Power Dynamics in Shakespeare Plays: Authority, Sex, and Resistance by Theatre for a New Audience

POWER DYNAMICS IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS:

Authority, Sex, and Resistance

Power Dynamics in Shakespeare Plays: Authority, Sex, and Resistance

Resources to facilitate discussions about the influence of identity, especially gender identity, on status and power in Shakespeare’s England and plays. Includes discussion questions and embodied exercises for examining statusandpower,as well as two lists of high quality resources to further discussions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello.

1 Brief Introduction to Women and Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Julie Crawford

An introduction to early modern English conversations and debates about women and their status in society

6 Staging Characters & Relationships: Tableau and ‘Reading’ Stage Pictures, Claudia Zelevansky

Exercises and discussion questions for learning about the role of “status” in a play and how embodied theatre activities can be used to explore it

8 Status and Tableaux in Shakespeare, Claudia Zelevansky

A companion to the previous document that gives examples for each conversation and exercise using the play, ‘Macbeth’

10 Secondary Sources – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mario DiGangi

A guide to resources by contemporary Shakespeare scholars discussing patriarchal and political authority, as well as dissent and resistance used by women and commoners in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

12 Secondary Sources – Othello, Mario DiGangi

A guide to resources by contemporary Shakespeare scholars discussing the historical context and ideas surrounding marriage, race, ethnicity, and republican government to further discussions about ‘Othello’

Click titles above to be taken to that section.

Table of Contents

BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN and GENDER in SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

Julie Crawford

Women wrote poems in Shakespeare’s England, including sonnets (you can see one by Mary Wroth here), elegies (here is a wonderful one by Hester Pulter), and defenses and celebrations of women. (You can read one by Katherine Philips here). While Shakespearean actors were all boys or men, women were nonetheless involved in the theater in many ways. They also wrote plays, participated in court masques (elaborate entertainments featuring music and dance), were great readers and patrons of writers, put on household entertainments, and performed publicly in a range of venues from inns to the street.

QUERELLE DES FEMMES

The querelle des femmes, or debate on women, in which writers attacked and/or defended women (often in the same venue!) was a popular form of entertainment from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. See for example the following entry Anne Southwell (1574–1636) included in the commonplace book she kept in the 1620s. (Many early modern readers kept commonplace books in which they recorded favorite poems and quotations, often organizing them under headings, like “Love” or “War” that made them easy to retrieve for later use in writing or argument).

All married men desire to have good wives:

But few give good example, by their lives

They are our head they would have us their heels. This makes the good wife kick the good man reles [ankles].

When god brought Eve to Adam for a bride

The text says she was ta’en from out mans side

A symbol of that side, whose sacred blood

Flowed for his spouse, the Churches saving good.

This is a misterie, perhaps too deep

For blockish Adam that was fallen asleep.

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities, Columbia University

Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

In response to a misogynist pamphlet entitled The Arraignment of Women (1615), Rachel Speght, a clergyman’s daughter and poet, wrote A Mouzell for Melastomus, the cynicall bayter of, and foule mouthed barker against Evahs sex (1617). The pamphlet endeavors to “muzzle” or silence the “black mouthed” misogynist, Joseph Swetnam, who wrote The Arraignment.

Authors in the querelle endeavored to show their creativity with the conventions of the debate, as Speght does in her revisioning of Genesis 2.7, 21-26 which recounts, in opposition to Genesis 1.26-27

(“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”), the creation of woman from man’s side:

“[The] matter whereof woman was made, was of a refined mould, if I may so speake: for man was created of the dust of the earth, but woman was made of a part of man, after that he was a living soule: yet was shee not produced from Adams foote, to be his too low inferiour; nor from his head to be his superiour, but from his side, neare his heart, to be his equall; that where he is Lord, she may be Lady: and therefore saith God concerning man and woman iointly, Let them rule [Genesis 1. 26] […] By which words, he makes their authority equall.”

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities, Columbia University Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

The debate later became the subject of a play. What do you notice about the amazing woodcut on its title page?

The following two woodcuts from pamphlets in the querelle – the first from the earliest days of the printing press in England, and printed by the marvelously-named Wynkyn de Worde – give some sense of the participation the debate invited from its readers.

