Journal articles on the topic 'Shakespeare, William. Much ado about nothing'

In Act 5 of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare Dramatizes Two Consecutive Episodes in Which Writing Poetry is Mixed suggestively with singing, recalling, or imitating music. The first comes when Benedick sings or speaks several lines from the popular ballad “The God of Love.” The second is Claudio's musical rite of contrition for slandering Hero and (he believes) causing her death. In both cases, poetry is produced through writing practices that are interwoven with song. Indeed, Shakespeare yokes literacy and aurality together in the same keyword, noting, which referred both to writing and to musical notes, and which (as scholars have long observed) is how nothing was pronounced in early modern English. Benedick seeks poetic inspiration from the notes of balladry, then bemoans his inability to versify in rhyme. Claudio not only sees that his epitaph is notated, read aloud, and hung on the tomb; he calls for a corresponding hymn to be sung. Taken together, the scenes attune us to forms of poetic making that are irreducible to writing or language—those overdetermined categories in literary studies that have enabled our neglect of the role that nonverbal sound has played in poetic composition.

The present article discusses one of the contributions of the Royal Shakespeare Company to the World Shakespeare Festival, a celebration of the Bard as the world’s playwright that took place in the UK in 2012 as part of the so-called Cultural Olympiad. Iqbal Khan directed for the RSC an all-Indian production of the comedy Much Ado about Nothing that transposed the actions from early modern Messina to contemporary Delhi and presented its story of love, merry war of wits and patriarchal domination in a colourful setting that recreated a world of tradition and modernity. Received with mixed reviews that in general applauded the vibrant relocation while criticising some directorial choices, this 2012 Much Ado about Nothing in modern-day Delhi raises a number of questions about cultural ownership and Shakespeare’s international performance – issues that are particularly relevant if we see the play in relation to other productions of the World Shakespeare Festival in this Olympic year but also in the context of the increasing internationalization of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in contemporary times.

This article describes a multi-part approach to Shakespeare's playwriting, including his conception of comedy, his method of characterisation, aspects of staging, and the relative status of male and female characters. It can accommodate all types of Shakespearean play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is treated as seminal. Other plays discussed include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Twelfth Night. The approach is cumulative in effect and derives from teaching English 17–18 year olds working on the coursework unit of their Advanced Level English Literature certificate. Its unitised structure suits college and classroom workshops. It can be modified for younger students.

Cognitive scientists are beginning to explore the important work our minds do when attention wanes. In particular, it seems that orientation of the individual in relation to past, present, and future may be developed and maintained during periods of distraction. Shakespeare works with the potential for productive mind-wandering in characters and in audiences. In Henry V, they and we think beyond present business into the ideologies and costs of the underlying plans and possibilities. The King himself embodies the interaction of wandering and selfhood. In Much Ado About Nothing the friends and audience of Beatrice and Benedick may not be fully absorbed by their witty exchanges; there is another story to be told, in the gaps Shakespeare creates in the action of the play, in which they end up taking their inevitable roles as lovers.

In their “Editors' Preface” to the Cambridge University Press Shakespeare in Production series, J. S. Bratton and Julie Hankey proudly describe the “comprehensive dossier of materials,” including “eye-witness accounts, contemporary criticism, promptbook marginalia, stage business, cuts, additions and rewritings,” that make up the heart of this brilliant and exceptionally useful collection of Shakespeare editions. Conceived by Jeremy Treglown and first published by Junction Books, the series was later printed by Bristol Classical Press as Plays in Performance, though none of the original four titles remains in print. Already published in the descendant Cambridge Shakespeare in Production series are nine plays—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Tempest, King Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice—with Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and As You Like It forthcoming.

This essay focuses on some Shakespeare productions in Japan during 2014 and 2015. One is a Bunraku version of Falstaff, for which the writer himself wrote the script. It is an amalgamation of scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor and those from Henry IV. It was highly reputed and its stage design was awarded a 2014 Yomiuri Theatre Award. Another is a production of Much Ado about Nothing produced by the writer himself in a theatre-in-the-round in his new translation. Another is a production of Macbeth arranged and directed by Mansai Nomura the Kyogen performer. All the characters besides Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were performed by the three witches, suggesting that the whole illusion was produced by the witches. It was highly acclaimed worldwide. Another is a production of Hamlet directed by Yukio Ninagawa, with Tatsuya Fujiwara in the title role. It was brought to the Barbican theatre. There were also many other Shakespeare productions to commemorate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

This paper intends to provide a thorough analysis of some linguistic features of Early Modern English present in three Shakespeare movies and how they have been transferred in the Spanish translation for dubbing. To achieve it, a close observation of forms of address, greetings and other archaic formulae regulated by the norms of decorum of the age has been carried out. The corpus used for the analysis: Hamlet (Olivier 1948) and Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh 1993), highly acclaimed and rated by the audience as two of the greatest Shakespeare movies. A more recent version of Hamlet (Branagh 1996)—the first unabridged theatrical film version of the play—will be analyzed too in the light of the translation choices, and the results will be compared with those of the other two films.

