Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England

Rory Loughnane, Edel Semple, Rory Loughnane, Edel Semple

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030008918
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030008925
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama.

This book was preceded by a companion collection, Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England, published in 2013: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137349354

© The Author(s) 2019

Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple (eds.)Staged Normality in Shakespeare's EnglandPalgrave Shakespeare Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00892-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Stages of Normality

Rory Loughnane¹

(1)

School of English, University of Kent, Kent, UK

Rory Loughnane

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary , and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. ¹

Anonymous, Rhetorica ad Herennium

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) ²

Ludwig Wittgenstein , Philosophical Investigations

Writing nearly two thousand years apart, an anonymous Roman schoolteacher and an Austrian–British philosopher both articulate a universal truth: what is perceived as normal or everyday rarely draws or sustains interest. The schoolteacher finds this situation entirely understandable. Outlining the rules and methods for memoria, the fourth canon of rhetoric , he thinks it is only natural that when ‘we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time ’. ³ The everyday is forgettable and therefore of little use for practices of mnemonics; it is taken for granted. Wittgenstein , for his part, is investigating questions of philosophical psychology, specifically how we see things as something or other. (In medieval psychology, this is the power of apperception.) Writing about epistemology, he opined that not only was the everyday taken for granted, but also that it was less well understood because it was so taken.

As both men highlight, there is no reason for one to recall (and log) the unremarkable, but that does not mean there is not something therein concealed that deserves our attention . ⁴ Before our Roman schoolteacher, Heraclitus had observed that ‘man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar’. ⁵ This notion of attentiveness and the attenuation of attention have been recently theorized with relation to the ‘pursuit of the everyday ’ in contemporary poetics and culture. Andrew Epstein , drawing upon the musings of Max Weber about ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (i.e., industrial and scientific revolutions coinciding with increased secularization) and setting up the Romantic treatment of celebrating the everyday , argues that there emerged ‘a newfound recognition that the everyday , the here and now, is perhaps the primary arena of human experience’. ⁶ While Epstein concedes that the everyday has been a ‘perennial concern’ of literary and artistic engagement, name-checking the works of Shakespeare alongside those written by Homer, Chaucer , and others, he firmly grounds this in a twentieth-century codification and reification (his terms) of the phenomena of ‘the ordinary ’, ‘the everyday ’, and ‘the nature of attention ’. ⁷

This volume seeks to pay very careful attention to that which otherwise slips from the span of accumulated attentiveness, and it does so by analysing staged English drama of the early modern period. It is unlikely that Heraclitus , the rhetoric teacher, or Wittgenstein were thinking of the ordinary and the familiar in relation to drama of any period. An obvious explanation for this is that performance, as a mode of entertainment, tends towards the abnormal , the not-everyday , the extraordinary, and the uncommon. Drama , in our modern non-theatrical sense, is always put in contrast with the quotidian realities of existence. So, too, ‘drama ’ can seem opposed to normality ; the clue is in the Greek etymology of the word—‘doing’, ‘action’, ‘deed’. ⁸ Drama , in the sense of plays and their performance, is rarely associated with tedium or routine. Not even the hardiest of Beckett fans would pay to see a play in which truly nothing happens. ⁹ Stage plays entertain. Audiences may have always wanted to find themselves and their own lives reflected on stage (the mimetic correspondence leading to catharsis), but merely by putting action on stage it becomes extraordinary through exhibition, observation, and the dynamics of the staged performance experience. It is, of course, representation rather than presentation. Staged and Normality might seem therefore unlikely bedfellows. If an action is staged, it overturns and denies expectations and conventions of normality ; regardless of content, a staged act is performative, and that act of staging calls attention to itself as a site of performance. For the stage, which could take any form, demarcates the space where the performance act (speech, song, movement) takes place from where it does not. An associated meaning of staged—that an event or action has been staged so as to mean that it is artificially produced in some way that is reminiscent of a performance—discloses the word’s innate connoted abnormality.

In this volume, we are looking at normality through a very specific lens: performance, which simultaneously permits the imitation of normality (a subjective idea, as discussed below) and undoes it because it is recognizably imitative of normal behaviour rather than the recognized behaviour itself. But, as noted, that which is normal can easily drift from our attention , can be taken for granted. We are seeking, then, an analysis of the nature of drama apropos Carlo Ginzburg’s analysis of the nature of clues. ¹⁰ He compares the methods and reasoning process of Morelli (a nineteenth-century art historian), Freud , and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes , to argue that what they had in common was a focus on the seemingly irrelevant detail rather than on the eye-catching centre of an artwork, a life, or a criminal case. (Thus, to identify the artist, the viewer must attend to the mundane feature—the painted ears and fingers—rather than the arresting focus of the work —the figure’s enigmatic smile or ecstatic response to heaven; the same principles apply for investigating the psyche and crime.) What is normal may occupy a similar kind of place in early modern drama as the slip of the tongue for Freud , or the scratches on a watch for Holmes ; it is that which does not grab and retain our attention , but that which is assumed, understated, unremarkable, overlooked, or, in essence, deemed to be normal, that merits and rewards improved understanding. The chapters in this volume, identifying and analysing passages of staged normality in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, seek to see test the veracity of this hypothesis. ¹¹

Attention and Drama

The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. ¹²

Timon of Athens (14.299–300)

Staged normality may not be a concept one readily associates with pre-modern drama , and perhaps especially not with the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Asked for a recommendation of plays of the normal type, we might think of the ‘naturalism’ and ‘realism ’ of later dramatists like Strindberg , Ibsen , Chekhov , Miller , and O’Neill , with their everyman antiheroes and scenes of domestic interaction. ¹³ With early modern English drama , reflecting upon the plays of Marlow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Stages of Normality
• Part I. Discourses of Normality
• Part II. Negotiating Normality in Performance
• Part III. Staged Normality and the Domestic Space
• Back Matter