| Description |
1 online resource |
| Contents |
Cover -- Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Note on Texts -- Introduction: Redefining Touch -- Redefinitions -- Staging Touch -- An Anatomy of Contact -- 1: "Guided by her Foot, Which is Basest": Dominance, Submission, and Resistance at the Body's Base -- "Spurns her" -- "Sweet wench, let me lick thy toes" -- "Thou shalt no more / Descend unto my foot" -- "Horsing foot on foot" -- 2: "Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?": Hierarchy, Reciprocity, and the Female Touch -- "Thy head so childishlie laid on a womans lap" |
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"Quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap" -- "Lay then your head upon my lap sweet lord" -- "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" -- 3: "Untwine those Arms": Embraces, Marching Arm in Arm, and Contested Intimacy -- "Here I clip / The anvil of my sword" -- "Haling of my lord / From Gaveston" -- "Arm in arm, like loving friends[?]" -- 4: "What mean these Hands?": Ambivalence, Agency, and Negotiation -- "Come, friendes: clap hands, tis a bargaine" -- "Let's go hand in hand, not one before the other" -- "Let each man render me his bloody hand" -- "I give my hand, and with my hand, my heart" |
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5: "Makers of Manners": Rethinking Kissing on the Early Modern Stage -- "I had as lief they would break wind in my lips" -- "You kiss by th' book" -- Coda: Reunions -- Bibliography -- Index |
| Summary |
Examines the social roles of touch as depicted and debated in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to show how touch is central to the dramatic vocabulary of early modern England. This book offers a social semiotics of contact on the early modern stage. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships, with different forms of touch embodying different power dynamics, from submission to reciprocity, to mutuality and consent. Second, touch acts do not have stable meanings offstage, to which characters' behavior conforms. In this period, the proper social role of touch was up for debate, especially in conduct literature addressing courtesy and civility. The theater, therefore, does not simply reflect offstage codes of conduct. Instead, it participates in debates surrounding the appropriateness of touch gestures like kissing, embracing, or holding hands in contexts like courtship, friendship, marriage, politics, and business. In the playhouse, then, audiences encounter new models or scripts for interpersonal behavior. With its focus on social signification, this approach addresses topics central to early modern sensory studies--affect, cognition, the nature of sensation--from the outside-in, offering a sociology rather than phenomenology of contact. In the process, it shows how theatrical depictions of touch are central to the Shakespearean theater's investigation of questions surrounding embodiment, among them consent, gender, sexuality, intimacy, and individual agency |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from home page (viewed on December 8, 2022) |
| Subject |
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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| SUBJECT |
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 fast |
| Subject |
English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism
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Touch in literature.
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English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan
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Touch in literature
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| Genre/Form |
Electronic books
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780192671783 |
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0192671782 |
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