20TH INTERNATIONAL SEDERI CONFERENCE

Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies

University of Valencia
22-24 April 2009

24/3/09 11:38 AM

During the Francoist dictatorship not only were Shakespeare’s plays performed at the Teatro Español, but commercial theatre companies turned to Shakespearean plays to guarantee the feasibility of their performances. They were based on a business model which remained intact throughout the dictatorship and which could not allow their proposals to be rejected by the official censorship. Thus, Pemán’s Hamlet or González Ruiz’s Otelo served to give prestige to the Teatro Español, whereas commercial companies such as Enrique Guitart’s, Enrique Rambal’s or Alejandro Ulloa’s made use of Astrana’s translations because they were a sure bet in terms of state censorship.

The aim of the present paper is two-fold: 1) to show that tolerance towards Shakespeare’s plays was the norm of behaviour among official censors; and 2) to give evidence of how appropriation of previous literary translations was the norm of translation adopted by commercial theatre companies when staging Shakespeare, the highest degree of appropriation being direct plagiarism.

Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s translation of Hamlet in 1798 was a highlight in the history of Shakespeare reception in Spain. It was the first translation ever done from the English original, and it was accompanied by a critical apparatus -Introduction, Prologue and Notes- that became a blueprint for the future Shakespearian translations that appeared in the nineteenth century.

In an age of Neoclassical principles and rules, Moratín’s faithful rendering of Hamlet was a major achievement which, unfortunately, received little critical appraisal. It was not until the twentieth century when a number of Spanish critics recovered Moratín’s translation and analysed it in a series of literary studies (Juliá (1918), Ruppert (1920), Par (1935), Pujals (1975), Regalado (1986), Verdaguer (2004) and Pujante (2007).

The outcome of this modern research was as surprising as it was unexpected, for Moratín’s Hamlet was unanimously judged a Romantic translation which made its otherwise Neoclassical author a visionary playwright with a genuine devotion for Shakespeare.

In this paper, we will seek to unravel the complex circumstances which led Spanish critics to this conclusion, and we will propose an alternative if uncomfortable explanation to the reason behind Moratín’s Hamlet, which in our opinion was conceived as an anti-Shakespearean pamphlet to prevent the Bard’s influence from contaminating the Spanish stage.

It has often been pointed out that George Herbert’s poem “Jordan (II)” (The Temple, 1633) is a sacred parody or contrafactum of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 2. However, not many editors point out that this imitation is actually mediated through Shakespeare’s own disputatio with Sidney’s sonnet in Sonnets 21. Shakespeare’s and Herbert’s sonnets share the same consideration of truth and sincerity in poetry, although each in its own field of secular and religious poetry. Herbert draws from Shakespeare’s sonnet to voice his particular concern over the plainness of both his poetic diction and his expression of truth and true religious feeling. Thus, lines 5 and 6 in “Jordan (II)” (“Curling with metaphors a plain intention, / Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.”) are closely modelled on Shakespeare’s final couplet in sonnet 21 (“Let them say more that like of hearsay well; / I will not praise that purpose not to sell”).

This paper discusses Herbert’s lines 5 and 6 as early modern evidence that validates the alternative reading and interpretation of Shakespeare’s final couplet as a coherent closing to sonnet 21 that we first proposed at the 16th SEDERI conference held in Murcia in 2005. This reading contests and challenges the traditional interpretation, constantly and uncritically repeated by even the latest editors of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, based on the consideration of the traditional proverb: “He praises who wishes to sell” (Tilley 546) and Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.184-87 thus forcing the final couplet to break the cohesion of the sonnet by reading against the conventional regular structure and metaphoric unity of the Renaissance and Shakespearean sonnet.

