Relatori: abstract e biografie

Genealogies have been termed ‘maps of time’ by Eviatar Zerubavel, who has usefully synthesized recent sociological and anthropological work that describes genealogy as, among other things, a structure of thought, a form of historical imagining, and a visualization of time and kinship. Perhaps the most compelling of human sensations and experiences, time is experienced primarily as it passes, which raises the question: How can time be represented? Many ways have been invented by which time is measured – hourglass, mechanical clock, sundial, water clock, lunar cycles, astronomical clock, digital watch, zodiac, atomic clock, calendars of all types, and so on – but that is a different question. Modern scholarship on early modern theories of time, and applications to Shakespeare’s plays and other literary works, have articulated much of the period’s rich discourse on the subject, and philosophical writers from Aristotle and Agamben to Serres and Latour have worried the subject. In this paper I will explore briefly how late medieval and early modern culture visually represented Time, rather than simply measured it, through modes such as allegory, emblems, and especially the genre of genealogical charts. My analysis will consider images such as Petrarch’s The Triumph of Time and other works influenced by it, and allegorical personifications such as those found in Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems, but the main focus will be on genealogical images. Some genealogical images represent the flow of time as descent: ‘lineage’ is, as the OED has it, ‘Lineal descent from an ancestor; ancestry, pedigree’ (n.1a). One problem with the concept of descent is that it also implies decline, as the originary blood of the founder of a family or nation is diluted generation by generation, so that by the 8th or 10th succeeding generation, there was scarcely any of the founder’s blood still flowing. In other charts, time flows upward from a founding ancestor – probably in imitation of the tradition of the Tree of Jesse, which originates in Jesse’s side as he sleeps, rising up to Jesus. I will offer a close reading of several of these genealogies in terms of their use of recurring tropes to indicate true and false children, the frequent erasure of undesirable kin, the multiple visual forms that come to represent lineage, and especially, the exclusion of women from visualizations of descent. Genealogy is primarily masculine discourse, and genealogical trees, as Mary Bouquet has observed, often “reflect a (patriarchal) vision of the present projected onto (and struggling with the vestiges of) a (matriarchal) past.” The paper will conclude with an examination of these issues as embodied in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, from the prophecies to the Show of Kings, with lineage – the line that stretches out to the crack of doom – as a central concern of the play.

Given their intrinsic multisemiotic nature, dance manuals can be considered multimodal, instructional texts characterised by the combination of graphemes, i.e., letters (either used to create acronyms, abbreviations, or lexical items), symbols indicating steps, choreographies, or representing dancers, and sometimes graphic elements and pictures. The pedagogical aim behind these complex plurisemiotic systems is that of teaching dances at a distance, in case it is not possible either to afford face-to-face dance lessons or have more realistic pictures reproducing dancing couples and/or groups of performers in books. The first edition of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, the earliest dancing manual ever written in English, is the case study for this paper. It is a collection of 105 English Country Dances collected from miscellaneous sources and oral traditions, published in 1651 during the Interregnum, printed by Thomas Harper, and sold by John Playford himself (thus it shapes up to be a self-promotional volume) at his bookshop near Temple Church, London. Playford’s intent is overtly pedagogical since the very beginning of The English Dancing Master. In his dedicatory letter “To the ingenious reader”, the author uses the artifice of the ‘discovered manuscript’ to justify the publication of a volume whose nature does not “agree [with] these times” of political turmoil. Yet, the discovered manuscript does not provide any valuable content per se, unlike, say, in the case of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. On the contrary, Playford states he found a “false and surreptitious copy” of his manuscript “at the printing press” that he prevented from being printed, otherwise it “would have been a disparagement of to the quality of the professors thereof, and a hinderance to the learner”. Therefore, to guarantee a better educational standard, Playford printed his book before the ‘bad copy’ was published. Reading through the book, one may observe that the dances mentioned by Playford are visualised thanks to a detailed multisemiotic description which takes into account sheet music in one-staff format (bass staff or treble staff), symbols representing male and female dancers and their spatial disposition at the beginning of each choreography (a sort of forerunner of such dance notations as Labanotation), graphemes reproducing both entire lexical items and abbreviated forms, and conventional, arbitrary symbols indicating “a strain played” once, twice, three times, etc. Thus, the pages of The English Dancing Master become speaking pictures aimed to teach Country Dances through an interwoven system of conventional signs suited to instruct “young gentlemen”, as Playford declares in his dedicatory epistle.

