"Conversational Exchanges in Early Modern England" seminar participants confirmed for 2013 NeMLA Convention!
October 15, 2012
October 15, 2012
This seminar seeks to further the scholarly discourse
interrogating literary conversations in the sixteenth- and seventeenth
centuries. Our goal is to advance scholarship in the emerging discourse surrounding
early modern conversation by building critical contexts from which to examine
the socio-historical and rhetorical implications generated by multiple
interlocutors. We
want to investigate, in more detail than we have to date, matrices of
intertextual, interpersonal, epistolary, and cognitive models of conversation
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are especially interested in
papers that examine conversation as a collaborative, compositional, and/or
hermeneutic methodology. Session organizers: Kristen Abbott Bennett (Tufts University), Dianne Berg (Tufts University)
Seminar Abstracts and Participants:
“How 24 Common People Talked To The British
Monarchy: Kett’s Rebellion & The Petition of 1549”
- Daniel Bender, Pace
University
The
classical tradition in rhetoric assumes an all-capable and self-sufficient
master, who works on the minds of the many. This ethos is explicit in
Aristotle’s stipulation of a (singular) trained orator who possesses an arsenal
of techniques. From these the professional trained in persuasion chooses “the
best means available.”
Aristotle’s
directive imagined a socially privileged Greek male who could roam the topoi or
places of argument, extract the most fitting topic, and fashion words that
would move hearers to see things his way. The distant but still luminous
figures of this tradition--Demosthenes or later Cicero--
fuel the historical momentum of the solitary speaker model.
In the summer of 1549 in the sweltering heat and unemployment of East Anglia, however, no such individual speaker could
take up the cause of landless and unemployed common folks of Norfolk
and Suffolk. A commoner daring to assume the
elite role of the classical rhetor would enrage the Privy Council and London and their agents in rural England.
The commons had lost faith in the Protectorate that surrounded the teenaged
Edward VI. Enclosures that were declared illegal nevertheless remained
standing, so that tillage of arable land had dropped, pasture in common areas
had been cordoned off by nobles and merchants, and the whole pastoral economy
of East Anglia had become polarized, rich and
poor.
This
presentation explores a fascinating and largely anomalous moment in English
discursive practices: 24 men, representing each shire, gathered to produce 29
Grievances, addressed not in the expository form of writing-a discursus with
only an implied reader-- but in the form of conversational address.
Specifically, this paper sets out the recuperative values of collaborative
writing, and analyzes the rhetorical prowess of conversational address, marked
by the choric invocation: “We pray your grace….”
“The conversation of
commendatory verse”
-
Audrey Birkett, University of Colorado, Colorado
Springs
In Ben Jonson’s conversations with
William Drummond, he praises and slanders his contemporaries. The gossip and
slander that Jonson engaged in was a vibrant and common part of the dramatic
community of the Jacobean and Caroline eras. It was also, increasingly, an
important part of early modern dramatic paratext. This paper examines how early
modern playwrights used commendatory verses to communicate with friends and
allies to form communities and trade ideas. The paratext served as an elaborate
public conversation between playwrights about the theater and contemporary
authors.
Paratextual exchanges in the
commendatory verses of James Shirley, John Ford, and Philip Massinger
advertised the shared ideas of this coterie. Their verses show developed thought
and sustained dialogue, about the state of the theatre. The authors in the Brome Circle imitated, in commendatory verses, the ideas
and concepts of their peers. Their verses serve as metadramatic commentary on
the business of playwriting and solidified an alliance dedicated to the
professional theater. The man at the center of the circle, Richard Brome, used
his verses, often to scold and then slander his enemies. Brome’s paratextual
discourse with his arch-rival William Davenant, accuses the courtier poet of
abandoning the principles of the commercial theater. Davenant also responded in
verse to defend himself from such accusations.
This paper looks at how commendatory
verses of early modern drama served as conversations between dramatists to
advertise, exchange ideas, form alliances, and combat enemies.
