Journal Article A Refusal to Celebrate the First Folio’s Last Centenary Get access Jason Scott-Warren Jason Scott-Warren Email: jes1003@cam.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 4, Winter 2023, Pages 428–433, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad038 Published: 19 December 2023

Journal Article 1623–2023: The First Folio Unbound: A Reckoning With and Within Early Modern Critical Race Studies Get access Noémie Ndiaye Noémie Ndiaye Email: ndiaye@uchicago.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 3, Fall 2023, Pages 171–189, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad027 Published: 29 September 2023

Journal Article "A Moniment, without a tombe": Institution, Instruction, and Succession in Shakespeare's First Folio Get access Urvashi Chakravarty Urvashi Chakravarty Email: urvashi.chakravarty@utoronto.ca Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 3, Fall 2023, Pages 217–232, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad024 Published: 29 September 2023

Journal Article Shakespeare from the Bottom: Transnationalism, Unfounded Whiteness, and the First Folio Get access Emily Weissbourd Emily Weissbourd Email: emw616@lehigh.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 3, Fall 2023, Pages 204–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad028 Published: 29 September 2023

Out of no fewer than five so-called “Shakespeare’s chairs” that have been preserved or at least referred to in sources, the most remarkable one is probably the chair purchased by Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1746–1831) in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1790, today housed in the National Museum in Krakow.1 Despite its long and turbulent history, a large fragment of the chair has survived, having been kept in a reliquary-like case prepared especially for it at the beginning of the nineteenth century (figure 1). Moreover, the number of preserved documents related to the object is exceptional. The two most important ones are an extensive, extremely detailed, vivid, slightly amusing, and slightly gruesome description of the circumstances of the purchase, written by Izabela Czartoryska herself around 1820, and a certificate of the chair’s authenticity issued in Stratford in January 1791.2 The other available documents contain only passing references to the chair, but still throw some light on its history. Izabela’s account is well-known and has been frequently cited and repeated in academic literature.3 Thus far, it has never been questioned. In this essay, I present ample evidence to suggest that many elements of the story are inaccurate, to say the least, while its most extraordinary and exciting fragments are entirely fictitious. I aim to reconstruct as faithfully as possible the circumstances of Izabela Czartoryska’s purchase of “Shakespeare’s chair,” to describe its later fate, and to propose an explanation for the fantastic story about its acquisition. From a broader perspective, the essay is concerned with the problem of a material relic as an essential element of a poet’s cult.4

Journal Article Shakespeare, Steevens, and the Fleeting Moon: Glossing and Reading in Antony and Cleopatra Get access Andrew Mattison Andrew Mattison Email: Andrew.Mattison@utoledo.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 90–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad010 Published: 31 May 2023

It is my great pleasure to introduce this special issue in honor of Gail Kern Paster, who provided field-shaping leadership of Shakespeare Quarterly and its home institution the Folger Shakespeare Library, and whose scholarly work has given us a powerful language and methodology for thinking about the relation between mind, body, and environment in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am grateful to Bruce R. Smith, Evelyn Tribble, Paul Yachnin, and Julian Yates for accepting my invitation to contribute to this issue and for producing a set of vivid, imaginative essays that demonstrate the range and depth of Gail’s influence. Most broadly, the aim of Gail’s work is (as she puts it near the beginning of Humoring the Body) “to look for traces of a historical phenomenology in the language of affect in early modern drama in order that readers of that drama and other texts of the period may begin to recover some of the historical particularity of early modern emotional self-experience.”1 It is a testament to the success of this project that, in reading a sentence like the one I have just quoted, we now barely register its staggering ambition. Gail’s scholarship has made the excavation of affect in a distant historical moment—the recovery of “lived practices of early modern cosmology” (20) and the assessment of Shakespeare’s “idiosyncratic understanding of contemporary psychophysiology” in relation to the “intellectual framework of his cultural moment” (23)—not only a locally productive form of cultural archaeology, but a pervasive, vital methodology for the interpretation of early modern literature in relation to our own historical moment and our own sense of ourselves. As Gail would be the first to point out, her scholarship has not accomplished this feat on its own; rather, it has flourished in sustained dialogue with a vast array of historians and theorists of the emotions, the body, and the theater who have inspired her and been inspired by her. At once skeptical and receptive in its approach to the texts it encounters, Gail’s work is consistently generative to those who encounter it. The dialogic quality of her scholarship, and its continuing ability to push early modern studies in new directions, is everywhere on display in this issue’s four essays: from Bruce Smith’s listening for the sound of early modern “complexion,” to Lyn Tribble’s description of the atmospherics of magic circles, to Paul Yachnin’s anatomy of bodily shame in the Sonnets, to Julian Yates’s discussion of the intersection between affect and apocalypse in King Lear and some of its distant descendants.

Hamletis a play enmeshed in multiple traditions of conscience. In Shakespeare’s England, medieval scholastic conscience, a thirteenth-century theory based on Aristotelian and Christian theological frameworks, continued to influence scholarly thought. From the fourteenth century onward, conscience was also part of a tradition of casuistry, practiced by Catholics and, from the sixteenth century, by Protestants as well. Chancery conscience, rising to prominence in the fourteenth century and regarded either as another spiritual form of conscience or as a juridical form of conscience adopted by the English legal system, continued to be petitioned. And in the sixteenth century a reformed conscience, shaped by Luther and supported by Calvin, also began to emerge. In this essay, I historicize the various traditions of conscience that would have informed Shakespeare’s use and his audience’s understanding of the word in Hamlet. Depending on which tradition of conscience a person was thinking in, conscience could inhibit action or hasten action, inspire conviction in the truth or suspicion of the truth, invoke an individual authority or a general authority. Hamlet’s thinking spans these different traditions of conscience, and so we see him paralyzed and active, certain and doubting, the master and the subject of judgment. Throughout the play, Hamlet and the audience are caught in the nexus of multiple meanings of conscience as they examine questions of truth and will.

This essay focuses on King Lear, but a passage from Macbeth epitomizes the historical and Shakespearean problem it addresses. Moments after murdering Duncan, Macbeth recounts an incident that took place as he passed the second bedchamber: With unwavering focus, Lady Macbeth admonishes him not to “[c]onsider it […] so deeply,” but Macbeth cannot let it go: “But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’? / I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ / Stuck in my throat” (2.2.29–36).1 This tense conversation reveals Macbeth’s understanding of blessing as both a spiritual need and a spoken wish.2 Although the prayer that he overhears places the power to bless with God, Macbeth’s response emphasizes his own failure to speak. The conjunction of his deeply felt need for blessing with his inability to utter it terrifies him.

The week I began reading Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe, Russia invaded Ukraine. Those events made clear the timely, or, rather, depressingly timeless, nature of Andrew Hiscock’s analysis of how debates about war have shaped Europe’s international order. Hiscock possesses an insightful eye for the nuances of narratives about transnational violence and their complex relationships with literary texts—particularly Shakespeare’s history plays. His perspective is impressively broad, exploring how ideas about warfare have been repeated, re-formed, and interpreted in sources from England and the Continent from the seventeenth century to the present. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe proposes that the debates about “armed conflict as an instrument of state policy” were “articulated regularly in the playhouses and in early modern court culture”; in both, Hiscock argues, “the waging of hostilities was frequently linked with the overseeing of political continuity or change management, assertions of lordship and/or pressing crises responding to individual or collective insecurities” (3). While this is not a controversial claim, Hiscock builds upon it, showing how violence was deployed to reinforce claims of legitimate authority or conceal grounds of illegitimate authority, and arguing that the “enduring appetite for violence has come to fashion political discourse itself” (66).