In comparison to the technical sophistication of European woodblock printing, the pictorial culture of early modern England was undeveloped. This is particularly notable in the publications of cosmography, that is of works that variously attempted to explain the relationship between the earth and the heavens or to illustrate the strangeness and the variety of the expanding world. While there is a paucity of printed cosmographical images in England, occasionally it is possible to recognize analogies and transferences in verbal and stage imagery. The epistemological anxieties of cosmography – who or what to belief in the face of old and new knowledge – are reflected on the stage. In this paper, I will explore the correspondence of visual and verbal images in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographicus Universalis and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. After the Bible Münster’s cosmography was one of the most widely circulated texts in sixteenth century Europe. This compendium of knowledge about the world – what Bodin described as geohistory – taught early modern readers virtually all that they needed to know about the world. The text is lavishly illustrated with maps, world, regional and urban, and images of work, leisure, historic and mythological personages, peoples of recently discovered places as well as strange fauna. Shakespeare’s play introduces us to a world of celestial, mythological and ethnographic images (spirits, monsters, unicorns). Characters hover between belief and unbelief, questioning – like Munster at certain moments – the reliability of the available evidence. At a time when it was beyond the means of all but a few to verify reports on the newly discovered lands, for most the boundary between the credible and the incredible was difficult to discern.

Archaeologically underwritten by the imagery of the burning Troy, the semantics of ruins defines all tropes of invasion, destruction, and appropriation, in Shakespeare’s Roman canon. In The Rape of Lucrece ruins are discovered as a heuristic tool, an instrument of self-anatomizing knowledge for Shakespeare’s two protagonists, Lucrece and Tarquin, but most radically by Lucrece. In my talk I concentrate on Lucrece’s long drawn ekphrasis of the Troy piece – a “piece of skilful painting” (vv. 1366-67) – which takes place after her rape, and the way it serves a transaction between painting and body, Hecuba’s image and Lucrece’s trauma: a pictorial exploration of the self, I argue, through which, before putting an end to her life, Lucrece transforms her own face into a disquieting and speaking ‘anatomy of ruin’. Interacting with the vocabulary of the visual arts −and the heuristic intrinsic nature of the Renaissance art of design (see Vasari’s conceptualization of design as the ‘father of all arts’) − the paper brings to the fore the intersemiotic aspect of Lucrece’s performance of her mourning and the way it grows into a modern and challenging experiment in self-representation.

The early modern dumb show was considered a mode of ‘portraiture’, i.e. a mixed-media event in which the iconographic dimension prevailed. It constituted a performative mode quite distinct from the ‘main’ play, being based on the language of gesture, posture and movement, and often including elaborate stage properties, usually symbolic but sometimes realistic. It called on special actorial skills, although we know little about the actual performance of the pantomime. Perhaps for this reason, the dumb show has received relatively little critical attention. Among the issues largely ignored in the critical literature is the question of women’s agency in the pantomime, despite the fact that female roles are often central in the genre. Dumb shows present opposing figurations of womanhood: on the one hand, a transgressive and often violent mode of agency, and on the other a more passive form of subordination, often involving inner suffering. Transgressive agency is associated with adultery, incest and above all murder, especially in the classical tragedies performed in private theatres — often before the Queen — such as Gorboduc (1561) and Jocasta (1565). A later play performed for Elizabeth, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), centred on adultery and familial warfare, includes a pantomime showing affective inwardness, where the suffering of women is expressed through the gesture of wringing hands.

