Dear Colleagues,
I write to announce and invite participation in a Shakespeare
Association seminar for spring 2001. (The conference will be held in Miami
this time.) In the hope of reaching scholars from a wide range of
specialties and disciplines for this unusual topic I'm broadcasting this
message. I'm especially anxious to hear from those whose interests would
furhter extend the range of the description given below.
My apologies for duplicate listings. Inquiries off-list, please.
Many thanks.
Frank Whigham
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Early Modern "Manuals" and the Representation of Scripted Behavior
Early modern English society was afflicted (or blessed) with many
disruptive forms of social change; persons and ideas were endlessly getting
disembedded from original contexts and made or enabled to serve in new
ones. Often discursive and commodified theory arose to codify and manage
(or deter) such transpositions. Speaking of the studious artisan who has
read his Art of English Poesy, George Puttenham says he has "apparelled him
to our seeming, in all his gorgious habilliments, and pull[ed] him first
from the carte to the schoole, and from thence to the Court, and preferred
him to your Maiesties seruice."
However, early modern England was much more widely equipped with
behavioral "manuals" than a narrowly courtly setting may indicate. The
categories of praxis for which "how-to" texts survive might include the
following: courtesy (Castiglione, Guazzo, Dekker, Braithwaite), rhetoric
(Wilson, Peacham), courtly poetry (Tottel, Sidney, Puttenham, Daniel),
education (Erasmus, Elyot, Ascham, Mulcaster), letter-writing (Day, Browne,
Fleming, Fulwood), sententious life-wisdom (Guicciardini, Nicholas and
Francis Bacon, Gabriel Harvey), chivalry and genealogy (Ferne, Romei,
Paulus Jovius), religion (Erasmus's Enchiridion, the Homilies, Foxe,
Ponet), auto/biography (Whythorne, Greville, Stuart women's autobiography),
the law and legal regulations (sumptuary proclamations, T.E.'s Lawes
Resolutions of Women's Rights), household manuals, dueling manuals, and
anti/theatrical tracts (Stubbes, Gosson, Prynne; Dekker's Apology.)
An SAA session might easily aim such a list at the drama. However,
I would also like to see some direct, non-instrumental exploration of these
and other such texts as themselves dramatic, involved in scripting social
behavior and often providing explicitly dramatized exemplary scripts for
mimetic appropriation by those in need (or, as one might say, in desire).
In part such a focus would entail attention to logic(s) of imitation and
quotation, constructions of audience, etc., but also to various aspects of
improvisation (Bourdieu), and to the many functions of conversation (Mead,
Brown and Levinson, Goffman).
tentative background texts:
-- Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (on the structures and
limitations of codified "rules" of practice).
-- Goffman, Relations in Public (discussions of "hello" and "thank you").
-- Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (on Iago and empathy).
-- Brown and Levinson on politeness theory.
-- Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, ch. 1 ("Courtesy Literature and Social
Change").
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