bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Directors and Designers since 1960
Authors: Walsh Ian
Published: September 2016

Although Irish theatre is often considered to be primarily a writer’s theatre, with its roots in a realist tradition, Irish theatre since 1960 has consistently challenged this definition through the work of its directors and designer. Whether in the case of Tomás Mac Anna’s work at the Abbey in the mid-1960s, Joe Dowling’s production ofJuno and the Paycock, or the collaborative work of Patrick Mason with writer Tom MacIntyre and actor Tom Hickey in the 1980s, contemporary Irish theatre has equally been shaped by its directors. Likewise, although less heralded, designers such as Bronwen Casson, Frank Conway, Wendy Shea, Joe Vanek, and Robert Ballagh played a crucial role in the development of a contemporary Irish theatre. This chapter considers their work, focusing on key examples from influential productions.
Oscar Wilde
Authors: McAteer Michael
Published: September 2016

While Oscar Wilde’s plays—particularly his comedies—have often been read in terms of politics of gender identity and social class, it has not often been observed that they were also responding to a sense of political crisis in the 1890s. This chapter unravels the traces of a wider geopolitics in Wilde’s plays, extending beyond London or Dublin. It argues that the magnificent, unsettling witticisms of Wilde’s dramas, their constant play with the dangers of social and political subterfuge, and their fascination with the sacrificial act all contribute to the sense of his theatrical achievement as a portent of the calamities that would follow the age of Wagner. It concludes that while Wilde did not write for Ireland, the influence of Ireland’s historical conflict with England prompted and enabled him to develop his distinctive theatrical perspectives on art, politics, and sacrifice as prophecies of this future.
Beckett at the Gate
Authors: Bates Julie
Published: September 2016

The place of Samuel Beckett in Irish theatre is anomalous. On the one hand, he is the inescapable figure, the writer cited by so many subsequent Irish playwrights as a touchstone for their work. On the other hand, his work is not ‘Irish’ in any obvious way. While there are fleeting references to Irish placenames, much of the late work takes place in a purely theatrical world that is removed from any national or culturally specific setting. The Beckett Festival of 1991, in which all of Beckett’s nineteen plays were produced, was developed by Michael Colgan as a way of repatriating the playwright. Colgan’s entrepreneurial skills were put at the service of a major theatre event in which popular Irish actors such as Barry McGovern, Johnny Murphy, and Maureen Potter were matched with international directors. This Irish event then toured abroad, and led to the commemorative ‘Beckett on Film’ project.
Negotiating Differences in the Plays of Frank McGuinness
Authors: Lojek Helen Heusner
Published: September 2016

The career of the playwright Frank McGuinness encapsulates the trajectory of identity politics in Ireland since the mid-1980s. McGuiness first achieved major recognition forObserve the Sons of Ulsterin 1985, a play by a Catholic playwright exploring the Ulster Unionist psyche and a continuum of male relationships from the homosexual to the homosocial. This play set the template for McGuinness’ future work, in which characters cross the expected boundaries of gender and cultural identity in ways that both transgress and respect existing categories. His later plays, such asCarthaginians(1988),Someone Who’ll Watch OverMe(1992),Mutabilitie(1997), andGates of Gold(2002), all incorporate slightly different perspectives on the general topics of Other, difference, and identity. Dramatic form reinforces those thematic concerns, and both characters and audiences must confront their own realities and negotiate differences.
Irish Theatre Devised
Authors: Singleton Brian
Published: September 2016

Since the early 1980s, a considerable debate has grown up around the centrality of the written script in Irish theatre. While the major artist in many other European theatre cultures was the director or the scenographer, Irish theatre remained dominated by the writer. However, with an expansion in the number of theatre companies, an increasingly globalized culture, and new forms of Irish actor training, companies began to emerge whose work did not begin with a playwright. In some companies, such as Corn Exchange, work is devised with the collaboration of writer, director, and the ensemble. In other cases, companies such as Pan Pan have used classic texts as the basis for director-driven post-dramatic works, while other companies such as ANU have moved further into forms of devised work. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the writer was no longer necessarily the key figure in Irish theatre .
Irish Theatre in Europe
Authors: Pilný Ondřej
Published: September 2016

While Irish drama has achieved a distinctive reputation within the Anglophone world, the situation in continental Europe has been much more complex. Wilde and Shaw continue to be widely revived but are rarely identified as Irish. Even more strikingly, contemporary Irish playwrights such as Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh, both extremely popular in Europe, are assimilated within a general category of British theatre, while Brian Friel’s work is much less well known. There have been established theatrical traditions of playing some Irish dramatists in individual countries, as in the case of Synge in the Czech lands, or the later plays of O’Casey in postwar Germany and in Eastern Europe. Specific productions such as the German and Czech stagings of Behan’sThe Hostageillustrate well the local political and theatrical contexts which made for their success. By contrast, Irish theatre companies travelling to Europe have had a quite mixed reception.
Irish Theatre and Historiography
Authors: Jordan Eamonn
Published: September 2016