There has been some discussion as to the authorship of the play The Life of Mother Shipton, ascribed by Francis Kirkman to a Thomas Thompson, whose identity remains a mystery. However, critics like Macmanaway suggested that Richard Head, who wrote The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (1677), a narrative with many similarities with the aforementioned play, was the author behind the play. This argument seems all the more feasible as Thomas Thompson also wrote a play entitled The English Rogue (1668) and coincides, if only in title, with another narrative of the same name by Richard Head.

Therefore this paper will explore not only the stilistic similarities between the two works dealing with Mother Shipton but also also the differences, not only stylistic but also ideological, as a way to elucidate if Richard Head was the author behind the play. This will also serve to to shed some light on the precedence of the narrative over the play, which has been up to this day taken for granted, without any regard to the possibility that the play was acted before Head’s work.

Brabantio’s warning (to the Moor in Othello) on the changing nature of female loyalty cues the present paper. Closely examining daughters caught in the conflict between anxious fathers and husbands-to-be, this paper sets out to explore female deliberate deviancy and its legal and dramatic implications with reference to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice.

I will argue that Lavinia’s, Portia’s, and Jessica’s struggle to evade male subsidiarity results in their conscious positioning on the verge of illegality. Besides occasioning productive exploration of law and justice ‘within the dynamics of human desire and of social institutions’ (Morss 2007:183), I argue that their self-exclusion reconfigures the male domain by affording the inclusion of previous outsiders (Bassianus, Antonio, Bassanio and Shylock) but only to reassert the status quo – one in which women maintain their deviant role.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon offers his own version of an early modern revenge tragedy in The Courier’s Tragedy. This paper comments on the language and plot of Pynchon’s play, identifying possible sources of inspiration and examining the author’s use of this genre’s conventions, delving into Pynchon’s use of allusion and the characteristics of his parody.

Pynchon “quotes” numerous conventions of revenge tragedy, respecting some and subverting others. The consequence of rewriting a specific genre, of putting already-existing materials in a new context, is that they interact in new, unexpected ways. Thus, unrelated as renaissance England and postmodernist America are, Pynchon could not have found a more appropriate genre to reflect on issues that are at stake in both a 1960s pseudo-detective novel and a mock revenge tragedy. The author manages to approximate two genres that seem totally unrelated; proving that it is possible to convey such apparently revolutionary notions as the critique of language, meaning and historiography, the Protean concept of identity or the need to revise the current concept of justice through the parody of such an apparently old-fashioned genre as the revenge tragedy.

The Case for Prophecy: Politics, Gender and Self-representation in 17th-century Prophetic Genres

It has been suggested that women prophets in the culture of seventeenth-century England represent the first significant group of women to establish the political authority of self-conscious female identity, and that as such they represent a foundational moment in the development of modern feminist consciousness.

My paper will argue that the political, religious and social upheavals in the English Revolution witnessed an explosion of prophetic speech among women. As a result, women prophets forged a widely-read literary genre which suited both their private and public concerns; at the same time, this venue allowed them to approach a sense of feminine writing away from the topos found in the Querelles des femmes , thus contributing to the formation of a prehistory of novelistic discourse (understood in Bakhtinean terms).

According to Phyllis Mack, some three hundred women prophesied during the 1640s and 1650s. Not all of these women's visions appeared as published tracts, but documentary evidence indicates that in the years 1641 to 1660, some 50 women prophets produced roughly 156 published treatises. Given that only 39 female-authored first editions of any genre appeared in the first forty years of the seventeenth century, the women prophets' publishing record represents a significant contribution in women's literary history.

In the manner of the Hebrew prophets of old, many female visionaries understood themselves to be called by God to warn political leaders. For women such as these, calls to prophesy and to intervention in the public sphere could take the form of dramatic visions, complex dreams, and audible voices. Likewise, prophetic messages themselves ranged from dramatic pronouncements of doom to carefully plotted exegetical commentary.

My paper will study these issues focusing on three prophetic discourses: Eleanor Davies To the Citie of London (1645); Anna Trapnel The Cry of a Stone (1654); and Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers A Short Relation of their Sufferings (1662).

