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Bolingbroke and Coriolanus each set in motion a ‘war machine’ with the respective results that have been pointed out. Other characters, also victims of abusive banishment, do not take part in such a dynamic of riposte; rather, they find another way of expressing their feelings of injustice, trying to sublimate their temptation to be revenged. Sometimes violence does erupt, but it is channelled away
Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are effective because they come with armed forces that are unexpected and, as such, convey the impression of having what Deleuze and Guattari, in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, term a ‘war machine’. In A Thousand Plateaus , they explore several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of
status and affiliations may have alienated his father, and other Englishmen like him. 8 After all, Southwell’s letter to his father is, in asking him to restore himself in the faith, requiring him to become a hostage to a now vengeful English State. Part of his war of words was in this fraught personal arena, therefore; his letter and the several poems that seem to echo its sentiments suggest that he is
This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that mainly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus and King Lear. These plays present with particular clarity the mechanism of the banishment proclamation and its consequences, that is, the dynamic of exclusion and its repercussions. Those repercussions may entail breaking the ban to come back illegally and seek revenge; devising strategies of deviation, such as disguise and change of identity; or resorting to mental subterfuges as a means of refuge. They may also lead to entropy – exhaustion, letting go or heartbreak. Each in its own way, they invite us to reflect upon the complex articulation between banishment and abuse of power, upon the strategies of resistance and displacement employed to shun or endure the painful experience of ‘deterritorialisation’; they put into play the dialectics of allegiance and disobedience, of fearlessly speaking and silencing, of endurance and exhaustion; they question both the legitimacy of power and the limits of human resistance. This study draws on French scholars in Shakespearean studies, and also on contemporary French historians, theorists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, essayists and philosophers, who can help us read Shakespeare’s plays in our time. It thus takes into account some of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Boris Cyrulnik and Emmanuel Housset. The hope is that their respective intellectual approaches will shed specific kinds of light on Shakespeare’s plays and initiate a fruitful dialogue with Anglo-Saxon criticism.
If honour and principle were the watchwords for Caesars of the nineteenth century, and totalitarianism the core of twentieth, the word which ghosts twenty-first-century productions most clearly is 'spin'. This book traces this evolutionary journey, and discusses productions because they somehow speak to ideas about the play which characterise their period of production, or they have significant features in their own right. It first gives an account of productions of the play prior to the Second World War, right from the stagings at the Globe Theatre's in 1599 to William Bridges-Adams's productions till 1934. The 1937 Orson Welles's production of Julius Caesar, staged at New York's Mercury Theatre was decked out with all the trappings and scenic theatricality of contemporary European Fascism. Shakespeare's play becomes a forum for a consideration of an ethics of American identity with John Houseman's 1953 film. The book discusses three modernist productions of Lindsay Anderson, John Barton and Trevor Nunn, and the new versions of the play for the British TV. The productions under Thatcher's Britain are also focused as well as the unknown accents, especially the Indian and African ones. The productions of Italy, Austria and Germany productions have eschewed direct political association with past or present regimes. The book also presents a detailed study of two productions by a single company, Georgia Shakespeare. In the new millennium, the play's back-and-forth exchange between its long past and the shrill and vibrant insistence of its present, have taken centre stage.
!’ (1.1.10)) should remain behind on stage. Then the DSM adds: ‘As soon as they're off all wogs jabber. Philo shouts at them – wogs exit nearest way.’ 1 This was the first post-war Antony and Cleopatra in Stratford. The one just before it, directed by Robert Atkins, opened on 23 April 1945, when Hitler still had another week to live and when Victory in Europe was still a fortnight off. Resolutely ‘post’, Shaw's Antony and Cleopatra nevertheless carried into the ‘post
James I set the tone of his English reign by completing a peace agreement with Spain in 1604, and from that point on revelling in his motto, ‘Beati Pacifici’ (‘Blessed are the Peace-makers’). Even with the turmoil prompted by his son-in-law Elector Frederick’s taking of the Bohemian crown in 1618–19, James largely avoided the war that engulfed northern Europe in the early
, because Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are very swift and efficient, thanks to their armed forces (whether they are merely deterrent or fully in action), which evoke what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘war machine’. On stage, the effect of speed, and even acceleration, is created by the spatio-temporal ellipsis of exile. None of the two plays presents us with what is expected from banishment, that is, ‘a
Thomas Heywood’s 1 Iron Age (performed c. 1613, published 1632) 1 contains evidence of the playwright’s interest in Homer and particularly in George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad . 2 However, this staging of the Trojan War also relies on non-Homeric sources, especially William Caxton’s The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473/74). Although scholars have long recognised this debt, 3 Heywood’s engagement with medieval mythography has not been analysed in detail. The electronic edition of Troia Britanica (in which Heywood also exploits Caxton
. Though they are officially, though unjustly, banished, some characters (Bolingbroke in King Richard II , Coriolanus) will not passively endure; once abroad, they initiate a dynamics of frontal counterattack and illegally return with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’. For this illegal return to succeed, expedient alliance must prevail over national loyalty, and the rebellious banished person appeals to mercenaries or turns mercenary himself, gives free