Irish theatre history, like Irish theatre, has for many years orbited around two centres: the writer and the Abbey Theatre. To some extent this continues to be both true, and for good reason. At the same time as Irish theatre culture has diversified, so too has scholarly writing about Irish theatre. There has been a distinct turn towards the study of performance in the twenty-first century, which is notable in an area that for so long had been dominated by the study of writers. In the same period, as Irish culture became more diverse, questions of gender identity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism have come into focus in new ways; and this in turn happened during a paradigm shift that has taken place across the humanities as a result of digitization. This chapter consider both the legacy of Irish theatre scholarship, and the new directions it has been following.
Theatre and Activism 1900–1916
Authors: Mathews P.J.
Published: September 2016

Whereas previous scholarship has concentrated on the political struggle for Irish independence leading to the Easter Rising of 1916, new critical attention to the diverse range of groups, movements, and societies dedicated to multiple forms of political action has revealed a more complex picture of activism during the period 1900–1916. Of particular importance is the role that theatre-making played in binding together a multiplicity of fringe political groups, and in promoting their various aims and agendas. Significant among the vibrant theatre companies that emerged during an intense period of Irish social activism between 1900 and 1916 are: the Ulster Literary Theatre, the Theatre of Ireland, and Na hAisteoirí. The history of these three companies, their achievements, and their political objectives are explored in this chapter.
Singing “The Internationale”
Authors: Chen Xiaomei
Published: September 2016

This chapter examines the preoccupation of Chinese intellectuals, translators, writers, and performers with the power of voice and sound by analyzing the prominent role of “The Internationale” throughout the changing landscape of Chinese cultural performance. It traces how “The Internationale” evolved from its French and Soviet roots into a Chinese nationalist song and how it became a rally song to mobilize the Chinese masses, preserving its popularity through political vicissitudes up until the postsocialist era. Despite the song’s historical involvement in the construction of revolutionary discourse, “The Internationale” has retained its function as a song of memory and of counterculture for manipulating the very revolutionary beliefs it had helped promote. As a site of sonic construction of knowledge and power, “The Internationale” embodies and manifests complex and paradoxical impulses, which can at once legitimize and challenge the status quo and its authoritarian system.
“Are our drawers empty?”
Authors: Li Jie
Published: September 2016

Borrowing from literature scholar Chen Sihe’s concept of “drawer literature,” referring to literature written during the Maoist period but which could not be published until years later (if at all), this chapter proposes a related concept of “dossier literature.” Rather than looking at literary works that have been stuffed away into figurative drawers because they could not be openly published, this chapter instead looks at the writings that may be found in the dossiers maintained by the state on individual writers and intellectuals. The analysis focuses in particular on writings in the dossier of the writer Nie Gannu in order to help undo the dichotomy between “good literature” and “bad politics” and to paint an ambivalent picture of intellectual survival under dictatorship.
A Dream of Returning to 1997
Authors: Fu Junning
Published: September 2016

This chapter analyzes the Chinese web fantasy novelA Dream of Returning to 1997,created and serialized between 2004 and 2005 by the pseudonymous author Tonglingzhe, as a basis for reflecting upon the medial and commercial pragmatics as well as the ideological framework of web literature. With its plot of a web fantasy aficionado who achieves literary and economic success only after traveling back in time and reaping the fruits of his earlier unproductive spare-time activity, the novel offers a self-referential commentary on the genre of web fantasy and its infrastructure. Apart from fictionalizing the history of the genre and the company that runs its major platform (Qidian), the novel also reflects on, questions, and elides the binary oppositions between original and copy, as well as high literature and popular culture, thus allowing for a reflection on the real and imaginary economies and mediascapes of capitalist modernity.
Sense of Place and Urban Images
Authors: Chan Leonard Kwok-Kou
Published: September 2016

Through a close reading of works by a number of different Hong Kong poets, this chapter analyzes how the poets construct an identity for themselves and their place by finding expression for their urban experience. The analysis focuses on North Point and Nathan Road—two of the busiest districts in Hong Kong—and their position within the poetic imagination. Paying particular attention to poetry’s sociohistorical function as a construction site of cultural memory, the discussion looks into the feeling of topophilia towards the places, as well as the sociocultural critique of the poems, which gives rise to an antithetical feeling of topophobia.
Where the “Trans-Pacific” Meets Chinese Literature
Authors: Shen Shuang
Published: September 2016

