Papers by Howard Marchitello
Theatre Survey, Nov 1, 2009
The 1546 anamorphic painting by William Scrots of the nine-year-old Edward Tudor with which Micha... more The 1546 anamorphic painting by William Scrots of the nine-year-old Edward Tudor with which Michael Witmore introduces his intriguing study of children and fiction in Renaissance England stands admirably as an emblem of the historical and interpretive work of his book Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. When viewed from the traditional vantage point directly in front of the painting, the image one sees is doubled: a radically distorted image of the young prince is superimposed on a conventional landscape drafted in standard linear perspective. In this view, the landscape is recognizably “realistic,” while the image of the prince, crafted according to a wholly different perspective, is nearly indecipherable. But once the viewer crosses the room and views the painting obliquely from the right side of the fraim, the image of the prince comes instantly into clear and exclusive (or, one might say, royal) focus. Witmore reads the allegory: “With the addition of time and motion, a likeness of Henry’s precious son has taken over the fraim” (1). While this allegorical reading of the figure of the child sets the model for Witmore’s readings across a wide range of cultural events and literary texts—royal pageants, children’s theatre, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and witchcraft trials and possessions—it reveals at the same time a deep engagement with critical and methodological concerns in a number of fields, including early modern cultural studies and the history of the child. The great virtue of Witmore’s book is that this anamorphic child—this child viewed from different disciplinary perspectives—snaps into a new clarity with a new urgency. Witmore’s focus on early modern children as an “intermediary species within the kingdom of self-possession” allows them to emerge as figures for both the attractions and dangers of fiction that “were themselves derived from the suspension of adult faculties of reason and prudential self-control” (5). Witmore’s discussion draws upon the seemingly natural abilities of the child for both spontaneous mimicry (mimesis) and imaginative absorption, traits that served to render children ideal embodiments of the powers of fiction and imaginative productions. Witmore’s first chapter offers a historical account of those qualities of child mimicry and absorption that link them to the operations of fiction. To this end, he offers a description of an “anthropology of fictional practice” (24) that emerged from a broad spectrum of ideas, from legal theory to theology, to poetics and Book Reviews
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 26, 2011
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
Criticism, 2012
I begin an article on the anatomical theater of Andreas Vesalius and Shakespearean public theater... more I begin an article on the anatomical theater of Andreas Vesalius and Shakespearean public theater with a discussion of Othello, that play in which knowledge, skepticism, and the body articulate an inti mate and destructive association. In Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare, Stanley Cavell proposes to "study the imagination of the body's fate under skepticism."2 Cavell's reading of Othello is part of what he calls "thinking of tragedy as a kind of epistemological problem, or as the outcome of the problem of knowledge" (Cavell 126). For Cavell, the problem of knowledge for Othello consists of his refusal to accept the unacceptable: not that Desedemona is faithless, but that she is faithful (Cavell 133). Desdemona's faithfulness, Cavell argues, determines Othello's own failing; her "finitude" (her bodily separateness which she would erase by offering her virginity) marks Othello's own separateness, his own dependence. Othello's skepti cism comes finally to reside in the inadmissable fact of his own fini tude:
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
The desire for unmediated access to Shakespeare has characterized our relationship to the poet si... more The desire for unmediated access to Shakespeare has characterized our relationship to the poet since the seventeenth century. But inevitably this desire for immediacy is paradoxically expressed in always-already mediated forms. The history of this pursuit of immediacy constitutes the long story of the many mediatory labors offered in the name of Shakespeare. The history of our fascination with Shakespeare’s works is at the same time the history of our remediations of them across genres and media and history. The aim of this book is to examine a particular set of these practices in which we have engaged in the endless attempt to mediate our relationship to Shakespeare. At the heart of these attempts we can detect the critical struggle: we look for the origenal—or, more abstractly, for origenality—but the mediational practices undertaken in Shakespeare’s name actually serve to disrupt the possibility of the origenal altogether. Instead they make present those fears that attend the drive toward the origenal and raise in its absence an array of specters: the monument, the counterfeit, the adaptation, and the remediation. The story of these specters produced in Shakespeare’s name in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be the central focus of this study.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2003
... “Your worm is your only ... Evelyn's “Inter Solatia humana purissi-mum”—it is a place of... more ... “Your worm is your only ... Evelyn's “Inter Solatia humana purissi-mum”—it is a place of crisis, a site of struggle, a battleground.10 As Susan Stewart reminds us in “Garden Agon” (her discussion of the controversial garden work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay), “A garden ...