Shakespeare and his works are widely analyzed and studied, however, you can always find something to discuss about or study, since Shakespeare’s works are always challenging and attractive. This time my focus is on the father figures that appear in some of his greatest works, like King Hamlet and Polonius in Hamlet, Barbantio in Othello, Lord Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and Gloucester in King Lear, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, etc. Actually, this paper aims to give an insight and compare the major characters as fathers. It covers an analysis of father-son relationship and the father-daughter relationship, fathers’ attitude towards their children, the influence they have in the life of their children, their love and authority, expectations, their image in the eyes of their children and so on. Each and every one of these characters has a specific relationship with their child; they are all authoritative, some more and some less, they are proud and they influence their children’s lives by accepting their decisions or not, by requesting very important and delicate tasks from them, by deciding themselves for their children, etc. Focusing on the issue of authority, power and ownership, the article aims at showing how stereotypical social and gender roles resonate with various political and social contexts of power. However, the paper will also analyze the dreams, duty, as well as defiance children have, show or express towards their fathers. A special importance in this paper is given to the relationships between fathers and daughters, having in mind the social position women had at that time, the role they had in their families etc. In these relationships, it is clearly that there is more likely to find a tyrannical possessiveness in excess of normal parental affection in the father's behaviour—or, as the case may be, a capriciousness, coldness, or disloyalty unwarranted by the daughter's exemplary conduct, which in fact results in the creation or not of a father figure in these plays. Namely, it is clear that Shakespeare depicted the struggle and entanglement of a father character who realizes the lonely emptiness he has to face after fulfilling the happiness of his child. As I mentioned, no matter the uniqueness of these relationships that are presented between parents and children, we can find some similarities as well, as many of the plays depict the same situations but with similar circumstances. Consequently, I hope that this paper will be just a small contribution in the field of literature and that future scholars will find it useful in their further studies and analysis of Shakespeare’s works, which is really a never-ending ‘struggle.’

Em fins do século XVI, William Shakespeare escreveu, além de outros textosdramáticos, três comédias que giram em torno da inebriante e complicada experiênciade se estar apaixonado – Much ado about nothing (1598), As you like it (1599-1600) e Twelfth Night (1601). Nas três, personagens femininas ocupam papel de destaque e se tornam a força motriz da trama, superando desafios. Em 2006, a Editora Objetiva publicou o romance A décima segunda noite, do escritor, cronista, cartunista, tradutor, roteirista e dramaturgo Luís Fernando Verissimo (1936-), uma releitura bem humorada da comédia shakespeariana, Twelfth Night or What you Will. O novo texto confirma a relevância das personagens femininas da comédia inglesa e possibilita que o leitor se divirta com as identidades trocadas por meio dos disfarces de gênero. Este quinto romance do escritor gaúcho é o segundo da coleção ‘Devorando Shakespeare’, que pretendia publicar recriações do dramaturgo inglês. Aqui, num movimento de convergência de duas de suas paixões – a capital francesa e a produção do dramaturgo inglês – o escritor gaúcho desloca o lócus dramático da Ilíria balcânica, para a Paris dos anos 70, lócus onde se constrói o híbrido, onde se cruzam os lugares realmente vividos por diferentes sujeitos oriundos dediversos estratos sociais que se unem através do sentimento de solidariedade de grupo, próprio da condição do exílio. De maneira sensível e inteligente, o romancista insere em seu texto um narrador particular: o papagaio Henri, que constrói sua narrativa a partir do poleiro onde o colocam, no salão de cabelereiros Ilíria, de propriedade de Orsino.

This article asserts that in Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare lays open the rottenness within an arbitrary system of government but does not dare carry the plot to its logical conclusion. The responses to events by the dominant nobles, a prince and a count, are not merely foolish and damaging, but, in light of the guidance of, among others, Girolamo Muzio and Baldassare Castiglione, deeply dishonourable. The playmakers, as the most talented team in the realm licensed for performance entertainment, create a historically credible set of characters, but, possibly because they wish to continue to benefit from their protected status and draw their regular customers, do not make explicit any radical questioning of rank and degree. An analysis of Margaret’s role suggests a strategic ambiguity within the jocular ending.

Arguably, in a time of war literature, and indeed all writing, is saturated with deep psychic responses to conflict. So that not only in literary genres such as epic and tragedy, but also in the novel and comedy, can writing about war be discerned. C.G. Jung, Shakespeare and Lindsay Clarke are fundamentally writers of war who share allied literary strategies. Moreover, they diagnose similar origins to the malaise of a culture tending to war in the neglect of aspects of the feminine that patriarchy prefers to ignore. In repressing or evading the dark feminine, cultures as dissimilar as ancient Greece, the 21st century, Shakespeare's England and Jung's Europe prevent the healing energies of the conjunctio of masculine and feminine from stabilising an increasingly fragile consciousness. In the Troy novels of Clarke, Answer to Job by Jung and Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare, some attempt at spiritual nourishment is made through the writing.

Inspired by Much Ado about Nothing of Shakespeare, the comic opera Béatrice et Bénédict of Berlioz countains a significant amount of irony. Richard Pohl, the author of the German translation, removed several strokes of irony for the performances in Weimar in 1863. This choice shows linguistic and cultural obstacles, as well as a specific aesthetic and ideological orientation. Irony, moreover, contributes to the different semiosis used in opera and circulates between text, music and theater. Music remains the same in both versions, but the new text changes the general atmosphere.