When James acceded to the English throne he and Anna of Denmark set in motion a process that began in 1603 and concluded only in 1605. This paper explores the narrative of negotiations towards and the formal signings – plural – of the peace between England and Spain as an extended performance. This involved not only one – or two – official, ceremonial acts in London and Valladolid but a sequence of events in both England and then Spain, as first the Spanish and then the English diplomatic missions were entertained by their counterparts.

This cross-cultural narrative included entertainment at James’s court for Villamediana in January 1604, when he attended a masque, and a series of civic entertainments for Nottingham from his landing in Spain to his arrival in Valladolid in 1605, following the signing of the peace at Somerset House in August 1604. These events were official exercises in diplomacy and hospitality, yet they also served a theatrical purpose which the printed narrative accounts underscored. Indeed, the peace thus became a performance transmitted and circulated among a range of audiences. This paper examines the ways in which the performative features of this narrative might be explored for their literary, theatrical, and political significance.

In Puck's epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, he tells us: "I am sent with broom before/ To sweep the dust behind the door." The image of a playmaker with a broom predates Puck significantly, however, cropping up, for example, in John Bale when the Vice enters with a "brom-brom-brom. In a later incarnation, broom and playmaker come together again as Jonson puns on the physical object of the broom and the name of his former-apprentice playwright.

Last year, we explored the magic Vices offer with their surprise legerdemain and creation of mirth, play, and identity. This year, as a part of our ongoing research into the heritage of the Vice as improvising playmaker, we will examine the previous stage of performance: creating of the empty space. Looking at the physical and metaphorical broom of the Vice and his successors, and the manner in which they clear an open and potentially magical space for play, we will ask what exactly these Vices are cleaning; what are they cleaning for?

As we deal everyday with the reality of war, the longing for peace, and History’s insistence in defying the best intentions of the human race, European renaissance literature may offer some clues for a better understanding of some of our contemporary controversies: just war requirements, preemptive wars, preventive wars, treatment of P.O.W.s, and the progress of disillusion about the avoidability of war in and outside anti-war narratives, to name just a few. At the time of the formation of the nation-states of Britain, France and Spain, while Alberico Gentili was lecturing at Oxford University on the ius ad bellum and the ius in bello, Lord Deputy Arthur Grey of Wilton was ordering his troops to execute six hundred Irish, Italian and Spanish soldiers who had just surrendered (the Irish hanged and the rest put to the sword) in the so-called Smerwick massacre

For many, the idea of a better world requires a society without war and violence. The dream of a better world soon became so much an essential condition of the human experience that the term utopia, coined by Thomas More in 1516, immediately turned into a rhetorical paradigm around which all later utopias (and a substantial part of contemporary political literature) have been built. This lecture will attempt a reading of contemporary controversies about war and peace through the exploration of the morality of utopianism as depicted in two early English renaissance utopias: Th. More’s The Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia (1516) and F. Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626).

Nineteenth-century burlesque has traditionally been regarded as a poor quality drama which added little interest to the history of English theatre. Notwithstanding the lack of verbal wit of many of the plays, Victorian burlesque is a valuable source for understanding the politics, culture, humour and the aesthetic taste of the age. The plots of burlesque were recurrent and the parodies ranged from Shakespeare to melodrama, novels, historical figures and classical myths and legends.

Seminal studies by Stanley Wells and Richard W. Schoch demonstrate how all major burlesque authors such as Francis Talfourd, the Brough brothers, Francis C. Burnand, and Henry James Byron succumbed to the temptation of parodying the Bard. Second cousin to Shakespearean burlesque, Classical burlesque often appealed to famous scenes and speeches from Shakespeare’s tragedies to guarantee the favour of the audience. This paper seeks to explore the reception of Shakespearean tragedy within Victorian Classical burlesque as epitome of the syncretism between high-brow and popular stereotypes in the cultural texture of Victorian comic theatre. To this purpose I shall consider Robert Reece’s uses of Hamlet and Macbeth in Agamemnon and Cassandra, or the Prophet and Loss of Troy (1868).