This chapter proposes an understanding of trans-Pacific Chinese literature not as yet another uncritical expansion of the territory of Chinese literature, but as an examination of the relationship between Chinese-language literature and the trans-Pacific world(s) it makes, as well as that between the literature and the real worlds of the Pacific societies it touches. Whereas “Asia Pacific” as a regional concept is inseparable from Euro-American expansions in the region, trans-Pacific Chinese literature does not necessarily reproduce this dominant regional thinking. Through reading narratives of the Cold War written in different locations of the Asia Pacific, this chapter shows that thinking comparatively about Chinese literature from disparate locations of the Asia Pacific can engender alternative regional imagination.
Poet of the Late Summer Corn
Authors: Bender Mark
Published: September 2016

This chapter introduces the poetry of Aku Wuwu (aka Luo Qingchun), a member of the Yi ethnic minority group in ethnically diverse southwest China. His experiences growing up in the Liangshan Mountains of southern Sichuan have deeply marked his work and shaped his academic career. The chapter explores his use of imagery of traditional and contemporary Yi culture and the natural and human-manipulated environment in his work. His stress on “mother tongue” writing in the Nuosu dialect of Yi and the positioning of himself as a cultural hybrid are major aspects of his theoretical approach. His bilingual corpus of poetry (Nuosu and Han languages) and critical works provide insight into key issues in ethnic minority writing in China today.
Literary Translation and Modern Chinese Literature
Authors: Jin JI
Published: September 2016

Since the late Qing, literature in translation and modern Chinese literature have maintained a symbiotic relationship. Translation, understood as an entirely new means of creation and expression rather than a mere change in language, profoundly influenced modern Chinese literature with regard to narrative structures and techniques as well as generic and formal innovations. Literature in translation can be considered from the dual perspectives of cultural alterity and sameness; even as the process of translation was influenced by modern literature, translation played an important role in the development of modern Chinese literature. To regard literature in translation as an integral part of modern Chinese literature challenges how we define the “Chineseness” of Chinese literature. It allows for a new understanding of the dialectic relationship between literature in translation and modern Chinese literature in the broader context of world literature and thus opens up new possibilities for literary creation.
Genre in Modern Chinese Fiction
Authors: Hamm Jonathan Christopher
Published: September 2016

This chapter explores the place of genre in modern Chinese fiction through a reading of Xiang Kairan’s martial arts novelRighteous Heroes of Modern Times, considered one of the foundational works of modern martial arts fiction. The novel’s narrative centers on the question of the transmission of China’s martial arts. In a self-reflexive turn, it establishes connections between the transmission of the martial arts and of narrative—both the transitivity of the narrative act and the transmission of particular bodies of narrative material. The tale involves a modernization of the mode of transmission, thus probing the tension between continuity and change inherent in the logic of transmission—of martial arts traditions as well as of the generic structures of martial arts fiction. This allows for a reflection on the laws of genre itself, since a genre work succeeds in part by varying or violating the material that it inherits.
Chinese Literary Thought in Modern Times
Authors: Wang David Der-wei
Published: September 2016

Theory has both enriched contemporary Chinese literary studies and generated discontent. Rather than uncritically embracing or rejecting theory, this chapter probes the discourse of Chinese literary thought in Chinese modernity as an engagement with Chinese traditions as well as modern Western theoretical practice. Contrary to the perception that the May Fourth era was a period of total antitraditionalism, intellectuals at the time appear to have been radical comparativists when analyzing foreign importations and traditional legacies. This chapter introduces three cases—the dictum ofshi yan zhi(“poetry is that which expresses what is intently on the mind”), the trope ofxing(“affective evocation”), and the dialogic ofshishi(“poetry as history”). By bringing literary thought to bear on theoretical engagement on one hand and textual studies on the other, we can reengage theory critically as a movement across cultures that shapes and is shaped by its different contexts.
Gao Xingjian
Authors: Liu Jianmei
Published: September 2016

This chapter looks at how Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, has brought Zhuangzi’s spirit of absolute liberation and freedom to the highest level. A discussion of his novelSoul Mountainand the poems “As Free as a Bird” and “Roaming Spirit and Metaphysical Thinking” shows how Gao’s self-exile and his persistent pursuit of the aesthetic spirit of literature embody Zhuangzi’s spirit of individual freedom and liberation. By successfully turning the meaning of “exile” from negative to positive, Gao has recreated a nature, or a Garden of Eden, in which he can transcend all kinds of restrictions and wander freely in the literary world. Gao Xingjian’s tropes of fleeing and self-exile, closely associated with his literary works, represent one of the most compelling cases of the interplay between literature and individual freedom at the end of the twentieth century.
From Exile to Queer Homecoming
Authors: Tan E.K.
Published: September 2016