Inspired by Much Ado about Nothing of Shakespeare, the comic opera Béatrice et Bénédict of Berlioz countains a significant amount of irony. Richard Pohl, the author of the German translation, removed several strokes of irony for the performances in Weimar in 1863. This choice shows linguistic and cultural obstacles, as well as a specific aesthetic and ideological orientation. Irony, moreover, contributes to the different semiosis used in opera and circulates between text, music and theater. Music remains the same in both versions, but the new text changes the general atmosphere.

I wake up early, questions buzzing through my mind. While I sip my morning cup of tea and read The Guardian online, the writer, restless because I’m ignoring her, walks around firing questions.“Expecting the patriarchy to want to share its enormous wealth and power with women is extremely naïve.”I nod. Outside the window pieces of sky are framed by trees, fluffy white clouds alternate with bright patches of blue. The sweet, heady first wafts of lavender and citrus drift in through the open window. Spring has come to Hvar. Time to get to work.The more I understand about narcissism, the more I understand the world. I didn’t understand before. In the 1990s.“No—you knew, but you didn’t know at the same time.”I kept telling everybody The River Ophelia wasn’t about sex, (or the sex wasn’t about sex), it was about power. Not many people listened or heard, though. Only some readers.I’ve come here to get away. To disappear. To write.I can’t find the essay I want for my article about the 1990s. I consider the novel I’m reading, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and wonder whether I should write about it instead? It’s just been reprinted, twenty years after its initial release. The back cover boasts, “widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades.” It was first published in the 1990s. So far it’s about a woman named Chris who’s addictively obsessed with an unavailable man, though I’m yet to unravel Kraus’s particular brand of feminism—abjection? Maybe, maybe … while I think, I click through my storage folder. Half way through, I find a piece I wrote about Kathy Acker in 1997, a tribute of sorts that was never published. The last I’d heard from Kathy before this had been that she was heading down to Mexico to try shark cartilage for her breast cancer. That was just before she died.When I was first introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, it was very political; it was about what was happening to the economy and about changing the political system. By the time it was taken up by the American academy, the politics had gone to hell. (Acker qtd. in Friedman 20)Looking back, I’d have to say my friendship with Kathy Acker was intense and short-lived.In the original I’d written “was a little off and on.” But I prefer the new version. I first met Kathy in person in Sydney, in 1995. We were at a World Art launch at Ariel bookshop and I remember feeling distinctly nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have been. Nervous, that is.Reading this now brings it all back: how Kathy and I lost touch in the intervening two years and the sudden fact of her death. I turn to the end and read, “She died tragically, not only because she was much too young, but because American literature seems rather frumpy without her, of cancer on the 30th November 1997, aged 53.”The same age as I am now. (While some believe Kathy was 50 when she died, Kathy told me she lied about her age even to the point of changing her passport. Women who lie about their age tend to want to be younger than they are, so I’m sticking with 53.) This coincidence spooks me a little.I make a cup of tea and eat some chocolate.“This could work …” the writer says. My reasons for feeling nervous were historical. I’d spoken to Kathy once previously (before the publication of The River Ophelia on the phone from Seattle to San Francisco in 1993) and the conversation had ended abruptly. I’d wanted to interview Kathy for my PhD on American fiction but Kathy wouldn’t commit. Now I was meeting her face to face and trying to push the past to the back of my mind.The evening turned out to be a memorable one. A whole bunch of us—a mixture of writers, publishers, academics and literati—went out to dinner and then carried on drinking well into the night. I made plans to see Kathy again. She struck me as a warm, generous, sincere and intensely engaging person. It seemed we might become friends. I hesitated: should I include the rest? Or was that too much?The first thing Kathy had said when we were introduced was, “I loved your book, The River Ophelia. I found it as soon as I arrived. I bought it from the bookshop at the airport. I saw your amazing cover and then I read on the back that it was influenced by the work of Kathy Acker. I was like, wow, no one in America has ever put that on the back cover of a novel. So I read it immediately and I couldn’t put it down. I love the way you’ve deconstructed the canon but still managed to put a compelling narrative to it. I never did that.”Why didn’t I include that? It had given me more satisfaction than anything anyone else had said.I remember how quickly I abandoned my bestselling life in Sydney, sexual harassment had all but ruined my career, and exchanged it for an uncertain future in London. My notoriety as an author was damaging my books and my relationship with my publisher had become toxic. The first thing I did in London was hire a lawyer, break my contract with Picador and take both novels out of print.Reality intrudes in the form of a phone call from my mother. Terminally ill with cancer, she informs me that she’s off her food. For a retired chef, the loss of appetite is not inconsiderable. Her dying is a dull ache, a constant tiredness and sadness in me. She’s just arrived in London. I will go there next week to meet her.(1)I first came across Kathy’s work in 1991. I’d just finished my MA thesis on postmodernism and parody and was rewarding myself with some real reading (i.e. not related to my thesis) when I came across the novel Don Quixote. This novel had a tremendous impact on me. Those familiar with DQ may recall that it begins with an abortion that transforms its female narrator into a knight.When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. (Acker Quixote 9)Kathy’s opening sentences produced a powerful emotional response in me and her bold confronting account of an abortion both put me in touch with feelings I was trying to avoid and connected these disturbing feelings with a broader political context. Kathy’s technique of linking the personal and emotional with the political changed the way I worked as a writer.I’d submitted the piece as an obituary for publication to an Australian journal; the editor had written suggestions in the margin in red. All about making the piece a more conventional academic essay. I hadn’t been sure that was what I wanted to do. Ambitious, creative, I was trying to put poststructuralist theory into practice, to write theoretical fiction. It’s true, I hadn’t been to the Sorbonne, but so what? What was the point of studying theory if one didn’t put it into practice? I was trying to write like French theorists, not to write about them. The editor’s remarks would have made a better academic essay, it’s just