Journal of the Wooden O

Shakespeare's Boy Actors and the Ideal of White Femininity

Virginia Mason Vaughan — 2023-04-18

Throughout its lengthy stage history, Shakespeare’s Othello startled and sometimes outraged audiences by its juxtaposition of a black (occasionally bronze) Moor with the fair-skinned Desdemona. In performances from the seventeenth-century to the early twentieth, adult actors crafted Shakespeare’s Moor through exotic language, face blackening, and prosthetics—wigs, props, and costumes. Early modern race studies often focus on the ways such “blackface” representations of Othello from Shakespeare’s era to nineteenth-century minstrel shows created, circulated and solidified racist assumptions.¹ As Judith Butler argued in her study of gender, “repeated stylizations of the body . . , congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being;”² in the case of Othello, repeated performances naturalized the stereotype of the black, jealous, murderous Moor.

Shakespeare's Racial Destiny

Teddy Lance — 2023-04-18

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

The Traumatic Stress of Revenge and War in Hamlet and Stephan Wolfert's Cry Havoc!

Christine Gottlieb — 2023-04-18

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

Possible Impossibilities

Caitlin Mahaffy — 2023-04-18

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.

Acting Shakespeare

Isabel Smith-Bernstein — 2023-04-18

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.

"Is there any record of any two that loved better than we do?"

Fabia Buescher — 2023-04-18

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.