Portraits in Early Modern English Drama: Visual Culture, Play-Texts, and Performances

Description

Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues. Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women’s portraits in a theatre without actresses? This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Table of contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Notes Bibliography Part I The meanings of staged portraits 1 Interpreting portraits: Semiotic approaches Situating portraits in visual and material culture studies Notes Bibliography 2 Early modern visualities The ambiguities of the visual culture of early modern England Framing vision: the “figuring forth good things” and the “infecting of the fancy” Offending shadows: idolatry and iconoclasm Notes Bibliography 3 Early modern English portraiture: Objects and poetics Innovation in the Renaissance portrait Portraits in early modern England Miniatures The poetics of limning Notes Bibliography 4 Portraits on stage in early modern England Viewing auditors, hearing spectators “Passioning” over pictures in the theatre Seeing and looking at the staged pictures Dramatic uses of portraits and genre Measure for measure: reconstructing the size and format of staged pictures The worth of the staged pictures Painted boys and women’s paintings Notes Bibliography Part II Case studies 5 “Closet scenes”: The case of Hamlet’s First Quarto (1603) First steps into the closet and Q1 Staging the two pictures Pictures in the early modern gentlewoman’s closet Close reading of the speech Visuality in Q1 Notes Bibliography 6 Tragic limning in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) Murder they showed: poisonous spectacle Websterio pinxit: pictures in John Webster Limning and dislimning the night-piece Close reading of the first dumb show I: multimodality and the portrait as a focus Close reading of the first dumb show II: the portrait as an agent and its socio-cultural associations Visibility and the other pictures in the play Disorienting perspectives and converting viewpoints Notes Bibliography 7 Philip Massinger’s The Picture (1630): Impregnable women and pregnable pictures Synopsis of the play Between magic and science, following Della Porta Staging the picture Limning subjectivity Humouring the body and the picture (Im)pregnability and interpersonal identity construal The wife as an idol Lively women and spectacle Notes Bibliography 8 Shadow vision in William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636) Contextualising William Sampson’s play and its woodcut illustration Portraits in tragedy: a “theatregram” Threatening vision and the interrogation of one’s identity Introducing the “spectacular body”: The ghost The “spectacular body” and distraction: The first portrait scene Gazes in gynocentric spaces, Puritan painters, and the reconciliation with iconography Notes Bibliography 9 The drama of Platonic gazing in Caroline courtly play-texts: William Cartwright’s The Siege (1651) William Cartwright and courtly drama Courtly visual culture and Platonism Platonic contemplation in Caroline literature: “Turn all eye / All depth and mind” Portraits in courtly romances and drama Performing gazes in The Siege A sisterhood of pictures: subjectivity and subjection of Leucasia as spectacle Notes Bibliography Conclusion Notes Bibliography Appendix Index