While tropes of exile and transgressive aesthetics have been prominent characteristics of queer-themed literature in Taiwan, this chapter focuses on queer homecoming as a literary and political imaginary. Rather than echoing or contesting critiques leveled at the domestication of queerness, for instance in the debates about same-sex marriage in Taiwan and elsewhere, to analyze representations of queer kinship provides insights about the displaced connection and meaning of home for queer subjects. Taking Chen Xue’s diary novelA Wife’s Diaryas an example, this chapter treats queer homecoming as an intervention into a seemingly stable heteronormative structure. Such an intervention urges both queer subjects and their families to simultaneously navigate and negotiate a new type of kinship that is more inclusive than the traditional one. Queer homecoming allows us to rearrange and rethink the notion of home and thus creates a more welcoming familial environment.
Care, Vulnerability, Resilience
Authors: Thornber Karen
Published: September 2016

Chinese-language writers have grappled with the destruction of environments at home and abroad for millennia. Analyzing more closely precisely how they have done so, becoming more attentive to the ecological resonances in creative production of all types, exposes our vulnerabilities at the same time that it points to possibilities for the future, alternative ways of caregiving and giving care, and different types of resilience, if not immunity. This chapter discusses the ecological resonances of two works of Chinese-language literature set against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Taiwanese writer Chu T’ien-wen’sNotes of a Desolate Man(1994) and mainland Chinese writer Yan Lianke’sDream of Ding Village(2006). It analyzes howNotesprobes the intricacies and paradoxes of caregiving and howDreamengages with the interdependence and shared fragility of people and landscapes.
A Distant Shore
Authors: Tsai Chien-hsin
Published: September 2016

What relation does or should a descendant of immigrant parents have to the ancestral homeland? And what notions can he or she rely on to characterize, sustain, or even nullify such relations—language, ethnicity, consanguinity, or cultural loyalty? The Chinese Singaporean writer Chia Joo Ming ponders and casts new lights on these questions in his novella “Ambon Vacation.” For Chia, Chinese diasporic subjects have open-ended and plural identities that move and change in time and space. This chapter analyzes the way in which Chia details the entanglement among historical contingency, literary imagination, and personal feelings in relation to contemporary identity politics and the notion of loyalism.
On Time
Authors: Rojas Carlos
Published: September 2016

Through a close reading of several works by contemporary Hong Kong author Dung Kai-Cheung, and particularly his recent novelWorks and Creations, this chapter examines how Dung deploys a dialectics of anticipatory loss and belated recognition to comment not only on the status of contemporary Hong Kong but also on the process of fiction-writing itself. The analysis draws on the precisely inverse Freudian concepts of the fetish and of deferred action, which approach the present through the prism of either an anticipated future loss or a belated reassessment of a past event, while also reflecting more broadly on the relationship between temporality and narration.
The Story of Literary History
Authors: Pingyuan Chen
Published: September 2016

Starting with a reflection on Lu Xun’s ambivalence toward the writing of literary history, this chapter analyzes the emergence and importance of literary history as a discursive tool for structuring the production and transmission of knowledge about literature from the late Qing onward. In the context of China’s transition to a Western-style educational system in the early twentieth century, reinforced by a turn of intellectuals from literary revolution to “Rearranging the National Heritage” after 1919, literary history with its systemic approach replaced the traditional literary education focused on rhetoric, aesthetic taste, and composition. This crucial shift in discursive system and the concomitant lack of attention to literariness and creativity has had a profound and lasting influence on literary studies in China and continues to impact the production, analysis, and teaching of literature today.
Voice and the Quest for Modernity in Chinese Literature
Authors: Chia-ling MEI
Published: September 2016

Participants in the May Fourth New Culture movement, such as Lu Xun, frequently invoked the concept of voice as a remedy for what they perceived as the “voiceless” China of the past with its superannuated script, language, and culture. This chapter complicates their invocation of “voice” by analyzing the political importance and concrete practices of voicing and recitation in Chinese poetic discourses of the 1930s. The different emphases on recitation proposed by the Poetry Reading Society and the China Poetry Society throw light on the agonistic relationship between voice and writing in the literary discourses of the first decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, recitation and voicing played a key role in the ideal of language education proposed by Zhu Ziqing and others that shaped the modern voice in the literary history of China in the context of national-language education.
Hongkong-Speak
Authors: Chan Shelby Kar-yan , Fong Gilbert C. F.
Published: September 2016

Cantonese has been used in “spoken drama” performances since the 1910s, but scripts (both original scripts and ones translated from other languages) were almost invariably written in standard Mandarin. Taking as its starting point the work of Rupert Chan, who was among the first to translate Western plays into colloquial Cantonese, this chapter examines some of the implications of the use of written Cantonese in contemporary Hong Kong. Of particular interest is the relationship between the use of written Cantonese and notions of local Hong Kong identity. As something new and unique to Hong Kong, Chan’s versions maintain an open-minded attitude vis-à-vis other cultural expressions and absorb, appropriate, and transform them, which is characteristic of the writing of Hong Kong identity.
Self-Efficacy
Authors: Maddux James E. , Kleiman Evan M.
Published: September 2016

