Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion's Slaves.

Hobgood, Allison P.

Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion's Slaves

By Bridget Escolme

London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014

Bridget Escolme's Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion's Slaves explores the force of emotions in Renaissance theater, especially feeling's incitement to political and ethical movement, even subversion. Her insistence upon "emotion as movement" (1)--passion in and as action--drives the book's parallel goal of re-politicizing now the power of Shakespearean emotions then. Escolme is less interested in how feeling happens and more in when feeling is "too much." What, she wonders, does the motion of emotion precipitate, and how does the Shakespearean stage both represent and enact that potential? Further, the book probes the boundaries between reason and excess to posit that extreme emotions were--and still are--pleasurable to watch: turns out, it is often fun to get really carried away.

Through what she describes as a "comparative, transhistorical project, a project that is always historically contentious," (2) Escolme aims to link theater and cultural history to the now of stageplaying. In other words, the book is definitively comparative as it purposes "to consider how actors and audiences deal with ideas about emotional excess in early modern drama today." (3) This comparative methodology opens a broad study of the conception, regulation, and celebration of emotion as it is represented theatrically. In a kind of transhistorical navigation of feeling and its historical similarities and differences, she investigates "the ways in which we receive and remake the cultural artefacts of the past" and ponders how "we might attempt to perform Then in a range of more exciting and challenging ways Now." (4)

The book is organized in four main chapters on anger, laughter, love, and grief. It opens with some historicizing of the term "emotion" that emphasizes feeling's powerful animation and inherent motion. Every chapter then contains select background in the contours of each emotion, calling most heavily upon early modern humoral theory, as well as philosophical, religious, and medical tracts from the period. Chapter 1 explores anger in Coriolanus (via a range of recent stage versions) to ask the question: how does violent emotion get used, both on stage and more politically out in the world? Escolme argues that Coriolanus fundamentally is a play about anger and, further, that an audience's positionality in watching Coriolanus is contingent upon the anger of the play's characters in their social and theatrical spaces. Playing with the question of whether anger can be restorative--it is both valued and eschewed in early modernity--she focuses most on two productions: first, Coriolanus at the Globe in 2006; and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus on film. Escolme reads the Globe production via a post-Freudian lens as she examines the psychological underpinnings of Jonathan Cake's Martius and a modern audience's empathy towards highly legible anger. Of the Fiennes film, she suggests that " 'extreme rage' is hardly in excess of what is needed in warfare" (5) and toys with the notion that angry motion and destruction are political necessities. The chapter closes with a noteworthy reading of Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes's National Theatre Wales 2012 production of the play, the site-specific Coriolanus: Coriolan / Us, as "interested in anger as a political force, as that which makes and destroys communities of needs and interests, rather than as a means or effect of personal expression." (6)

Chapter 2 uses textual traces to probe the assumption that "a more violent culture laughs at subjects that its more sheltered descendants might consider cruel." (7) Here, Escolme wants to trouble a too easy binary of "cruel laughter" versus "compassionate seriousness." (8) She posits that while early modern audiences indeed might have laughed more freely, "laughter in the early modern theatre is ambivalent and multi-directional rather than simply excessive and cruel." (9) The chapter reads The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi, The Honest Whore, Twelfth Night, (and Tim Crouch's I, Malvolio) to argue for madness as producing an always excessive, although sometimes agential, subjectivity. These complexities, Escolme contends, ask spectators to examine the community of people with whom they laugh in challenging ways--laughter functions as a social force that does not necessarily "need to point to a group of outsiders as the objects of laughter" but rather can prompt spectators to laugh at themselves. (10)

Chapters 3 and 4 both loosely explore the ways that feeling--in these instances, love and grief--drive characters to excessive action or inaction and have intense political ramifications: for example, stagings of grief expressly "dramatize the politics and the policing of emotion." (11) Among other things, Chapter 3 focuses on All's Well That Ends Well and Antony and Cleopatra to parse out how (political and politicized) love has "its anxiety and pleasure-producing excesses," (12) and this section of the book spends time excavating the nuances of explicitly gendered love as well as the tensions between early modern love and love now. Chapter 4 examines "political grief" in Richard III, Hamlet, and the Henry VI plays. It contends that early modern theater used representations of extreme grief to provoke audience pleasure, in spite of the cultural belief that expressions of grief required moderation and timeliness. Readings in this chapter remind us of, and support, anti-theatrical logics that saw Renaissance theatre as a "dangerous place of bodied-forth imaginings and imaginary bodies" that prompted audiences to "feel more." (13) Gender as a point of analysis resurfaces in this chapter as Escolme offers a thought-provoking reading of Richard III at the Swan in 2012 that, in her estimation, gave modern spectators access to the complex politics of early modern women's grief. Chapter 4 closes with further discussion of grief as it was staged in a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre in 2010. Here, grief functions as provocation towards passive arrest, as the possibility of an "insightful grief" that is crucial to subjectivity but appears to bring with it a kind of "stillness or directionless movement rather than clear trajectory." (14)

While there is much to glean in each of these chapters, Escolme's early modern play readings are less convincing than her forays into modern productions. In other words, she posits claims upon which she does not fully elaborate and occasionally devolves into a kind of character analysis that loses sight of the book's historicist aims in the face of a psychology of emotion. Some of the nuanced arguments about the complexities of Escolme's four key feelings fall short of being fully convincing--perhaps because the book takes up too many texts/productions such that the deep tissue of its readings and analyses get lost in that shuffle. In Chapter 3, on love, it was difficult to discern the evident links between then and now as she sets them out theoretically in the book's introduction. Further, the book suffers in spots from what might be called transhistorical slippages. For example, she argues for the consistency of laughter across 400 years while simultaneously espousing that historical dissonance is crucial to remember, particularly in reading and rethinking modern productions. Put differently, Escolme often wants it both ways: then as now; now nothing like then. The book would have benefited throughout from even more explicit excavation of this tension.

Emotional Excess's straightforward structure as outlined above complements its accessible style. In many moments, Escolme's unique voice and illuminating anecdotes--albeit occasionally lost in too much deference to other scholarship--come together to powerfully enliven the stage even as it is being recalled and recovered, both historically and contemporarily, in a narrative form (the monograph) that so frequently seems to do injustice to theatrical "liveness." Too, readers will appreciate both her comparative impulse and willingness to be overtly speculative as she crafts conversation about how emotions work on stage over/in time. The book will be most useful, I would venture, to readers interested in Shakespeare in contemporary performance. For this reader, Escolme's informative, detailed descriptions and analysis of modern plays were the most compelling aspects of the book in ways that will especially appeal to scholars and practitioners invested in modern Shakespeare, materialism, theater, and performance studies.

Notes

(1.) Bridget Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion's Slaves (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), xxiv.

(2.) Ibid., 220.

(3.) Ibid., xviii.

(4.) Ibid., xix, xxx.

(5.) Ibid., 37.

(6.) Ibid., 52.

(7.) Ibid., 57.

(8.) Ibid., 75.

(9.) Ibid., 57.

(10.) Ibid., 63.

(11.) Ibid., 172.

(12.) Ibid., 111.

(13.) Ibid., 181.

(14.) Ibid., 206.