FWSA Blog post

Recently, I had the pleasure of writing an article for the FWSA blog. Their theme for August's posts was groundbreaking women or feminists, and so I chose to write an article on Jane Sharp - the groundbreaking seventeenth-century midwife who wrote and published The Midwives Book.

If you didn't see the lovely tweets the the FWSA's Twitter account (@FWSAuk) posted about it, or simply would like to have a read of it, please click below and check it out!

http://fwsablog.org.uk/2013/08/23/mrs-jane-sharp-a-pioneering-midwife-discovered/

However, if nineteenth-century literature is more your thing, there is also a brilliant new post by Lynn Shepherd that has just been added entitled 'Was Mary Shelley a feminist?':

http://fwsablog.org.uk/2013/08/26/wasmaryshelleyafeminist/

Holinshed, the body and Marlowe's 'Edward II' - Part 2

The cell in which Edward was reportedly held at Berkeley Castle

Firstly, I apologise for the delay in uploading this second post. I have been stuck on jury service for a couple of weeks! In the first part of these two posts on Marlowe's Edward II, I outlined the account of Edward's murder from Holinshed's Chronicles. In this post, I will now consider how Marlowe uses the corporeal and physical focus of Holinshed's material within the most significant speeches of his murder scene that occurs in Act V Scene v. 

In his celebrated account of Marlow's play, Charles Lamb concluded that 'the death scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted'. This is certainly something that I would agree with. The transformation of Edward from arrogant monarch to degraded and tortured prisoner is just as shocking each time I come back to it.

This is one of my favourite speeches of the murder scene, spoken by Edward:

'And there in mire and puddle have I stood
This ten days' space; and lest that I should sleep,
One plays continually upon a drum.
They give me bread and water, being a king,
So that for want of sleep and sustenance
My mind's distempered and my body's numbed,
And whether I have limbs or no, I know not.
O, would my blood dropped out from every vein,
As doth this water from my tattered robes' (V.v.58-66).

In this speech, what the audience sees is a focus on the disorder of Edward's body. He is no longer the monarch in total control of his own self, or with the authority to dictate the existences of other beings around him (although this was clearly affected by Gaveston's control over Edward). Instead, Edward appears in symbolically 'tattered robes' and is tortured through his sense of hearing and taste, causing a great disparity between, and separation of, his immaterial and physical self: 'my mind's distempered and my body's numbed'. As though this unbearable feeling were not enough, Marlowe takes it one step further, as Edward states that he does not even know 'whether I have limbs or no', thus becoming totally dissociated from his physical being.

By creating such highly emotive speeches, I would suggest that the corporeal focus of Marlowe's text goes beyond what Holinshed achieves in his account. By having such torturous images and expressions spoken by his protagonist, Marlowe makes it even harder for his audience to ignore the cruelty of Edward's imprisonment and murder. Hence, what I think Marlowe achieves by including these speeches as a pre-amble to the actual murder, is that he succeeds in increasing the audience's sense of Edward's extreme suffering, causing them to re-consider the justice that is apparently achieved by killing him in such a disturbingly retributive and medieval manner.

A depiction of Edward II's death 

 References:
1. Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. by Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsey (London: A & C Black, 2006)
2. Cell at Berkeley Castle: http://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/they-dont-like-it-up-em-revisiting-the-sordid-deaths-of-edmund-ironside-edward-ii-and-james-i-of-scotland/
3. Depiction of Edward's death: http://www.glreview.org/article/article-1403/

© Jenna Townend 2013

Holinshed and Marlowe's 'Edward II' - Part 1

This blog post is going to form the first part of two pieces that I want to do on Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. In this first one, though, I would like to briefly highlight one of the primary sources for Marlowe's play; in particular, the scene of Edward's death that occurs in Act V Scene v. 