In Guillaume Alexis’s He [sic] begynneth an interlocucyon, with an argument, betwyxt man and woman & whiche of them could prove to be most excelle[n]t (1468?), the man seems to be speaking with authority to the woman – note his raised finger! What, though, might she be saying to him in response? (The Oxford English Dictionary defines an “interlocucyon” (“interlocution”) – from the Latin inter (between) loquī (to speak) – as “the action (on the part of two or more persons) of talking or replying to each other”).

A woodcut in Here begynneth a merry ieste of a shrewde and curste wyfe, lapped in morrelles skin, for her good behauyour (1580), a pamphlet recounting a popular story of a man punishing his “shrewish” wife by wrapping her in the hide of a dead horse, has empty cartouches (speech bubbles) for both the man and the woman Don’t they seem to invite you to fill them in? What else does the image seem to be telling us as readers/viewers?

DOMESTIC CONDUCT and MARITAL ADVICE

Books about how to behave yourself as part of a household and a marriage were enormously popular in Shakespeare’s England, but they were not, as we might expect, wholly concerned with the subordination or obedience of women. Compare, for example, the following quotations from some of the most popular conduct books from the period. What do we learn from William Gouge’s preface in particular?

William Perkins, Christian Economy: or, A Short Survey of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Family According the Scriptures (1609): “The husband is he which hath authority over the wife; hereupon in Scripture he is called the guide of her youth, and they twain being but one flesh, he is also the head over his wife […] The duties of the wife are principally two. The first is to submit herself to her husband and to acknowledge and reverence him as her head in all things. [The second is obedience].”

William Whately, A bride-bush, or, A wedding sermon compendiously describing the duties of marriage persons: by performing whereof, marriage shall be to them a great helpe, which now finde it a little hell (1617): “[H]ee rules in a right manner, when in ruling, he rules himself by three principall vertues […The third] is Justice, the soule of government, the true temperature of authority, without which it rots and putrifieth, and degenerated into the most fulsome and stinking carrion of tyranny. […Let the wife] be made equall partner of that which her husband hath [and the question of obedience] will not bee so much questioned, as the measure: Not whether shee must obey, but how farre.”

William Gouge, Of Domestical Duties (1622; 1634): “I remember when these Domestical duties were first uttered out of the pulpit, much exception was taken against the application of a wife’s subjection to the restraining her from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against, her husband’s consent […] Other exceptions were made against some other particular duties of wives […] This just apology I have been forced to make, that I might not ever be judged (as some have censured me) an hater of women. Now, that in all those places where a wife’s yoke may seem most to pinch, I might give some ease, I have to every head of a wives’ duties made a reference, in the margin over against it, to the duties of husbands answerable thereunto, and noted the reference with his mark *, that it might be more readily turned unto.

STAGING CHARACTERS & RELATIONSHIPS: Tableau and ‘Reading’ Stage Pictures

Claudia Zelevansky

Introduction: Status

The question of status, or our place in any given society, is one of the building blocks of drama. Look at any Shakespeare play and you will find characters fighting for higher status, trying to maintain status, or being deeply impacted by how slippery the nature of status is

Introductory Exercise: Think of a time and circumstance in which you had very high status. Where were you? Why did you have such high status? And then, ask yourself to think of a time in which you were or felt you were, close to the bottom of the power pyramid. What changed?

Quick exercise: Have your students share examples of feeling high or low status. As you generate a list, ask if anyone has any examples of experiencing a big range within the same environment? School, for example, is often a place in which the conditions (age, grade, grades, social cliques) can turn on a dime.

Staging status and relationship:

Staging status, or creating a stage picture in which the viewer can see that some people have more power, authority, or status than others, is a great first entry point to staging.

Exercise: “Great Game of Power”

- Clearly define the boundaries of the performance space. Put a few simple pieces of furniture there - chairs, maybe a table. If the furniture is sturdy enough to stand on, all the better.

- Ask one volunteer to enter the space, and put their body in the place - and the physical position - that gives them the most possible ‘power’ in the space. Ask them to consider the “audience” as well as the room itself.

- Ask a second volunteer to enter the space, and put their body in the place - and the physical position - that gives them the most possible power, and takes it from the first volunteer.

- Repeat as desired, up to 5-6 people.

- Debrief: Discuss the tactics people used, and what tools are available in a theatrical setting to give a particular character/performer/body more or less power/focus/status onstage.

Created by Claudia Zelevansky, czcoaching.com Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

Introduction: Tableau

A tableau is a frozen picture, a staged photograph of a moment in time. Tableaux allow us to stage a moment that can show us relationship, power, status, environment, and even conflict! Once you have explored status, you can apply that to the tableaux, or pictures, you make to tell a story.

