The Journal of the Wooden O is a peer-reviewed academic publication focusing on all things Shakespeare. It is published annually by Southern Utah University Press in cooperation with the SUU Center for Shakespeare Studies and the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Articles published in the the Journal of the Wooden O are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the World Shakespeare Bibliography and appear full-text in EBSCO Academic Search Premiere. Selected papers from the annual Wooden O Symposium are also considered for publication. Single copies may be purchased for $15 each. Libraries or individuals may subscribe to the journal for $15/year. Prices include shipping and handling.
Shelley: Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Hopefully this morning has been productive thus far. I heard applause in the other room, so I’m assuming things are going well. By way of introduction, my name is Stewart. I’m the education director with the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and I’m delighted to introduce you to the amazing friends, brilliant company members, and some of the best verse speakers in the nation, who you were able to see last evening in Antony and Cleopatra. I’m interested to hear your thoughts and your questions. We have Gabriel Elmore, Cassandra Bissell, Chauncey Thomas, and Geoffrey Kent who are joining us. All of them incredible. I’m going to let them introduce themselves, and tell you a little bit about where they’re from. I also like to pose a question just to get brains kind of warmed up. What is it about Antony and Cleopatra that surprised you, delighted you, or caught you off guard in this show particularly?
Copyright (c) 2026 Southern Utah University Press
In the Sam Wanamaker performance of Titus Andronicus in 2023, directed by Jude Christian, a curious taming of the material occurs. From its position as the notoriously grisly Shakespearean tragedy, Christian alters it into a cabaret-style show that reduces one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays to a bloodless affair, using wax candles carried by each character as a substitute for the body. These candles are meant to withstand the violent acts of Titus Andronicus—being snapped, cut in half, chopped, and finally literally snuffed out even as the characters’ lives are snuffed out metaphorically. As the Sam Wanamaker Theatre is a candlelit theatre, these candles serve both as lighting and bodily metaphor, removing the bloodshed from this bloody play.
Fools and the Circular Structure of King Lear
In King Lear (1606) by William Shakespeare, Lear’s final address to Cordelia as “my poor fool” (5.3.304) has drawn considerable scholarly attention,1 prompting debate over whether the phrase refers exclusively to Cordelia or to both Cordelia and the Fool.2 Yet, little attention has been paid to the fact that the two characters who remain on stage at the end— Albany and Edgar—are themselves “fools.” Albany, husband to Lear’s eldest daughter Goneril, is derided by her as “a moral fool” (4.2.59) for his moral rigidity. Deceived by his illegitimate brother and driven into exile, Edgar endures by adopting the disguise of the mad beggar “Poor Tom,” describing his helplessness with the lament, “Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow” (4.1.40). Although Lear’s Fool disappears from the stage after Act 3, Scene 6, his absence paradoxically governs the kingdom through the figures of Albany and Edgar. This paper argues that through the presence of these “fools” who remain at the end, King Lear reveals a structural circularity that extends beyond Lear’s personal tragedy.
Shakespeare's Rhetorical Training and His Early Plays
The importance of the art of rhetoric for Renaissance letters in general and William Shakespeare in particular has long been recognized. T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (1944) provides a survey of the wide range of literary texts and treatises available to Shakespeare, and Sr. Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (1947) closely examines the manifold use made by Shakespeare of traditional techniques of invention and argumentation, pathos and ethos. Since then, however, there have been few specific studies on Shakespeare’s rhetorical training and practice. While interest in Shakespeare’s schooling has risen, few direct links between his Stratford lessons and the text of his plays have been established.
In Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and their Meaning, Eric Mallin outlines a critical method for exploring Shakespearean analogues and meanings in films that are not adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Mallin defines a nonadaptation as “like a traditional form of cinematic production in that it summons a relationship between (in this case) a Shakespeare play and a movie that can be read through or in that play. But such a film lacks the discursive or extra-textual features of the adaptation: a known, implied, or readily deduced derivation from a prior text.”1 This approach views non-adaptations as films in dialogue with Shakespeare’s work: the non-adaptational lens aims to highlight how two works with little to no direct relation “might have rewarding samenesses, and in those we might find something true and new about each text.”2 The non-adaptation framework allows for creative critical exercise through which the similarities and differences between a Shakespeare play and a given film open new insights about both works while bypassing the oft-debated constraints associated with adaptation theory.3 To explore the Shakespearean non-adaptation is not to capture, in relation to the Shakespearean text, what the film is, but to re-contextualize and reexamine what it might mean.
Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider transposes Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet into the fractured, fragile and unstable political landscape of 1990’s Kashmir—a region in India that continues to scar with brutalities, of militancy, disappearances, and the dominating presence of Indian military under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). The plot focuses on the personal struggles of a young student from Aligarh Muslim University after he returns to Srinagar to find his father missing and his mother entangled in a love affair with his uncle. The fabric of Shakespeare’s narration is woven through the intricate realities drawn from Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Nights. Together, these sketch Kashmir’s figurative character and reimagine its core. Kashmir turns into a haunting metaphor for Bjardwaj, whose lineage wanders within the intersections of hushed resistance, stifled justice and faint rebellion. As Bhardwaj affirmed in an interview, Kashmir is the Hamlet of his film. Bhardwaj stays true to the emotional challenges, everyday experiences, and nuanced representation of Kashmir’s social reality as experienced by locals. Haider’s cinematic frames, directorial vision and poetic anguish are uniquely inspired by shades of suffering that do not collapse into mourning. Instead, they transcend tangled desires, connecting longings and emotions to a plane of reason, as inspired by the liminalities of Shakespeare’s stage. Bhardwaj dwells within a vulnerable, numbing uneasiness that becomes palpable through frosty silences and desaturated acoustic textures. Silence operates not as absence but as affective pressure. Extended pauses, muted interiors, and snow-laden long shots suspend dialogue, allowing ambient sounds, the crunch of footsteps, distant military hums, and unanswered telephones to assume narrative force.
The early modern era was a time of significant transformation in England. The population was booming, enclosure was altering people’s relationship with land, and an increase in colonial projects marked a new level of globalization. These transformations expanded trade and shifted early modern understandings of the world, ultimately leading to more complex interactions with people from other places. As Jean Howard notes, the shift in population meant that “between foreigners and aliens, London must at times have felt like a city where… the mixing of different kinds of people was inevitable.”1 While there had always been some instability, this shift in wealth and population challenged previously restrictive sociocultural boundaries in the early modern era. Patricia Akhimie explains that this shift was not just about land and money, but identity as well, since “the potential for mobility—a shift in social status, or national or cultural identity—[was] revolutionary in the early modern period… an awesome opportunity as well as an anxiety-provoking prospect.”2 As space between different lands became more easily traversed, so did the space between class and the identity associated with it. Thus, the early modern population grappled not only with new ideas and cultures, but with how contact with these previously unknown entities would alter their own sense of identity.
The Comedy of Errors, like most Shakespeare plays, includes far more male characters than female ones. Only sixteen percent of Shakespeare’s 981 characters are female, and only thirteen percent of major roles (with more than 500 lines) are given to female characters.1 This percentage is slightly higher in The Comedy of Errors, but still only five of eighteen named characters are women. Thus, the interaction between the male characters seems to largely drive the main events of the play. Egeon argues for his life and the two Antipholuses and Dromios continually misidentify each other until the Duke resolves the whole situation at the end. Though the low proportion of female characters might suggest that they play a less important role than their male counterparts, these five women not only add much of the psychological depth of the play, but they also introduce important topics related to gender and equality that Shakespeare will return to again and again in his subsequent plays.
Shelley: Welcome, everybody. We are delighted to spend a little bit of time with you discussing Henry the Eighth. We’re delighted that that was the common show that people selected as part of the conference, and hopefully you enjoyed that on Monday evening. We have additional actors who will be joining us. They are on their way over. But in the meantime, by way of introduction, my name is Stuart. I’m the education director at the Festival. I’ve been with the Festival full time now for three seasons, with a brief stint in 2016 doing summer camps and classes. We have Alaysia Duncan with us, we have Geoffrey Kent, and we will hopefully have Topher Embrey and Christopher Centinaro joining us shortly. We’ll get started, and I’m going to just give the welcoming question. If you’ll tell us a little bit about yourself, the roles that you play this season, Henry the Eighth and other plays, and where you’re from. We’ll get started there, and then we’ll move forward.