I’m not sure that’s where I wanted to go. I never rewrote it and it was never published.I first encountered I Love Dick (2017) during a film course at the AFTVRS when the lecturer presented a short clip of the adaptation for the class to analyse. When I later saw the novel in a bookshop I bought a copy. Given my discovery of the unpublished obituary it is also a bit spooky that I’m reading this book as both Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker had relationships with academic and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. Chris as his wife, Kathy as his lover. Kraus wrote a biography of Acker called After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which seems fairly unsympathetic according to the review I read in The Guardian. (Cooke 2017) Intrigued, I add Kraus’s biography to my growing pile of Acker related reading, the Acker/Wark letters I’m Very Into You and Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. While I’ve not read the letters yet, Crudo’s breathless yet rhythmic layering of images and it’s fragmented reflections upon war, women and politics reminded me less of Acker and more of Woolf; Mrs Dalloway, in fact.(2)What most inspired me, and what makes Kathy such a great writer, is her manner of writing politically. For the purposes of this piece, when I say Kathy writes politically, I’m referring to what happens when you read her books. That is, your mind—fuelled by powerful feelings—makes creative leaps that link everyday things and ideas with political discourses and debates (for Kathy, these were usually critiques of bourgeois society, of oedipal culture and of the patriarchy).In the first pages of Don Quixote, for example, an abortion becomes synonymous with the process of becoming a knight. The links Kathy makes between these two seemingly unrelated events yields a political message for the creative reader. There is more at stake than just gender-bending or metamorphoses here: a reversal of power seems to have taken place. A relatively powerless woman (a female victim except for the fact that in having an abortion she’s exerting some measure of control over her life), far from being destroyed by the experience of aborting her foetus, actually gains power—power to become a knight and go about the world fulfilling a quest. In writing about an abortion in this way, Kathy challenges our assumptions about this controversial topic: beyond the moral debate, there are other issues at stake, like identity and power. An abortion becomes a birth, rather than a banal tragedy.When I think about the 1990s, I automatically think of shoulder pads, cocktails and expense accounts (the consumption of the former, in my case, dependent on the latter). But on reflection, I think about the corporatisation of the publishing industry, the Backlash and films like Thelma and Louise, (1991) Basic Instinct (1992) and Single White Female (1992). It occurs to me that the Hollywood movie star glamorous #MeToo has its origin in the turbulent 1990s Backlash. When I first saw each of these films I thought they were exciting, controversial. I loved the provocative stance they took about women. But looking back I can’t help wondering: whose stories were they really, why were we hearing them and what was the political point?It was a confusing time in terms of debates about gender equality.Excluding the premise for Thelma and Louise, all three films present as narrative truth scenarios that ran in stark contrast to reality. When it came to violence and women, most domestic homicide and violence was perpetrated by men. And violence towards women, in the 1990s, was statistically on the rise and there’s little improvement in these statistics today.Utter chaos, having a British passport never feels quite so wonderful as it does in the arrivals hall at Heathrow.“Perhaps these films allow women to fantasise about killing the men who are violent towards them?”Nyah, BI is chick killing chick … and think about the moral to the story. Fantasy OK, concrete action painful, even deadly.“Different story today …”How so?“Violent female protagonists are all the rage and definitely profitable. Killing Eve (2018) and A Simple Favour (2018).”I don’t have an immediate answer here. Killing Eve is a TV series, I think aloud, A Simple Favour structurally similar to Single White Female … “Why don’t you try self-publishing? It’ll be 20 years since you took The River Ophelia out of print, bit of an anniversary, maybe it’s time?”Not a bad idea. I’m now on the tube to meet mum at her bed and breakfast but the writer is impatient to get back to work. Maybe I should just write the screenplay instead?“Try both. If you don’t believe in your writing, who else will?”She has a point. I’m not getting anywhere with my new novel.A message pips through on Facebook. Want to catch up?What? Talk about out of the blue. I haven’t heard from Sade in twenty years … and how on earth did he get through my privacy settings?After meeting mum, the next thing I do is go to the doctor. My old doctor from West Kensington, she asks me how I’m going and I say I’m fine except that mum’s dying and this awful narcissistic ex-partner of mine has contacted me on Facebook. She recommends I read the following article, “The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist” (Psychology Today).“Sometimes being a kind caring person makes you vulnerable to abusers.”After the appointment I can’t get her words out of my head.I dash into a Starbucks, I’m in Notting Hill just near the tube station, and read the article on my laptop on wifi. I highlight various sections. Narcissists “have a complete lack of empathy for others including their own family and friends, so that they will take advantage of people to get their own needs and desires met, even if it hurts someone.” That sounds about right, Sade could always find some way of masking his real motives in charm, or twisting reality around to make it look like things weren’t his fault, they were mine. How cleverly he’d lied! Narcissists, I read, are attracted to kind, compassionate people who they then use and lie to without remorse.But the bit that really makes me sit up is towards the end of the article. “For someone on the outside looking at a relationship between a highly sensitive person and a narcissist, it’s all too easy to blame the HSP. How and why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship?” Narcissists are incredibly good at making you doubt yourself, especially the part of you that says: this has happened before, it’ll happen again. You need to leave.The opening paragraph of the psychology textbook I read next uses Donald Trump as an example. Trump is also Patrick Bateman’s hero, the misogynistic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious American Psycho. Despite an earlier version that broadly focused on New York fiction of the 1990s, Ellis’s novel and the feminist outcry it provoked became the central topic of my PhD.“Are you alright mum?”I’ve just picked Mum up and I’m driving her to Paris for a night and then on to Switzerland where she’s going to have voluntary euthanasia. Despite the London drizzle and the horrific traffic the whole thing has a Thelma and Louise feel about it. I tell mum and she laughs.“We should watch it again. Have you seen it since it first came out?”