‘“Of
whom proud Rome hath boasted long’: Intertextual
“Conversations” in Early
Modern
England”
-
Kavita Mudan Finn. Georgetown and
George Washington Universities
The
development of a popular historical culture in England in the mid-to-late
sixteenth century has been an object of much scholarly interest over the past
two decades, particularly as regards the relationship between historical
narratives and contemporary political concerns. What I intend to focus on here
is how historical culture manifests itself in intertextual “conversations” that
transcend both medium and genre.
One
of the many strains of literary-historical intersection in early modern England is historical complaint poetry, a subgenre of
first-person narrative poems centred on female protagonists. These poems build
upon one another and initiate dialogues implying their audience’s familiarity
with not simply the historical facts but also the literary backdrop for
these women. Michael Drayton’s Matilda, for instance, references
“Shore’s Wife,” “Faire Rosamond,” and “Lucrece, of whom proud Rome hath boasted long” as precursors, while the
historical dramas of the period include these characters with little to no ntroduction. Nor are these dialogues limited
to poetry and drama; chroniclers such as John Foxe and Raphael Holinshed engage
in these moments of referentiality, relying as much on their audience’s
knowledge of tropes and motifs as they do on their (admittedly scanty) sources.
This
paper will consider the significance of such “conversations” to the development
and proliferation of an early modern historical culture. What can they tell us
about how early modern English readers viewed history and historical figures?
What are the implications of references that cross between different mediums
and genres that transcend what modern readers would view as fact and fiction?
“Talking
to Ghosts: Imaginary Conversations in Early Modern Drama”
-
M. Stephanie Murray, Carnegie
Mellon University
When
a dramatic text stages imagined rather than actual conversations, it draws
attention to the strangeness of that moment. In early modern plays, the forward
movement of narrative is arrested by imaginary conversations that take place in
a synchronic space, aligning actual past and potential future in a single
rhetorical moment. Imaginary conversations attempt to forecast the future by
acting it out in the present.
In
this paper, I consider three forms of imaginary conversations: apostrophe,
conversations with inanimate objects, and re-enactments of conversations.
Hamlet’s “Remember thee?” speech to the just-departed Ghost tries to frame his
perplexing encounter with it by imagining his next actions. Vindice, the
revenger-hero of The Revenger’s Tragedy, repeatedly engages in one-sided
conversations with the skull of his long-dead beloved, refreshing his thirst
for vengeance with every exchange. I set these two examples from tragedy that
the imaginary
conversation to
revisit injury and establish future action against a scene from The Winter’s
Tale that entirely replaces staged action with a conversation about that
action. Rather than forecasting the future as the two examples from tragedies
do, the re-enacted version of the reunion of Perdita and Leontes in Winter’s
Tale, produced through a conversation between three unnamed gentlemen,
seems to be simple exposition. It is conspicuously inefficient as exposition,
however, which suggests that its replacement of the actual scene is serving a
more complicated purpose. It is, in fact, staging the future by prescribing
proper responses to the scene described.
“Political Contestation
and Courtly Conversation in Edward II”
- James
MacDonald, Yale University
The royal court was, by its nature, a
conversational center: an institution which had originated and continued to
function as a large aristocratic household establishment became a central organ
of royal administration under Tudor rule. The overlaying of the sovereign’s own
house with the apparatus of state, symbolized by the increasing penetration of
important government offices into Westminster and Whitehall palaces, could
easily turn the monarch’s bedroom itself into what David Starkey terms “both an
alternative power center to the Council Chamber and a hotbed of factional
intrigue.” In this paper I explore how Marlowe’s Edward II probes the unavoidable slippage between the sovereign’s
private life and public office. In particular, I suggest, Marlowe represents
this unresolved ambiguity through a battle of equivocal language between
Edwards and his leading aristocrats. A disputed word, “minion,” takes a leading
role in both the king’s own and his courtiers’ diction, occurring 15 times
within a stretch of about 1,000 lines. The ‘head meaning’ of this word
describes a relationship of political subordination, but its French etymology
carries erotic connotation: through conversational byplay, Edward and his
barons dispute whether Gaveston is his “minion” in a political or affective
sense, and whether the root of his kingship lies in personal power or
institutional authority. Even as Edward and his barons employ common language,
their opposing efforts to claim and reclaim the very terms of argument turn
courtly conversation into a political contestation for meaning.
