Raphael Glazov

Ph.D. Candidate, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies

Riddles on the Stage: Naming, Un-naming, and Recognition in Shakespeare 

This paper asks how naming, un-naming, and the irony of recognition work in Shakespeare, and what function the riddle “Who’s there?” may serve on stage. The line plays out Aristotelian anagnorisis: a change from ignorance to knowledge that occurs in degrees. Naming binds a speaker to a person. Un-naming dissolves that bond. For Phyllis Gorfain the riddle is metapoetry: the form in which these acts are staged, not a puzzle captured in the plot. 

The inquiry centres on two tragic scenes in which the demand for a name is explicit. Hamlet, read by S. A. Blackmore as a sequence of riddles, begins with the sentries’ challenge; the same question is then put to the Ghost. In King Lear Poor Tom un-names himself from his true role as Edgar. Recognition restores names only after un-naming and exile. 

The practice is not confined to tragedy. Shakespeare uses naming and un-naming throughout the canon, to different effect by genre. A name may be refused in public, or delayed until recognition becomes ironic, or released from the office the play has forced upon a figure. Until someone is named, unnamed, or left unknown, the play cannot move, and in some plays it cannot end.

Ferron Guerreiro

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English

How to “handelithe the gentilmen”: Playmaking and Service at Titchfield Abbey

On February 1st, 1538, the steward Anthony Roke “scribbled” a letter to his employer Thomas Wriothesley relaying household business. After listing the provisions he’d received for the properties of Micheldever and Titchfield Abbey, Roke recounted his mistress Jane Wriothesley’s interactions with servants and locals over the Christmas season, writing that “she handelithe the gentilmen of the Contrey your ffermours & their wiefes to your grete wourships /. and euery night mery as can be with Cristmas pleys and maskes with Anthony gedges and other your seruantes” (REED, SP 7/1, no. 31). In this paper, I examine the language Roke employs in his brief account of household performance, asking how the work of playmaking was understood by its practitioners prior to the purpose-built playhouse. Drawing on archival materials that offer insight into the occupations of Jane Wriothesley and her servants, as well as contemporary guides to household management, I demonstrate how the positionality of each contributor to Titchfield’s “pleys and maskes” shaped the value and meaning of their work. By treating Roke’s letter as a case study for collaborative playmaking between Tudor noblewomen and their household servants, my paper articulates an epistemology of labour underpinning the form and meaning of early modern household performance.