Staging disgust : rape, shame, and performance in Shakespeare and Middleton /
This Element turns to the stage to ask a deceptively simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in an affect even more intractable than shame: disgust. Exploring both...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press,
2024.
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| Series: | Cambridge elements. Elements in Shakespeare performance.
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| Summary: | This Element turns to the stage to ask a deceptively simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in an affect even more intractable than shame: disgust. Exploring both the textual "performance" of affect -- how literary language works to evoke emotions -- and the ways disgust can work in theatrical performance, this Element begins with Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece as the classic paradigm of sexual pollution and shame, where disgust's irrational logic of contamination leaves the raped wife in a permanent state of uncleanness that spreads from the body to the soul. Staging disgust, however, offers alternatives to this depressing trajectory: Middleton's Women Beware Women and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus perform disgust with a difference, deploying the audience's revulsion to challenge the assumption that a raped woman should "naturally" feel intolerable shame--back cover. |
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| Physical Description: | 95 pages ; 18 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [83]-93). |
| ISBN: | 1009379828 9781009379823 |