As you explored in the GGP, you can show status in a variety of ways, from position relative to the audience or actors, literal height or levels, body languages and facial expressions.

Exercise: Three Tableaux

Have the class come up with a simple story everyone knows, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Then break the students up into small groups of 3-4 people. Have each group stage three tableaux: the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Ask them to consider the following question:

Who are the characters? What is their status relationship to each other? Does it change?

Where are they?

What is the event of each frozen moment?

Have each group perform their three tableaux in order and then discuss what story they told and what choices really made the story pop!

Created by Claudia Zelevansky, czcoaching.com Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

STATUS AND TABLEAUX IN SHAKESPEARE

Claudia Zelevansky

The previous exercises on Status and Tableaux can be applied to Shakespeare’s plays directly. Here are some examples for working on status in Macbeth:

Quick discussion: What is status? What is the definition of status? What are some other words that describe status? Work together as a group to generate a list: For example: Power, authority, position, privilege, access, wealth, etc.

Discussion: Status in Shakespeare’s plays

Looking at one of Shakespeare’s plays, who has the most status at the beginning of the play? How does that change over the course of the story? Does anyone go from lower to higher status?

Exercise: Status and Macbeth (or any Shakespeare play)

High status at beginning: King Duncan

How does his status change? He’s killed, so he loses status. He gives status to Macbeth, which undermines his own power

Who’s status changes over the course of the play? Macbeth goes all the way from the middle to top, but then loses power. How?

Other questions: How would you rate the Witches’ status? Does it change? How much of status is perception?

Applying Status to Staging: Macbeth and the Great Game of Power

- Clearly define the performance space in the room. Put a few simple pieces of furniture therechairs, maybe a table. If the furniture is sturdy enough to stand on, all the better.

- Ask for a few volunteers and assign them roles from Macbeth and agree on whether you are staging the status at the beginning, middle or end of the play.

- Have the first actor (perhaps Duncan) enter the space, and put their body in the place - and the physical position - that gives them the most possible ‘power’ in the space. Ask them to consider the “audience” as well as the room itself.

Created by Claudia Zelevansky, czcoaching.com Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

- Ask a second actor (perhaps Lady M) to enter the space, and put their body in the place - and the physical position - that gives them the most possible power, and takes it from the first volunteer.

- Ask a third actor (perhaps a Witch) to enter the space, and put their body in the place - and the physical position - that gives them the most possible power, and takes it from the first and second actor

- Debrief: Discuss the tactics people used, and what tools are available in a theatrical setting to give a particular character/performer/body more or less power/focus/status onstage

Exercises: Status & Tableaux in Macbeth

Definition: Tableau

As you explored in the GGP, you can show status in a variety of ways, from position relative to the audience or actors, literal height or levels, body languages and facial expressions.

Exercise: Three Tableaux and Macbeth

Have the class talk through the beginning, middle and end of either a scene from Macbeth or the whole play. Then break the students up into small groups of 3-4 people. Have each group stage three tableaux: the beginning, middle, and end of that story. Ask them to consider the following questions:

Who are the characters? What is their status relationship to each other? Does it change over the three pictures?

Where are they? What is their location? Does it change?

What is the event or action of each frozen moment? What is happening in each picture?

Have each group perform their three tableaux in order and then discuss as a class what story they communicated and what choices really made the story pop!

Created by Claudia Zelevansky, czcoaching.com Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays

through Scholarship & Performance

SECONDARY SOURCES - A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Mario DiGangi

Issues of authority, sex, and resistance in this beloved comedy center on women’s sexual and emotional autonomy in relation to fathers, husbands, rulers, and suitors. The play opens with Egeus complaining that his daughter Hermia refuses to marry the man of his choosing; Duke Theseus gives Hermia the choice of obedience to her father, death, or life in a convent. Theseus himself anticipates his marriage to Hippolyta, the Amazonian warrior he “wooed” with his “sword.” At the same time, the King and Queen of fairies, Oberon and Titania, are feuding over Titania’s refusal to relinquish to her husband a young boy, the son of a dead Indian votaress that Titania had dearly loved. The texts below explore modes of patriarchal and political authority in the play, as well as strategies of dissent and resistance used by women and commoners.

Bailey, Amanda. “Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race. Ed. Valerie Traub.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 400–18. Bailey uses Bottom’s transformation in the context of early modern legal texts to address the politics of consent in the play.

