Louis André, Université de Poitiers, Women in Transition(s)
Venturing Beyond Catholic Expectations of Womanhood in John Webster’s Drama
King Henry VIII’s Schism from Rome redefines the religious and social landscape, with marriage emerging as a new model for the Christian community. The once-revered ideal of virginity, previously upheld as the epitome of Christian virtue, is increasingly criticized as hypocritical considering the corruption and decadence associated with Catholic authorities. As the Catholic Church’s influence over English social and political life wanes, statuses previously deemed inferior gain acceptance and are even promoted, superseding the now-archaic ideal of virginity. This shift, driven by the creation of the Church of England, fosters a revaluation of marriage and initiates a cultural transition for women, altering long-standing gendered conceptions of femininity. In light of the failure of celibacy—unattainable for the average person—marriage is offered as the lesser evil. These societal changes permeate contemporary cultural productions, including theatre.
In this particular context, John Webster’s works merit examination. The playwright dramatizes this reversal of values, where marriage supplants virginity and abstinence as the chaste ideal to pursue. Do his plays merely underscore the failure of traditional Catholic representations of women—virgins and chaste figures—or do they propose a “new woman” aligned with Protestant ideals, embodied by mothers and wives? This study contends that Webster transcends the dichotomy between Catholic and Protestant models by portraying his female characters not as remnants of a bygone Catholic ideal nor as endpoints of Protestant reform, but as figures in transition. This transitional perspective, shaping femininity and its relationship to religion, emerges as a distinct hallmark of Webster’s aesthetic standpoint.
Priscilla Bucher, Université d’Aix-Marseille
Marie de Guise et Marie Stuart face à la Réforme (1554-1567) : repenser la transition de l’Écosse du catholicisme au protestantisme
Dans l’historiographie écossaise, l’année 1560 est considérée comme charnière, marquant le passage abrupt d’un royaume catholique en un état protestant: imposée par une partie de la noblesse à la population ainsi qu’à la monarque Marie Stuart, cette réforme « par le haut » marque la victoire politique des Lords de la Congrégation face à la régente, Marie de Guise, mère de Marie Stuart. Si les historiens se sont concentrés sur l’Église écossaise d’avant 1560 ou sur la mise en place de la Réforme après 1560, faisant de cette année une barrière symbolique entre deux époques, il s’agit de revoir cette position en analysant la transition progressive de l’Écosse du catholicisme au protestantisme sur une plus longue durée, par le prisme des actions politico-religieuses de ses reines. Présentées comme des figures tyranniques par les chroniqueurs protestants, Marie de Guise et sa fille ne tentent pourtant pas d’imposer leur foi catholique aux réformateurs mais plutôt de faire respecter leur statut d’exception. Les deux reines agissent l’une par rapport à l’autre, à la fois en continuité et en opposition, dans le but de modérer les tensions politico-religieuses et de mettre à mal la progression de la Réforme. La consécration du protestantisme est couplée à un rejet absolu de l’autorité féminine en place, qu’il s’agisse de la déposition de jure de la régente Marie de Guise en 1559 ou de l’abdication forcée de Marie Stuart en 1567. Ce n’est qu’au couronnement de Jacques VI et sa ratification en 1567 des lois votées en 1560 que l’Écosse devient véritablement protestante.
John Delsinne, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
« Where is my strength, my valour, and my force ? » (1 Henry VI, I.5.1) : Le « décentrement » de la figure du « Preux » ?
Dans 1 Henry VI,Shakespeare et ses collaborateurs, sous couvert de mettre en scène la mythique bataille de Castillon, « représentent » un moment pivot dans l’Histoire, la chute d’un « Preux » légendaire, le chevalier Talbot, miroir de l’esprit chevaleresque du monde médiéval. L’iconographie du temps montre de nombreuses représentations graphiques de cette figure du « preux », signe d’une forme de nostalgie élisabéthaine pour cet idéal féodal, qui paraît désormais suranné et caduc. Dans 1 Henry IV, le dramaturge met en scène le combat symbolique entre le preux chevalier Hotspur, qui, mû par le goût de la prouesse chevaleresque, représente un monde archaïque, et le prince moderne Hal, disciple de Machiavel, que personne n’attendait dans ce type de haut fait. À travers le déclin de ce que représente le preux et la déliquescence des valeurs féodales, Shakespeare semble thématiser la fin de l’âge de la chevalerie et de la féodalité. Cette déconstruction, pour ne pas dire ce « décentrement », de tout l’héritage médiéval autour de la figure du « Preux » prépare-t-elle ainsi la transition vers l’avènement de la modernité ? Le prince Hal, futur Henry V, qui l’emporte sur le Preux Hotspur, incarne-t-il une nouvelle figure de « Preux » ou est-il l’incarnation d’un « prince moderne », contemporain de Machiavel et héritier du roi politique Henry IV, son père ? Shakespeare s’inscrit-il dans une « esthétique du décentrement » pour mieux préparer la « transition » vers la « modernité » ?
