Staging Disgust - Rape, Shame, and Performance in Shakespeare and Middleton

This Element turns to the stage to ask a simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in affect, disgust. It explores both the textual "performance" of affect, how literary language works to evoke emotions and the ways disgust can work in theatrical performance. Here Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece is the classic paradigm of sexual pollution and shame, where disgust's irrational logic of contamination leaves the raped wife in a permanent state of uncleanness that spreads from body to soul. Staging Disgust offers alternatives to this depressing trajectory: Middleton's Women Beware Women and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus perform disgust with a difference, deploying the audience's revulsion to challenge the assumption that a raped woman should "naturally" feel intolerable shame.

List of contents

1. Introduction: literature, affect, and performance; 2. Early modern sexual pollution; 3. The rape of Lucrece; 4. Women beware women; 5. Titus Andronicus; 6. Coda; Bibliography.

Summary

This Element turns to the stage to ask a simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in an affect even more intractable than shame: disgust.

Product details

• Authors: Jennifer Panek, Jennifer (University of Ottawa) Panek, Panek Jennifer
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.03.2024
• EAN: 9781009379823
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0937982-3
• No. of pages: 106
• Series: Elements in Shakespeare Performance
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama, Theatre Studies, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Literary studies: plays & playwrights, Shakespeare Studies & Criticism, Literary studies: plays and playwrights, Relating to Shakespeare / Shakespearean