Swimming with Shakespeare Flashcards
Water in Shakespeare
- Shipwrecks (e.g. The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles)
- Sea battles (Othello, Antony and Cleopatra)
- Maritime trade (The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice)
- Ships (The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet)
- Pirates (Twelfth Night, Hamlet)
- Drownings (Hamlet)
- Cleansing (Macbeth)
Shakespeare’s Aquatic Environment
- The physical geography and social history of England inevitably put a maritime stamp on the works of its most celebrated poet. The British Isles have an immensely long coastline in proportion to their area; it is physically impossible to be much more than fifty miles from the sea anywhere in England. London at the end of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth was the early modern center of English shipping
- The sea was not only locally and literally present in late Renaissance English life, it was also culturally and economically of increasing centrality to the nation-state. Within two decades of Shakespeare’s death, “at least half the King’s subjects derived their living directly or indirectly from the sea”
Early Modern Blue Humanities
- the significance of the sea in the works of Shakespeare has in recent decades been largely ignored
- Shakespeare employed a broad range of nautical imagery and terminology … Shakespeare’s preoccupation with marine phenomena – whales, wrecks, pirates, and the wonders of the seabed
- he was intensely interested in the aesthetic possibilities of imagining a realm that was essentially invisible
-Today, as the human impact on the seas becomes increasingly apparent, scholars are again turning to the literary history of the sea
Blue Shakespeare
The oceans comprise the largest and least-known space on the planet, a moving body of more-than-human power and instability. We need a poetic history of the oceans, and Shakespeare, somewhat surprisingly, can help us tell one. … We need Shakespeare now, because late-twentieth-century culture has frayed our connection to the sea
Why Blue Humanities?
- sheer mass of water => influence on culture, literature, art
- blue turn => change of perspective on space (mobility, volume & depth)
Shakespeare’s oceans
- his oceans span the God-sea of the ancient world where ‘they who go down to the sea in ships’ see ‘wonders in the deep’, and the boundless deeps of the early modern globe. Shakespeare’s plays write the sea as opaque, inhospitable, and alluring, a dynamic reservoir of estrangement and enchantment
- Sixteenth- century cartographers and writers transformed the traditional European world picture from a largely terrestrial one to an oceanic one
- the sea emerges as a geopolitically vital yet obstinately unassimilable piece of the world picture
A Brief History of Sea & Shore
The sea-shore of antiquity, as imagined in the classical period, remains haunted by the possibility of a monster bursting forth or of the sudden incursion of foreigners, who are comparable to monsters; as a natural setting for unexpected violence, it is the privileged scene for abductions.
Early modern ocean
- sea originally feared and alluded to chaos
- age of voyages, trade, travel
- sea emerges as geopolitically vital
- Shakespeare wrote in response to contemporary events (maps created during his time)
Twelfth Night
Viola, separated from her twin Sebastian, dresses as a boy and works for the Duke Orsino, whom she falls in love with. Orsino is in love with the Countess Olivia, and sends Viola to court her for him, but Olivia falls for Viola instead. Sebastian arrives, causing a flood of mistaken identity, and marries Olivia. Viola then reveals she is a girl and marries Orsino.
The Tempest
Prospero uses magic to conjure a storm and torment the survivors of a shipwreck, including the King of Naples and Prospero’s treacherous brother, Antonio. Prospero’s slave, Caliban, plots to rid himself of his master, but is thwarted by Prospero’s spirit-servant Ariel. The King’s young son Ferdinand, thought to be dead, falls in love with Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Their celebrations are cut short when Prospero confronts his brother and reveals his identity as the usurped Duke of Milan. The families are reunited and all conflict is resolved. Prospero grants Ariel his freedom and prepares to leave the island.
RSC vs The Globe
RSC:
- Technology (visual effects)
- emerges and transgresses through senses
The Globe:
- uses no technology to fit Renaissance time
- Oven roof –> raining adds to atmosphere
- Audience looks like a sea
Aquatic Language
Early modern playgoers … went to “hear” a play rather than to see it; they were “auditors” … before they were “spectators”
Aquatic Setting: Transformation — Ariel’s Song
- Bodies relation with sea
- Drowning
- Transformation makes death beautiful and threatening
- a sea floor almost accessible = murky realm that’s alien and beyond human comprehension
- seduces
Through his engagement with the sea, Shakespeare does what?
- explores the metaphorical potential of a mysterious and unknown – ‘invisible’ – space;
- conveys a sense of a rapidly expanding of the world;
- conveys what it was like to live in an aquatic context;
- explores the possibilities of language to create an alien and mysterious space;
- uses sea travel as a motif for the exploration of life.
