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"Daniel Derrin"
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Shakespeare and the soliloquy in early modern English drama
\"Encompassing nearly a century of drama, this is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy. Considering the antecedents of the form in Roman, late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century drama, it analyses its diversity, its theatrical functions and its socio-political significances. Containing detailed case-studies of the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Middleton and Davenant, this collection will equip students in their own close-readings of texts, providing them with an indepth knowledge of the verbal and dramaturgical aspects of the form. Informed by rich theatrical and historical understanding, the essays reveal the larger connections between Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy and its deployment by his fellow dramatists\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Rhetoric and the familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne
Rhetoric and the Familiar examines the writing and oratory of Francis Bacon and John Donne from the perspective of the faculty psychology they both inherited. Both writers inherited the resources of the classical rhetorical tradition through their university education. The book traces, from within that tradition, the sources of Bacon and Donne’s ideas about the processes of mental image making, reasoning, and passionate feeling. It analyzes how knowledge about those mental processes underlies the rhetorical planning of texts by Bacon, such as New Atlantis, Essayes or Counsels, Novum Organum, and the parliamentary speeches, and of texts by Donne such as the Verse Letters, Essayes in Divinity, Holy Sonnets, and the sermons. The book argues that their rhetorical practices reflect a common appropriation of ideas about mental process from faculty psychology, and that they deploy it in divergent ways depending on their rhetorical contexts. It demonstrates the vital importance, in early modern thinking about rhetoric, of considering what familiar remembered material will occur to a given audience, how that differs according to context, and the problems the familiar entails.
eBook
Humour and the unacceptable in Neil Hamburger's routine
The 'sick' humour of Australian born US comedian Gregg Turkington's alter-ego, 'Neil Hamburger,' invites us to ask questions about the meaning of offensive humour as an instance of the unacceptable. Hamburger invites us to 'stop and think,' in Lockyer and Pickering's phrase (2011: 12), about why we are unable to laugh at some things and about whether we ought to or not. How and when humour becomes offensive has become an important topic in contemporary humour studies. Neil Hamburger's standup routine is an interesting instance of humour that borders on offence not just because of the 'sick' elements in his jokes but also because of his parody of standup comedy itself. It is purposeful but risks the possibility of not being funny. Notwithstanding the context of the comedy club - where jokes that push the limit are expected - anyone who gets up on an American stage to joke about God not being able to create tits because he is gay is likely to risk offence, and of course, the 'joke' not being experienced as funny. The unseemliness of Hamburger's stage persona helps him get away with it but Hamburger does provoke wildly divergent reactions, from gleeful approval to moral outrage and (or) boredom. One reviewer from the Guardian, Brian Logan, described him as a 'sobad- he's-still-bad anti-comedian' and stated of a particular performance in Edinburgh that 'if we laugh - and I did - we're doing so at the intemperance of his hatred, and at his assumption that we'll share it'. Why does Neil Hamburger tell the kind of jokes that genuinely risk not being funny? What is his purpose in deliberately going so close to many bones? In short, how does offence play into his politics?
Journal Article
Alexander Pope in the Reign of Queen Anne
This is the first collection of essays since George Sherburn’s landmark monograph The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) to reconsider how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain fashioned his early career. The volume covers Pope’s writings from across the reign of Queen Anne and just beyond. It focuses, in particular, on his interaction with the courtly culture constellated round the Queen. It examines, for instance, his representations of Queen Anne herself, his portrayals of politics and patronage under her reign, his negotiations with current literary theory, with the classical tradition, with chronologically distant yet also contemporaneous English poets, with current thought on the passions and with membership of a religious minority. In doing so, it comprehensively reconsiders anew the ways in which Pope, increasingly supportive of Anne’s rule and mindful of the Virgilian rota, sought at first to realise his authorial aspirations.
eBook
SELF-REFERRING DEFORMITIES
Few studies have addressed comprehensively the place of jesting in early modern pulpit rhetoric. This article documents some of the humour—jests and witty speech—in the period’s extant sermon literature. Specifically it identifies the analytical potential of revisiting an ancient, and early modern, idea: that the laughable is a kind of deformitas (deformity). A standard approach in studies of humour from the early modern period has been to identify ‘scorn’ as its centraI emotional category. However, with reference especially to the sermons of Hugh Latimer in the 1540s and Thomas Adams in the first decades of the seventeenth century, I shall argue that scorn for what is deemed ‘other’, and therefore ‘low’, does not exhaust the range of affective rhetoric achieved by jests against ‘deformities’ in sermons. Pulpit jesting also generates what are called here ‘self-referring’ laughable deformities, with much more complex affective purposes.
Journal Article
Rethinking Iago’s jests in Othello II.i
An early scene in Act Two of Shakespeare's Othello is often cut or shortened. It is the one in which Iago jests with Desdemona while she waits and hopes for Othello to arrive safely in Cyprus (II.i.100–66). Critics and directors have found the scene jarring. Sir Lawrence Olivier's production, staged in 1963 and filmed in 1965, cut almost all of the jests, fifty lines from 116–61, while Jonathan Miller's production for the BBC Shakespeare series (1981), cut scarcely less from 139–61. Though Miller's production preserves a little of the scene's comic flavour it makes those which remain of Iago's jests simply a sort of filler provided for an anxious Desdemona, eager to ‘beguile’ the thing she is ‘by seeming otherwise’ (122–3). Dismissals of the scene are also common and commonly quoted by editors, Ridley's for instance: ‘one of the most unsatisfactory passages in Shakespeare’. Such comments are typical of those who see Iago's and Desdemona's exchange literally as farce, that is, as stuffing or filler. However, that perception flattens out what can instead be seen as a complex communal exchange of power and moral ideals and a delicate negotiation of an ethos – honestas – in a public setting, which cannot be reduced merely to an act of power characterized by attack and defence. This article develops a means of exploring more fully the power and ethical significance of the scene by treating it as a serious dramatic exploration of Iago's persuasiveness and Desdemona's cleverness. I shall argue that the scene embodies a more complex exchange of social values than has been acknowledged. In doing so, I suggest that the rhetoric of jesting Shakespeare dramatizes here is a kind of efficacy that works – to the extent that it does – by producing what is better described as a morally meaningful community than as the effects of a reified ‘power structure’, merely facilitating self-interest in moral disguise.
Journal Article
Sine Dolore
How do we understand Shakespeare’s invitation to laugh in the context of war? Previous critical accounts have offered too simple a view: that laughter undercuts military ideals. Instead, this article draws on the Aristotelian description of laughable ‘deformity’ and Plato’s description of laughable ignorance in order to characterize Shakespeare’s laughter in the context of war more carefully as an expression of ‘relative painlessness’. It discusses how the fraught amusement of Coriolanus (Coriolanus), the reciprocality of Falstaff and Hotspur as laughable military failures (1 Henry IV) and the laughter of Bertram at Paroles (All’s Well That Ends Well) each engage with an ancient philosophical conundrum articulated poignantly by St. Augustine: the requirement that a Christian civilization engage in war to defend itself against honour-obsessed aggressors without turning into a like aggressor itself. Shakespeare’s laughter at war enacts the desire for that balance.
Journal Article