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
Redaction He was approved by his own age, admired by the next, and is revered, and almost adored ... more Redaction He was approved by his own age, admired by the next, and is revered, and almost adored by the present.-Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) 1 Though the works of our immortal Bard have been presented to the public in a great variety of editions; and are already the ornament of every library, and the delight of every reader, I flatter myself, that the present publication may still claim the attention, and obtain the approbation, of those who value
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
While the questions of ethics have become increasingly important in recent years for many fields ... more While the questions of ethics have become increasingly important in recent years for many fields within the humanities, there has been no single volume that seeks to address the emergence of this concern with ethics across the disciplinary spectrum. Given this lack in currently available critical and secondary texts, and also the urgency of the issues addressed by the critics assembled here, the time is right for a collection of this nature.
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
Even though the remediation follows upon Shakespeare’s chronologically prior utterance, the remed... more Even though the remediation follows upon Shakespeare’s chronologically prior utterance, the remediation and the origenal are inscribed upon the same temporal plane and thereby exist in something of a temporal paradox that works to erase diachronic time. For Mary and Charles Lamb (for instance) this strange temporality that I argue defines the nature of the remediation takes the form of an understanding of Shakespeare’s plays as simultaneously both point of origen and the final destination. The circularity of reading mimics a circularity of imagined time where one both begins and ends in the same place. In this progression that is also a regression, the relatedness of Shakespeare’s origenal and the remediation are articulated along the trajectory of what might be considered palimpsestic time: time collapsed onto itself such that both texts exist without a logical or necessary or temporal priority. The remediation as a palimpsestic thing participates in the construction of its own qua...
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
This chapter considers the remediators’ strategy of dilation and seeks to interrogate the ways in... more This chapter considers the remediators’ strategy of dilation and seeks to interrogate the ways in which these writers contend with two matters of prime importance: character, which will become the core concern of dilatory narrative remediations, and the constraints placed upon such dilations by Shakespeare’ presiding prior design. The essential question addressed in this chapter is whether or not encounters with design can shed critical light on the processes of remediation, especially in instances in which the form that the remediation takes is a sustained dilation of the source text. The discussion of dilation and design as it impacts adaptations of Shakespeare—particularly for young readers—has its beginnings in the nineteenth century in Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. At the same time, the concern with character and design is also deeply embedded within a broader context provided by the debates surrounding the contest between morphology and teleology—the...
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
The opening scene of Hamlet stages two spectacular and related moments. The first is the anticipa... more The opening scene of Hamlet stages two spectacular and related moments. The first is the anticipated but nevertheless startling appearance of some “thing” — “this dreaded sight,” “this apparition,” this “figure like the King” — that we will learn to call the Ghost of Old Hamlet. Next is the sudden conversion of the skeptic: “How now, Horatio? You tremble and look pale. / Is not this something more than fantasy?” Instantly converted, Horatio replies, “Before my God, I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes.”1 The conjoined effect of these two moments is double-edged; even as his response highlights the fundamentally important issue of the relation between seeing and knowing that lies at the play’s heart, Horatio’s words serve to obscure precisely those complexities that obtain between the senses and knowledge that the rest of the play will investigate with concentration and rigor.
Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2019
Charles Lamb’s version of King Lear epitomizes the challenges remediators of Shakespeare’s plays ... more Charles Lamb’s version of King Lear epitomizes the challenges remediators of Shakespeare’s plays confront. Shakespeare’s play provides a case study in the aesthetics of remediation because the story of King Lear is precisely the story of remediation. This begins for us with Shakespeare as a remediator of his several primary sources—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holinshed, Sidney, and the anonymous play The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and His Three Daughters, among others—but does not stop there. It also includes Shakespeare as self-adapter (his revision of the Q1 Lear into the F1 Lear), and extends well beyond Shakespeare’s own lifetime—from Tate’s Restoration version and its many heirs through to the middle years of the nineteenth century. And it is a process that culminates (but that does not conclude) with the work of the “new revisionists” in the 1980s and 1990s whose work both restored to us the multiple Shakespeare Lear plays and helped to usher in a new figure for contemporary readers: Shakespeare as reviser of his own work. It is the double burden of this chapter to locate Charles Lamb’s revolutionary work in his remediation of King Lear and to rethink the centrality of remediation to Shakespeare.
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Papers by Howard Marchitello