Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre ed. by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison (review)

Editors Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison claim the essays collected in this volume ‘complicate what has become a standard reading of the blazon’ (p. 3). However, the blazonic dismembering of the female body is a somewhat over-familiar trope in early modern studies. Perhaps in recognition of the difficulty of providing fresh insights into the subject, the editors admit that the anthology is indebted to the critical work of Nancy Vickers and Jonathan Sawday. The essays also draw heavily upon Lynn Enterline’s The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare(Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Grant Williams’s essay uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories and early modern notions of lovesickness to interesting effect. Unfortunately they lack clarification, and the essay seems rushed. A far more accomplished piece is Katherine R. Kellett’s analysis of the underappreciated female ghosts in the complaint poems of the 1590s. She finds an affinity with these female ghosts in Hermione from The Winter’s Tale. Hermione’s uncertain state between living and dead allows Kellett to explore the blazon through an incorporeal body.

Elizabeth Williamson examines courtly love in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The confusion of gendered identities and bodies caused by a boy actor playing Julia finds its expression with a sympathetic audience. Lisa S. Starks-Estes investigates the blazon being staged literally in Titus Andronicus. She argues that Shakespeare uses ‘a fresh, new, innovative Ovid’ to reinvent the Petrarchan sonnet (p. 54). Her reading of Lavinia being played by a boy actor and the conceit’s resonance with Ovid’s Metamorphosesis fascinating. Sara Morrison finds a refreshing change in the use of blazonic language by female characters in Measure for Measureand The Duchess of Malfi. In particular, she gives details of how Petrarchan conventions are used to depict scars on the female body that represent pain on stage.

Patricia Marchesi’s captivating essay examines how theatrical props and human limbs become interchangeable in the B-text of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The fact that traitors’ dismembered limbs were displayed in Elizabethan society finds an intriguing correlation with the way Faustus’s body is easily pulled apart. Added to this is Marchesi’s insight that Faustus is comparable to the objectified beloved of a Petrarchan sonnet. Ariane M. Balizet’s subject is cuckoldry in Arden of Favershamand A Woman Killed with Kindness. More specifically, she looks at ‘blazons ofmen bymen’ (p. 98). Balizet argues that the dehumanising effect of the cuckold’s horns erodes the husband’s role as the head of the household.

Thomas P. Anderson explores Julie Taymor’s Titus(1999), a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus. He argues that Lavinia’s fragmented body in the film ‘offers a form of corporeal feminism’ (p. 111). The most fascinating section of Anderson’s essay is his exploration of the artificial limbs and how Lavinia attempts to make her dismembered body whole again.

Joseph M. Ortiz investigates other uses for the blazon apart from erotic desire. In Shakespeare’s history plays, he finds faces being scrutinised for signs of royal legitimacy. His impressive close reading of Henry Vfinds an allusion to printed history books. Lisa Dickson examines scenes of fragmented and dismembered bodies and texts in The War of the Rosesand The Plantagenets. Erin E. Kelly argues that The Rebellion of Naplesshould be regarded as a play rather than a play-pamphlet. Its graphic depictions of violence imitate the falling apart of Charles I’s body politic. The ending to Kelly’s essay is the most enigmatic and chilling in the anthology.

The problems of blazoning the female reproductive body in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whoreare investigated by Sara D. Luttfring. In particular, she examines Giovanni’s anxieties over his sister’s sinful womb. Nancy Simpson-Younger explores identity in the sleeping or dead characters...