Copyright (c) 2025 Southern Utah University Press
In this paper, I study William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) from environmental and postcolonial perspectives. I will analyze Shakespeare’s play as a means to discuss such concepts as anthropocentrism, agency, ecophobia, speciesism, and ecological imperialism, which inherently culminate in postcolonial ecocriticism. I argue that The Tempest emphasizes the repercussions of colonial endeavors on humans, other beings and nature, by delineating the violent relationships that arise from conflicts, and the risks of controlling the environment. This paper also emphasizes that the play does not simply reflect colonial and environmental anxieties but actively critiques them. While many scholars have explored its engagement with anthropocentrism, speciesism, and ecological imperialism, this study builds on these foundations to emphasize two key aspects: first, the ambiguous identity of Caliban and the implications for both racism and speciesism, and second, the play’s nuanced portrayal of nature as not inherently dangerous but manipulated by human intervention for political gain. By foregrounding these aspects, The Tempest emerges not only as a commentary on colonial exploitation, but also as a prophetic warning about environmental destruction.
Why does Macbeth order the murder of Macduff’s family? Macduff is a threat to Macbeth’s power, and Macbeth has been warned to beware Macduff. Although the murder of Macduff’s family serves as an act of revenge for Macduff’s resistance, Macbeth’s order is an exercise of tyranny over the people and lineal successions—over the present and the future. Macbeth’s tyrannical desire for greater power is a shared characteristic with Shakespeare’s other tyrants. Particular to Macbeth, however, is the focus on inheritance and lineal succession. Macbeth’s attempts to prevent the lineal rule of Duncan and Banquo, while simultaneously trying to establish his own hereditary dynasty, suggests the desire to extend his rule and power to a longer stretch of time—to a new scale. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the different scalar operations of time—temporality and eternity—are reflected in the different scalar operations of politics—the individual and the body politic. Macbeth’s tragedy lies in his attempt and ultimate failure to cross the scalar threshold of temporal politics.
Ask Shakespeare critics what is Shylock’s most indispensable monologue in The Merchant of Venice, and we should not be surprised if the answer is, more frequently than not, the “Hath Not a Jew” speech in which Shylock denounces Antonio for mistreating him despite the fact that all men share the same essential characteristics (3.1.50-69).1 The reasons that this particular speech have fascinated readers and critics need hardly take up much space in the main text of this article. Suffice it to note that the speech has been called, in its appeal for Shylock’s humanity, “the only moment of genuine nobility and dignity” for the character, and an opportunity for Shakespeare to expose “the irrationality and evil of prejudice.”2 And yet, despite the attention paid to “Hath Not a Jew,” I will argue that the most interesting and significant speech given by Shylock in the play is his less appreciated speech on slavery in the trial scene, a speech I will refer to as “Many A Purchased Slave.”3 Where “Hath Not A Jew” shocks by its stark evocation of hatred, its vitriolic confrontation of the ideology of difference, and its chilling promise of “hard” vengeance, “Many A Purchased Slave” challenges us to wrestle with a more complex and nuanced production of Shylock’s rhetoric and to do so in a more suggestive social and historical context.
