Good morning, scholars -- We're back again, bright and early, for Session 2 of the MLitt/MFA Thesis Festival. This session runs from 9:30am to 12:00pm.
Clara Giebel: "Playing Paper"
Giebel's presentation begins with an interesting tableau: Katy Mulvaney, Linden Kueck, and Amanda Noel Allen on-stage, crafting -- rather than, as we might expect, sitting on the gallant stools holding scripts. Giebel explains that sometimes a tradition should be broken "just because there's something we'd rather do," and that she hopes their presence will provide a meaningful counterpoint to her ideas.
She moves into discussing the typical structure and tropes of fairy tales, and she shares illustrations from some classic fairy tales via a Powerpoint presentation. She explains that these images are not only beautiful but "look right to our eyes", with conventional tropes reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. She expands the idea further, referring to how Disney's fairy tale movies often open with the frame narrative of books, giving images of pages turning before the animation begins. Giebel explains these frame devices as important because of the "time of textual transmission" we currently exist in. The movement of page to screen, first scene from books to movies, is now prominent in the idea of moving from books to e-readers. She demonstrates various "skins" and covers for e-readers which attempt to recover the tangible and visual elements that are lost in the transmission to digital text. She posits that the two most important elements lost are the paper itself and the "codex", or non-textual visual information, which she demonstrates through a reading of "The Monster at the End of This Book" and through a consideration of pop-up books, which "glory in the paper-ness of paper". Giebel talks about the importance of sound, smell, and texture to the experience of reading, and relates those concepts to ideas of crafting.
Giebel then brings her ideas around to the early modern period, looking at the history of textile handwork, particularly with regards to gender assignations of various tasks such as embroidery and knitting, seen as female tasks both in the early modern period and in the 21st century. She notes, however, that these tasks no longer have the same cultural significance, thanks to mass marketing -- similar to the fading essentialism of paper in books.
Teachers, parents, and the media, as Giebel points out, teach fairy tales to children, but particularly to girls, emphasizing the female character "as the object of other characters' acts and desires", not as the agent. She notes that Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well both draws on and inverts these fairy tale tropes, featuring not just one, but several active women. Helena has to mangle her own sentences to try and fit herself into the expected passive role. All's Well is "a fairy tale, but a problematic one... a deliciously messy one" in contrast to the neat, happy endings of Disney's fairy tales. Giebel has worked with Linden Kueck to design a paper-based set for All's Well That Ends Well based on these concepts, particularly as an exploration of the gender issues at play. She ends by foregrounding the need to examine, in this concept of textual transmission and shifting gender roles, what we want to keep from the past and what we want to move on to -- a world where we can both read blogs on our cellphones, but also enjoy the texture and physical reality of paper, "where boys can learn embroidery and girls can be the king".
Brian Maxwell: "The First Generation: The Dawn of American Shakespeare"
Maxwell's presentation begins by interrogating our awareness, in the American Shakespeare Center, of the history of Shakespeare in America. Actors Jarom Brown, Brian Falbo, Rebecca Hodder, and Zach Brown assist by taking on the personas of various 19th-century American Shakespearean actors. Maxwell contrasts the various acting styles of these historical actors: Forrest, Cushman, Booth (Edwin, not his infamous brother), and Jefferson. Forrest represents the emotional style, requiring the actor to give himself over entirely to the affect of the character. Maxwell notes that this style was incredibly popular in the first half of the nineteenth century in America and drew in the working-classes to the theatre. By contrast, Booth and Jefferson display the style which became popular in the second half of the century. This style was a "launching point for Stanislavski's method", praised for its naturalism, but less popular with those of the working classes seated in the galleries and a bit too far from the gaslit stage to appreciate the nuances.
Maxwell then encourages Forrest and Booth to dueling monologues. The contrast, with Forrest's bombastic style and Booth's understated delivery, makes plain the differences between the early and late methods. Maxwell credits both styles as important to American theatrical heritage. He also posits that these actors, others like them, and their companies gave America cultural credit on the world stage. He shares a 1902 video of Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle and an 1890 wax cylinder audio recording by Edwin Booth.
Daniel Kennedy: "From Place to Space: The Abstraction and Diminution of Hell on the Renaissance Stage"
Kennedy begins by coaxing us all into singing "Happy Birthday" to Christopher Marlowe. He then discusses the ASC Actors' Renaissance Season production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and the dismay of the actors when, each time they revealed the painted-plywood hellmouth, the audience chuckled. Kennedy sketches out the history of the hellmouth, with its roots in medieval representations of Biblical stories. Early illustrations envisioned "an open pit" to invoke Hell; later a volcano, initially considered appropriate for its fiery and sulpherous nature, but later rejected as too passive; later the heads of beasts, particularly dragons. He positions the evolution in relation to attempts to convert the Danish pagans of north England: "Now, if I know Vikings, at least one of those bad motherf*ckers has walked out of a volcano. I don't think any have walked out of a dragon's mouth." Clearly, this imagery would have had a resonance for the England-occupying Danes.
