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OVERVIEW
The major field in my orals
lists is organized under the title of "Markets,
Theatres, Cultures." It comprises an inquiry
into the institutional and representational changes
in English theatre between 1350 and 1650. More generally,
this major field is an opportunity to examine how
English drama shifted from productions discretely
located in urbanized towns—especially in the
case of cycle drama—to the culturally dominant
theatrical institution of the London stages. My
first minor list for the orals exam is "Richardian
Literature and its Afterlives." Examining selected
poetry and prose from the late fourteenth century
and the fifteenth century will enable an analysis
of the representations of poverty and the poor,
governance and government, religious orthodoxy and
dissent, as well as gender and sexuality in context.
Specifically, I want to learn how narratives from
the late Middle Ages serve as the premises and precursors
of late Medieval and Early Modern drama. My second
minor list is entitled "Romance and the Questions
of Gender and 'Race'." The readings for this
list focus on the formation of individual subjectivity
within a single genre over the course of the twelfth
to fifteenth centuries. By investigating the ways
in which various romances are told and re-told,
I hope to excavate the socio-cultural nuances of
gender, sexuality, and rank in a genre in which
categories of identity are often thrown into question.
Within this investigation, I will explore the problems
and possibilities of the recent critical turn to
modern conceptions of race to understand the significance
of color in the representation of characters from
a different rank, religion, or geographical location
than that of the central character(s). As well,
I want to consider how the conventions of the genre
of romance structure the poetry and drama of the
Middle Ages. From the vantage point of a historicist
and materialist feminist approach, I expect my reading
for my orals exam to create the foundation for a
dissertation project that interrogates English theatre
as a literary-social institution in which the values
of the market are enacted and subjectivities are
re-negotiated; the theatre, I argue, performs the
cultural work of forming subjects who accommodate
and contest the marketplace in an increasingly commercial
public sphere.
Historians and literary critics conceptualize the
socio-economic relationship between late Medieval
and Early Modern England as transitional. Alan Hunt,
for instance, considers the case of sumptuary laws
and their reiteration between the fourteenth and
the eighteenth centuries with a special emphasis
on their re-imposition in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. He initially posits that sumptuary law
is one of the primary "tactics of governance"
on the part of the state, because this law's effectiveness
depends upon its diffusion through social institutions,
professional organizations, and other "social
entities" that are not necessarily directly
established by the state (424 and 411). Once these
legalized dress codes are diffused through social
institutions and are reiterated over time, they
take hold of their subjects, producing and enforcing
clear lines between rank and gender identities.
While Hunt explicitly states that the social norms
that circulate through the institutional framework
of social life are neither "coherent"
nor "teleological," he does asset that
tracing the socio-cultural effects of sumptuary
law can uncover how "emergent strands of modernity",
including 'modern' notions of subjectivity, appear
in late Medieval and Early Modern culture (424).
Hunt, therefore, emphasizes the 'Modern' in late
Medieval and Early Modern worlds; these tactics
of governance bequeath a heritage of subjection
that is in the process of articulation in the transition
from the Medieval to the Early Modern.
In comparison, Margreta de Grazia challenges the
argumentative move that frames the difference between
the late Medieval and Early Modern eras as one between
"feudal collectivity" and "bourgeois
individuality" (258). In a re-reading of Shakespeare's
"King Lear," de Grazia troubles this "historical
continuum" by focusing on Lear's loss of identity
marked by the loss of his retainers and his attendant
descent into madness (263). Without his retainers
and his other 'objects', especially his clothes,
Lear's ostracism and madness function as an example
of what can happen to someone without a stable set
of possessions in a context of socio-political upheaval.
Shakespeare, via Lear, critiques this fluidity,
which de Grazia associates with the "Modern"
market in goods and services in which objects and
values are increasingly fungible, by staging and
reiterating a direct link between property and personhood
(259-60). For de Grazia, "King Lear" becomes
an "anti-Early Modern" play and
registers a harkening back to increasingly antiquated
modes of subjectivity even in the face of the tremendous
socio-economic changes in the market and the growth
of a consuming society (259). Here, the Early Modern
is not nearly so 'Modern' as it is in Hunt's argument.
Rather, the Early Modern era seems to be adhering
to modes of subjectivity that are more amenable
to the socio-cultural context of the Middle Ages.
The examples from Hunt and de Grazia are indicative
of how the socio-cultural context of transition
in England from the late Medieval to the Early Modern
operates as a site of contest over different modes
of the market, subjection, and values. The theatre,
I contend, is a specific social institution in which
this contesting markedly occurs.
Works Cited
de Grazia, Margreta. "The Ideology of Superfluous
Things: King Lear as Period Piece." In Subject
and Object in Renaissance Culture. Margreta
de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass,
eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996:
255-84.
Hunt, Alan. "Consumption: Sumptuary Laws and
Shifting Forms of Regulation." Economy and
Society. 25.3 (August 1996): 410-27.
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