Home     |     1998 Projects Index     |     Mark Scandling - Project Home

---

The Worlds of the Renaissance: Projects - Mark Scandling

Documenting a Context:
Slander and Incest in Elizabethan England

• Jardine, Lisa. "'No Offence I'Th" World': Unlawful Marriage in Hamlet." Reading Shakespeare Historically. New York: Routledge, 1996. 35-36.
• Jardine, Lisa. "'Why Should He Call Her Whore?': Defamation and Desdemona's Case." Reading Shakespeare Historically. New York: Routledge, 1996. 19-34.
• Lahr, John, "Speaking Shakespeare," The New Yorker, September 7, 1998.
• Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Penquin Books, 1970.
• Shakespeare, William. Othello. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1958.
• Whelan, Peter. The Herbal Bed. London: Warner/Chappell Plays Ltd, 1996.

Each year in a senior Shakespeare elective, my students and I involve ourselves in the dramatic and thematic complexities of Othello and Hamlet. We begin our inquiries with performance issues, and, like actors and directors, our attention centers on language and textual cues that reveal motivation, emotion, movement, antithesis, and conflict. Though I know secondary material and critical essays may amplify the plays for the best students, I've sensed my students, whatever their skill, seem to gain confidence in their interpretive skills when I force them to return to the text for closer reading. While this approach continues to succeed, I've wondered lately if some expansion would be appropriate. A recent essay in The New Yorker about former Royal Shakespeare Company director John Barton further adjusted my thinking. Asked about character-based interpretations favored by American actors, Barton said, "The trap is that if you look for the emotional truth you may not find the argument, but if you find the argument you may find the character" (78). The argument, he asserts, is evident in Shakespeare's constant use of antithesis.

Occasionally, however, contextual questions and arguments arise that can't be answered fully without a clearer sense of the Elizabethan culture in which Shakespeare wrote. And while authorial intentions and the representativeness of historical material cannot be established directly, it would be shortsighted to ignore the possibilities that arise when the methods of New Historicism can be applied. For example, my students always express their bafflement over the definition and legal implications of incest in Elsinore and wonder why Desdemona's reputation can't protect her from Othello's slanders. We've never fully resolved those concerns, but critical approaches detailed in two essays in Lisa Jardine's Reading Shakespeare Historically will now offer new lines of inquiry.

Top of page

Previous     |     Mark Scandling - project home     |     Next