It is well documented that Marlowe's dominant historical source for his portrayal of Edward's death was Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles. The Chronicles are a text that I know from experience is consistently bandied around in lectures on early-modern British drama, but sadly we do not always, or are not able to, take the time to look at how it informed those that used it as a primary source in their work. It was, of course, from this source that Marlowe extracted the gruesome details of Edward's murder, and the following passage is the account of Edward's death taken from Holinshed:

'they came suddenlie one night into the chamber where he laie in bed fast asléepe, and with heauie featherbeds or a table (as some write) being cast vpon him, they kept him down and withall put into his fundament an horne, and through the same they thrust vp into his bodie an hot spit, or (as other haue) through the pipe of a trumpet a plumbers instrument of iron made verie hot, the which passing vp into his intrailes, and being rolled to and fro, burnt the same, but so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardlie might be once perceiued. His crie did mooue manie within the castell and towne of Berkley to compassion, plainelie hearing him vtter a wailefull noise, as the tormentors were about to murther him, so that diuerse being awakened therewith (as they themselues confessed) praied heartilie to God to receiue his soule, when they vnderstood by his crie what the matter ment' (p. 342).

The extraordinary, medieval nature of Edward's murder in Holinshed's account is impossible to overlook. He is guilty of buggery, and so at the moment of his death he too is buggered by a 'hot spit'. However, what is equally remarkable about Holinshed's account is its sustained corporeal focus. Not only are we given this information about what would be referred to today as the murder weapon, but Holinshed also treats us to more gruesome physical details about the murder. The 'hot spit' passes 'vp into [Edward's] intrailes', and is 'rolled to and fro', presumably to cause the most excruciating amount of pain. For Holinshed, it would seem, this is the supposedly accurate account of a murder in which his readers are to be left in no doubt as to the level of its brutality.

So, having outlined this source material that Marlowe undoubtedly used when formulating the action of the scene in which his Edward II is murdered, in my next post I will explore how Marlowe uses Holinshed's material, with all of its corporeal and physical focus, within the most significant speeches of his murder scene. 

References:

1. Raphael Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (London: Henry Denham, 1586), in EEBO.

2. Frontispiece of Holinshed's Chronicles, as above.

3. Image of Edward II: http://kinemage.biochem.duke.edu/panther/scarborough/html/index.edward.p.html

© Jenna Townend 2013

Giovanni Bracelli: early modern Cubist?

Giovanni Battista Bracelli was, by all accounts, an Italian engraver and artist based in Florence in the early part of the seventeenth century. It was during this time that he compiled his little-known work Bizzarie di Varie Figure, which was published in 1624. It contains what are certainly some of the most highly inventive drawings of human-like figures of the period, which were sadly lost to the world until the re-discovery of the text in, or around, 1950.

As Sue Welsh Reed indicates, the Bizzarie shows characteristics of the artistic style called Mannerism,
which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century: 'the term derives from the Italian word maniera, meaning style. It is applied to a way of working that was developed to oppose the idealized naturalism of the Renaissance as practiced by Raphael and others'.

Below I have shared three of my favourite engravings from Bracelli's work. As several other scholars working on Bracelli have indicated, the figures in the Bizzarie certainly seem to be a kind of prescient for the modern artistic trend of Cubism.

Stumbling across these wonderful drawings were a welcome break from the rather gory reading that I've been doing this week, and certainly gives me a different slant on considering the early modern body!

References:
1. I owe the origin of these images from the Bizzarie (which are sadly not available on EEBO), to this article on Bracelli that was written in 2005: http://www.spamula.net/blog/2005/08/bracelli.html
2. For a more detailed commentary on Bracelli and his work, as well as a more comprehensive biography, see this pdf file: http://mail.nysoclib.org/Braccelli_Bizzarie_di_varie_figure/BCLBZR.PDF

© Jenna Townend 2013

Vlog: dream dinner party guests from history

So over the last few days I decided that I would get a little creative with my posts, and this is the result! I've chosen to do a video blog on the five historical figures that I would invite to my fantasy dinner party, and have given a little explanation as to why I have picked each one. I realise that this isn't the most academic of blog posts, but I thought that it might make a nice change from the ordinary.

I definitely still have a lot to learn about editing videos and splicing them together, so please excuse me if this video is not the smoothest in terms of its editing, or indeed my presentation! I promise that if I decide to do another vlog I will brush up on my technical skills.

I hope you enjoy watching the video, and I would love to hear some of the historical figures that you might all choose too!