“Sounds like a good idea.”Mum, tiny, pointy-kneed and wearing an out-of-character fluoro green beanie given to her at the oncology clinic in Sydney, is being very stoic but I can tell from the way she constantly wrings her hands that she’s actually quite terrified.“OK Louise,” she says as I unfold her Zimmer frame later that evening.“OK Thelma,” I reply as she walks off towards the hotel.Paris is a treat. My brother is waiting inside and we’re hoping to enjoy one last meal together.Mum didn’t want to continue with chemo at 83, but she’s frightened of dying a horrific death. As we approach hotel reception Mum can’t help taking a detour to inspect the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant.“Oysters naturel. That sounds nice.”I smile, wait, and take her by the elbow.I’ve completely forgotten. The interview/review I wrote of Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, in 1995 for Rolling Stone. Where is it? I open my laptop and quickly click through the endless publicity and reviews of The River Ophelia, the interview/review came out around the same time the novel was published, but I can’t find it. I know I had it out just a few months ago, when I was chasing up some freelance book reviews.I make a fresh pot of tea from the mini bar, green, and return to my Acker tribute. Should I try to get it published? Here, or back in Australia? Ever the émigré’s dilemma. I decide I like the Parisian sense of style in this room, especially the cotton-linen sheets.Finally, I find it, it’s in the wrong folder. Printing it out, I remember how Kathy had called her agent and publisher in New York, and her disbelief when I’d told her the book hadn’t been picked up overseas. Kathy’s call resulted in my first New York agent. I scrutinise its pages.Kathy smiles benign childlike creativity in the larger photo, and gestures in passionate exasperation in the smaller group, her baby face framed by countless metal ear piercings. The interview takes place—at Kathy’s insistence—on her futon in her hotel room. My memories clarify. It wasn’t that we drifted apart, or rather we did, but only after men had come between us first. Neither of us had much luck in that department.(4)Kathy’s writing is also political because her characters don’t act or speak the way you’d expect them to. They don’t seem to follow the rules or behave in the way your average fictional character tends to do. From sentence to sentence, Kathy’s characters either change into different people, or live revolutionary lives, or even more radical still, live impossible lives.When the narrator of DQ transforms herself into a knight (and lives an impossible life); she turns a situation in which she is passive and relatively powerless—she is about to be operated on and drugged—into an empowering experience (and lives a creative revolutionary life). Ironically, getting power means she turns herself into a male knight. But Kathy gets around the problem that power is male by not letting things rest there. The female, aborting Kathy isn’t actually replaced by a male knight, bits of him are just grafted onto her. Sure, she sets out on a quest, but the other aspects of her empowerment are pretty superficial: she does adopt a new name (which is more like a disguise), and identity (appearance); and picks up a bad habit or two—a tendency to talk in the language used by knights.“But who’s the father?” the writer wants to know. “I mean isn’t that the real question here?”No, that is exactly not the real question here and not the point. It is not about who the father is—it’s about what happens to a woman who has an unwanted unplanned pregnancy.The phone rings. It’s my brother. Mum’s waiting for me downstairs and the oysters are beckoning.(5)The idea that writing could be political was very appealing. The transformation between my first novel, Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure and my second, The River Ophelia (Picador insisted on publishing them in reverse chronology) was partly a result of my discovery of Kathy’s work and the ideas it set off in me. Kathy wasn’t the first novelist to write politically, but she was the first female novelist to do so in a way that had an immediate impact on me at an emotional level. And it was this powerful emotional response that inspired me as a writer—I wanted to affect my readers in a similar way (because reading Kathy’s work, I felt less alone and that my darkest experiences, so long silenced by shame and skirted around in the interests of maintaining appearances, could be given a voice).We’re driving through Switzerland and I’m thinking about narcissism and the way the narcissists in my personal and professional life overshadowed everything else. But now it’s time to give the rest of the world some attention. It’s also one way of pulling back the power from the psychopaths who rule the world.As we approach Zurich, my mother asks to pull over so she can use the ladies. When she comes out I can see she’s been crying. Inside the car, she reaches for my hand and clasps it. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say goodbye.”“It’s alright Mum,” I say and hold her while we both cry.A police car drives by and my mother’s eyes snag. Harassed by the police in Australia and unable to obtain Nembutal in the UK, Mum has run out of options.To be a woman in this society is to find oneself living outside the law. Maybe this is what Acker meant when she wrote about becoming a pirate, or a knight?Textual deconstruction can be a risky business and writers like Acker walk a fine line when it comes to the law. Empire of the Senseless ran into a plagiarism suit in the UK and her publishers forced Acker to sign an apology to Harold Robbins (Acker Hannibal Lecter 13). My third novel Dependency similarly fell foul of the law when I discovered that in deconstructing gossip and myths about celebrities, drawing on their lives and then making stuff up, the result proved prophetic. When my publisher, Harper Collins, refused to indemnify me against potential unintended defamation I pulled the book from its contract on the advice of a lawyer. I was worth seven million pounds on paper at that point, the internet travel site my then husband and I had founded with Bob Geldof had taken off, and the novel was a radical hybrid text comprised of Rupert Murdoch’s biography, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hello Magazine and I was worried that Murdoch might come after me personally. I’d fictionalised him as a King Lear type, writing his Cordelia out of his will and leaving everything to his Goneril and Reagan.Recent theoretical studies argue that Acker’s appropriation and deconstruction constitute a feminist politics as “fragmentation” (June 2) and as “agency” (Pitchford 22). As Acker puts it. “And then it’s like a kid: suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture.” (Acker Hannibal Lecter 11).We don’t easily fit in a system that wasn’t ever designed to meet our needs.