The basic premise of self-efficacy theory is that “people’s beliefs in their capabilities to produce desired effects by their own actions” (Bandura, 1997, p. vii) are the most important determinants of the behaviors people choose to engage in and how much they persevere in their efforts in the face of obstacles and challenges. Self-efficacy theory also maintains that these efficacy beliefs play a crucial role in psychological adjustment, psychological problems, physical health, as well as professionally guided and self-guided behavioral change strategies. This chapter provides an overview of self-efficacy theory and research by addressing three basic questions: (a) What is self-efficacy? (b) Where do self-efficacy beliefs come from? (c) Why is self-efficacy important? The chapter also discusses “collective efficacy”—group members’ beliefs in their ability to collectively accomplish shared goals.
Range and Innovation in Jonson’s Staging
Authors: Happé Peter
Published: September 2016

This review of Jonson’s staging methods in eight plays over 34 years in five theatres suggests that he was persistently innovative and creative. He adapted his plays to different types of theatre and made his decisions about staging match the differing objectives he set himself within the plays. It shows that he could write on a large scale as well as for intimate situations, and that he created stage events which involved complex movement and intricate actions. He was always aware of the need to entertain his audiences as well as being concerned to stimulate their thinking, and in order to do this he used a range of staging devices including metatheatrical presentation, onstage commentary, and the creation of an imagined space offstage. Such devices could be simple and adaptable to different situations, but at times he also located stage action quite specifically to real places in London.
Explaining Change
Authors: Koslofsky Craig
Published: September 2016

Delineations of the causes of the Reformation have long been synonymous with claims about its significance on a personal, spiritual, confessional, national, or world-historical level. Conversely, these levels have presented a single clear or overriding account of the causes of the Reformation (e.g., “Luther's Reformation was the work of the devil”; or “the Reformation reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie”), rather than a complex story of equal parts faith, force, and fortune. By exploring these complexities, scholars have shown that social and political causes of the Reformation were quite diverse, as were its intellectual origins. Historically speaking, the Reformation arose not from a shared doctrine of justification, nor from a vision of a church reformed according to Scripture, but from the common cultural challenges it addressed, and from the common solutions authorized by the Reformers’ diverse views.
Introduction—Feminist Shakespeare Studies
Authors: Traub Valerie
Published: September 2016

This Introduction offers a map of the current state of feminism in Shakespeare studies by inquiring into its key terms, concepts, and critical values. After describing four theoretical propositions that orient much feminist scholarship and providing a brief genealogy of feminist Shakespeare criticism, I explore the tensions in the field between gender and sexuality studies and gender and studies of race and ethnicity, paying particular attention to intersectionality. Arguing that contradictions and conflicts within feminism are a sign of health, not decline, I advocate continuing the strategic border crossing that has long energized feminist thought. I conclude by suggesting that the term ‘embodiment’ provides a heuristic sufficiently capacious to articulate the complex, intersecting, and historical relations of power, identity, agency, and struggle that remain among feminism’s core critical investments.
Bruised with Adversity
Authors: Akhimie Patricia
Published: September 2016

‘Bruis’d with Adversity: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors’ examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which individuals may be grouped with others who merely share the same somatic markers, and the ease with which somatic markers may be stigmatized. The essay focuses on the treatment of the bruised bodies of the two servant/slaves, Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse, arguing that although the bruise is perceived as temporary, it is in fact experienced as an indelible somatic mark, endured from birth, and indicating both a moral and a social inferiority that is hereditary and insurmountable.
Comedies End in Marriage
Authors: Schwarz Kathryn
Published: September 2016

This essay traces close links between socialized desire and social death, and asks what is lost if we accept marriage as the necessary end of comic processes. Marriage sacrifices flexible, multifaceted relations to narrower and more durable contracts. Both for those included in marriage and for those excluded from it, situational attachments—whether pragmatic or affective, exigent or incidental—cannot survive exclusive unions. Shakespearean comedies put these consequences on display, creating articulate subjects of loss who speak for alternative modes of connection. Priorities forged by local desires and needs interrupt the drive towards a single exclusive choice. Rather than stand as a naturalized outcome, marriage becomes a contested artefact, challenged by characters whose presence is supplemental, anachronistic, and melancholic. While I do not argue that Shakespeare is against marriage, I do suggest that the plays invite us to count its costs, and to envision more capacious and consensual bonds.
The Fierce Urgency of Now
Authors: Stockton Will
Published: September 2016

This essay offers a presentist reading of Romeo and Juliet in light of the political move to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples in the United States. At the same time, it critiques the recent anti-social, queer theoretical tendency to disassociate queerness from both gay identity and critical efforts to historicize desire. Identifying the Second City Network’s character of Sassy Gay Friend as the combined figure of the Nurse and Mercurtio, this essay argues for the viability of a gay, feminist, and queer life that stands against the rush to secure marriage rites, as well as against the death-drive that anti-social queer theory celebrates as queer.
Entangled Agency
Authors: DiGangi Mario
Published: September 2016

