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

POWER DYNAMICS IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS

Power Dynamics in Shakespeare Plays

Resources to facilitate discussions about iden�ty in Shakespeare’s plays and how it inﬂuenced status and power dynamics in Shakespeare’s England. Includes discussion ques�ons and exercises for examining “status” through performance-based prac�ce, as well as lists of high-quality secondary sources to further discussions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, As You Like It, and King Lear.

1 Brief Introduc�on to Women and Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Julie Crawford

An introduction to the conversations and debates being had about women and their status in a marriage and in general society within Shakespeare’s England

6 Staging Characters & Rela�onships: Tableau and ‘Reading’ Stage Pictures, Claudia Zelevansky

Exercises and discussion questions for learning about the importance of “status” in a play and how tableau 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

An excellent list of resources 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

An excellent list of resources discussing the historical context and ideas surrounding marriage, race, ethnicity, and republican government to further discussions about ‘Othello’

14 Secondary Sources – As You Like It, Mario DiGangi

An excellent list of resources discussing the historical context and ideas surrounding government, the natural world, and interpersonal relationships to further discussions about ‘As You Like It ’

15 Secondary Sources – King Lear, Mario DiGangi

An excellent list of resources discussing the historical context and ideas surrounding nature, culture, and government to further discussions about ‘King Lear’

16 Secondary Sources – Race in Shakespeare, Mario DiGangi

An excellent list of resources discussing the historical context and ideas surrounding race in Shakespeare’s plays, early modern England, and today

18 King Lear and the Grounds of Government, Julie Crawford

Drawing on speciﬁc textual moments, Dr. Crawford tracks the evolution of central characters’ relationship to power and inequality through the course of play

25 Social Order in King Lear, Julie Crawford

Primary sources to contextualize the conversation about social order taking place at the time that Shakespeare wrote King Lear Click �tles above to be taken to that sec�on.

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

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

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”).

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

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?

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

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

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

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

- 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

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.

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

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.

Julia Reinhard Lupton. “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

Secondary Sources – As You Like It

Mario DiGangi

Barnaby, Andrew. “The Political Conscience of As You Like It.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 15001900 36 (1996): 373-95. Barnaby argues that As You Like It engages contemporaneous political questions over land-use rights, the enclosure of common lands, poverty, and vagrancy.

Crawford, Julie. “The Place of a Cousin in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 69 (2018): 101-27.

Examining the importance of the kinship relationship between Rosalind and Celia, Crawford argues that “same-sex vows between women” might be enabled instead of cancelled by marriage.

Diamond, Catherine. “Four Women in the Woods: An Ecofeminist Look at the Forest as Home.”

Comparative Drama 51 (2017): 71-100. Using an ecofeminist framework, Diamond argues that Rosalind, having used the equalizing atmosphere of the forest to educate Orlando, “leaves it as unaffected as she found it.”

Fitter, Chris J. “Reading Orlando Historically: Vagrancy, Forest, and Vestry Values in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010): 114-41. Defining As You Like It as a “protest play,” Fitter uses Orlando to explore the play’s depiction of social ills such as vagrancy.

Martin, Randall. Shakespeare and Ecology Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. In a chapter on “biorelations” in As You Like It, Martin shows how the play engages with sixteenth-century debates over the use of land.

Nardizzi, Vin. “Shakespeare’s Queer Pastoral Ecology: Alienation around Arden.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23 (2016): 564-82. Nardizzi draws on pastoral traditions to argue that Aliena (the disguised Celia) manages to establish a “queer pastoral” household with Rosalind in the forest.

Zajac, Paul Joseph. “The Politics of Contentment: Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Studies in Philology 113 (2016): 306-36. Focusing on the forest of Arden scenes, Zajac argues that As You Like It explores “the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and political contentment.”

Secondary Sources – King Lear

Mario DiGangi

Achilleos, Stella. “Sovereignty, Social Contract, and the State of Nature in King Lear.” The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy. Ed. Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne. London: Routledge, 2019. 267-78. Achilleos discusses Lear’s disastrous division of the kingdom, which negates his own sovereignty, within the context of early modern European political theories.