Organology, Infinite Semiosis, and Gender Fluidity in Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1599) is known for its recurrent themes of music and gender—themes that have been the focus of scholarship in various disciplines. Musicology and English literature studies have addressed these central elements of the play. Yet, while most of these analyses have been carried out within the purview of their separate subject areas, only a handful of scholars have addressed these topics in conjunction. Most notably, Marcus Tan focuses on the music likely used in the performance of Twelfth Night as a commentary on gender ambivalence.1
Much has been written about the breadth of knowledge that William Shakespeare displays in his work, allowing scholars to combine historical and biographical details to speculate on his impressive range of intellect. While numerous articles discuss the relationship between the Bard and the medical field,2 comparatively less attention has been paid to his discussion of dentistry. This article aims to provide a holistic look at the various components of dental care that were on the audience’s mind at the time: the numerous factors that negatively impacted the quality of one’s teeth, leading to toothaches; attempts to clean teeth to stave off their removal; the persistence of halitosis; and the supernatural relevance ascribed to toothaches, natal teeth, and other dental abnormalities, such as harelips. Comparatively few scholars have discussed the expansive role and influence of dentistry in the early modern period in depth, and this article looks to compile the disparate research into a concise view of the problems plaguing Shakespeare’s audience. Additionally, without speculating on how much personal experience Shakespeare had with the unsettling dentistry practices of the time, this article discusses how he reflects his audience’s understanding of these issues throughout his canon. Nearly every play3 mentions teeth in a variety of applications, and he ultimately draws a correlation between one’s dental condition and social status: from the toothpicks used by the upper class, to the low opinion held of tooth-pullers, to the maliciousness ascribed to Richard III because of his natal teeth. Shakespeare’s works reveal a communal dental experience that united audience members from the Queen to the peasants, yet still reaffirmed cultural differences in how they did—or did not—address their dental problems.
As Shakespeare director and scholar Sara Reimers puts it, the “very idea of a feminist Shrew is arguably an oxymoron.”1 For anyone familiar with the play, it is not difficult to understand how such an argument could be made. While Shakespeare’s later comedies are often lauded for the liberating journeys undertaken by their heroines, The Taming of the Shrew can be read as a shockingly misogynistic mirror image. Although at first glance it is extremely troubling, it remains one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays.2 Certainly, there have been modern productions that uncritically restage Shrew’s early modern sexism for laughs, but thankfully most modern producers realize that Petruchio’s beliefs and behaviors cannot fly as straightly-played comedy. As a result, modern Shakespeare practice has developed several strategies for staging feminist interpretations of the play that are more tolerable and useful to modern audiences, including both traditional and non-traditional casting approaches.
Dance and swordplay played important roles in the early modern playhouse. Considered to be complementary arts, they were a feature of many plays of the time, including William Shakespeare’s.1 Actors would have needed to be skilled in dancing and fencing to fulfil their roles in such plays. To accurately portray a wide range of societies and characters and to appeal to the range of audience members in the playhouse—from the working classes to gentlemen—acting companies would have to know both elite and common dance and fencing practices.2 Presenting a pavane on stage, for example, would resonate with upper classes in the audience, while a country or morris dance would be recognizable by working-class audience members.3 In his plays, Shakespeare uses dance and swordplay as part of the play’s action, and in his rhetoric to develop characters’ personalities, create stylistic figures, portray tropes, and perform other functions.4
Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare’s most frequently performed comedy,1 often centers on the witty banter and relationship of Beatrice and Benedick. Though the dramatic plot centers around Hero and Claudio, the actors playing Beatrice and Benedick are nonetheless the first billed in theater and film adaptations, and the pair’s romance features heavily in Much Ado marketing. In their content advisory for example, the Utah Shakespeare Festival described their 2024 production of Much Ado by claiming that Beatrice and Benedick are one of Shakespeare’s “most popular and best-matched couples” and also warning that the play comes with “sexual puns and innuendo” and “themes of deceit and infidelity.”2 Placing Beatrice and Benedick at the fore is a good marketing strategy, but the omnipresent “themes of infidelity” are often cut or softened in modern productions. One of these softening approaches is the routine abridgment of the character of Margaret—Hero’s waiting gentlewoman—who plays a key role in the central deceit of the play.
In 2019, Justin Audibert used cross-gender casting in the RSC’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, setting the play in an alternate Elizabethan era where women hold power over men.1 Inspired by Naomi Alderman’s matriarchal sci-fi novel The Power, Audibert’s production changes characters and lines in the play to reflect a matriarchy that is the direct inverse of the patriarchy portrayed in Shakespeare’s Shrew.2 In a casting experiment some reviewers dismissed as a “gimmick”3 or an attempt at “political correctness,”4 Audibert swaps the genders of most of the characters in the play, with an emphasis on placing female characters in roles of power. Katherine and Bianca (Bianco, in this production) are re-gendered as male and many of the male characters are renamed and re-written as female (Petruchio becomes Petruchia, Lucentio is Lucentia, etc.). There is particular resonance to using this technique with Shrew, which owes its problem-play status to the brutality of the power imbalance in the central relationship between Katherine and Petruchio. The visual and textual coding of female authority and male subservience in the production demonstrates that the societal inequities of Shakespeare’s Padua go beyond the Katherine/Petruchio marriage, however. Audibert’s world-building reverses the power imbalance in Shakespeare’s Shrew rather than removing or correcting it, illustrating that any systemic power imbalance is destructive to communities as well as individuals. Although Audibert’s staged matriarchy is not idealized as a solution for patriarchy or for the problems of the Shrew, his gender-swapped casting presents an innovative alternative for gender parity on the Shakespearean stage.
