Staging Disgust: Rape, Shame, and Performance in Shakespeare and Middleton (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781009379823)

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.

Author: Jennifer Panek
ISBN-10: 1009379828
ISBN-13: 9781009379823
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/29/2024
Pages: 106
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.22lbs
Size: 7.00h x 5.00w x 0.22d