Elden, Stuart. “The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth.” Law and Literature 26 (2013): 14765. Elden explores the relationship between land and politics in King Lear by analyzing the ways in which territory and land are gifted, distributed, controlled, and contested in the play.

Logan, Sandra. “Cordelia, Foreign Queenship, and the Commonweal.” The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens. Ed. Kativa Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 69-85. Logan analyzes the political justification for and consequences of Cordelia’s efforts, as Queen of France, to invade England and to restore Lear as English sovereign.

Mentz, Steve. “Tongues in the Storm: Shakespeare, Ecological Crisis, and the Resources of Genre.”

Ecocritical Shakespeare. Ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton. London: Routledge, 2011. 155-71. Characterizing As You Like It and King Lear as plays “obsessed with the relationship between human beings and nature,” Mentz compares the “legible and hospitable” Forest of Arden with the “opaque and hostile natural world” of King Lear

Ng, Su Fang. “Bare-Forked Animals: King Lear and the Problems of Patriarchalism.” Family Politics in Early Modern Literature. Ed. Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 173-89. Revealing the limits of King James I’s theory of the king as father of his country, King Lear depicts the destabilizing effects of Lear’s exchange of land for political allegiance.

Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 129-171. In contrast to early modern notions of the self-sufficiency of animals, King Lear’s account of man as a “poor, bare, forked animal” interprets human beings as “helpless, radically exposed” creatures.

Whiteley, Giles. “Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear.” Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance. Ed. Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky. London: Routledge, 2020. 134-49.

Whiteley argues that the weather in Shakespeare’s tragedies can constitute a “dark ecology” that reduces even sovereigns to abject, vulnerable things.

Secondary Sources – Race in Shakespeare

Mario DiGangi

Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race Conduct and the Early Modern World London: Routledge, 2018. Through readings of Othello, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest, Akhimie argues that in Shakespeare blackness is read as a sign of the incapacity for civilized self-improvement.

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds. London: Routledge, 2024. Dadabhoy demonstrates how Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories engage with Islamic and Muslim tropes, despite the absence of Islamic cultures and Muslim people from the plays.

Espinosa, Ruben. Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. London: Routledge, 2021. Arguing that Shakespeare “embodies whiteness . . . as a cultural icon that many aspire to access,” Espinosa uses racist episodes from Shakespeare’s texts to address how contemporary racism renders Black and brown people vulnerable.

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hall analyzes how depic�ons of blackness and gender in plays (e.g., Shakespeare’s Cleopatra), poetry, travel narra�ves, and visual art were aﬀected by England’s early seventeenth-century expansion as a commercial, naval, and imperialist power.

Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Diﬀerence: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Iyengar argues that early modern literary depic�ons of racial diﬀerence “at once create and interrogate the assump�ons about race, skin color, and gender that we live with today.”

Litle, Jr., Arthur L., ed. White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. This collec�on examines how Shakespeare’s texts engage in the process of “making” white people, and also how “white people have used Shakespeare to deﬁne and bolster their white cultural racial iden�ty, solidarity, and authority.”

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Devoting individual chapters to Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice, this study historicizes early modern ideas about race by analyzing how the plays represent differences of color, religion, geography, and economic practice.

Loomba, Ania and Jonathan Burton, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Loomba and Burton collect a wealth of primary texts that illuminate early modern ideas about race. Smith, Ian. “We are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67 (2016): 104-124. 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: Cambridge University Press, 2021. This collection provides an up-to-date overview of major historical, critical, and theoretical perspectives for the study of race in Shakespeare. Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Thompson examines various cultural sites film, novels, theater, prison programs, etc. as evidence for the instability of the relationship between Shakespeare and race in contemporary America.

Created by Professor Mario DiGangi, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

King Lear and the Grounds of Government

Julie Crawford

The play is invested in land and who owns and governs it, ﬁrst from a far and abstract distance (the map) and then through close up, ground level experience – largely through suﬀering.

The map there. Know we have divided/In three our kingdom. (Lear, scene 1, l.37-8.

All quota�ons are taken from King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells, Oxford UP)

Of all these bounds even from this line to this/ With shady forests and wide-skirted meads/We make thee lady. (Lear to Goneril, sc. 1, l.57-9)

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars/Are in the poorest things superﬂuous. (Lear, sc. 7, l.422-3)

GLOUCESTER

Alack, the night comes on, and the bleak winds

Do sorely rustle. For many miles about

There’s not a bush.

