in 1607, opens with a
Prince’s ghost but the shades of the underworld as proper participants in grief: Then like a bould enchaunter I will call, The mournfull shadowes from infernall deepe, They know best how t’adorne a Funerall Or
men. 17 Of course, the true, originary source of the words themselves, and the sentiments expressed, is ‘John Derricke’, the engraver, designer, author, and first begetter of the illustration itself: a fact which reflects the purpose or aim of the ensemble of other texts and illustrations of which this text and illustration form (and play) an integral part. The starting point of this chapter is Derricke’s representation of conspicuously primitive behaviour by participants in an
key to Shakespeare’s treatment of mimetic practice in The Winter’s Tale. In the next section, therefore, I discuss Paulina as a patron whose role straddles the functions of spectator, consumer of images and participant in the construction of spectacle. The immaterial/material unknowability of Hermione is shown to be traceable to Paulina’s active work in these roles
analogical transfer between the self and the other, he writes that when remembering collectively, ‘It is as if we were comparing the testimony of several witnesses’ (my emphasis). Halbwachs explains his rationale in greater detail: ‘Our memories remain collective … and are recalled to us through others even though only we were participants in the events or saw the things concerned. In reality, we are never
ideology within whose aegis the artistic text is shaped. It is here, at those points where the text discloses contradictions with which it cannot cope, that intertextuality has a particular formative role to play, since it is the combined dynamic, diachronic and synchronic space where the social and the aesthetic intersect and interact. The intertext is necessarily a ‘locution’ which is ‘ the expression and product of the social interaction of three participants: the speaker (author), the listener (reader), and the topic