Serendipities

…is a done dissertation. And the best way to start a day of writing: Crooked Timber’s strategic advice on succesful completion of a PhD thesis!

The website of the Internet Shakespeare Editions has been completely redesigned, and new material has been added. The site looks wonderful, and has been designed around such rooms as the Foyer, the Library, the Theatre and the Annex.

New features include a section on performance, and a collection of facsimiles that can be viewed online. The Quarto version of Hamlet, for example, features this lesser known version of his famous line: “To be or not to be, I there’s the point” (sig. D4v). The performance section in the “Theater” contains a wealth of material on Shakespeare on Film, as well as on historical and modern performances of his plays. The database is searcheable, and contains material from over a thousand productions, including digitized version of such material as prompt books, costumes, and reviews. Professionally annotated editions of the plays are to be added in the near future, making the site a comprehensive Shakespearean repository.

The whole site is beautifully designed, with attention even to the tiniest detail. When a page cannot be found (it happened to me only once), the 404 Error page displays a sad-looking Shakespeare in a new version of the Droeshout engraving. Ingenious!

I was rehearsing my conference paper this morning, and discovered a very useful tool to time the paper. With this online stopwatch I found out that my paper takes me 20 minutes and 52 seconds to read. Very reassuring.

Also on the subject of presentation tools, I plan to use a PowerPoint presentation at the conference, to allow the audience to read along with quotations from primary material, and to display some images. I had a discussion over the use of PowerPoint this weekend, when an exact scientist (who shall remain anonymous) advised me to include slides that summarize my arguments, or at least reveal the structure of my paper to the audience. I used to be bored by such slides in lectures, but perhaps in the case of a twenty-minute paper, which tends to be rather dense, this is not such a bad idea? I have the impression, though, that although such summarizing slides are common in the exact sciences, you do not find them much at conferences in the humanities. Is it because we put more faith in our rhetorical skills?

I looked into this question, and googled Paul N. Edwards’ brave attempt at transforming the conference culture of the humanities. He writes that speakers at a conference should simply talk to their audience, instead of reading out a paper. Also, PowerPoint in his view can function as a means of structuring as well as timing a paper.

Finally, a fresh post on this blog. After my enthusiastic posts on the Gunpowder plot, I was absorbed by so much work (and by the latest History carnival, of course) that I did not find the time or the inspiration to write on anything early modern here. My apologies to those who visited and kept finding my scribbles on the assassination of William of Orange lurking at the top of the page!

Tomorrow, I will be off to France to attend a colloquium on women and the literature of early modern England at the University of Valenciennes. My paper is more on gender than on women, I have to admit. “Murdering Medeas: The Gender of Revenge in Late Sixteenth-Century Drama” will focus more on the gender poetics of revenge than on actual women, but that is precisely the point of the paper. For I will argue that the literary stereotype of the murderous Medea in certain plays should be related to early modern debates over the legitimacy of revenge, rather than be read — as feminist critics have done — as reflecting contemporary anxieties over women’s power.

To return to the Gunpowder Plot once more — the fourth centenary of the day has spawned a host of interesting new books on the subject. Online reviews of these books abound. Ronald Hutton wrote a review in the TLS, Murrough O’Brien in The Independent, and Alex Butterworth publishes his review today in the Observer.

Among the books reviewed is Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of Four Hundred Years of Bonfire Night by Brenda Buchanan et al (Penguin £14.99), in which Antonia Fraser imagines what would have happened had Guy Fawkes succeeded in his plot. The “what-if”-approach is current in The Netherlands as well, where historian Thomas van der Dunk in his new book, published this week, speculates on what would have happened had Balthasar Gerards been unsuccesful in his attempt to murder of William of Orange.

My Dutch newspaper reports that Amazon is to launch a facility that allows us to buy separate pages from books. I found the news online also at The Seattle Times. Amazon Pages facilitates the purchase of only those pages that we really need from a book: they “unbundle” the book for you. If they could also tell me how I am supposed to know precisely which pages of the book contain the piece of the puzzle that I am looking for, this would speed up my research considerably, Pages or no Pages.

Their second program sounds interesting as well. My books are never where I want them to be. I use my office at the university as an overspill for my bookcases at home. Books can be in two places, therefore, and they always manage to be precisely where I am not. Now here is Amazon’s solution: with Amazon Upgrade you buy a physical copy of the book, and get perpetual access to the online version of that same book! The word “upgrade” even seems to suggest that you will have access to all future editions as well. I am more enthusiastic about this idea than about “unbundling” books — it has a sacrilegious feel to it.

