Staging Disgust
Rape, Shame, and Performance in Shakespeare and Middleton
Published on 28. February 2024
978-1-009-37984-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
File size
1,50 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-009-37984-7 (9781009379847)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
02/2024
Cambridge University Press
€24.00
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Content
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.