Subversive energies abounded in early modern English theater. This was partly due to evolving political and economic systems as England moved toward a capitalist society. As commercial enterprises, the early modern theaters became sites wherein the emerging conflicts of political and socioeconomic changes both pressured the theatrical venture and were dramatized by it. Nowhere are these conflicts more manifest than in the clown characters. The theatrical clown may have functioned as a means of controlling the audience’s (or specific audience members’) subversive energies. By controlling audience responses, and encouraging audience interaction when, and only when, it served the drama, the clown may have been upholding the political and socio-economic status quo by encouraging textual veneration and ensuring a well-ordered and controlled theatrical event.1 However, examining the careers of the actors who played the clown characters–their improvisations which resisted government censorship, the connections they forged with what we would today call working-class audience members, and their subversion of the play-text itself–suggests that early modern theatrical clowns could not be so simply categorized.
Bahr: It’s the twenty-fourth year of inviting academic scholars to campus to see Shakespeare performed. I think this is a very, very important part of the work. And when I say the work, I’m talking about the overall work of both production and research.
Copyright (c) 2023 Southern Utah University Press
"Let all the dukes and all the devils roar"
Having recently freed the noble kinsman Palamon from prison, the Jailer’s Daughter defiantly exclaims what she has done: “Let all the dukes and all the devils roar, / He is at liberty! I have ventured for him / And out I have brought him” (2.6.1-3).1 In the Daughter’s soliloquy, she details the complex machinations behind the plot which has been motivated by her passionate love for the eloquent prisoner of whom she observes, “Fairer spoken / Was never gentleman” (2.4.20-21). Furthermore, as she confesses of her primary motivation for releasing Palamon without her father, the Jailer’s knowledge, “O, Love, / What a stout-hearted child thou art!” (2.6.8-9). At this pivotal moment in time, the Jailer’s Daughter demonstrates the remarkable potency of language to illuminate key relationships between people. As Russ McDonald argues of this crucial type of speech, “Shakespeare’s artful arrangement of moving words is the engine that generates immense emotional and theatrical power. The events depicted are often extremely moving, and usually it is the form of expression that augments the emotional effect.”2 For example, the Jailer’s Daughter’s striking repetition of the personal pronoun “I” in this stunning jailbreak speech underscores her strong female agency and commitment to securing Palamon’s freedom: “I have ventured for him / And out I have brought him” (2.6.2-3). As Hélène Cixous reflects of the markedly gendered verbal power which the Daughter displays, “Feminine strength is such that while running away with syntax, breaking the famous line (just a tiny little thread, so they say) … she goes to the impossible where she plays the other, for love, without dying of it.”3 Challenging her potential detractors, the Daughter rhetorically “runs away with syntax” by speaking from a place of deeply rooted authority—and of course, personal agency. If, as Jillian Cavanaugh argues, “Performativity is the power of language to effect change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead (or also) function as a form of social action,” the Jailer’s Daughter’s decisive words not only emphasize her shocking release of the prisoner, but also trigger the powerful affective responses of imagination and empathy within the audience—thus rendering its members complicit in her compelling ruse.4
“What does a woman want?” That was the “great question” which Freud famously posed to Marie Bonaparte while investigating her difficulties achieving orgasm. That was the great mystery for one relationship workshop, whose claims of how “she’s so confusing, no means yes? yes means no?” motivated booklets purporting to “decode” what a woman says versus what she means.1 The stereotype is that a woman cannot be taken at her word, from which arises the related stereotypes of women being either deceitful or fickle—and the complementing view that a man’s role is to then find out what truly lies behind her words. Uncertainties around women, and patriarchal society’s anxiety to eliminate that uncertainty, have been mainstays of human culture for a long time. Of particular note for this essay would be Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, plays which in part dramatize the investigation into women and female sexuality. Pericles begins with its eponymous character challenging King Antiochus’s riddle for the right to marry his daughter, which would make him son-in-law to Antiochus and thus heir to his kingdom. When the riddle turns out to obliquely refer to the incest between King and daughter, it sets the stage for how the play would thereafter continue to fold its preoccupation with the ambiguities of women (including female bodies and female sexuality) into its riddling structure. Pericles, in a sense, makes woman a riddle to be solved. The riddle that Kinsmen takes up, meanwhile, is that of whom the heroine Emilia would prefer to marry, between the titular Arcite and Palamon, who must then fight to marry her and to be recognised by her kingly brother-in-law Theseus.