This paper presents an exploration of Shakespeare's phraseological language by using Corpus Stylistic methodology and techniques. As part of a research project on Shakespeare's phraseology*, the paper aims to show through a few practical examples some of the advantages of using electronic tools -for instance, for the automatic identification and retrieval of a large number of phraseological patterns in his plays- and their applicability to different areas of Shakespeare studies, such as authorship attribution, style, or translations. The paper also discusses some of the difficulties that we have encountered in using these tools for exploring certain aspects of Shakespeare's phraseology.

Project title: A Discourse-based approach to the phraseological language of Shakespeare's Plays: with special reference to the modification of phraseological units (HUM 2005/ 01062FIL).

From the early 1580s on, Penelope Rich (née Devereux) was the brightest star at Elizabeth’s court. Daughter and sister to the Earls of Essex, her descent from Mary Boleyn and —almost certainly— Henry VIII, gave her also close kinship to Queen Elizabeth. Her beauty, charm, education and wit earned her the praise of many remarkable men of her time, the most famous tribute being Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella.

Besides providing the inspiration for Stella, Penelope may have been the Diana to whom Constable addressed his sonnet sequence, first published in 1592, and certainly makes an appearance in five sonnets included among his poems addressed to noble personages in the Todd MS (Victoria and Albert Museum, MS Dyce 44) which bear unequivocal references to her name. Of these sonnets, the corpus of my analysis, two engage with conventional love praise following Sidney’s model; two celebrate and bemoan the birth and death of Penelope’s daughter in 1588 while at the same time extolling the mother; and a fifth addresses Nicholas Hilliard, the famous miniature painter whose portrait of Penelope Constable carried to Scotland in 1589 as a present for King James. Sidney’s influence on Constable, the cult of Penelope, and Constable’s status as an insider in the Devereux’s political circle and manoeuvres, converge in these sonnets, providing new clues about this fascinating woman and her admirer. 

The first Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, by the Cuban Matías de Velasco y Rojas (Madrid, 1877), were in prose, but in 1889 Velasco published what may be the first verse rendering in Spanish of a Shakespearean sonnet. Further verse translations followed for over thirty years. However, and unlike their fortunes in Germany — where the whole cycle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was being translated in verse from the first half of the 19th century—, none of the verse translators of the Sonnets into Spanish in these three decades concentrated so exclusively on Shakespeare as to render all the sonnets or even a substantial number of them. Instead, Spanish verse renderings were scattered in various literary reviews and anthologies of English and foreign poetry in Spain and Latin America, which has made it difficult to trace them.

The present paper provides new evidence of 21 early verse translations of the Sonnets into Spanish that have never been listed in the relevant bibliographies, discusses their first publication, the translators, their characteristics and importance, and complements the extant information with some new facts.

Despite the multi, inter- or transdisciplinary trends we have been witnessing for a few decades, there are still areas of research that go along astonishingly apart. Historical English linguistics and the edition of Shakespeare’s texts are a case in point: bearing on his remarkable erudition on both the history of English and Shakespeare’s works, Norman Blake has proven that decisions required in the editing of that canon would certainly benefit from developments in modern and historical linguistics (1997) and claimed that historians of English would profit from a comparative study of the various Renaissance editions of Shakespeare’s texts (1990: 78-79; 1991: 56) .

Recognizing this as a judicious and almost unchallenged piece of criticism as far as research on the Early Modern English language is concerned, especially when variorum editions of the plays have been in print for so long, I will try in this paper to identify variations in Renaissance quarto and folio editions of Richard II (or Troilus and Cressida) that may contribute to the understanding of morpho-syntactic changes taking place in the Early Modern period. This work will be based on the collation of those early versions presented in M. W. Black’s (or H. N. Hillebrand’s) variorum edition of the play.

