Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England

Notes

c h a p t e r o n e 1. I Wrst introduced my “transversal theory” in my article “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England ,” Theatre Journal 49: 2 (May 1997): 143–67. See also Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick, “The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault’s Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse,” Diacritics 29:3 (Fall 1999): 63–80; Bryan Reynolds, “‘What is the city but the people?’: Transversal Performance and Radical Politics in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Brecht’s Coriolan,” in Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, ed. Bryan Reynolds and Donald Hedrick (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 107–32; Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick, “Venetian Ideology or Transversal Power?: Iago’s Motives and the Means by Which Othello Falls,” in Critical Essays on Othello, ed. Philip Kolin (New York: Garland, 2001); and Bryan Reynolds and D. J. Hopkins, “The Making of Authorships: Transversal Navigation in the Wake of Hamlet, Robert Wilson, Wolfgang Wiens, and Shakespace,” in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2001). 2. See, for instance, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, parts I (1972), II (1974), and III (1990); John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985); Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob (1988); and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990). 3. Consider biographies and novels such as Peter Maas’s The Valachi Papers (1968), Nicolas Pileggi’s Wiseguy: Life in a MaWa Family (1985), John Cummings’s Goombata: The Improbable Rise and Fall of John Gotti and His Gang (1990), and Mario Puzo’s The Last Don (1996); or songs such as Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” (1974), Bob Dylan’s “Joey” (about Joseph Gallo [1975]), and Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” (1982). 4. For an interesting discussion of the job of the historian, see Hayden White, n o t e s Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially the chapter entitled “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” 81–100. 5. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 82. 6. James Intriligator and I introduced this concept in a paper entitled “Transversal Power: Molecules, Jesus Christ, The Greatful Dead, and Beyond” presented at the Manifesto Conference at Harvard University on May 9, 1998. 7. For an intriguing comparison of the “mythological” presences of Santa Claus and Shakespeare that is theoretically related to The Smithereens’ comparison cited here, see Michael Bristol, “Shakespeare: The Myth,” in David Scott Kasten ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 489–502. 8. An earlier version of much of this section was published in my article “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England,” Theatre Journal 49:2 (May 1997), 143–67. 9. For an in depth discussion on Ideological State Apparatuses, see Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation )” in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). For Althusser “every State Apparatus, whether Repressive or Ideological , ‘functions’ both by violence and by ideology,” but “the (Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology,” and “the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology” (145). Whereas this paradigm is useful to a discussion on the sociopolitical situation of early modern England, it is ultimately inadequate because the repressive aspect of all the state apparatuses was rarely primary and never constituted, as Althusser asserts, a cohesive or singular repressive state apparatus that was “secured by its uniWed and centralized organization” (149); neither Queen Elizabeth nor King James possessed a professional army. 10. In The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Random House, 1945), E. M. W. Tillyard holds that despite the many diVerences between factions of the church, such as the Puritans, and the courts of James and Elizabeth, all were “more united by a common theological bond than they were divided by ethical disagreements” (4). Carl Bridenbaugh upholds Tillyard’s conclusion in his Vexed and Troubled Englishmen , 1590–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); his analysis of a variety of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts leads him to emphatically assert, “Indeed, Church and commonwealth did constitute society” (274). In his Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Alvin Kernan subscribes to the view that...