Converging Polarities in Shakespeare's Othello
Scholarship has largely discussed the genre of Othello, a tragedy that challenges a simple definition because it creates a kind of singularity out of a range of different genres. Like many Renaissance and Elizabethan dramatic works, Othello is a synthesis of influences resulting from the adaptation of Roman drama, epic sources, non-fictional treatises like Machiavelli’s Il Principe, and a dramatic tradition ranging from festive performance cultures to revenge tragedy.1 This complex generative process has led to new generic definitions, such as “Satiric Comedy Ending in Tragedy” (Richard Whalen), “Comedy of Abjection” (Michael D. Bristol), and “Comedy of Judgement” (Jason Crawford), which might look like an antithesis to the classification of tragedy and call for a re-evaluation of the genre conventions present in the play.
Gendered Severed Hands and "Acting" Disabled in Titus Andronicus
Throughout its critical history, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus has been positioned as relentlessly violent and morbidly obsessed with dismemberment to the detriment of the play’s interpretive value. While this seeming brutality has been evaluated from various points of view and through an array of theoretical lenses, previous scholarship has not yet seriously discussed the portrayal of intersectional disability in tandem with metatheatrical performance within this play. This essay aims to consider the embodied implications of the characterization of disability and gendered impairment in Titus Andronicus with a focus on the contrasting experiences of Titus and Lavinia. In particular, the motif of the severed, gendered hand embodies this concept as it holds significant socio-theoretical weight in addition to physical agentive power. The play establishes and enforces an ableist framework which alienates the disabled body from the agentive body, using disability as a synonym for incapacity in plot-making, which has significant ramifications in staging contemporary performance. Although previous disability scholarship on Titus has considered Titus and Lavinia equally through the lens of the traumatized body, this essay seeks to discuss the issue of intersectionality and disability in addition to the way the play interrogates true and performed disability in the text and on-stage.
"Feasts are too Proud / Better to Starve"
Food plays an unexpectedly key role in the Shakespearean canon, regularly signaling social, political, economic, and religious cruxes. While frequently overlooked, the preparation, availability and scarcity of food highlights significant informational nodes in the plays. Disputes involving food, for instance, often reveal close convergences between dietary options and challenging loci of interpersonal conflict, frequently connected with competing hierarchies associated with status as well as domestic, political, financial, or social power. Access to expensive items, on the other hand, typically indicates privilege when it is available and social or financial precarity when it is absent, restricted, threatened, or taken away. While food is not the only marker of status or authority appearing in the dramas, it draws attention to close ties between diet and social or political standing. As the title of this essay suggests, both feast and famine regularly signal complex moral and ethical issues. Many of Shakespeare’s plays use food to communicate matters of social importance and distinction. These markers are not always evident to conventional modern audiences, but they help make visible how comestible privilege and deprivation illuminates critical social divides in the societies on display.
"Is there any record of any two that loved better than we do?"