Emblems are, in essence, images that speak. As Dame Frances Amelia Yates noted in her studies, the type of emblems in use during the Renaissance seem to have originated from the in-depth study of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were believed to be images containing a divine meaning: they represented the fundamental key to understanding the secrets of nature and the universe. This contribution will focus on the fortune of emblematic literature in Renaissance England, with particular attention paid to the interpretations of Giordano Bruno and Sir Francis Bacon. Bruno was in England from April 1583 until the end of 1585. In this period he published many of his most significant works, also regarding the relationship between images, knowledge and the art of memory. In particular, it is taken into consideration De gli eroici furori, published in London in 1585 and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It is a non-illustrated book of emblems in which the author, through his explanation of images, and “making them speak” as it were, shows how they offer the only means via which to access an otherwise unattainable knowledge. Three other works on the art of memory, published in London in 1583 in a single volume, are also considered: the Sigillus sigillorum, the Ars reminescendi and the Triginta sigillorum explicatio. In the latter, Bruno himself states that "philosophers are in some way painters and poets, poets are painters and philosophers; painters are philosophers and poets". The second part of the contribution is focused on the role of emblematic literature in the works Sir Francis Bacon. If in the Advancement of learning (1605) he states that “emblem reduceth conceits intellectual to images sensible, which strike the memory more”, it is in De sapientia veterum (1609) that the use of images, figurative and emblematic language, reaches its highest expression. Bacon uses images whenever he needs to address concepts that would otherwise be too abstract and difficult to understand. Although there is no evidence that Bruno and Bacon knew each other personally, it is known that in the same years they both attended the same circles in London, first and foremost the court of Queen Elizabeth and the circle of Sir Philip Sidney. Therefore, both can certainly be considered relevant examples of the fortune of emblematic literature and the prominent role of images in the culture of Renaissance England. The discussion of the chosen passages is accompanied by images and emblems taken from the most popular emblem books in circulation at the time (e. g. Alciati’s Emblematum liber), as well as – where present – by the images contained in the works of the two authors.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word “hallucinate” entered the language in 1604, between Hamlet and Macbeth, and in the same year as Othello. This conjunction of dates could have been predicted. Shakespeare’s three plays, which mark the peak of his interest in the subjective nature of vision, the mind’s capacity to take control of what the eye sees, were staged just when theorists of perception were addressing the same question in study after study. Du Laurens’ A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight appeared in 1599, Wright’s The Passions of the Mind in 1601 (enlarged in 1604), Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures in 1603 (used by Shakespeare in King Lear), and De Loyer’s A Treatise of Spectres, or Strange Sights, Visions, and Apparitions Appearing Sensibly unto Men in 1605. In that last year, in The Advancement of Learning, Bacon described a human tendency “to submit the shows of things to the desires of the mind”. This paper discusses the growing complexity of cases of prejudiced, ambiguous, or self-generated vision in Shakespeare’s plays. Initially the problems are merely ones of misinterpretation, and the result of accident or trickery. In The Comedy of Errors the twins “wander in illusions”, but they find that true seeing is easily restored, however much bias or credulity have played a part in the mistakes. In the late 1590s, however, as Shakespeare moves from the drama of action to the drama of character, he starts to explore states of obsessive, guilt-ridden, or otherwise afflicted consciousness, and to seek the means by which such internal trauma might be dramatised. Hallucinations, sometimes made visible to the audience, sometimes not, are his main method.

In this paper, I reflect on the bibliographical use of “ghost images” in my recent study of the Pavier Quartos. These images—faint impressions of the oil in the ink on one page transferred onto an adjacent page—offer new insights into the Shakespearean canon as developed by the publishers of the first attempt to collect his plays into a single volume. While these are not “images" in the usual sense that this conference imagines—paintings, sculptures, emblems, and other kinds of visual culture in early modern England, they provide a new perspective on Shakespeare’s work. Based on this work, which derives from my book Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes, I will then move on to something I was not able to do in the book, a discussion of what these ghost images can tell us about the nature of Shakespearean tragedy, with a particular emphasis on King Lear.

