Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Pollard, Tanya

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270835.001.0001

Cited by 45 publications

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“…Margaret Willes explores the medicinal qualities of plants and the use and growth of plants for "physick" (2014b), joining other scholars who have begun to explore the many herbal remedies in literary texts (Pollard 2005;Kerwin 2005). In other words, the early modern stage has long been interested in the curative and catastrophic artistry of plants.…”

Section: Performing With Plantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's <i>Rhodon and Iris</i>

Howard

2021

Performance Philosophy

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This essay investigates the performativity of plants in Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris, a play that was written and performed for a feast held by the Norwich Society of Florists in 1631. The play explores at least two forms of performativity: the first is the act of staging plants for a theatrical performance, where vegetables present their virtues through floral allegories that are enacted by human players. The second form is the way plants affect and are affected by their environments, particularly as theorized by Michael Marder and Mel Y. Chen. In Rhodon and Iris, these two dimensions work together to produce a form of floral agency that decenters the human. The essay explores how floral agency collaborates with literary narratives when beings perform for plants (within a history of floral celebrations), as plants (embodying plants as allegorical figures), and with plants (floral characters using plants as ingredients in cosmetics, poisons, and antidotes). Knevet uses literature to articulate a unique plant philosophy that challenges divisions between art and nature and among literature, philosophy, and science. Rhodon and Iris thus illustrates the many ways that theatrical performances and printed playbooks, and even printed herbals and herbaria, responded to and shaped the performativity of plants.

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Section: Performing With Plantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's <i>Rhodon and Iris</i>

Howard

2021

Performance Philosophy

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“…18 Noting a pervasive cultural anxiety about foreign infection, Tanya Pollard's Drugs and Theater investigates the analogous relationship between the poisonous components of paint and the perceived dangers of infectious theatricality. 19 Focusing on the material properties of face paint on the early modern stage, Karim-Cooper addresses the ways in which the materiality of face paint invokes and responds to anxieties about dissimulation, prostitution, and foreign "ingredient culture" infecting and "diminishing Englishness." 20 Rather than the more usual concern with the vitriolic attacks on tinctures, fucuses, and paints found in the anticosmetics literature of the period, I explore the construction of whiteness and Englishness relational to cosmetic self-fashioning and materiality.…”

Section: Cosmetics Whiteness and Fashioning Early Modern Englishness Josie Schoelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cosmetics, Whiteness, and Fashioning Early Modern Englishness

Schoel¹

2020

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

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“…Both Drew‐Bear (1981) and Pollard (1999) look at the poisonous materials such as lead and mercury used in stage makeup of the time and read those literal poisons against the period’s commonly voiced anti‐theatrical invective about “painting.” Here, poisoning becomes allied to anxieties about the relationship between appearance and reality in physical looks, moral constitution, and theatrical influence. Pollard expands on this work in her important monograph, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005). She argues that “Like drugs, plays were understood as offering a remedy, seducing consumers with promises of pleasure, escapism, and at times improvement; also like their chemical counterparts, they were seen as having volatile, unpredictable, and dangerous side effects” (16).…”

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Toxic Encounters: Poisoning in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Thomas

2012

Literature Compass

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This essay discusses the various ways poisoning signified as a literal act and symbolic motif in the literature and culture of early modern England. I offer an overview of the scholarship on the subject, from its early focus on dramatic imagery and questions of historical prevalence, to its interest in poisoning’s cultural and rhetorical meanings. This field of study has enjoyed significant growth in the past 10 years with increased critical attention to embodiment, political rhetoric, and encounters between dominant and marginalized groups. Poisoning serves as an important index of early modern ideas about violence, language, health (individual and social), gender, and nationhood. I argue, finally, that it is most significant in its production of a rhetoric of terror, one that may be particularly situated in its historical moment, but also that resonates with readers and critics of later periods.

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Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Cited by 45 publications

References 0 publications

Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's <i>Rhodon and Iris</i>

Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's <i>Rhodon and Iris</i>

Cosmetics, Whiteness, and Fashioning Early Modern Englishness

Toxic Encounters: Poisoning in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

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