Since it is exactly four hundred years ago that Guy Fawkes and his men attempted to blow up the houses of Parliament, and since I know that Sharon Howard will be hosting a conspiratory carnival on plots and politics at Early Modern Notes tomorrow, a post on the Gunpowder plot is called for today! This post, therefore, is on women and the Gunpowder Plot.

Women? Of course, no women were involved in the plot — at least, no women were executed for participating in Guy Fawkes’s treason. The cultural imagination of early modern England nevertheless associated the Gunpowder Plot with women “and their sneaky, cunning schemes” (47), writes Frances Dolan in her cultural history of Catholicism and gender Whores of Babylon. Although no women were among the conspirators, many wives and female servants were imprisoned and questioned after the attempted attack on the houses of parliament. Anti-Catholic discourse associated Catholics with disorderly women. One of the causes of this association, Dolan argues, is that post-reformation English culture figured Catholicism as a rebellious and treasonous wife. Since women who murdered their husbands were by law convicted of “petty-treason,” traitors were by analogy compared to rebellious wives. Catholics in English society were represented as what Dolan in a previous book termed “dangerous familiars”: like wives who secretly poison their husbands in domestic tragedies, they are part of the community, “intimate, proximate, yet unknowable” (44).

The association of the Gunpowder plot with women occurs also in the drama. Dolan cites a passage from Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case (1617) in which Romelio speaks of his mother:

[H]er pretence
Of a grieved conscience, and religion,
Like to the horrid powder-treason in England,
Has a most bloody unnatural revenge
Hid under it. Oh the violencies of women! (4.2.285-89)

Dolan argues that the leap Romelio here makes from his mother, to the Gunpowder plot, to the general “violencies of women” seems quirky, but is explained by inserting a missing link: the priest. Especially Jesuit priests were thought to be behind Catholic schemes, and wives as well as other women were “assumed to be in cahoots with the priests” (48). I would like to suggest a different explanation for the slip from Guy Fawkes to the violence of women, a cultural-historical explanation that hinges on the “bloody unnatural revenge” mentioned in line 88.

For some representations of female vindictiveness in early modern culture associate women’s revenge with the sort of secrecy, hidden motives and bloody violence that link it to the Gunpowder Plot. Let’s go to one of the icons of bloody unnatural revenge in early modern culture: Medea. In John Studley’s translation of the play (1566), the nurse gives Medea the following advice on how best to plan her revenge:

For godsake (Madame) I you pray your tongue to silence frame.
Eke hyde your privy languishing and greefe in secret vayne:
Who with a modest minde abides the Spurs of pricking payne,
And suffereth sorrowes paciently, may it repay agayne
Who beares a privy grudge in breast, and keepes his malyce close.
He leeseth opportunity who vengeaunce doth requyre,
That shewes by open sparkes the flame the heate of kindled fyre.

The nurse — in quite archaic English — bids Medea to keep silent about her grief. “Remember, remember” she seems to tell her mistress, “but not openly so.” If Medea were publicly to declare her desire for revenge on Jason, and show her sparks of anger, she would lose the opportunity for a carefully planned vengeance. On the other hand, if she should suffer her sorrow patiently, and were to bear her grudge privately and secretly, this would gain her more time to plot her revenge. That the latter strategy is considered a typically female way of approaching revenge, appears also from Richard’s Brathwait conduct book addressed to the English Gentlewoman:

What a furious and inconsiderate thing is Woman when Passion distempers her? How much is her Behaviour altered, as if Iocasta were now to be personated? True it is, some with a bite of their lip, can surpresse an intended revenge: and like dangerous Politicians, pleasingly entertaine time with one they mortally hate, till oportunity [sic] usher revenge, which they can act with as much hostility, as if that very moment were the Actor of their injury.

Women and dangerous politicians alike, Brathwait states, are able to contain their passion, to bite their lip and secretly plot their revenges. Then, when the right moment presents itself, they can strike in their “bloody unnatural revenges” with as much anger as if they had just been dealt the injury. Here, I would argue, is the missing link between women’s revenges and the gunpowder plot: it lies in women’s alleged capability to brood on their revenge secretly and privately, without giving their husbands or other men any indication of their anger, and then to execute a bloody revenge when the time is ripe. Like the terrorists of 9-11, women are here represented as capable of conforming to the ruling order (wearing Western clothes, pursuing a study at University) – while secretly harbouring plots for revenge. Also with respect to their revenges then, women were considered in early modern culture as both intimate and unknowable: as dangerous familiars.