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Serial Shakespeare explores the dissemination and reassemblage of Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary media culture, regarding the way this taps into but also transforms his preferred themes, concerns and constellations of characters. The appropriations discussed include isolated citations in Westworld and The Wire, a typology of the first female president modelled on figures of female sovereignty, as well as a discussion of what one might call a specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy in Deadwood and The Americans. By proposing a reciprocal exchange between the early modern plays and contemporary serial TV drama, the book focusses on the transhistoric and transmedial dialogue a revisitation of the Bard entails. The readings consider the Shakespeare text again, from a different perspective, but also address the fact that his text comes back to us again, from the past. The book claims that serial TV drama keeps appropriating Shakespeare to give voice to unfinished cultural business regarding the state of the American nation because both share the sense of writing in and for a period of interim. Given that the Bard continues to write and read America, what the book draws into focus is how both scriptwriters and cultural critics can, by repurposing him, come up with narratives that are appropriate to our times.
against the politician, the mediality of her material embodiment also comes to be foregrounded. Moreover, these screen re-enactments thematically address the conflict between private person and public persona particular to female sovereignty because the Queen is both stateswoman and potential wife and mother (or virgin in the case of Elizabeth I). This raises the question of how each of the four film
a murderous hold on power with a contemplative attitude, a proto feminist re-encoding of the tragic manifests itself in this reduction of the couple to one absolute sovereign. What if Lady Macbeth had not committed suicide and instead waited for her bloodthirsty husband to lose his final battle before returning to the stage? Indeed, if Frank Underwood’s sudden death assures Claire’s political survival, what comes to be debated over his dead body is contemporary culture’s anxiety regarding female sovereignty. 16 In one of her asides, Claire explains what it
In this chapter the first response, delivered by the ‘first wife’, is examined in detail. Her response is shown initially to inhere with the conventional demande d’amour, despite veering towards sexual innuendo and humour. Her fantasy of free love and female sovereignty is compared to medieval conduct literature, especially the Scottish poem The Thewis off Gud Women. Her response, however, abruptly shifts tone, subject matter, and form in order to deliver an excoriating flyting against her husband. The Scottish poetic invective form depends on a vivid and horrifying vocabulary of abuse in order to deride opponents. The wife ably employs this in her attack on her husband, which reveals explicitly the sexual and emotional abuse to which she is subject. Her fluid discourse once again shifts as she casts herself as manipulating her husband with sexual favours in exchange for luxury material items. The complex and uncomfortable tone and subject matter created by the trio of themes is explicated by the narrative grotesque: William Dunbar destroys conventional ‘languages of love’ and perceptions about eloquent emotional expression and replaces them with discourses that meld horror and humour. This displacement of one pole of expression for another, however, is shown to be equally problematic in terms of subjectivity, authenticity, and veracity.
’/’explorer’ Nicholas Van Huyn who first enters Tera's mortuary chamber in the late 1640s and draws on the observations of John Greaves, author of the real Pyramidographia: A Study of the Pyramids of Aegypt (1646) to inspire his own travelogue published in 1650. 13 Van Huyn is followed by English ‘Egyptologists’ Trelawny and Corbeck who, literate in hieroglyphs, make Tera's mummy and tomb their life's work. Tethered to 2500 bce , when female sovereignty was the exception rather than the norm, and awaiting in a death-sleep her
her husband. If Henry’s death was to be tantamount to the removal of the royal succession from her son, she now declares, ‘Off with the crown, and with the crown, his head’. 30 In the brief time left, York responds by returning her callousness in kind, calling her a ‘she-wolf of France’, an ‘Amazonian trull’, and ‘false Frenchwoman’. What makes her most monstrous in his eyes, however, articulates a larger anxiety about female sovereignty. To him, she is a rogue because she has strayed from proper womanhood. Women, he claims, ‘are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible
sovereign’s natural body and persists in the body political, guaranteeing the institution’s immortality. 9 As a female monarch, Elizabeth I was constituted by a normatively masculine symbolic body and a feminine natural one, a duality that is also marked in the relations of gender to power in her cinematic representation. Addressing the conflict between private person and public persona particular to female sovereignty, Elisabeth
. 122; Susan Frye, ‘Specters of female sovereignty in Shakespeare’s plays’, in The Oxford Handbooks of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 112–30. 178 Bess of Hardwick: new perspectives 15 Jerry Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (New York: Viking, 2016), pp. 1–11. 16 For example, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Debra Johanyak and Walter
apologists continued to defend female sovereignty from these attacks: John Fowler, for example, publishing a translation of Peter Frarin’s An Oration Against the Unlawfull Insurrections of the Protestantes in 1566, which rebutted Knox and Goodman’s denial of Mary’s right to rule.145 Christopher Goodman was unique in excluding female rule on principle. Mary was disqualified not just because she was the ‘ungodlie and vnlawful Gouernesse, wicked Iesabel’ and ‘in dede bastarde, and unlawfully begotten’, but also because ‘beit that she were no bastard, but the kinges daughter
all to speak, in line with the demands of her inner nature. Should we see the Wife’s arguments in favour of female sovereignty as really being an argument for the renunciation by men of their supremacy within marriage which is the precondition of a new and more equal relationship between the sexes? Certainly, the Wife tells us that once her fifth husband surrendered ‘the governance of hous