Desdemona & Co. : Sleeping Beauties on the Jacobean Stage
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the medieval and early-modern theatrical traditions, the depiction of sleep on the stage was a frequent (and popular) theatergram, with a strong thematic and dramatic significance. One of the dramatic functions of this motif was the sleeper’s victimisation, which can be observed in a number of works from French liturgical plays of the 12th century to English Renaissance drama of the 17th. The present paper will focus on a group of Jacobean plays that employed the topos of an endangered sleeping figure that seem to constitute a distinct fashionable wave in early-modern English drama. Although the authorship of some of the works is dubious, all of them are, quite interestingly, somehow connected with the late Shakespeare or his theatre company, the King’s Men. The presentation will observe the development of the topos, which appears to have started with Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1603), and show how the individual plays influenced each other in other to create a certain dramatic effect and provoke a strong emotional reaction in their audiences. |
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