Early Modern as Brand Name

When someone asks me about my work, the term I use most often is Renaissance as in “I teach Renaissance literature.” To be sure, the way I use the term Renaissance is inaccurate and mired in misconceptions of the past, as my colleagues who teach Italian art history can explain. But the people who ask me are generally those who do not know the answer. They are neighbors, acquaintances, or academics who work in areas such as the physical sciences. To tell them what I do, with mind-numbing particularity and full attention to the contingent nature of history and culture, would be inexcusably rude. If they still look puzzled, I add, “Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth and stuff.” So far everyone I have met has responded with recognition, and our getting-to-know-you conversation moves on. When I meet new people who also work in my field, my response is different, usually involving the term early modern or transnational or feminism or pop culture usage or some such, depending on their line of questioning. For the label—and we are, after all, discussing labels—varies depending on the social moment. That point seems to me to be crucial.

Because I think that such terms are labels, I have relatively little invested in them. The particulars of what I do are very important to me, but I generally restrain myself from sharing those particulars unless the person with whom I am speaking shows genuine interest.¹ Labels are useful only in specific circumstances. My research occurs in three areas. I investigate performance history, performance theory, and women writing before 1700. As a performance historian, I find the term early modern useful, if only for the reminder that the work I am doing is in the domain of history. As a performance theorist, I find early modern often gets in the way of thinking about performances that exist across boundaries of time and space. As a feminist scholar, I am torn: Joan Kelly-Gadol’s generative essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” serves as a powerful reminder that the term one uses may well have hidden assumptions about the way that culture operates.

The chosen label shapes and is shaped by the way that one focuses attention. By asking the question “Are We Being Historical Yet?” Carolyn Porter pointed out that the way one looks into a text is never fixed. Each approach asks the reader “to reformulate questions in accordance with the terms it has used and the models it has deployed” (Porter 254). In performance history, the term early modern implies that a historical model will be the most fruitful, that, whenever someone comments on a performance or the moment that the performance occurs, understanding the historical moment can offer the scholar a deeper analysis of what is said and not said. What Samuel Pepys says of Nell Gwynne’s performance in The Maiden Queen (1667) makes much more sense when one knows when actresses began performing in London and what a britches role was, who Nell Gwynne was and what her relationship to Charles II was about to become, and who Samuel Pepys was and what he was like.

Yet when one tries to theorize performance more broadly, the historical model, so rooted in the particular place and moment, can become a hindrance. Anyone who has tried to persuade a class of undergraduates that Freytag’s Pyramid (based loosely on Aristotle) does not describe Shakespeare’s tragedies very usefully has encountered the problem. Because Freytag uses Aristotle as his basis to produce a model that supposedly describes all of drama, one has to begin by explaining that Aristotle had no idea of what drama might look like in other cultures. Then one has to explain that the universal model is based on classical plays of which Shakespeare was largely unaware (and hence he was unlikely to be using Sophocles as his model). Finally, the entire notion of a universal model for tragedy may even blind students to the questions of whether or not Chikamatsu’s...