In early modern England, male friendship had a significant influence on various areas of everyday life, including the social, political and economic spheres. Contemporaries such as Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon therefore attempted to conceptualize and articulate a definition of an ideal male friendship. According to Montaigne, in an idealized friendship, “there is general, universal warmth, tempered, moreover, and even, a constant and settled warmth, all gentleness and smoothness that has nothing harsh and stinging about it.”1 To such an ideal friendship, Montaigne explains, marriage is an impediment because, unlike friendship, marriage is “forced” since it is a “business or commerce,” and it can thus “upset the course of keen affection.”2 This opinion is also shared by Francis Bacon, who states that “he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises….Unmarried men are best friends.”3 Both Montaigne and Bacon, then, accord friendship a higher value than family since, in contrast to marriage, which is based on economic motivations, ideal male friendship is of an immaterial nature, characterized by altruism and mutual emotional support. Furthermore, because it is such a central aspect of human life, male friendship is fundamental to identity formation. As Montaigne states, friends “mingle and blend so completely into one another, in so complete a mixture, that they efface the seam between them.”4 Such a Humanist understanding of ideal male friendship thus suggests a spiritual conceptualization, in which friends figuratively merge into one another and, in this way, share and determine each other’s identity, dissolving the boundaries of selfhood. As a result of this spiritual union, friendship not only affects individual identity, but it also shapes all other bonds, including romantic, social and political relationships.5 Idealized male friendship is thus universally potent.
Copyright (c) 2022 Southern Utah University Press
Stewart Shelley: Welcome to our Actor’s Panel. We are delighted to welcome members of the panel and Dr. Bernstein, who is our dramaturg and director of seminar. We have Yvette, Jeremy, Kevan and Rob ready to discuss the show, answer questions, and share insight. This is our incredible group of Wooden O participants. We also have a few people joining us via Zoom. So, without further ado, I will turn that over to you.
In Act 2, scene 2 of John Lyly’s Galatea, Cupid expresses his plan to complicate the lives of Diana and her nymphs: “I will make their pains my pastimes, and so / confound their loves in their own sex that they shall dote / in their desires, delight in their affection, and practice / other impossibilities” (2.2.7-10)1. Cupid’s belief that it is an “impossibility” to love someone of the same sex is contested by the content of Lyly’s play, in which two women dressed as men fall deeply in love with one another in the safety of a forest. Though the play appears to suggest that it is not possible for a pair of women to pursue a life together, it also implies that the “practice” of sex acts between women might not be “impossible” at all.
The Traumatic Stress of Revenge and War in Hamlet and Stephan Wolfert's Cry Havoc!
In Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors—and Ours, Alan Warren Friedman analyzes Hamlet’s paradoxical status as a play that both is and is not about a “returning warrior.”1 I argue this paradox is related to the play’s dramatization of the alienation of traumatic stress in a context of suppressed collective trauma. In both Hamlet and contemporary America, trauma is both pervasive yet individualized; it is largely unrecognized at the cultural level, yet medicalized at the level of the subject. This dynamic is particularly relevant to America’s treatment of veterans with posttraumatic stress. Stephan Wolfert’s Cry Havoc!2 excavates these paradoxes, bringing them to the surface to create cathartic theater that is both a one-man play and a communal experience. Wolfert shares his experience as an Army veteran and the work itself creates a community of Shakespeare’s isolated veterans: Richard III shares the stage with Coriolanus and Macbeth. Wolfert goes beyond dramatizing trauma and explicitly aims to heal veterans’ trauma; Cry Havoc! raises awareness about Wolfert’s DE-CRUIT program, “which uses theatre to address traumatic stress and related problems encountered by veterans.”3
Eight months after John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln, his brother and fellow Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth returned to the national stage as Hamlet. Opening night, January 2, 1866, saw a crowd of hundreds thronging the entrance to the Winter Garden Theatre, clamoring to see Booth’s return.1 According to the New York World, as soon as the curtain revealed Booth in the second scene, “applause burst spontaneously from every part of the house. The men stamped, clapped their hands, and hurrahed continuously; the ladies rose in their seats and waved a thousand handkerchiefs; and for a full five minutes a scene of wild excitement forbade the progress of the play.” The play eventually proceeded, but each act ended with a shower of wreaths and applause for Booth, and even occasional hisses and groans for the lone New York paper to denounce Booth’s return to public life.2