“Utopia in
dialogue: Humanism and community in Thomas More’s Utopia”
-
Jane Raisch, UC Berkeley
Part
travel narrative, part circulated correspondence, and part dialogue, Thomas
More’s Utopia is the coming together of a number of imagined
intertextual, inter-generic, and interpersonal conversations. As both Early
Modern and modern readers of Utopia have long realized, despite its
overt interest in the construction of an ideal “no-place,” it is a text
urgently self-conscious about its very material place within an intellectual
and political European community. While the fictional world it imagines is defined
by a quasi-monastic insular community, More’s book is indelibly marked by its
existence within a Humanist culture where insularity has become incommensurable
with community and communal identity. I argue that the prefatory letters and
dialogic frame of Utopia’s Book I register the realities of this
Humanist culture, and enact a model where intellectual exchange through
conversation becomes a vehicle for communal self-definition.
By
embedding the dialogic conversation between More and Hythloday within multiple
paratextual correspondences (More’s letter to the Flemish printer Peter Giles,
Erasmus’ printed marginal commentary, the French humanist Guillame Bude’s
appended letter to More’s printer), the narrative of Utopia becomes a
narrative of its own productions. In this way, the union of a Socratic model of
dialogue with a diplomatic model of correspondence allows for communication
over long distances and across multiple languages and nationalities to become a
vehicle for, not an impediment to, community. Similarly, by imagining the
juxtaposition of such disparate genres as also in conversation, intertextuality
becomes not competitive but cooperative and does not threaten but solidifies
the unified integrity of More’s book and the community of readers it
establishes.
“Call and Response for a Queered Coterie: Intertextual Exchanges
in Robert Chester's Love's Martyr”
-
Donald Rodrigues,
Vanderbilt University
This paper will explore the intertextual matrices found within the
pages of Robert Chester’s text Love’s Martyr (1601). While Chester’s
long-winded allegorical poem, “Loves Martyr,” occupies the bulk of the 187-page
volume expressly dedicated to the marriage of Sir John and Ursula Salusbury,
the collection contains two poems signed “Vatum Chorus,” one “Ignoto,” and
several others by the “best and chiefest of our modern writers”: John Martson,
George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare. This paper will
demonstrate primarily that the contentious critical history of Shakespeare’s
contribution, “The Phoenix and Turtle” (1601), was
very likely inaugurated in the volume in which it first appeared. Marston’s
untitled poem, sitting directly opposite the third page of Shakespeare’s
“Phoenix,” responds directly to the poem’s radical claim that the traditionally
imperishable phoenix does not rise from its ashes; likewise, subsequent poems
in the volume by Chapman and Johnson respond in technical, aesthetic, and
polemical terms to themes and concerns that may be traced to Shakespeare’s poem
and within the confused pages of the much larger work by Chester. While the
body of scholarship on Love’s Martyr tends to focus almost entirely on
Shakespeare’s contribution, this paper focuses its consideration on the ways in
which attributed and non-attributed poems in the volume express interest in the
notion of a communal or coterie readership -- one that can be understood as
decidedly queer in nature. Moreover, I will explore the rhetorical and
allegorical devices deployed by these poets to construct masculine poetic identities
while adopting, and at turns strategically undoing, the phoenix myth and the
attendant myth of a joyous unity-in-marriage envisioned by Chester and
radically complicated by Shakespeare.
