The goal of this panel, then, is to examine how Shakespeare’s drama variously represents and enacts the formation of collectives at a range of scales—sexual, theatrical, and political—through phenomenological apprehension. If phenomenology articulates, as Julia Reinhardt Lupton puts it, the process by which the subject “spreads out toward objects,” these papers offer an account of the social connections made possible by such apprehension, from the lived experiences of private sexual life to the formation of a collective national consciousness. Individually, the three 18-minute presentations will track the way the plays imagine the phenomenological constitution of social collectives at different scales, whether sexual, theatrical, or political; in the papers’ intersections and overlaps, the panel will aim to prompt questions and discussion about where and how the borders between these various collectives might be productively blurred.
In “The Sex Lives of Shakespearean Women,” Joseph Gamble articulates what such a critical shift from theoretical discourse about phenomenology to dramatic representations of lived experience offers to the study of early modern sexuality: by surveying the sexual experiences of women across several genres of Shakespearean drama, he turns from the question of what sex meant within a broader social sphere to the question of how sex was practiced in the daily lives—the sex lives—of early moderns. Combining the recent turn to character criticisms, both new formalist and cognitive, with parallel conversations in historical phenomenology, affect, and sexual epistemology, Gamble suggests, is a means to better understand not just historical character, but historical lived experience. Colloquial use of the term “sex life” usually takes the form of a value judgment: one’s sex life is either “good” or “bad.” These judgments, however, also signal a host of assumptions—simultaneously phenomenological and epistemological—about the ways that sex weaves itself through daily life. The sex life, Gamble argues, can help us understand the embodied sexual knowledges evinced by Shakespeare’s female characters: “I have given suck,” Lady Macbeth says, “and know / How tender ‘tis.” Gamble ultimately suggests that Shakespeare’s women can, in turn, help us understand the sex lives of early moderns themselves.
Lauren Robertson, in “The Politics of Theatrical Phenomenology in Julius Caesar,” turns to a broader social collective by examining the phenomenological experience of theatrical spectatorship itself. Julius Caesar’s opening scene brings the world of the play into being on the bare stage by enlisting the imaginative participation of its spectators; the language of the play would have invited audience members in the newly-built Globe in 1599, that is, to recall their own past experiences as spectators to pageants and public spectacle in the crowded streets of London in order to constitute the temporally and spatially distant fictional world of ancient Rome on the stage. Robertson thus argues that in the first scene of the play, which places spectators in somatic relation to the unfolding stage spectacle as well as to each other, phenomenological apprehension necessarily precipitates political interpretation; Julius Caesar’s opening does not just dramatize the tensions animating the conflict between tribunes and plebeians, but shapes, in real time, its spectators into a political collective, who must jockey for control of the public space they inhabit, and who must later place judgement on the conspirators’ actions. Robertson ultimately suggests that by positioning its spectators both somatically and affectively, Julius Caesar’s phenomenological structure invites its spectators to feel their way into politics from the ground up.
In “Emotional Memory as Nationhood in Richard II: Shameful Conquests,” Kyle Pivetti brings together the sexual and political concerns of Gamble and Robertson’s papers by taking up the representation of shame, and in particular sexualized shame, in Richard II. Focusing on the broadest social collective of all three papers, he argues that humiliation plays a vital role in forming the collective memory of the early modern English nation. Pivetti draws on Antonio Damasio’s contention that memory itself depends upon embodied processes of feeling—processes that are always relational and always under production—to show that Richard’s fall from power is marked by deeply shameful (and gendered) performances before the public: the king compares himself to a humiliated beggar, and John of Gaunt’s virginal “scepter’d isle” makes “a shameful conquest” of herself. By performing the sexualized shame of Richard, the play produces the memorial humiliation underwriting nationhood. Eve Sedgwick insists that “shame is theatrical.” Pivetti argues that Richard II dramatizes the political force of her conclusion, constructing a national identity through the dramatic construction of feeling.
Taken together, these papers track new directions in the study of Shakespeare and phenomenology, as well as offer new ways of reading early modern drama more broadly. The panel reveals Shakespeare’s plays as archives of embodied apprehensions and social relations—as constitutive, that is, to our understanding of early modern phenomenological experience as the culturally- and historically-specific discourses surrounding the plays themselves.