In Richard III and King John, Shakespeare explores the assassin’s political agency in terms of the affective entanglements that connect him to his patron, partners, and victim, and that take shape within a particular network of material affordances and constraints. Conscience, which functions at the intersection of private feeling and public knowledge, provides an apt perspective into these affective entanglements. Whereas in Richard III the Executioners’ affective examination of conscience compromises Richard’s control over his assassination plot, in King John Arthur’s emotional appeals to his executioner affirm the value of a private and embodied affection, which ultimately makes a stronger claim on Hubert’s loyalties than his political bond with the king. Through these scenarios, Shakespeare explores how affective intimacies between men can shape ethical and political choices in ways that do not always serve the ends of those who wield the most power.
Incorporating Kate
Authors: Rubright Marjorie
Published: September 2016

Revisiting a pervasive through-line of 1990s feminist approaches to Henry V, this essay posits that this body of criticism has bestowed a powerful but restrictive sense of the relation between language, embodiment, and agency in the play. Focusing on the play’s process of displaying competing models of linguistic ‘incorporation’, I argue that Kate’s speech—both on stage and in its typographic embodiment in the first Folio—puts English’s heterogeneity on display, challenging the model of monolingualism that undergirds Henry’s articulations of England’s conquest. Sounding out the limits of ‘the King’s English’, and showcasing the ways in which bodies of language exceed the cultural histories and implicit genealogical principles that they are invoked to define, Kate’s speech poses significant challenges to Henry’s desire to render England and France an ‘incorporate league’.
The Undocumented Lives of William Shakespeare
Authors: Stewart Alan
Published: September 2016

Modern Shakespeare biographies give special weight to details of Shakespeare’s life supported by reference to archival materials. The ‘documentary life’ records only those life-events in which the legal profession, church, and state have a vested interest, producing a ‘documentary life’ with a particular, predictable, shape—producing Shakespeare as a son, husband, and father, a Stratford resident, a property owner, and a sharer in a theatrical company. But this ‘documentary life’ obscures an earlier biographical tradition which is routinely dismissed as apocryphal. This essay aims to take seriously the seventeenth-century tellings of Shakespeare’s life, analysing them not for their ability to tally with the documentary traces but rather for what they say and where and how they say it. They provide a remarkably consistent characterization, and one that is often intriguingly at odds with the supposedly ‘authentic’, documentary Shakespeare.
The Gendered Text and Its Labour
Authors: Wayne Valerie
Published: September 2016

By describing the value and volume of editorial labour while disrupting the binary between editing and criticism, this essay demonstrates how texts are gendered by their editors and can manifest related investments concerning sexuality, class, and race. Following a brief history of the editorial tradition, it explains the work that goes into a scholarly edition and notes the contributions to be made by a feminist editor. It examines instances of editorial discretion in Cymbeline that have masked the play’s attention to misogyny and obscured its connections with Juvenal’s sixth satire. In the author’s forthcoming Arden 3 edition of Cymbeline, the introductionwill examine how the play disrupts rather than firmly anchors Innogen’s gender as an object of desire while it conflates class with race-based ancestry, complicates elitism, and critiques a character’s misogyny through his repentance. Our texts are products of our own begetting as well as our collective inheritance.
Glossing and T*pping
Authors: Masten Jeffrey
Published: September 2016

Reading a series of textual cruxes and glosses in Othello editions, the essay refocuses attention on the 1622–3 printed texts’ description of what we would call ‘sexual intercourse’, and the way in which modern editions attempt to correct/standardize uses of the sexual verb top to tup. At stake are notions of sexuality, sodomy discourse in relation to early modern ‘race’ and human–animal distinctions, power and positionality in historical sexual practices, the relation of textual ‘gloss’ and textual ‘crux’ in Shakespeare editions, and notions of character and coherence in Shakespeare’s plays. The essay argues for integrating scholarship on the intersecting histories of race, gender, and sexuality into editorial work—work often assumed to be prior to criticism and cultural history.
A Time for The Merry Wives of Windsor
Authors: McLuskie Kathleen E.
Published: September 2016

This essay explores different ways that time affects the reception and reproduction of The Merry Wives of Windsor as they move between the shared present of the theatrical experience, the narrative time of the action, and the invocation of the historical time of social change that informs its contemporary reproduction. It draws attention to the differences in this account of time offered in the two texts of the play (F1 and Q1) and suggests that critical responses to those differences are themselves inflected by expectations arising from attempts to locate the play in time. The aim of the essay throughout is to acknowledge but also resist the implied teleology of the familiar opposition between the present and the past, exploring instead the complex relationships between text, narrative, and time as they are mediated by material changes in theatre and in print.
Precarious Bodies
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: September 2016

