Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater

Robert Henke, Eric Nicholson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317006756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The essays in this volume investigate English, Italian, Spanish, German, Czech, and Bengali early modern theater, placing Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the theatrical contexts of western and central Europe, as well as the Indian sub-continent. Contributors explore the mobility of theatrical units, genres, performance practices, visual images, and dramatic texts across geo-linguistic borders in early modern Europe. Combining 'distant' and 'close' reading, a systemic and structural approach identifies common theatrical units, or 'theatergrams' as departure points for specifying the particular translations of theatrical cultures across national boundaries. The essays engage both 'dramatic' approaches (e.g., genre, plot, action, and the dramatic text) and 'theatrical' perspectives (e.g., costume, the body and gender of the actor). Following recent work in 'mobility studies, ' mobility is examined from both material and symbolic angles, revealing both ample transnational movement and periodic resistance to border-crossing. Four final essays attend to the practical and theoretical dimensions of theatrical translation and adaptation, and contribute to the book's overall inquiry into the ways in which values, properties, and identities are lost, transformed, or gained in movement across geo-linguistic borders.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson

Methods and Range

This book was produced by an international research collective, Theater Without Borders, that for its decade-long existence has convened scholars working on early modern English, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, German, and Czech theater, as well as on the dissemination of Shakespeare in South Africa and India. We contest the constriction of the category “early modern theater” to England alone, and we believe that the best model for a truly transnational and comparative study of theater between roughly 1500–1650¹ is a collaborative one; our practice, in our annual meetings and ongoing collaborative writing,² is continually to frame “national” theatrical phenomena by placing them in transnational contexts.

Three principles define us, and each serves to expand the range of our inquiry well beyond the national and monolingual compass. First, our work draws on practices and methods developed in Comparative Literature in recent years. By training and habit we are committed to detailed research, thick description, and careful interpretation of different kinds of texts in their original languages. As comparatists in a multicultural and global world, we also recognize the need to work collaboratively and rely on collective expertise to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The geo-linguistic reach of early modern English theater, we argue, must be expanded by connecting it to the theaters of both the Romance language-speaking countries and the regions of central and northern Europe. Although our attention to close textual reading does set us apart from a pure adherence to Franco Moretti’s idea of “distant reading,” we do embrace Moretti’s principle that large patterns and structures beyond the compass of traditional close reading must be tracked, and hypotheses ventured regarding those patterns.³ We find the systemic and structural “theatergram” method originally developed by Louise George Clubb in her study of Shakespeare and Italian drama⁴ compatible with the wide-angle method advocated by Moretti, even if we have not (yet) ventured into digital analysis. If occasionally we rely on translation, and often depend on experts in adjacent geo-linguistic areas, we also think it crucially important to consider the theory and practice of translation and adaptation, as Jacques Lezra, David Schalkwyk, Alessandro Serpieri, and Shormishtha Panja do in their contributions to this volume.

Secondly, we are theater-centered, devoting ourselves to the material practice, the corporeal reality, and the forms and techniques of live theater, considering such things as the actor’s body, staging devices, performance practices, clothing, theatrical sight-lines, and the actor-audience relationship. If we are interested in “theatergrams”—modular dramatic units common to European dramaturgy that can normally be identified in the dramatic text⁵—we recognize the thin line between the “compositions” of the playwright and the improvising actor (e.g., the English clown and the commedia dell’arte actor), and we extend the theatergram concept into the realm of the “performance text,” addressing phenomena such as transportable actors’ gags and foreign-produced costume accessories.

Thirdly, we have a particular interest in combining material and theoretical approaches to early modern theater. As Jacques Lezra writes in this volume, when describing the relationship between a material phenomenon such as trade and a symbolic one such as translation, we do not necessarily subordinate the material to the symbolic—or vice versa. Lezra argues that a material commodity can “work or travel” like a meaning-bearing theatrical element: this assertion is certainly borne out by Christian Billing’s essay on the performative qualities of foreign costumes on the English stage. We are interested in material phenomena such as traveling actors and foreign clothing moving across borders, and we are interested in theorizing such material mobility. Of an Italian troupe performing in France, or of a piece of Dutch ruff sewn into a costume worn by English actors, or of an English plot translated for a German audience by a traveling company, we want to know how values, properties, and identities are gained, lost, reversed, or transformed as a material or symbolic unit crosses borders. Especially at the moment of entry into the target culture, the “foreign” often carries added or at least altered symbolic and cultural value (the extra-material analogue to the tariff). The value of the “foreign” may peak as a novelty effect, only to suddenly disappear or gradually wane. Alternatively, foreign plots, stage actions, characters, dramatic forms, gags, or acting companies may stay for an extended period in the host locale, by which the source is extended, reversed, or transformed in myriad ways, often merging with the target culture.

