It is my first time heading out to the annual Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference, and I am very much looking forward to the intra-disciplinarity the event promises. Before I hop my flight from PDX Saturday morning, here’s my dance-card—perhaps more aspirational than anything else.
Looking for me? I’ll be giving my paper, “Cham’s Beard and Tartar’s Bow: Mongolia in the Elizabethan Repertory,” based on research at the Huntington this past summer, at the top of the 11:00 a.m. session entitled Contextualizing Performance in English Renaissance Drama. It is generously hosted by the University of North Texas Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium. My co-panelists and I met at a Blackfriars’ conference some years ago and have been dying to get together on a project. Thus, the session promises to be one of convivial delight. Follow along at #RenSA19.
Abstract
Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama like stars around a black hole: while no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, paratextual documents suggest that they were once there. There is consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tartary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in the early thirteenth century in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This talk takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plotts of the Elizabethan period in England, the two-part Tamar Cam plays (1596), to consider the role of Tartarian allusion its stages. The only Elizabethan narrative we know to have focused on Mongol-China, I consider the hitherto unexamined source materials and repertorial context of this otherwise lost play, articulating both the allusive opportunities it made available as well as how it contributed to the Admiral’s Men’s repertory.
Sunday, March 17
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
- Early Modern Women and Books I: Owners and Makers
- Nostalgia, Memory, and Loss in Early Modern England
- Offending Spirits: Expectation and Negotiation in Shakespearean Performance
11:00 – 12:30 p.m.
- Class in Early Modern Britain
- Early Modern Women and Books II: Locating Women Publishers
- Musical Forms in English Renaissance Literature
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
- Negotiating Community in Early Modern Italy
- Rethinking the “Popular” in Early Modern England
- Studies in Reception
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
6:15 – 7:15 p.m.
Monday, March 18
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
- Allegories of the Law
- Editing and the Work of the Imagination I
- Embodying Value: Representing Money in the Early Modern Period I
- Gender and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage
- Natural Disasters and Environmental Interventions in the Early Modern World I
- Seasons, Smells, and Sickness in the Early Modern City
- The Black Renaissance: Early Modern Afro-Hispanic Cultures
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
- Middleton’s Afterlives in the Twenty-First Century I
- Performances of Gender in Shakespearean England
- Women Writing Race in Early Modern England
4:00 – 5:50 p.m.
- Middleton’s Afterlives in the Twenty-First Century II: Pedagogy
- Seasons, Sociability, and Work: Negotiating Boundaries
6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
7:30 p.m.
- ECRs@RSA: Les 3 Brasseurs (120 Adelaide St W)
Tuesday, March 19
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
- Digital Tools for Medieval and Renaissance Italian Texts
- Feminist Ethics on the Early Modern Stage
- Renaissance Economy I
- Transforming Bodies in Early Modern English Drama
11:00 – 12:30 p.m.
Contextualizing Performance in English Renaissance Drama
- Cham’s Beard and Tartar’s Bow: Mongolia in the Elizabethan Repertory
- Revenge as a Performance of Sexual Trauma
- Pharmacological Performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Staging Nuanced Audience Reactions to the Nine Worthies’ Pageant in Love’s Labour’s Lost
12:45 – 1:45 p.m.
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
- Early Modern Anticlericalisms
- The Merchant of Venice: Contexts of Reception
- Renaissance Economy III
- Theatrical Spectators