(6)By writing about the most private parts of women’s lives, I’ve tried to show how far there is to go before women and men are equal on a personal level. The River Ophelia is about a young woman whose public life might seem a success from the outside (she is a student doing an honours year at university in receipt of a scholarship), but whose private life is insufferable (she knows nothing about dealing with misogyny on an intimate level and she has no real relationship-survival skills, partly as a result of her family history, partly because the only survival skills she has have been inscribed by patriarchy and leave her vulnerable to more abuse). When Justine-the-character learns how to get around sexism of the personal variety (by re-inventing her life through parodies of classic texts about oedipal society) she not only changes her life, but she passes on her new-found survival skills to the reader.A disturbing tale about a young university student who loses herself in a destructive relationship, The River Ophelia is a postmodern novel about domestic violence and sexual harassment in the academy, contrary to its marketing campaign at the time. It’s protagonist, Justine, loves Sade but Sade is only interested in sex; indeed, he’s a brutish sex addict. Despite this, Justine can’t seem to leave: for all her education, she’s looking for love and commitment in all the wrong places. While the feminist lore of previous generations seems to work well in theory, Justine can’t seem to make it work in practise. Owning her power and experimenting with her own sexuality only leaves her feeling more despairing than before. Unconventional, compelling and controversial, The River Ophelia became an instant best-seller and is credited with beginning the Australian literary movement known as grunge/dirty realism.But there is always the possibility, given the rich intertextuality and self referentiality, that The River Ophelia is Justine’s honours thesis in creative writing. In this case, Sade, Juliette, Ophelia, Hamlet, Bataille, Simone, Marcelle and Leopold become hybrids made up from appropriated canonical characters, fragments of Justine’s turbulent student’s world and invented sections. But The River Ophelia is also a feminist novel that partly began as a dialogue with Ellis whose scandalous American Psycho it parodies even as it reinvents. This creative activity, which also involves the reader by inviting her to participate in the textual play, eventually empowers Justine over the canon and over her perpetrator, Sade.Another hotel room. This one, just out of Zürich, is tiny. I place my suitcase on the rack beneath the window overlooking the narrow street and start to unpack.“Hasn’t this all been said before, about The River Ophelia?” The writer says, trying out the bed. I’m in the middle of an email about self-publishing a new edition of TRO.Some of it. While the grunge label has been refuted, Acker’s influence has been underplayed.Acker often named her protagonists after herself, so losing the Acker part of my textual filiation plays into the whole grunge/dirty realism marketing campaign. I’ve talked about how I always name protagonists after famous women but not linked this to Acker. Bohemia Beach has a protagonist named after Cathy as in Wuthering Heights. Justine of The River Ophelia was doubly an Acker trait: firstly, she was named Justine after De Sade’s character and is a deconstruction of that character, and secondly she was named Justine self-reflexively after me, as a tribute to Kathy as in Kathy Goes to Haiti.The other context for The River Ophelia that has been lost is to do with the early work of Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier. The narcissists were so destructive and so powerful they left no time for the relatively more subtle Gaitskill or Texier. Prototypes for Sex in the City, the 1990s was also a time when Downtown New York women writers explored the idea that gender equality meant women could do anything men did sexually, that they deserved the full gamut of libertine sexual freedoms. Twenty years on it should also be said that women who push the envelope by writing women protagonists who are every bit as sexually transgressive as men, every bit as addictively self-destructive as male protagonists deserve not to be shamed for that experimentation. They deserve to be celebrated and read.AfterwordI’d like to remember Kathy as I knew her briefly in Sydney. A bottle-blonde with a number two haircut, a leopard-skin bikini and a totally tattooed body, she swam a surprisingly genteel breast-stroke in the next lane in one of the world’s most macho lap-swimming pools.ReferencesA Simple Favour. Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate, 2018.Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. London: Collins, 1986.———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.———. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.———. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly, 1994.——— and McKenzie Wark. I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996. New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton and Co, 2003.Bushnell, Candace. Sex in the City. United States: Grand Central Publishing, 1996.Cooke, Rachel. “Review of After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus—Baffling Life Study.” The Guardian 4 Sep. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/after-kathy-acker-a-biography-chris-kraus-review>.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.Ettler, Justine. Bohemia Beach. Melbourne: Transit Lounge. 2018.———. “Kathy Acker: King of the Pussies.” Review of Pussy, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker. Rolling Stone. Nov. 1995: 60-61.———. Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure. Sydney: Picador, 1996.———. “La Trobe University Essay: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and Catherine Texier’s Break Up.” Australian Book Review, 1995.———. The Best Ellis for Business: A Re-Examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of “American Psycho.” PhD. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2013.———. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989): 20-21.Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behaviour. New York: Random House, 1988.I Love Dick. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Video, 2017.June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern Feminist and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Therese Huk, Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.Killing Eve. Dir. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. BBC America, 2018.Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin, 2017.———. I Love Dick. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016.Laing, Olivia. Crudo. London: Picador, 2018.Lee, Bandy. The Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2017.Lombard, Nancy, and Lesley McMillan. “Introduction.” Violence against Women. Eds. Nancy Lombard and Lesley McMillan. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013.Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. London: Associated Uni Press, 2002.Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso, 2000.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. United States: John Hopkins Press, 1989.Single White Female. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Columbia Pictures, 1992.Texier, Catherine. Panic Blood. London: Collins, 1991.Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Ward, Deborah. “Sense and Sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist.” Psychology Today (16 Jan. 2012). 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-and-sensitivity/201201/the-highly-sensitive-person-and-the-narcissist>.