This chapter looks at embodiment in Romeo and Juliet not in its typical context as an exemplary expression of romantic love, but instead as a prompt for contested nationality and a complex global politics. The case study for this discussion is the Iraqi Theatre Company’s adaptation, Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, performed in London and Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the World Shakespeare Festival (a signature event within the Cultural Olympiad staged as part of the London 2012 celebrations). The Iraqi version of the play sets the well-known plot as a story of cross-sectarian love (the Capulets are Sunni and the Montagus Shia) and so dramatizes the contingent practices of Iraqi nationhood. Performances emphasized the national, religious, and gendered bodies at risk and challenged an English spectatorship who, I argue, were particularly unprepared for such a revision of the play.
Amazons, Turks, and Tartars in the Gesta Grayorum and The Comedy of Errors
Authors: Andrea Bernadette
Published: September 2016

This essay pursues the multiple and contradictory meanings of the signifier ‘Tartar’ in Elizabethan drama by parsing how its classical and historical referents were mapped onto the ‘trouble’ associated with gendered and racialized embodiment in the period, which was further mapped onto the early Anglo–Islamic encounter. It focuses on the imbricated series of cultural performances that constituted the 1594–5 Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn, subsequently published as the Gesta Grayorum: the semi-parodic allegory of the Prince of Purpoole and ‘an Ambassador from the mighty Emperor of Russia and Moscovy’; the madcap premier of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors; and the Masque of
Proteus, with Queen Elizabeth in the audience. In assessing the patriarchal web of empire indexed by the Gesta Grayorum, this essay foregrounds the fraught historical embodiment of subaltern women from the Islamic world in Elizabethan England and their neglected, albeit constitutive role in its literature, including Shakespeare’s plays.
Becoming Caliban
Authors: Cline Lauren Eriks
Published: September 2016

Caliban’s semantic slipperiness derives from page descriptions and stage performances that excessively mark Caliban’s bodies with vilifying language, while at the same time destabilizing the referential value of that language through their very excessiveness. ‘Fish’, ‘beast’, and ‘Hag-seed’ spawn the incoherent stage signs of fins, fur, scales, and skin disease. Following monstrous vectors of contagion along rhizomatic lines, my readings will concern themselves with the de- and re-territorializations of Caliban’s bodies on page and stage: first by focusing on the tracings of language that inscribe Caliban’s identity, and second by mapping the movements of ‘becoming-animal’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ that signal his lines of flight. I ultimately argue for the usefulness of Caliban’s monstrous becomings not as a finished analytical product but as a working critical model: an exercise in treating the fragmentation and opacity of the performing body not as a limitation but a possibility.
Feeling Shakespeare
Authors: Albanese Denise
Published: September 2016

‘Feeling Shakespeare’ resituates a lapsed critical conversation about aesthetics and Shakespeare by referring the question of aesthetics back to the realm of bodily sensations, and ahead to the emergent field of affect theory. By attending as well to the way our current moment conditions the possibility of feeling and perception, it offers four exemplary analyses of the way Shakespeare is materialized—via play-text, performance, cinema, and graphic novel. The essay suggests that much of the way Shakespeare appears to us at the present cannot but generate mixed feelings, rather than the distanced aesthetic disposition described by Kant, and critiqued by Bourdieu.
Constructing the Inferior Body
Authors: Kaplan M. Lindsay
Published: September 2016

Christian scriptural and patristic texts posit that God imposed perpetual servitude upon the Jews as punishment for the sin of deicide. The medieval church cites this concept of Jewish inferiority in expressing concern about Jews exercising power over Christians. The inversion of the proper hierarchy between the two groups, ecclesiastical authorities feared, exposed subordinated Christians to the peril of conversion. These anxieties continue to shape relations between Christians and Jews as represented in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In those moments when Shylock is poised to exercise power over Christians, the play’s characters describe his body as inanimate, bestial, dark, and demonic in an attempt to construct a physical inferiority that will return him to his rightful place of subjection. However, Shylock’s rejection of ‘natural’ inferiority, his insistence on physical parity between Christians and Jews and Portia’s reliance on the law to enforce hierarchy, all expose this difference as constructed, not inherent.
Regulating in the Face of Sociotechnical Change
Authors: Bennett Moses Lyria
Published: September 2016

This chapter looks broadly at how lawyers and regulators should understand the relationship between regulation and changing technologies. It argues that instead of asking how we might 'regulate technology' or 'regulate new technology', we should focus on the question of how we might institutionally manage the adjustment of law and regulation in light of ongoing sociotechnical change. In particular, it argues that 'technology' is neither a special rationale for nor a special object of regulation, but rather that it is changes in the sociotechnical landscape that generate a need to constantly re-evaluate regulatory regimes. It concludes with high-level principles that follow from this reframing for regulatory design, choice of regulatory institution, regulatory timing, and regulatory responsiveness.
Effects of Heavy Exercise and Restricted Diet Regimes on Nitrogen Balance and Body Composition
Authors: Huelsemann Frank , Koehler Karsten , Flenker Ulrich
Published: September 2016