REGAN O sir, to willful men

The injuries that they themselves procure

Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors. He is atended with a desperate train, And what they may incense him to, being apt

To have his ear abused, wisdom bids fear.

CORNWALL

Shut up your doors, my lord. ‘Tis a wild night. My Regan counsels well. Come out o’th’storm. (Sc. 7, 456-465)

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

Lear’s increasing sensi�vity to inequality comes from his experience not only of being reduced in circumstances, par�cularly in terms of all the things that “troop with majesty” but also of being outside, cold, and unhoused.

LEAR

My wit begins to turn.

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself – Where is this straw my fellow? The art of necessi�es is strange, That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. – (Lear, sc. 9, l. 68-72)

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, That bide the pel�ng of this pi�less storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en

Too litle care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superﬂux to them And show the heavens more just. (Lear, sc. 11, l. 25-33)

Is man no more than this?/Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (Lear, sc. 11, l. 96-7)

Note how Lear becomes increasingly associated with the Bri�sh landscape (all the named weeds below are na�ve to Britain)

Alack, ‘�s he! Why he was met even now, As mad as the racked sea, singing aloud, Crowned with rank fumitor and furrow-weeds With burdocks, hemlock, netles cuckoo-ﬂowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

In our sustaining corn. The centuries send forth. Search every acre in the high-grown ﬁeld, And bring him to our eye. (Cordelia, sc. 18, l. 1-8)

Note as well how Lear registers those on the lowest steps of the social ladder (here, a human scarecrow) and develops a cri�que of social inequality and hypocrisy.

Nature's above art in that respect. There's your press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard. Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace; this piece of toasted cheese will do 't. There's my gauntlet. I'll prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O, well ﬂown, bird, in the air. (Lear, sc. 20, l. 86-91)

KING LEAR

Read.

GLOUCESTER

What, with the case of eyes?

KING LEAR

O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes.

GLOUCESTER

I see it feelingly.

KING LEAR

What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yon jus�ce rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the jus�ce, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

GLOUCESTER

Ay, sir.

KING LEAR

And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in oﬃce.

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand.

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.

Thy blood as hotly lusts to use her in that kind

For which thou whip'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tater'd clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. [Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of jus�ce hurtless breaks:

Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.] (sc. 20. l. 140-158)

As is the case with Lear, Gloucester undergoes a radical reduc�on in bodily comfort and privilege that results in a greater awareness of social inequality

Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell/His way to Dover. (Regan on Gloucester, sc. 14, l. 91-2)

I’ll fetch some ﬂax and whites of eggs/To apply to his bleeding face. (Third Servant, on trea�ng his master with natural resources, sc. 14, l. 104-5)

Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues

Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched

Makes thee the happier. Heavens, deal so s�ll.

Let the superﬂuous and lust-dieted man,

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly.

So distribu�on should undo excess,

And each man have enough. Dost thou know Dover? (Gloucester to “Poor Tom”, sc. 15, l. 62-69)

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

Embedded in the landscape at the lowest level, “Poor Tom” (really the son of a Duke) ar�culates the experiences of the most dispossessed members of society. (Bedlam was a hospital for the indigent and mad.)

I heard myself proclaimed,

And by the happy hollow of a tree

Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place

That guard and most unusual vigilance

Does not atend my taking. While I may scape

I will preserve myself, and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury in contempt of man

Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with ﬁlth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots, And with presented nakedness ou�ace

The winds and persecu�ons of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars who with roaring voices

Strike in their numbed and mor�ﬁed bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary.

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pel�ng villages, sheep-cotes, and mills, Some�me with luna�c bans, some�me with prayers, Enforce their charity. “Poor Turlygod! poor Tom.”

That’s something yet. Edgar I nothing am.

(Edgar as Poor Tom, sc.7, l. 167-186)

Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul ﬁend rages, eats cowdung for salads, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from �thing to �thing, and stock-punished, and imprison’d (Edgar as Poor Tom, sc. 11, l. 115-120)

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

Later, when Edgar leads his blinded father to the cliffs of Dover, he offers a vision that includes a s�ll more vulnerable worker: one who collects “samphire,” a kind of edible seaweed, from the cliffs themselves.