The performances of Julius Caesar in 2007 by the independent Portuguese theatre company Teatro da Cornucópia won the annual prize of the Portuguese Association of Critics in that year. The Association praised the way in which the performances appropriated the play to stage a public debate about post-revolutionary Portuguese politics and allude to contemporary wars in Iraq. However, university students who accompanied me to see the performance admitted only to a sense of alienation. For them, the performance was long, tedious and often confusing while the parallels with Portugal after the 1974 Revolution simply passed them by. What might explain this generational disjunction in terms of expectations and forms of reading performance?

This paper starts from the perspective of these divergent interpretations of the performances in order to examine the question of representing history for contemporary audiences. It notes the ways in which conventions from mainstream television and cinema frame expectations about historical narratives in the theatre and render invisible more politicised approaches to the staging of history.

For decades, the analysis of regional variation in Early Modern England has been notably overlooked by scholarly tradition. But for a few examples, linguistic research on this intervening stage in the history of English has been largely biased, for attention has been mainly focused on a standard variety, and provincial modes of expression have been unjustly disregarded. Needless to say, what little evidence it has been hitherto assessed has been for the most part extracted from literary artefacts, mainly drama or fiction prose, that very often yield a perceptual and archetypal insight into regional speech at this time. Yet, as it has been well proved by García-Bermejo (1997, 1999, 2008) or Shorrocks (2004), these are useful and real guidances to Early Modern provincial varieties that do actually complete the patchy records of regionalisms in grammars or treatises of orthoepy.

This paper endeavours to widen our understanding of seventeenth-century northern English by means of a selection of popular ballads included in The Salamanca Corpus where regional traits proper to the North are attested. Our aim is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate that this kind of untapped literary documents are fruitful and valuable testimonies to Early Modern English regional variation. Popular literature has not received much attention as a potential source for Early Modern dialect data. To my knowledge, only García-Bermejo (2001) has brought into focus that sixteenth-century jest-books, for example, contain a worthy amount of dialect information. Also, Wales (2004) has convincingly shown that popular songs and ballads yield trustworthy data that can tell us much about the language of the North. Her research is centred on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century specimens, though. Secondly, it is our purpose to analyse unattested features that shed light upon the ascendancy of northern speech in terms of phonology or lexis. In so doing, we hope to make a contribution to Early Modern regional ‘Englishes’ and to northern dialects in particular.

When the Jesuit Robert Persons founded St Alban’s College in Valladolid in 1589, he had in mind an institution for training English Catholic priests. Because of the persecutions in England, these future spiritual fathers needed a safe place to settle and study before their return home in order to convert their fellow countrymen to the “old religion.” In this educational institution students and teachers required books, most of which have remained in the College throughout the centuries. This book collection has become a large library still extant nowadays.

In spite of being a foreign institution, both the College and its book holdings have been subject to the Spanish legislation, including the ideological control effected by the Inquisition. One of the main concerns of the Holy Office was the importation of foreign books, therefore we might expect that the English College would be subject to especial enquiries. The aim of this paper is to study the visits of the Inquisition officers to St Alban’s and the type of censorship carried out, paying attention to English books in particular and to the impact it could have on the dynamics of book culture.

This paper presents an exploration of Shakespeare's phraseological language by using Corpus Stylistic methodology and techniques. As part of a research project on Shakespeare's phraseology*, the paper aims to show through a few practical examples some of the advantages of using electronic tools -for instance, for the automatic identification and retrieval of a large number of phraseological patterns in his plays- and their applicability to different areas of Shakespeare studies, such as authorship attribution, style, or translations. The paper also discusses some of the difficulties that we have encountered in using these tools for exploring certain aspects of Shakespeare's phraseology.

Project title: A Discourse-based approach to the phraseological language of Shakespeare's Plays: with special reference to the modification of phraseological units (HUM 2005/ 01062FIL).