In the past people led far more strenuous, active lives than industrialized, sedentary populations do today, and conditions could be far harsher, for instance during frigid glacial conditions. These factors carry significant implications for human energy requirements and metabolism. Endurance athletes undergoing strenuous physical regimes can serve as models for such demanding conditions. This chapter reviews the influences of strenuous activity and dietary restrictions on energy and protein metabolism. The thesis is illustrated by describing a semi-controlled experiment of an expedition across a hostile environment, monitored by means of nutritional and activity records, and stable nitrogen isotope ratios (15N/14N) in hair. The results demonstrate that under demanding conditions both energy balance and protein intake lead to 15N-enrichment; dietary and metabolic effects cannot be separated. They suggest that physically demanding lifestyles, especially under harsh conditions, must be considered in the interpretation of human 15N/14N values for dietary reconstructions.
‘Discourse on Rivers, and Fish and Fishing’
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: September 2016

Freshwater fish are often identified as a major resource for past hunter-gatherers, and their exploitation has been implicated in both the emergence of the capacity for modern behaviour and the evolution of sociopolitical complexity. Archaeological attention has mostly been directed at higher latitude groups, but southern Africa is one of several middle and lower latitude regions in which freshwater fish were also procured, sometimes on a large scale. This chapter considers their exploitation in Africa south of the Zambezi over the longue durée of the past 70,000 years, discusses the ways in which they were captured, and evaluates claims that they helped sustain higher population densities, reduced mobility, seasonal aggregation, and the development of more ‘delayed return’ economies during the late Holocene.
The English Kyrie
Authors: Planchart Alejandro
Published: September 2016

This chapter discusses the history of the English Kyrie, an important prayer of Christian liturgy. More specifically, it examines both the suppression of the English Kyries on the Continent and the attempt, particularly in the later fifteenth century, to recover some of these Kyries in a different guise. It first provides an overview of the connection between the Eastern Kyrie litany and the Kyrie of the mass before discussing five “manners” of singing the Kyrie eleison in the early eleventh century. It then explores how the early Kyrie repertory of post-conquest England became almost entirely northern French in character and how a large repertory of English mass music was copied in northern Italy and southern Germany. It also considers the efforts of some scribes to salvage the English Kyries by transforming them into motets. Finally, it analyzes the surviving English fragments of the Kyrie as well as the manner in which English masses were transmitted in continental sources.
The Depoliticized Drama
Authors: Lütteken Laurenz
Published: September 2016

This chapter examines how Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s comic opera Le Nozze di Figaro was affected by the practice of censorship during the Josephine Enlightenment. It first discusses three aspects of Le Nozze di Figaro’s genesis as mentioned by Lorenzo Da Ponte: Mozart’s choice of the stage play La folle journée by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais; the remarkably quick working out of the score; and permission for performance. It then analyzes the circumstances surrounding the censoring of Beaumarchais’s performance of La folle journée and the opera’s release. It also evaluates freedom of the press and censorship in Austria under Joseph II, who accelerated and radicalized the implementation of reforms in the spirit of a controlled enlightenment. Finally, the chapter considers Beaumarchais’s theory of comedy in which he emphasized the social function of theater, albeit not in the political sense that was claimed in the subsequent reception of Figaro.
Selling Schnittke
Authors: Schmelz Peter J.
Published: September 2016

This chapter examines censorship in the Soviet Union during the Cold War by focusing on the experience of composer Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998). More specifically, it looks at Schnittke’s evolving interactions with Soviet political and aesthetic strictures, as well as the representation and interpretation of those interactions abroad, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The chapter explores the increasingly complex, globalized musical economy in which late Soviet censorship played a key role. It also discusses the “harsh censorship” that Schnittke had to endure and how it gave him prominence, and ultimately prestige, with the help of various agents such as Gidon Kremer and the Kronos Quartet, the Soviet copyright agency VAAP (All-Union Agency for the Protection of Authors’ Rights), and the BIS record label. Finally, it highlights the actors (performers, producers, impresarios, critics, and listeners) who affect the way music is shaped and received, bought and sold.
Introduction
Authors: Mason Owen , Friesen Max
Published: September 2016

This chapter introduces the central issues relating to the archaeology of the North American Arctic, a region stretching 6,000 km from west to east and 3,000 km south to north. The region is characterized by a uniquely detailed ethnographic record, and excellent preservation of organic remains due to cold temperatures, which together allow particularly high-resolution interpretation of the archaeological record. Themes common to all northern archaeology covered in this chapter include the use of ethnographic analogy to understand ancient archaeological cultures, the role of climate change in archaeological interpretation, the construction of chronologies in an arctic setting, and the role of migration and interaction in the arctic past.