Jean-Antoine Engel, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
“English beinge now he more respected language among vs” Anglicisation des élites irlandaises et traduction du Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1634-5)
Le tournant du 17e siècle irlandais est une période de profonds changements, marquée par la complétion de la reconquête de l’Irlande par les Tudor (1536-1603), la Fuite des Comtes (1607), le développement des plantations, et l’anglicisation progressive des puissantes familles d’Irlande. Les Butler, alors l’une des maisons les plus importantes en Irlande, n’échappent pas à ces changements. Cette famille, installée depuis la conquête anglo-normande du 12e siècle, s’est largement gaélicisée au fil du temps, ses membres maitrisant aussi bien l’anglais que l’irlandais. Si la branche principale, celle du comte d’Ormonde, est alors fidèle au pouvoir anglais, diverses branches mineurs restent proches de leurs traditions gaélicisées. En 1634, alors que l’anglicisation des puissantes familles se confirme, Geoffrey Keating compose le Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, ou « Fondement des Connaissances sur l’Irlande », un manuscrit retraçant l’histoire de l’Irlande. Dès 1635, ce texte est traduit vers l’anglais par Michael Kearney. L’auteur et le traducteur ont alors chacun comme mécènes une branche mineure de la famille Butler.
À travers la présentation du manuscrit RIA MS 24 G 16 (1668), seul exemplaire de la première traduction de ce texte en anglais, cette communication apportera des éléments de réponse expliquant cette traduction. Sans réfuter la possibilité qu’elle ait été entreprise afin de diffuser ce texte, nous nous concentrerons sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle cette traduction était destinée à un usage privé pour une puissante famille qui tente de conserver une identité irlandaise, tout en présageant de la disparition de la langue irlandaise chez ses descendants.
Kameron R.L. Johnson, Sorbonne Université et King’s College London
Innovation in Reading Transgender Characters in Early Modern Drama
Frequently, when reading dramatic texts which feature characters who present as multiple genders over the course of the play, scholarship limits is understanding of the methods used by these characters to their clothing alone. Sawyer Kemp’s frustration with this fixation on what they call ‘The Pants’ has led to their suggestion that we turn to modern trans experiences to identify transness in early modern characters. I suggest that in addition to this, we examine the other elements of early modern gender which were used to construct the characters’ identities, such as early modern medical views of sex, prosthetics of gender like pipes and codpieces, education-based constructions of boyhood, and the hierarchical masculinity of the swordsman. In doing so, we thereby illuminate not only the transgender methods of the characters in those texts but the transgender capacity of other play-texts as well. My three-fold methodology—beyond pants, beyond presentism, beyond labels—allows for a more expansive search for transness within early modern drama. Pulling examples from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Cure and Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, the proposed presentation reveals the methods used by these plays’ transmasculine characters to construct their genders and then turns those insights towards Macbeth and Henry IV, Part 1, which contain parallel constructions of masculinity, allowing us to explore the transgender capacity of those texts. (Word count: 221)
Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University
Excavating Transness in Literature through Performativity
Performativity—how language tacitly or overtly affects social actions—is the core of all utterances and imaginative literature. Building on J. L. Austin’s notion of speech act, Judith Butler has proposed the idea of gender performativity. It has been widely appropriated as a critical tool to understand sexuality and gender variance in the West. This paper develops a theory of trans performativity that re-calibrates our critical capacity to understand tacit transness. It uses this theory to read several literary instances, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
This paper engages with narratives that were not labeled as trans in order to demonstrate pervasive transness even in texts that are commonly thought of as cisgender. Trans performativity sheds a new light on gender as interpersonal relationships that evolve over time and in different social spaces. These social practices are constituted, and sometimes undermined, by performative speech acts. Performativity destabilizes the idea of singularity and the perceived absolutism of such signifiers as gender. The case studies show further that transness can become overt or tacit over time. Characters’ speech acts may be recognized or misrecognized by the readers as symbolizing or evading particular themes. The characters may not desire the same type of legibility at all times. Trans performativity expands the scope of trans literature beyond explicit transition narratives. Doing so will help us transcend the Cartesian logic we inherited from the Enlightenment, a way of thinking about the world through dualism and binaries.