Many of the essays here take up certain theatrical phenomena that, in our view, have been (literally) insulated by exclusively Anglo-centered approaches: staged gods (Wofford), fool iconography (Katritzky), explicit and implicit stage props (Walter), foreign costumes (Billing), the actress in relation to female protagonists (Brown), theatergrams circulated in the German and Czech-speaking regions (Drábek), Italian-English theatergrams (Andrews and Henke), low-class pastoral figures (Nicholson), and translatable motifs (Lezra, Schalkwyk, Serpieri, and Panja). In categorical terms, this book examines such things as theatrical practices (Wofford and Brown), visual emblems (Katritzky), narremes passing between the novella and the theater (Walter), epic tropes (Lezra), genre (Tylus, Wofford, and Nicholson), material “performance texts” (Billing), character types (Henke and Brown), “theatergrams” (Andrews and, effectively, all of the essays in this volume), and the dramatic text itself in translation (Schalkwyk, Serpieri, and Panja).

The wider geo-linguistic compass of our inquiry, including the expansion from the Mediterranean/Romance arena to that of central and northern Europe, provokes some interesting questions. As the brief preceding survey of the volume’s essays demonstrates, we continue to devote close attention to the resonance of Italian dramatic texts, acting styles, and staging practices in English early modern theater. If Shakespeare largely looked to ancient Roman comedy as a paradigm for The Comedy of Errors, early modern Italian drama would probably have seemed nearly as formative to him, argues Robert Henke, when he “translated” Ariosto’s I suppositi to the Bianca-Lucentio subplot of the early comedy The Taming of the Shrew (following George Gascoigne’s well-known translation of Ariosto’s play for a Gray’s Inn performance). Italian plays, printed in England both in Italian and in translation, and easily found in the printing house of Shakespeare’s fellow Stratfordian Richard Field and in the libraries of cultural intermediaries such as John Florio, were certainly available to English playwrights such as John Marston, Samuel Daniel, John Fletcher, and Shakespeare. But as Pamela Allen Brown explores in her essay, there were other possible conduits of Italian “theatergrams” to England: English travelers’ accounts of Italian professional theater, Italian troupes who traveled to England, encounters of English actors or English travelers with commedia dell’arte troupes in transnational “contact zones” such as Paris or Prague. The essays of Henke, Walter, Andrews, Brown, and the two essays on the international genre of pastoral drama by Wofford and Nicholson all examine the rich resonances of Italian theatergrams, performance practices, and narrative units in English early modern theater. In this particular volume, Spanish and French theater are frankly underrepresented, apart from Lezra’s discussion of Cervantes and the morisco play dramatizing the Aeneid story; we plan to correct this in future publications and do refer the reader to the studies of other members in our group not published in this volume: Melinda Gough’s research into transnational exchanges in the “supranational” milieu of the Italian-inspired French court of Maria de’ Medici, and the transnational work of the early modern Hispanist Michael Armstrong-Roche.⁶

In addition to the essays regarding Italian-English connections, M.A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek address the German-speaking regions and the Czech lands. The extensive traveling done by itinerant English troupes to the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Czech regions created vital transnational affiliations, which the important work of Anston Bosman on “interculturalism” has explored.⁷ As Drábek notes in his essay on “double etymology,” the English playwright Thomas Dekker, who was probably conversant in Dutch and German, traveled to the continent and may have brought back theatergrams and narremes from the German-speaking world. Drábek suggests that Dekker’s Old Fortunatus was influenced by the Fastnachtspiel playwright Hans Sachs. What most interests Drábek, however, is not so much the linear influence of, say, Sachs on Dekker, but the ways in which English troupes traveling in the Czech lands found dramatic prototypes and character modules onto which they could graft their own movable theatrical units: the plot conceit of Dr. Faustus fused with local magician motifs or the clown melded with comic figures from German and Czech folklore. Drábek hypothesizes an “intercultural and interlinguistic syntax” that is both pan-European and particularly centered on central Europe; in this theatrical “system” biblical and saints’ stories may play a somewhat larger role than in the theater of western Europe. Beginning with the Prince of Aragon’s dismayed encounter with a fool’s head—the “portrait of a blinking idiot”—in the casket scene of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, M.A. Katritzky identifies a pan-European emblematic and iconographic tradition deriving from late medieval German folly literature. The conceit of the fool’s bauble that reflects the image of its owner back to himself is shown to animate many moments in Shakespeare’s plays, including the mirroring conceit of “We Three” most famously invoked by Feste in Twelfth Night. For Katritzky, widely circulating popular prints and other forms of visual transmission helped create a post-Gutenberg, international visual system grounded in Germany, but radiating across Europe.