The epigraph to the call for papers for this issue of M/C Journal is taken from Act 2 Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prince of Denmark. As it appears in the call for papers, the referenced fragment of Hamlet’s speech, ‘for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (Shakespeare 75), could lead a reader to suspect that morality derives from reasoned thought in the play and that, according to the speaker, the object of moral judgment is neither good nor bad prior to such thought. Spoken in the context of a disagreement between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about whether Denmark is a prison, the epigraph supports this reading; Hamlet believes that Denmark is a prison, and the two courtiers do not. However, consideration of the entire passage from which the epigraph is taken suggests a subtlely different interpretation. In response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s assertion that Denmark is not a prison, Hamlet remarks: Why, then ‘tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. (Shakespeare 75) Rather than prompting the previous interpretation, a reading of the entire passage reveals Hamlet describing a sort of relativism. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their point of view, and Hamlet has his. Hamlet labels neither point of view good or bad here. So why does he introduce the language of morality at all? Why doesn’t he say, ‘Why, then, ‘tis none to you: to me it is a prison,’ instead, omitting the fragment that comprises the epigraph entirely? What function does the epigraphic fragment perform? Addressing these questions in the context of the discussion occurring in Hamlet can provide insight into the contemporary intellectual concerns posed by this call for papers, in particular, the cultural cost of employing a hierarchical or bureaucratic morality to guide determinations, especially consensual ones, about pursuing or discarding specific lines of inquiry. Scene II follows Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost, an event that coincides with the onset of the Prince’s perceived madness. Unsure of its true cause, the King and Queen enlist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to visit Hamlet and to discover the reason for his recent, strange behavior. The King and Queen promise the two friends money, social recognition, and public appreciation in exchange for their detective work. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern agree to this plan; in fact, once they contract with the crown, they are obligated to carry it out. Their conversation with Hamlet not only fails to produce the desired result but also makes some turns that actually undermine the King and Queen’s purpose. Not only does Hamlet appear more rational than the King and Queen suspect but he also seems quite willing to perform madness, thus meeting the expectations of his audience, in order to speak in an uncensored and unmannerly fashion. In addition, Hamlet only mentions ‘bad’ once, following the passage cited above, in reference to his recent dreams, which Guildenstern notes, whether good or bad, ‘indeed are ambition’ (Shakespeare 75). Their conversation with Hamlet produces other associations, however, between moral judgment and ambition, ambition and dreams, dreams and shadows, and shadows and social relations. This chain of associations builds connection between the worth, and rightness, of any given judgment and the social role of the judging individual. The passage cited above, which embeds the epigraph to this call for papers, is constructed in such a way that it is unclear whether significance attaches to the moral conclusion resulting from thought or the process of thinking itself, which ends up supplanting a thing’s neutral, objective existence with a subjectively-derived judgment of a thing’s worth. In either case, who thinks matters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not authoritative; Hamlet, although considered mad, is. When he closes the passage under consideration with ‘to me it is a prison’ (Shakespeare 75), he makes this assertion confident that what Denmark is to him carries more weight than what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deem it. In part, his confidence derives from knowing that, as outsiders and employees of the crown, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not in the position to make a public statement of this sort. Additionally, Hamlet’s words are empowered, worthy as words to hear and to heed, even if mad, worthy because he speaks them, and worthy for the moral judgments they convey. As set up in Act 2 Scene II of the play, the rhetorical situation presents a dialectical communication act that exposes the tension between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s dialogue, which conforms to the constraints of unauthoritative, but purchased, speech, and Hamlet’s, which represents the allowable excesses of authoritative, though suspiciously irrational, speech. The former must presume the literalness of language; for instance, Denmark is not a prison, if prison refers to the physical space of incarceration. The latter, unbound to the literalness of language, can use language figuratively. Denmark is a prison to Hamlet, not in the restrictive sense to which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern refer, but metaphorically. Hamlet’s figurative play, connected to his authoritative role and to the permission his role affords him to go crazy without threat of ending up in prison, leads to an interpretive moment, which would have undone the conventions of this rhetorical situation had Hamlet not cut it short. If he had conceded that beggars comprise the social body, and therefore speak with authority, and that monarchs exist in their shadow, guided by the linguistic precedents beggars either perform or circulate, rather than insisting that such an idea exemplifies his inability to reason, Hamlet would have not only justified his own deauthorization but also given up his rights both to perform madness and to use language metaphorically. In other words, if Hamlet had permitted himself to push his own interpretation a bit farther, he would have disclosed the artificiality of the socio-rhetorical conventions that guarantee his words an audience, a disclosure he absolutely refuses to put into words – that is, literally. To use metaphorical language, then, although a privilege that follows from social status and the authority that status affords, permits the speaker to avoid accountability of the sort that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern must demonstrate, specifically, to the King and the Queen. Hamlet, for instance, does not have to admit that his authority is an accident of birth; however, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the audience for the play know that it is his inheritance. Hamlet does not have to say to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he is a thinker, and they are not; although he does, in effect, when he utters the fragment that is the epigraph to this call for papers. Subordinated to the phrase that begins with ‘Why, then ’tis none to you,’ the epigraph might be rewritten as: ‘when you think, you think badly and come to the wrong conclusions.’ In other words, Hamlet does not trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to say anything other than what they are literally expected to say, what is conventional for them to say, and what they are paid by the King and Queen to say. Hamlet’s thinking, while apparently mad, still functions, authoritatively, yet there is no evidence provided in the play for the audience to know, without a doubt, that Denmark is or is not a prison. The truth, which must be interpreted, and therefore becomes a product of thinking, strictly follows from the rank of the speaker. The truth of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s speech derives from the extent to which it suits their station and their role and from the extent to which is satisfies the contractual situation compelling it; the truth does not follow from the content of their words. Rather, since they are paid to discover the source of Hamlet’s madness, their words must serve this economic purpose. The truth of Hamlet’s speech is also measured by its fit to his role. However, his role insures that an audience will attend to and interpret the meaning of the words he speaks. The truth of the rhetorical situation represented in Act 2 Scene II, then, is that the speech following from Hamlet’s position matters more than that uttered by paid courtiers; in fact, his is the only speech that means anything at all beyond simply marking social location or fulfilling an economic transaction. The epigraph suggests, then, not that there is a method for discriminating between good and bad ideas as such, but that an audience receives all ideas relative to the social role of the speaker. Those spoken by actors who use language in ways unfitting their social roles are unimaginable in Hamlet, unless, of course, they have inherited authority, as Hamlet has, and are thought mad. Consequently, speakers act responsibly toward their audiences, playing their parts, speaking their scripted lines. Clearly, Act 2 Scene II teaches readers that the objective or moral quality of any particular idea has less significance than does the recognised authority of the speaker and his or her adherence to socio-rhetorical conventions delimiting language exchange in particular contexts. The world in 2005 bears little or no resemblance to the world that Shakespeare inhabited; however, this lesson still holds true. Today, the free exchange of intellectual ideas—thought to be the primary activity, for instance, of professors and students on college and university campuses—is constrained in ways similar to those on display in Act 2 Scene II. Those who have less authority might pursue lines of inquiry, both in classrooms and in scholarship, that follow up on, apply, or restate authoritative positions. They are at less risk for receiving a low grade, for being rejected or criticised by their colleagues, and for losing their jobs if they do so. This type of teaching and learning, writing and research creates a sort of consensus, sometimes referred to as schools of thought, that at their best challenge and at their worst prohibit imagination. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could not imagine uttering the words, ‘Denmark is a prison.’ Their language and their structures of imagination are restricted by their economic and their social roles and, because of both, the expectations of their audience. In 2005, those in all social positions can imagine speaking such a critique; however, some might elect not to, self-censoring solely for the purpose of achieving one personal goal or another—a grade, professional recognition, or promotion. Hamlet, unable to imagine Denmark as anything but a prison, takes on an historical burden, transferred to him by his father’s ghost, that requires a break with convention, and with the rhetorical expectations of someone occupying his role, hence his presumed madness. While to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, economic survival requires preserving consensual thinking; according to Hamlet, it will lead to the end of his life, to the demise of Denmark, to the conclusion of Danish history. It is Hamlet’s duty, then, and that of all contemporary intellectuals, to think therefore to imagine, at risk of being thought mad, beyond consensus to sustain the production of ideas and history, the moral ingredient of thoughtful exchange, and to prevent the alternative, that is, the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The interjection that is the epigraph to this call for papers conveys as much to a postmodern, intellectual audience. Ideas have power in Hamlet’s world, no less chaotic, violent, and presumptively immoral than the world in 2005. It is a bad idea, a sort of madness actually, to act, then as now, as if language primarily functions bureaucratically, for the connected purposes of enforcing consensus, or canonicity, as a morally good idea, and of consolidating personal gain, as the sole measure of ethical conduct. Note All quotations appearing in this essay have been taken from Act 2 Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. Willard Farnham. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. 74-6. References Shakespeare, William. Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. Willard Farnham. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hood, Carra Leah. "Schools of Thought: The Madness of Consensus." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/08-hood.php>. APA Style Hood, C. (Feb. 2005) "Schools of Thought: The Madness of Consensus," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/08-hood.php>.

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masochistic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. 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