Boehrer, Bruce. “Economies of Desire in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004): 99–117. Boehrer argues that marriage in the play is defined against both cross-species eroticism (e.g., Titania and the ass-headed Bottom) and same-sex eroticism (e.g., Titania and the votaress).

Kehler, Dorothea, ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 1998. A useful collection of essays that includes traditional and more contemporary approaches, including essays on gender, sexuality, status, and power.

Floyd-Wilson, Mary. “The Habitation of Airy Nothings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England. Ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 243-61. Floyd-Wilson connects the invisible fairies of the play to early modern beliefs about the presence of spirits who could affect human beings.

Hendricks, Margo. “‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 37-60. Hendricks argues that through its representation of India the play contributes to the emergent racist ideologies of English imperialism.

Created by Professor Mario DiGangi, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

Loomba, Ania. “The Great Indian Vanishing Trick Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2016. 263–87. According to Loomba, the fairies’ conflict over the Indian boy represents a gendered struggle over colonial resources.

Schwarz, Kathryn. Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Schwarz addresses how Hippolyta’s identity as an Amazon affects the politics of gender hierarchy and marriage in the play.

Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Traub analyzes how the same-sex bonds of Hermia and Helena and of Titania and the Indian votaress are undone by the women’s impending marriages and by Titania’s submission to her husband.

Created by Professor Mario DiGangi, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

SECONDARY SOURCES – Othello

Mario DiGangi

With its central focus on an interracial marriage and a malcontent servant, Othello offers rich material for the study of authority, sex, and resistance in Shakespeare. Othello begins with a marriage that is at once happy for the spouses Desdemona and Othello’s accounts of their mutual love are among the most moving in Shakespeare and devastating for Brabantio, the patriarch who attempts to control his daughter’s freedom and assert racial boundaries. Brabantio, however, is soundly overruled, both by his daughter’s assertion of her sexual desires and by the republican values of Venice. The critical studies below can facilitate informed discussion of Renaissance ideas about marriage, race, ethnicity, and republican government, as well as provide historical contextualization about the multicultural Mediterranean world.

Bartels, Emily C. “The ‘Stranger of Here and Everywhere’: Othello and the Moor of Venice.” Speaking of the Moor: From “Alcazar” to “Othello.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

155–90. Bartels explores the historical implications of Shakespeare’s placing Othello, a Moorish general, in the service of the Venetian republic.

Bovilsky, Lara. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Bovilsky argues that Desdemona begins the play as pristinely white, but becomes racially “darkened” through her disobedience to her father and her sexual desire for a Moor.

Hall, Kim F., ed. Othello, the Moor of Venice: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2007. Hall’s excellent edition of the play provides scholarly accounts of topics such as race, religion, the Mediterranean, marriage, masculinity, and the passions.

Kolb, Laura. “Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning and Reputation in Othello.” Shakespeare Studies 44 (2016): 230-262. Addressing the play’s pervasive economic language, Kolb argues that Iago provokes Othello’s jealousy by teaching him new ways of calculating both his own worth and Desdemona’s.

Loomba, Ania. “Othello and the Racial Question.” Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 91-111. Loomba examines how medieval and newer ideas about Blacks and Muslims come together in Othello via the racialization of skin color, religion, and nation.

Created by Professor Mario DiGangi, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance

Lupton

, Julia Reinhard. “Othello Circumcised.”

Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 103-123. Lupton explores the contradiction between the inclusiveness of Christian republican civic ideals and the actual exclusions of national and religious others.

MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race, and Women.” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. John Wiley: 2016. 206-224. MacDonald explores how thoroughly “race permeates gender and class positions” in Othello, particularly through the domestication of women and their sexuality.

Neill, Michael. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383-412. Neill explores how Othello’s murder of Desdemona in their martial bed has historically provoked “fear and revulsion” about the spectacle of interracial sex.

Smith, Ian. “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64 (2013): 1-25. Noting that black cloth was used to simulate African skin on the Renaissance stage, Smith argues that regarding Othello’s handkerchief as black instead of white can alert us to the racist representation of a “black man as a thing.”

. “We are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67 (2016): 104124. Smith considers the implications of reading Othello in the contexts of academic racism and popular racism in the contemporary United States.

Thompson, Ayanna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge UP, 2021. This collection provides an excellent, up-to-date overview of major historical, critical, and theoretical perspectives for the study of race in Othello and Shakespeare generally.

Created by Professor Mario DiGangi, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance