This book discusses early modern English drama as a part of visual culture. It concerns the ideas about 'making and unmaking' that Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have known and formulated, and how these ideas relate to the author's own critical assumptions about early modern aesthetic experience. The study of drama as a part of visual culture offers the perfect context for an exploration of pre-modern aesthetic discourse. The book expounds the author's approach to plays as participants in a lively post-Reformation visual culture in the process of 're-formation'. It then focuses on the social meanings of patronage of the visual arts in a discussion of Paulina as patron of Hermione's image in The Winter's Tale. The discussion of The Winter's Tale pivots around the play's troubling investment in patriarchal notions of 'perfection'. The book also explores image-breaking in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This play presents an instance of onstage iconoclasm in the supernatural destruction of a demonic brazen head, a quasi-magical figure that had been depicted in English literature since at least the twelfth century. In focusing on the portrayal of invisibility in The Two Merry Milkmaids, the book explores early modern preoccupation with processes of visual construction in a play in which there is very little artisanal activity.
in a context in which completion is conceptualised as transgression? To begin to answer these questions, this chapter will explore image-breaking in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (first performed c. 1589), which presents an instance of onstage iconoclasm in the supernatural destruction of a demonic brazen head, a quasi-magical figure that had been
, since as a noun it referred to ‘the act of setting forth descriptively’. 2 When dramatists put image-making on display, therefore, they often do so using words as well as spectacle; in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay , we are told of the making of a magical brazen head by a demon named Belcephon, and see the destruction of this item onstage by means of a magical hammer. 3 In
pictures’ (p. 86, line 19). Consequently, examples in which dramatists grapple with the limitations of representational activity have been discussed here as a mode of problem-solving. This is the light in which I have viewed the deployment of defacement and erasure in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The Two Merry Milkmaids ; in addition, the evocation of the unknowability of Hermione’s image has
virtually anything to back up their argument.4 Probably taken from this purportedly factual source, it made its way into a play in the seventeenth century, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634).5 At a later date, another version of the story turns up as evidence provided by eyewitnesses in a criminal trial presided over by Sir Matthew Hale in the 1660s.6 Even more striking is the case of the 1592 witchcraft pamphlet mentioned by Marion Gibson, which ‘plagiarized a long extract from a play, Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, inserting incidents from it into the
an audience who also sees the moment of passage into a supposed state of invisibility. While it may be fair to say that invisibility on the early modern stage is always ‘on display’ as a material state, it should be pointed out that this display usually evades absolute clarity. Much like the brazen head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay , the making of the items which in turn
Society, 1926), l. pp. 953–59. Subsequent references, given parenthetically, are to this edition. 75 Whether or not the witch of Endor had any real power was a disputed point in early modern Europe, as was the nature of the apparition that spoke to Saul; see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 242–44, and the section on Macbeth in Chapter 3. Witchcraft in Elizabethan drama 83 (presumably the same prop was used in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay), and delivers false prophecies which lead directly to the death of the
Science in Twelfth-Century England: The History of Gerbert of Aurillac’s Talking Head’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73:2 (April 2012), 201–22. The fabled talking head apparently inspired the prop used in Robert Greene’s plays Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus King of Aragon (see Chapter 3). Scepticism in the Renaissance 51 ridiculous; even Infidelitas has to smile at them. Nonetheless, they do constitute witchcraft, and the possibility of giving oneself to the devil seems entirely real in the play. The kind of Catholic witchcraft represented by Idolatria
function as onstage spectators. In The Winter’s Tale , Paulina is patron of the supposed statue of Hermione; in Lyly’s Campaspe , Alexander the Great commissions a portrait of Campaspe, while in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay , Friar Bacon oversees a demonic image-making process. Since The Two Merry Milkmaids concerns spectatorship within the visual field rather than of a specific artwork, there