Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference

Akhimie, Patricia

doi:10.4324/9781351125048

Cited by 40 publications

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“…For the Italian prince, gathering logs becomes 'a test of his strength, obedience, and chastity', which he easily passes to win Miranda's hand. 112 In contrast, for Caliban it 'transform[s] him into something even more base, a "villain", "slave", "tortoise", and "earth", words that describe an abject and agricultural laborer'. 113 The discourse of crookedness is also hinted at in the name Sycorax itself.…”

Section: Prospero's Hoopmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare Survey 76

2023

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Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 76 is 'Digital and Virtual Shakespeare'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/publications/collections/cambridge-shakespeare. This searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

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Section: Prospero's Hoopmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare Survey 76

2023

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“…14 Akhimie argues that "the ideological processes by which working bodies are racialized are tied to a crucial difference between those deemed capable of change through self-improvement and those deemed incapable of change." 15 In other words, the imagined meritocracy, held tantalizingly out for all to grasp, rewards only those who are already thought to be deserving, while "suggesting that comportment is the purview and even the natural habit of aristocratic people alone." 16 In Cavendish's drama, "race" can mean family heritage or bloodline, as in The Unnatural Tragedy, The Lady Contemplation (Part One), or The Publick Wooing.…”

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confidence: 99%

Race Thinking in Margaret Cavendish's Drama

Iyengar¹

2021

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This essay uses an intersectional approach to identify in the drama of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the patterns that Hannah Arendt called "race thinking" and to extend Arendt's approach backwards in time as early as the seventeenth century. Famously, Cavendish—poet, playwright, personality—prided herself on her "singularity" or originality, from her cultivated eccentricity of dress to her insistence, which anticipates the Romantic movement, that her works come from her alone (down to her punctilious annotation of the occasional lines or stanzas or scenes composed by her husband and included in her plays). The combined authority Cavendish appropriates—rank and individual merit—and that she uses to transcend the restrictions placed on her by her gender makes Cavendish an apt instance through which to investigate how or whether merit and rank—and gender—can produce race thinking. I suggest that Cavendish's first play, the two-part Loves Adventures , simultaneously queers or questions heteronormative reproduction and the purity of an imagined bloodline or race and yet restricts the ability to transcend race (understood for Cavendish as bloodline and as gender) to those who can demonstrate merit or (to borrow Patricia Akhimie's invaluable formulation) "cultivation." Similarly, Cavendish's later play The Bridals uses crossor transgender casting and the potential for cultivation not to liberate but to humiliate and racialize its working-class characters. In The Female Academy , wealthy, aristocratic ladies literally become the gatekeepers and guarantors of education and bloodline. The intersectional hierarchies of rank, skin color, gender, and sexual autonomy thus triumph over an imagined innate or even a "cultivated" merit or virtue.

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Carleton, Mary

Lucenko

2024

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing

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Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference

Cited by 40 publications

References 0 publications

Shakespeare Survey 76

Shakespeare Survey 76

Race Thinking in Margaret Cavendish's Drama

Carleton, Mary

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