The hellmouth became a convention of the morality plays, an intricate construction, but one which, Kennedy notes with some dejection, audiences found "amusingly wonderful" rather than terrifying or awe-inspiring. He shows an illustration of the stage mansions of Valenciennes, the elaborate decorated carts used for these plays. He notes that, while the hellmouth itself disappeared, the opposition of Heaven and Hell remained prominent. While the structure of the medieval stage mansions positioned Heaven and Hell in horizontal opposition, the early modern audience was conditioned to think of up, the balcony or "heavens", as good and down, through the trap, as bad. The stage pictures became less religious spectacle, less a stylistic presentation, and more an interpretation of inner struggle.
Kennedy moves on to a discussion of the various texts of Doctor Faustus, noting that the A text, earlier published, lacks elements present in the later B text, considered the version closer to Marlowe's intended play. The stage direction "Hell is discovered" indicates that, reminiscent of the medieval morality plays, Hell must be visibly represented on the stage. Where, however, remains ambiguous. Kennedy presents it first as revealed in the discovery space, drawing on the image of a dragon's head gaping open to consume Faustus; then a second time, using the trap. In the second version, the Bad Angel's description becomes more critical to feeding the audience's imagination as the means for invoking Hell, rather than an actual stage depiction. Kennedy notes that while Shakespeare never directly calls for a hellmouth as Marlowe does, he still visually invokes the concepts of Hell, demons, and the afterlife in several plays (Hamlet, Macbeth, 1 and 2 Henry VI). He suggests that the accepted convention of the trap as Hell can inform the interpretation of the ghost of Hamlet's father; if he enters from the trap, the audience may assume him as a demonic figure. He also relates the concept to certain resonances in Macbeth to the idea of the Harrowing of Hell, particularly as relevant in the Porter scene.
Elizabeth Rentfro: "For I Am She: The Development of Margaret of Anjou in Performance"
Rentfro's presentation opens with a presentation from Richard III, with most of the cast (Liz Lodato, Brian Falbo, Mel Johnson, Dane Leasure, Deb Streusand, Jessica Schiermeister, Stephanie Tschetter, Kelly Elliot, and Rachel Ratkowski) on-stage, and Rentfro, as Margaret, moving in from the audience. Following Margaret's intrusion into the body of the scene, Rentfro details her experience having played Margaret in both full productions and staged readings across the "Margaret canon" of Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and Richard III. She prefaces that the presentation will work through the scene with a few breaks for her to explain her exploration as a self-evaluating performance study.
As they progress through the scene, Rentfro notes that while Margaret harbors special hate for Richard III and is the first person to see him for what he is, she also feels a kinship with him due to some of their inherent similarities. Likewise, she sees a reflection of herself in Elizabeth, the "poor painted queen" she mocks. Rentfro moves on through Margaret's exit, leaving the Yorkists behind to "muse why she's at liberty". She then relates her experience to that of Sarah Fallon, someone else who has seen Margaret all the way through her arc. She notes the experience as fairly rare, since so few companies perform the full tetralogy.
Jared Fair: "The Grieving Parent in Shakespeare and the Early Modern English Children's Epitaph"
Fair begins by positing the opinions of Laurence Stone as to the emotional distance between parents and children in the early modern period, which he views as necessary due to the high child mortality, depicting these parents as detached and unemotional even upon the death of a child. Fair juxtaposes this with the ideas of David Cressy, who claims that early modern people were deeply emotional and loving, with a great capacity for tenderness both in their families and their communities. Cressy uses diaries and letters as examples that early modern people experienced intense emotions upon the death of a loved one.
Fair presents (through actors Jarom Brown and Dr. Julie Fox) epitaphs from the early modern period, which demonstrate the emotions felt by parents upon the death of a child. These epitaphs imagine sleep as a death, which Fair suggests as a coping mechanism to soften the blow. They also suggest that "death is not the end, that life continues for the child." He presents an epitaph written by Ben Jonson on the death of a child actor, the first epitaph to so commemorate an actor. Jonson also wrote an epitaph when his own daughter died at 6 months and when his son died in the plague of 1603. Fair points out that Jonson describes himself as possessed by his own emotions; the epitaph serves as method to "loose" the bonds that hold him in thrall to grief. Fair then moves to considering Shakespeare's experience with a child's death, particularly in the proximity of the composition of King John to the death of his son Hamnet. Constance's grief "is anticipatory", upon Arthur's disappearance. Fair argues that if Hamnet suffered an illness rather than a sudden death, Shakespeare's own emotions may have informed this sense of anticipatory dread. He notes that Constance sinks into a suicidal depression, haunted by her son's image, reminded of him everywhere. She later dies "in a frenzy", inconsolable. Fair links this depiction of dramatic pain to Shakespeare's personal experience as a parent.
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For the rest of the Festival, see these posts:
Session 1
Session 3
Session 4
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