Solo performances : : staging the early modern self in England / / edited by Ute Berns.

• Superior document: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 132
• TeilnehmendeR: Berns, Ute.
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam ;, New York, NY : : Rodopi,, 2010.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 132.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 pages) :; illustrations.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

In this volume an international cast of scholars explores conceptions of the self in the literature and culture of the Early Modern England. Drawing on theories of performativity and performance, some contributors revisit monological speech and the soliloquy - that quintessential solo performance - on the stage of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Other authors move beyond the theatre as they investigate solo performances in different cultural locations, from the public stage of the pillory to the mental stage of the writing self. All contributors analyse corporeality, speech, writing and even silence as interrelated modes of self-enactment, whether they read solo performances as a way of inventing, authorizing or even pathologizing the self, or as a mode of fashioning sovereignty. The contributions trace how the performers appropriate specific discourses, whether religious, medical or political, and how they negotiate hierarchies of gender, rank or cultural difference. The articles cut across a variety of genres including plays and masques, religious tracts, diaries and journals, poems and even signatures. The collection links research on the inward and self-reflexive dimension of solo-performances with studies foregrounding the public and interactive dimension of performative self-fashioning. The articles collected here offer new perspectives on Early Modern subjectivity and will be of interest to all scholars and students of the Early Modern period.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Foreword / Manfred Pfister -- Solo Performances — an Introduction / Ute Berns -- The Theatre in the Head Performances of the Self for the Self by the Self / Ina Schabert -- Subjectivity and the Ekphrastic Prerogative Emilia’s Soliloquy in The Two Noble Kinsmen / Andrew James Johnston -- Our Good Will Shakespeare’s Cameo Performance / Richard Wilson -- Spiritual Self-Fashioning John Lilburne at the Pillory / Werner von Koppenfels -- Auto-Dialogues Performative Creation of Selves / Jürgen Schlaeger -- The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Hamlet, of Denmark / Günter Walch -- A Spider in the Eye/I The Hallucinatory Staging of the Self in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale / Maria Del Sapio Garbero -- Of Idiocy, Moroseness, and Vitriol Soloists of Rage in Ben Jonson’s Satire / Rui Carvalho Homem -- The Poem as Performance Self-Definition and Self-Exhibition in John Donne’s Songs and Sonets / Wolfgang G. Müller -- Plays of Self Theatrical Performativity in Donne / Margret Fetzer -- Stating the Sovereign Self Polity, Policy, and Politics on the Early Modern Stage / Roger Lüdeke and Andreas Mahler -- The Monarch as the Solo Performer in Stuart Masque / Jerzy Limon -- Turkish Brags and Winning Words Solo Performances in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great / Ralf Hertel -- Notes on Contributors.