Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: Introducing Shakespeare the Bodger
- 1 Shakespeare’s Ingenuity: Humanism, Materialism, and One Early Modern Self
- 2 “Your sorrow was too sore laid on”: Portraying the Subject of Ekphrasis
- 3 Julio at the Crossroads: Sex and Transfiguration in the Court of Sicilia
- 4 What Did Hermione’s Statue Look Like? The Four Ladies of Mantua and the Science of True Opinion
- 5 “A sad tale’s best for winter,” but for spring a comedy is better: Time, Turn, and Genre(s) in The Winter’s Tale
- Epilogue: Bodging Theatrical Faith
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Bodging Theatrical Faith
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: Introducing Shakespeare the Bodger
- 1 Shakespeare’s Ingenuity: Humanism, Materialism, and One Early Modern Self
- 2 “Your sorrow was too sore laid on”: Portraying the Subject of Ekphrasis
- 3 Julio at the Crossroads: Sex and Transfiguration in the Court of Sicilia
- 4 What Did Hermione’s Statue Look Like? The Four Ladies of Mantua and the Science of True Opinion
- 5 “A sad tale’s best for winter,” but for spring a comedy is better: Time, Turn, and Genre(s) in The Winter’s Tale
- Epilogue: Bodging Theatrical Faith
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Bodging a theatrical script is the practice of stitching verbal and visual patches into one's text in unexpected ways to produce a dramatic hybrid for the stage. In “verbal,” I include words, phrases, sentences, and patterns of speech that can be traced to written or spoken language outside the play. These would encompass such locutions as those that passed from Il pastor fido into All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure. By “visual,” I refer specifically to those vivid patches of dialogue that “lead objects before our eyes”—whether natural or artificial—by means of ekphrases, though visible actions—what we now call “stage business” or “theatergrams”—are also among the materials available for recycling. Bodging involves insight into the rightness of often improbable conjunctions of materials that function so well together that their union commands assent, despite—or perhaps because of—its unpredictability. It is born of ingenuity, which, we are told by the humanist Juan Luis Vives, is a God-given power to enable unaccommodated man to construct his world through “the lively keenness of an ingenium full of spontaneous play.” Its success lies in the eyes and ears of the bodger and his or her perceivers, who discover a “breakthrough into a new reality,” according to philosopher Ernesto Grassi, where “the metamorphosis of man takes place.” We have seen that Shakespeare was an inveterate bodger, using many kinds of materials to stitch together his plays—as, truth to tell, were most of his contemporaries, all trained in the arts of literary imitation, ekphrasis, ethical representation, topical dialectic, and the myriad other devices taught by classical and contemporary rhetoricians. The question that the foregoing account of The Winter's Tale inevitably raises, however, is whether one can bodge up faith.
The peculiarity of Paulina's injunction to Leontes, “It is required / You do awake your faith,” is that it seems to demand he arouse a dormant religious faith in the possibility of Hermione's resurrection and to direct the theater audience to do so as well, although they are involved only vicariously in the crisis confronting Hermione's family and friends onstage.
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- Information
- Shakespeare the BodgerIngenuity, Imitation and the Arts of The Winter's Tale, pp. 197 - 210Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023