English I: Stages of Play in Medieval and Early Modern England
Session Coordinator: Marissa Greenberg
Dept. of English, University of Pennsylvania
marissag@dept.english.upenn.edu

The Boredom of King James: The space of early modern London in performance and print

On the 15th of March 1604, decades of dynamic social and spatial development were expressed in a watershed cultural performance: the elaborate pageant prepared for James I’s royal entry into London. My examination of this city‑spanning theatrical event and the texts published by its authors considers the ways in which texts that ostensibly document this entry in fact complexly represent, and even reinvent, the king’s performance in the real‑and‑imagined spaces of early modern London. I document James’s boredom in order to juxtapose the king’s detached silence on the occasion of his entry with the voices of the entry's authors, whose texts trouble the stability of James’s absolutism.

This paper will focus on the ways in which the king’s entry demonstrates not only James’s strategies for representing his own kingship, but as well, the difficulty of documenting and transparently accessing early modern performance. The king’s sojourn in the public spaces of the city is documented by the three principal authors of James's entry: the playwrights Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, and the architect-designer Stephen Harrison, the artist responsible for the pageant's elaborate triumphal arches. Each of these documents is expressive of the vexed interaction of text and event – an interaction made visible in the streets of London in 1604.

D.J. Hopkins
Washington University in St. Louis
dhopkins@artsci.wustl.edu

“Parallels in Beauty’s Brow": The Influence and Function of Lazzi in Shakespeare’s Comedies

The development of early modern drama in Western European theatre appears to have run moderately parallel amongst urbanized countries such as England, Italy and France. The touring conventions of theatre practitioners within these regions are evidenced from diary and legal transactions. The influence of Italian theatre on the early English stage is obvious, but to exactly what extant is certainly unknowable. Through examining the peripatetic movement known as the Commedia dell’ Arte, there are abundant parallels that can be drawn to the Elizabethan stage. By narrowing this sphere to the lazzi inherent in Commedia performances and the effect on the written comic business in Shakespeare’s comedic plays, it is possible to establish a connection between the two spaces of play. Through determining the transformations of visual lazzi (traced through Italian oral history) into the written texts of Shakespeare’s plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a connection can be established between the visual lazzi that were seen in the performance origins of the commedia troupes in 1550-1700, through to the written scenarios that are extant today. As K. Lea states, “the Commedia dell’ Arte will not keep still within the bounds of a definition … it presents the drama with no new substance, but with a new flavour, which once tasted, is as unmistakable as it is hard to define.” It is these distinct essences that conceivably influence the written comic business of Shakespeare’s comedic plays.

Anna Racette
University of Toronto
annaracette@yahoo.ca

"At our last encounter": Playing at Ceremony on the Early Modern English Stage

Marissa Greenberg
Univ. of Pennsylvania