Pádraic Lamb, Université Lyon 2-Lumière
“È converso […] repute them barbarous”: Spenser’s Polemic Viewed from Ireland (1635-1636)
If Spenser’s polemical dialogue-treatise on Ireland, A View of the State of Ireland (c. 1596) is generally acknowledged to be bloodthirsty, if not genocidal, the problem remains that academics still rely for the most part on the writings of New English settlers and planters in Ireland such as Spenser in forming their picture of Early Modern Ireland.
One approach to this problem, exemplified in the Macmorris project led by Patricia Palmer at the University of Maynooth (https://macmorris.maynoothuniversity.ie/), is to turn from English- to Irish-language sources, from print to manuscript, in order to produce the first “inclusive account of creative, scholarly, and intellectual activity [in Ireland] in a time of conquest, plantation, and colonisation”.
Another approach enabling the transition from New English to Irish perspectives leads to the archives, and the analysis of little-known English-language texts written in 16th or 17th Ireland. In this paper, I would like to examine Michael Kearney’s pugnacious preface to his translation of Geoffrey Keating’s landmark work of Irish history and historiography Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Basis of Knowledge about Ireland, c.1634). This text, preserved in a single manuscript in the Royal Irish Academy, is a fascinating and early example of an Irish appropriation of the English language in response to the advances of colonization. Testament to the process of language transition in Ireland, Kearney takes Spenser as his principal opponent. This paper will focus on how Kearney turns the colonizer’s own rhetorical weapons against him, transforming Spenser’s diatribe, as he puts it, “è converso”, and thus providing a view of Ireland from an Irish perspective.
Andrew Mitchell, Université d’Aix-Marseille
La scène d’agonie dans les deux tétralogies de Shakespeare, ou le drame d’un monde en transition.
Scène emblématique du répertoire shakespearien, la scène d’agonie dans ses pièces historiques sert à mettre en scène, en le ritualisant, le drame d’un monde en transition qui voit advenir des temps nouveaux, ceux-là même où vivaient les spectateurs élisabéthains. Jean de Gand peu avant sa mort dans Richard II nous avertit que les mots du mourant ont la valeur d’une épiphanie, qu’ils sont un moment de vérité, et qu’ainsi ils commandent une attitude particulière de la part du spectateur face au drame qui est joué sur scène. Tout à la fois politique et religieuse dans sa portée, la scène d’agonie dans les deux tétralogies est également l’occasion d’une expérience esthétique de la participation où le spectateur est poussé à une introspection tout à la fois individuelle et collective — individuelle parce qu’elle le ramène à sa solitude face à sa propre fin ; et collective parce qu’elle contient la vérité sur le passé commun à cette communauté de spectateurs, sur cette histoire récente qu’ils ont en partage et sur les mythes qui la fondent. La scène d’agonie est une transition dramatique, mais cette transition est aussi un point de jointure, faisant de la scène du mourant un événement porteur de vérités sur l’Homme et sur l’Histoire. Dans quelle mesure peut-on affirmer que Jean de Gand parle au nom de Shakespeare, et que le poète utilise la scène d’agonie comme un moment clé révélant des vérités politiques, religieuses et historiques d’un drame historique qui se veut également commémoration de la transition dynastique vers le règne Tudor ? C’est de cela dont il sera question dans notre communication.
Johann Paccou, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Ganymede’s Transitions: A Queer Figure’s Itinerary from Page to Stage in Late Elizabethan Literature
The gender identity of the “girl-boy” (p.97) in Thomas Lodge’s 1590 romance Rosalynde is conspicuously ambiguous, as made evident by the narrator using both feminine and masculine pronouns to refer to the eponymous heroine dressed as a page. Richard Barnfield’s Ganymede in The Affectionate Shepheard (1594), on the other hand, is more distinctly masculine. His gender identity only becomes fully troubled when he is imagined as the persona’s sexual partner in the pastoral eclogues: “If thou wilt be my Boy, or else my Bride.” (“The Second Dayes Lamentation,” l.78). While the poems are famous for their unabashed expression of homoerotic desire towards a boy named after Jupiter’s paramour, Lodge’s romance is more chaste. Since Shakespeare found direct inspiration in Lodge’s story for his pastoral comedy As You Like It (c.1599), the gender identity of his own Ganymede is also at issue – especially as s/he was bodied forth by a boy actor. It is my contention that, finding inspiration not only in Lodge but also in Barnfield, the playwright created a character who is both ambiguously gendered and amorously inclined. In this paper, I will compare the three authors’ representations of the figure of Ganymede with a double aim in mind. Firstly, I intend to use the tools of queer and transgender studies to analyse Ganymede’s shifting place on the intersecting axes of sexuality and gender. Secondly, I want to consider the genres the three authors wrote in to explain the transitions undergone by Ganymede from the page to the stage. I hypothesise that the existence of literary precedents, the nature of the poetic or narrative voice, and modalities of text circulation and reception are significant generic factors accounting for fluctuations in the queer figure’s characterisation.