A wider geographical compass makes certain comparative observations regarding transnational theatrical influence possible. 1) Italian theater, as a coherent system of both scripted and improvised theater, exerted a considerable effect on English, as well as on French and Spanish early modern theater, if usually diffuse and latent because of the collective and amorphous nature of “source” and “influence” most pointedly described in Richard Andrews’s essay. By the eighteenth century, reciprocal influence emerges between Italian and French theater, manifested by figures such as Carlo Goldoni, who lived for an extended period in Paris. 2) The theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, despite its evident interest to visiting dignitaries and travelers such as Thomas Platter, and the powerful influence it has exerted world-wide since the late eighteenth century and German Romanticism, was in Shakespeare’s time practically unknown in Italy and other Romance countries where itinerant English troupes appear to have traveled very rarely; consequently, English theater exerted practically no influence in these regions in the early modern period. 3) In contrast, English theater, conveyed to the German-, Dutch-, and Czech-speaking lands by traveling players acting both in propria persona and with marionettes, appears to have functioned as a catalyst for the formation of German professional theater. Still, Drábek argues that the relationship very soon became reciprocal, with the English theatergrams merging with local motifs. Transnational exchange, therefore, is asymmetrical; it may be characterized by influence (e.g., Italian on English); or non-influence (English on early modern Italian, Spanish, and French theater); or reciprocity (early modern English and German/Czech theater; Italian and French in the eighteenth century).

The theatergram method provides a more expansive and inclusive view of early modern theater than can be gained by positivist source-and-influence study. In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt contrasts one view of imperial mobility in ancient Rome—“Where the emperor is, there the empire is”—with a more fluid, pervasive, and categorical view: “Where the fisc is, there the empire is.”⁸ When we discuss the circulation of the Dr. Faustus motif in the German and Czech-speaking lands (Drábek), or the movable theatergram of the desperate female lover who takes a potion to simulate death (Andrews), we are addressing what Greenblatt calls “categorical mobility.”⁹ We might well say, “Where the theatergram is, there the pan-European theatrical system is.” The triumphant model of westward translatio imperii, also discussed by Greenblatt, may lend itself to the transnational study of early modern epic, a text-by-text or author-to-author approach by which one might observe a “westward sway” from the Aeneid to Paradise Lost or (calibrating for romance epic) from Virgil to Ariosto to Spenser. But most of the transnational phenomena discussed in this book follow lines of dissemination that are centrifugal and amorphous, not capable of anything like linear plotting. (This very tension between the translatio of epic and that of theater is explored in Jacques Lezra’s essay.) Just as the itinerant troupes followed all points of the compass, the transnational dissemination of European theater resembled an amorphous net or web much more than a line.¹⁰

Mobility and Resistance; “Border Zones”

Early modern theater provides a particularly instructive case of transnational study because of the palpable material mobilities of actors, costumes, printed images of theater buildings, play-texts, plots, theatergrams, and physical gags across geo-linguistic borders. In studying the cultural mobility of early modern theater, we are able, as Greenblatt enjoins, to “take mobility in a highly literal sense”—to examine how it works on the material level even as it functions symbolically as well.¹¹ Inquiry into the material functions of early modern theater, moreover, checks a certain tendency in some transnational studies to exaggerate the ease of border-crossing (it may be helpful to distinguish, in fact, between frequenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Systems and Theatergrams
• Part 2 The Pastoral Zone
• Part 3 Performance Texts and Costumes
• Part 4 Northern and Central European Mobilities
• Part 5 Translation Theory and Practice
• EPILOGUE
• Select Bibliography
• Index