The final lecture in this year's EGO Fall Speaker Series will be delivered on Thursday, December 6 by Professor Jean Howard. Professor Howard began her career at Syracuse and we are thrilled to sponsor her return! Please plan to attend the final event of the semester.
"Beatrice's Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London
Comedy."
In this piece I consider the consequences for early modern
spectators of the staging of exotic objects in plays that deal with
contemporary London. My starting point will be the moment in Eastward Ho
when Beatrice, a maid, comes on stage with a monkey. What is both the
representational consequence of that action, given the considerable symbolic
freight attached to monkey and apes in the early modern imagination, and
what is the presentational consequence, that is, the effect of having a
non-human "actor" from an exotic clime have a role in a play set in 1604
London? Probably, the monkey would have been imported from Africa, brought
back on a ship engaged in trade along the West African coast. How, then, can
we think about this creature's appearance on the public stage, and what
larger implications does it have for understanding how the stage functioned
to domesticate the exotic and to mask the larger economic and political
forces that enabled monkeys to become figures in stories of London life.
Jean E. Howard is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives at Columbia University. Professor Howard’s specializations are Renaissance literature, history of drama, feminism, new historicism and Marxism. Her publications include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987), The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994), With Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997), Co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997), and Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000).