Elisabeth Szanto, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
“Sweet” Fools (1.4.139): Transitioning Roles in Shakespeare’s King Lear
In the wake of Michel Foucault’s study of the history of folly and Mickaël Bakhtin’s seminal work on the carnivalesque,[1] a great deal of Shakespeare criticism has focused on the centrality of the theme of folly in King Lear. It has dwelled in particular on the opposition and mirror effects between the king’s folly and the fool’s wisdom, confirming the idea of the great value awarded to the voice of the fool in the early modern period,[2] contrary to later periods. The wise fool graces many of Shakespeare’s plays – such as Twelfth Night (Feste), As You Like It (Touchstone and Jacques), King Lear (the Fool), etc. – lending a voice to truth and common sense, devoid of the courtiers abysmal flattery. But this “antic disposition”, on the other hand, as in Hamlet (H 1.5.179) or in Titus Andronicus, can also serve as a cunning disguise to freely pursue a (criminal) investigation or a vindication.
This paper will attempt to illustrate that Shakespeare’s approach to the wisdom of folly in his tragedy King Lear is in fact more complex than what has often been suggested. The play charts in fact many transitions and shifts in this function, that can also be borne by other characters, like Cordelia – Lear’s “poor [hang’d] fool” (KL 5.3.304), or Kent, who embraces the truth-speaking stance of the “all-licensed fool” (KL 1.4.191). From the start, Kent aims to overturn Lear’s rash decisions, openly stating that “Majesty falls to folly” (KL 1.1.150). Edgar too, takes on the fool’s role as poor Tom o’Bedlam, a disguise which helps him to avoid falling prey to Edmund’s plot and enables him to seek out the truth.
In this talk, I would like to argue that Shakespeare’s multiple use of the fool function in this play aims to reveal a variety of early modern social and political aspects that have an impact on individual trajectories. Indeed, it appears as a tool to vividly illustrate the disastrous consequences – human, social and political– the truth-speaking voice of the ‘fool’ can have on those, other than the Fool himself, who take up this transitioning role at the king’s side. Furthermore, it pointedly features poverty and folly through Edgar’s transition into the ‘poor Tom’ disguise, allowing these distressing conditions to take the stage. Thus, the play does not only foreground the centrality of the fool in the early modern age: it also draws attention to the growing marginality of characters whose struggles for truth have condemned them to deep forms of fragility.
Irène Vilquin, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dismembering the Family: Infanticides and Interrupted Filial Transitions in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays
In 2021, Todd Borlik suggested that Christopher Marlowe’s oeuvre showcased a sense of proto-Malthusianism, especially in the playwright’s staging of lineage, which Borlik interpreted as an anticipated form of denatalisation.[3] Borlik primarily focused on the figure of Tamburlaine and his killing of his son in 2Tamburlaine, and thus gave little attention to other cases of infanticide in his plays. Yet I argue that infanticides form an important aspect of Marlowe’s ars poetica, partaking, along with suicides, in a far-reaching motif of self-destruction.
While Borlik analysed Marlovian problematic descendance in light of later schools of thought, the present paper proposal offers to investigate Marlowe’s reception of Classical and Tudor literary examples of infanticide, notably Sophocles’, Seneca’s and Norton and Sackville’s influence. Inquiring about these sources highlights a transition towards a dematerialisation or “de-corporalisation” of family ties in Marlowe’s plays that sets him apart from previous and contemporary authors who more clearly handle the language of carnal bonds during infanticide scenes. This distance taken with embodied family ties invites us to envision Marlovian expression of subjectivity on stage as a form of self-shattering[4] based, amongst other phenomena, on a violent refusal of filial transition.
[1] Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Gallimard, C 1972;
Michel Foucault, «La littérature et la folie», Critique, 2016/12 n° 835, 2016. p.965-981.
Mikhail Bakhtin, « Rabelais and His World », translated from the Russian by Hélène Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, 2009.
[2] Allan R. Shickman, “The Fool’s Mirror in King Lear”, English Literary Renaissance, 21. 1; R. A. Zimbardo, “The King and The Fool: King Lear as Self-Deconstructing Text”, Criticism, 1990, 32.1.
[3] Todd Andrew Borlik, ‘Marlowe and Renaissance Malthusianism’.
[4] Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).