Despite the stage popularity of the plays of John Fletcher during the seventeenth century, no information concerning early performances of Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One (1620) survives, aside from its mention in a 1669 document enumerating a series of plays known to have been acted at the Blackfriars by the King’s Men. This piece of information on its own, however, cannot qualify as cogent evidence that The False One was first staged as the Blackfriars: between 1608 and 1642, the King’s Men were as likely to stage plays at the Globe as at the Blackfriars, a performance duality testified by the versatile nature of the plays in their repertory, which had to be liable to be staged both outdoors and indoors. Yet, despite the lack of unambiguous evidence pointing towards one hypothesis or the other, this paper presents sufficient clues, both internal and external to the play, to argue confidently that Fletcher and Massinger probably envisioned the Blackfriars as the venue for the first performance of The False One. This might seem counter-intuitive against a stereotyped notion of early modern Roman plays as specimens of theatrical entertainment seeking to offer playgoers spectacle on a grand scale, with a full apparatus of large armies, noisy onstage fights, long trains of people following the main characters, and loud sound effects. Yet The False One features little of all that: the scope of the play is narrow, as the scene remains in Alexandria throughout, mostly inside the royal palace; the final battle is announced and described but has little bearing upon stage business, and there is no resort to loud sounds. Fletcher and Massinger seem to have emphasized elements of performance that can be more readily connected with the Blackfriars, the most important one being the masque of Nile, which would have leveraged the specific power of the Blackfriars more effectively than that of the Globe by virtue of the possibility to use props and lighting in more flexible and creative ways. In particular, the light of candles might have rendered the display of gold and glistening wealth in the masque all the more dazzling for both Caesar and the audience, thereby enhancing the effect of the scene and making wealth appear as a much more credible distraction from Cleopatra’s beauty for him. In addition, the decision to have a white Cleopatra may be explained partly on the grounds that the light of candles in an indoor playhouse would have had an unsatisfactory effect on artificially blackened skin: Cleopatra’s facial expressions would have been less easily intelligible, thus compromising her connection with playgoers. Although it is impossible, in the absence of direct evidence, to establish with certainty where the play was first performed, this paper persuasively argues that Fletcher and Massinger probably penned The False One with the Blackfriars primarily in mind. By doing so, the paper provides an effective example of how the interplay between text and image and the dramatic uses of the visual and of props can be fruitfully explored to retrieve crucial information about the history of English drama.

Iconoclasm – the destruction and defacement of stained-glass windows, statues, church paintings and ornaments – has been widely acknowledged to play a central part in the Reformation. Iconoclastic acts intensified under Charles I in opposition to the religious policy of Archbishop Laud. Moreover, the resurgence of an iconoclastic zeal in the midseventeenth century invested not only the idolatry of religious images but also the divinely appointed monarch. Milton’s iconoclastic impulses are distinctively displayed in his Eikonoklastes as a response to Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, a book of royalist propaganda. In his rebuttal, Milton performs iconoclasm by shattering the image of the king as the greatest martyr of his age. The questioning upon the defacement of signs and idols of superstition continued till the very end of the poet’s career with Samson Agonistes, whose protagonist pulls down the temple and theatre of Dagon. Whilst there is ample evidence of his engagement with iconoclasm in his prose and poetry, the English author did not smash paintings and images under a hammer or a crowbar. Furthermore, elsewhere in his writing, Milton resorted to iconicity as a vehicle to represent his poetry. He famously pervaded his poetry with visual representations of monuments and, what is even more interesting, he aimed to write poetry that would serve as his lasting monument. How should we then interpret his fascination with funeral monuments, which were often the object of Puritan iconoclasm? What kind of iconoclast was Milton? Is it possible to reconcile his iconoclastic and iconic impulses? The paper will attempt to answer these questions by focusing on Milton’s conception of printed books as embodied vessels that preserve and convey the quintessence of the author’s soul. Seen in this light, Milton’s destruction of Eikon Basilike is a direct attack on the king’s textual agency, rather than on his idol. By reading Milton’s representations of poetry as a funeral monument, I hope to move beyond the idea of Milton as iconoclast and to draw attention to the permanence of the printed memorial as a vehicle for the author’s immortality.

Shakespeare’s picture in Hamlet of Pyrrhus with his ‘bleeding sword’ suspended above the head of Priam, as motionless ‘as a painted tyrant’, evokes the countless representations of Damoclean swords or hesitating warriors in actual paintings of the period, such as Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. There, the artist ‘associates this kind of frozen witnessing with the aesthetic’, and the mimetic fascination with violence is momentarily defeated, as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit observe. Shakespeare’s eroticised figure of Pyrrhus likewise seems to represent the eternal stasis of a picture as an ethical turn away from sacrifice, an ‘interim’ of neutralisation which the author witnesses, like Caravaggio, by inserting himself into the background, with his signature image of the ‘speechless’ actor petrified before a Globe ‘as hush as death’.