By Carol Chillington Rutter
Enter the Body bargains a chain of provocative case reviews of the paintings women's our bodies do on Shakespeare's intensely body-conscious level. Rutter's subject matters are intercourse, demise, race, gender, tradition, politics, and the over the top performative physique that exceeds the playtext it inhabits. in addition to drawing upon very important basic records from Shakespeare's day, Rutter bargains shut readings of women's performance's on degree and picture in Britian this day, from Peggy Ashcroft's (white) Cleopatra and Whoopi Goldberg's (whiteface) African Queen to Sally Dexter's languorous Helen and Alan Howard's raver 'Queen' of Troy.
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Extra info for Enter The Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage
Sample text
Stay a little,’ he commands, or perhaps implores. Again, she defies him, for this ‘sometime daughter’ will ‘never, never, never, never, never’ come again. Of course, Cordelia does ‘stay’. Dead, she can hardly do otherwise. And yet, this kind of staying is only more playing up, more naughtiness, for she is there, but significantly not there. ’ In his futile, fumbling way, Lear continues to fantasize compliance from this utterly resistant material. As he slides from Cordelia to ‘my poor fool…hang’d’, bizarrely collapsing identities (as when, earlier, he made his daughters his mother), spectators see the body accumulating meanings, becoming a saturated sign that defamiliarizes to refamiliarize— that is, it re-presents in disturbed replica what has been troubling this play from the beginning.
It plumbs the ‘sulphurous pit’ of female sexuality. Simultaneously, it writes women’s exterior forms as increasingly monstrous, illegible of human meaning, incomprehensible. Lear, ‘child-changed’, is daughtered by hags, Centaurs, sharp-toothed serpents, bloody pelicans. ’—and so opens the rhetorical abyss into which his self-recognition disappears. ’. The body is illegible. But staggeringly, the play proposes precisely the opposite. 33 Which of these bodies does Lear see at the end? And what about us, Shakespeare’s modern spectators?
This sequence is not, however, as I’ve described it, continuous; rather, it’s intercut, even interchopped, with Kent’s violent reaction to Edgar’s moves to save the king. ‘Vex not his ghost,’ Kent roars, shoving away both the younger man and the gestures that ‘ought to’ be performed. Again, the editing works disjunctively. What the eye sees next is a non sequitur, like an hallucination, which produces the uncanny sensation of two spatial or existential frames spliced into one. Camera tricks duplicate the tricks of Lear’s mind.