Circumstantial Shakespeare

209 Pages·2015·1.459 MB·English

by  Lorna Hutson

oxford wells shakespeare lectures
Circumstantial Shakespeare

Circumstantial
Shakespeare
LORNA HUTSON
1
1
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© Lorna Hutson 2015
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First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937098
ISBN 978–0–19–965710–0
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For Linda

Acknowledgements
This short book has incurred a long list of debts. Andrew McNeillie
first invited me to give the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures
and Jacqueline Baker followed up the invitation with characteristic
warmth and encouragement. The generous hospitality of the Oxford
English Faculty, Oxford University Press, and St Catharine’s College
enabled me to enjoy many conversations over the two-week period
of the lectures’ delivery in October 2012. Special thanks are due to
Bart Van Es, whose thoughtfulness both as the host of my visit and as
the host of the lectures made the experience of delivering them less
daunting and much more of a pleasure. It was an honour for me to
be delivering a lecture series named for Stanley Wells: many years ago
Stanley was one of my DPhil examiners.
I gave talks from the series at a number of other Universities.
I would like to thank Joanne Wilkes and Sophie Tomlinson at the
University of Auckland, where I was 2012 Alice Griffin Shakespeare
Fellow; Elaine Hadley at the University of Chicago; Kristine
Johanson at the University of Amsterdam; Subha Mukherji at
Cambridge; and Richard Wilson at Kingston University. Thanks, too,
to all the audiences at these different venues who patiently listened
and asked thought-provoking questions. At St Andrews the Centre
for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature has been an
immensely stimulating forum—thanks to Andy Murphy, my support-
ive Head of School, and to CMEMLL’s co-director, John Hudson. In
2013 postgraduates Rachel Holmes and Toria Johnson humoured me
with a CMEMLL conference that included ‘circumstances’ in its title,
thereby allowing the topic yet another airing.
A number of people have been kind enough to read and comment
on the lectures as they were gradually transformed into the chapters of
the book. From the first vague ideas and disorganized drafts, Victoria
Kahn and Bradin Cormack encouraged me to believe I actually had
an argument. St Andrews colleagues with whom I discussed the ideas,
Alex Davis and Neil Rhodes, helped sustain me in this belief. Mary
Nyquist read the lecture drafts and astutely pointed out many places
viii Acknowledgements
where the arguments needed tightening up. At a later stage, just when
I seemed unable to break through a conceptual impasse, Linda Hardy
made a crucial reading suggestion, pointing me towards narratology.
The enthusiasm of Robert Crawford and Natalie Davis was a huge
boost, making me feel that I was on to something.
I owe particular thanks to four people who read the entire book
manuscript in its latter stages. John Kerrigan ploughed through
both lecture and book drafts and to his comments, as well as to his
work on binding language, I happily acknowledge myself bound and
indebted. Though I delivered and titled the Circumstantial Shakespeare
lectures before I knew about Quentin Skinner’s Forensic Shakespeare,
I have benefited from Quentin’s generosity in sharing his typescript
with me, learning a great deal from his erudition in matters rhetorical,
as well as from his exemplary graciousness. To Colin Burrow I offer
grateful thanks for going through the whole typescript with pencilled
marginal comments. In response to Colin’s urging I rethought claims
for Shakespeare’s exceptionality and wrote a bit more about other
dramatists’ uses of the topics of circumstance. My extensive debt to
Kathy Eden’s foundational work is recorded in footnotes; at a late
stage, she also read the typescript and made wise criticisms. At Oxford
University Press, I’d like to thank Rachel Platt, my editor, and Edwin
Pritchard, my copy-editor, each exemplary in their roles.
Nearer home, I’d like to thank Ben Seal and Kirsty Whiten with-
out whose practical kindness and compassion and creative inspiration
I would never have been able to balance full-time teaching and writ-
ing the book with looking after the dog. My own family, the Hutsons,
and my late partner’s, the Sprents, have been a mainstay, as have
many friends, Charlotte Dormandy, Jocelyn Stoddard, and Maggie
Lloyd among them. My daughter Ellie has coped admirably in a sor-
rowful time, for which I am grateful. Last and most, however, Linda
Hardy has traded hemispheres to share life with me, for which no
words could ever adequately express my gratitude.
Contents
Introduction 1
I.1. Causa Tempus Locus: Motive, Time, and Place 1
I.2. Neoclassical ‘Reported Action’ and the
Fabula/Sjuzhet Distinction 5
I.3. Inferring the Fabula in Shakespeare Criticism 13
I.4. ‘This Accident is not unlike my dreame’: Arguments
and Episodes 17
I.5. ‘Many Days and Many Places, Inartificially Imagined’ 22
1. ‘Quando?’ (When?) in Romeo and Juliet 36
1.1. Shakespeare in Parts/Shakespeare is Pants? 36
1.2. ‘It was the Nightingale, and not the Larke’ 43
1.3. ‘The very same book which Shakespeare consulted’ 50
1.4. ‘The true ground of all these piteous woes’ 55
1.5. Juliet’s Unconscious 60
2. ‘Imaginary Work’: Opportunity in Lucrece and in King Lear 70
2.1. ‘This weaues it selfe perforce into my businesse’ 70
2.2. Circumstances before the Emergence
of Statistical Probability 76
2.3. Circumstances as Sources of Emotion
and Imagination 79
2.4. Lucrece’s Circumstances 86
2.5. Timing Is Everything: The Death of Cordelia 96
3. Where and How? Two Gentlemen of Verona and
The Maid’s Tragedy 107
3.1. ‘Tant d’actes particuliers’ 107
3.2. Where Should a Gentleman Spend His Time? 111
3.3. ‘How did thy Master part with Madam Iulia?’ 118
3.4. Marlowe, Lyly, Jonson 125
3.5. ‘About ye How & Where Debate arose’:
The Maid’s Tragedy 130