Come on, sir. Here’s the place. Stand s�ll. How fearful

And dizzy ’�s to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down

Hangs one that gathers samphire dreadful trade;

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

The ﬁshermen that ⟨walk⟩ upon the beach

Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark

Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge

That on th’ unnumbered idle pebble chafes

Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more Lest my brain turn and the deﬁcient sight

Topple down headlong.

Cornwall and Regan and Albany and Goneril become increasingly unjust and tyrannical governors as the play progresses. (Note as well the diﬀerences between Cornwall and Albany, and between Goneril and Albany.)

Though we may not pass upon [Gloucester’s] life

Without the form of jus�ce, yet our power

Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men

May blame but not control. (Cornwall, sc. 14, l. 22-5)

ALBANY (To Regan)

For this I hear: the King is come to his daughter, With others whom the rigour of our state

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

Forced to cry out. Where I could not be honest I never yet was valiant. For this business, It touches us as France invades our land; Yet bold’s the King, with others whom I fear. Most just and heavy causes make oppose.

EDMUND

Sir, you speak nobly.

REGAN

Why is this reasoned?

GONERIL

Combine together ‘gainst the enemy; For these domes�c poor par�culars Are not to ques�on here. (sc. 22, l. 23-33)

As for his mercy

Which he intends to Lear and Cordelia, The batle done, and they within our power, Shall never see his pardon; for my state Stands on me to defend, not to debate. (Edmund on Albany, sc. 22, l. 69-73)

Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humani�es, Columbia University

Social Order in King Lear

Julie Crawford

James I (also, and originally, James VI of Scotland) was the king of England when Shakespeare wrote King Lear. He was a defender of Divine Right monarchy. He was also an author.

James had three children: Henry, who was Duke of Cornwall and later Prince of Wales, Charles, who was Duke of Albany (until November 1605), and Elizabeth.

James I and VI, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598; 1603):

The king towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children, and to a head of a body composed of diverse members, for as fathers the good princes and magistrates of the people of God acknowledged themselves to their subjects.

As the Father over one family, so the King, as Father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and defend the whole commonwealth…so that all the duties of a King are summed up on the universal fatherly care of the people.

Domestic conduct books articulated social hierarchies for husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants. Yet they also argued for limits on these hierarchies. (See the scene in which a servant stands up to Cornwall.)

William Gouge, Of Domestical Duties (1622):

A servant must not wholly give himselfe to sooth and please his master: for so may he in many things displease Almighty God…when masters command and forbid any thing against God, they goe beyond their commission, and therein their authoritie ceaseth.

Poverty and homelessness were problems in Shakespeare’s time, as in our own, and occasioned a great deal of debate and a wide range of responses. (See the scene in which “Poor Tom” discusses “Bedlam beggars.”)

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

Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protests and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford University Press, 1988):

Early in January 1582, towards the end of Christmastide, the Queen was riding through Islington when her carriage was surrounded by a great crowd of beggars. The incident must have alarmed her, because William Fleetwood, recorder of London, was ordered to begin a sweep of masterless men the same day. The campaign lasted about ten days and netted several hundred vagrants – 100 being taken in a single day. The beggars in Islington were easily located because they were wont to huddle together for warmth among the brick kilns in the village.

Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (Rutger’s University Press, 1984), 141:

The settled poor [were] relatively fortunate in that they had a recognized place in society and were eligible for parish relief under the Elizabethan Poor Law…Beyond them well outside of charitable consideration of the authorities were the vagrant poor.

A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (Methuen, 1985):

Burials registered in St. Botolph’s without Aldgate between 1593 and 1598:

Edward Ellis a vagrant who died in the street.

A young man not known who died in a hay-loft.

A cripple that died in the street before John Awsten’s door.

A poor women, being vagrant, whose name was not known, she died in the street under the death before Mr. Christian Shipman’s house called the Crown…in the High Street.

A maid, a vagrant, unknown, who died in the street near the Postern [i.e. Gate].

Margaret, a deaf woman, who died in the street.

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

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

POWER DYNAMICS IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS

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