12/23/2014
Article Abstracts for Fall 2014 issue:
Essays
Empirical Middleton: Macbeth, Adaptation, and Microauthorship
Gary Taylor
Since 1778, scholars have disagreed about the relationship between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Middleton’s Witch. Allegedly empirical studies of the authorship of passages of Macbeth (3.5 and 4.1) have reached opposed conclusions. Although modern databases and more sophisticated attribution methods have succeeded in reaching consensus about whole plays and even plays divided between two authors, especially plays dating from the seventeenth century, they have been less successful with smaller blocks of text. Taylor’s essay presents the first survey of all lexical data (words, word strings of various lengths, collocations) in control passages in King Lear, Pericles, and A Mad World, My Masters, checked against databases of the entire Middleton and Shakespeare canons and then against databases of all early modern drama. Establishing the reliability of such comprehensive tests in identifying short passages of known authorship, the essay tests the suspect passages in Macbeth 3.5 and 4.1, using the same procedures and databases, concluding that there is overwhelming evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship and for Middleton as the adapter. Taylor relates this empirical conclusion to larger issues of style and epistemology in the Shakespeare and Middleton canons, concluding that Macbeth is the tragedy of a man who believed what he was told.
Michael Drayton, Shakespeare’s Shadow Shakespeare& #8217;s
Meghan C. Andrews
In this essay, Andrews argues that poet-playwright Michael Drayton was an important early reader and rewriter of Shakespeare and shows that their intertextual engagement was conditioned by their acquaintance at the Middle Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court. Demonstrating that Drayton systematically imitated Shakespeare’s works throughout the 1590s, the essay focuses on the influence of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy on Drayton’s historical poetry; the author has discovered that lines from Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597) appear in the Folio texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI but not the early quarto and octavo texts of these plays. The shared lines suggest that Shakespeare either revised early drafts of his plays or circulated longer versions of them in manuscript. Either possibility points to a more literary Shakespeare than critics are used to, as does Drayton’s modeling himself on Shakespeare. Andrews traces their intertextual exchange, which centered on The Mirror for Magistrates’s depiction of history as a tragic cycle and elegiac representation of subjectivity, and the Middle Temple where they met. The Mirror was the Inns’ most famous literary work, and the author draws on recent historiographical research on sociability and institutions to contend that the Inns led Shakespeare and Drayton to see each other as resources for this particular type of writing; moreover, the Inns’ atmosphere structured their literary relationship, leading them to work in productive and amicable engagement. Ultimately, Andrews underscores the key role that social environments such as the Inns had in the production of early modern literature.
“Play Me False”: R**e, Race, and Conquest in The Tempest
John Kunat
Caliban’s slave status has most often been attributed to either his racial identity or the practice of colonialism. This essay argues instead that Shakespeare clearly attributes his enslavement to a specific act—the attempted r**e of Miranda. Under the jus gentium, this assault constituted an act of private war, in which Caliban was conquered by Prospero, who acquired absolute mastery over Caliban’s person with the right to either kill or enslave him. This process is repeated when Ferdinand commits an act of war by drawing his sword against Prospero. Like Caliban, he is defeated and enslaved, as the play makes clear when he is ordered to stack logs, the same menial task performed by his putative rival for Miranda. To work through the trauma of sexual assault upon which the history of the island is founded, Ferdinand must repeat Caliban’s actions under Prospero’s supervision and control. The parallel between the two men who seek to possess Miranda sexually also draws attention to the relationship established in the play between Europe and Africa, which is developed in both the marriage of Claribel to the King of Tunis and Prospero’s rivalry with Sycorax.
