2 results
6 - “To catch the fellow, and come back again”: Games of Prisoner's Base in Early Modern English Drama
- Edited by Robin O'Bryan
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- Book:
- Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 March 2019, pp 183-202
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Summary
Abstract
For centuries, prisoner's base was one the most popular team capturing games and was played by children and adults. Although the rules vary, the game consistently requires that every player on the field target one specific member of the opposing team for capture while being chased by another individual adversary. Every player is simultaneously pursuer and pursued. This unique feature enables dramatic references to the game to evoke vital issues of contingency and risk. Prisoner's base appears in works by playwrights including Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, and its rules and variations figuratively and physically inform interpretation of their works. Taking into account the specificities of games like prisoner's base produces useful interpretive inroads, as is evidenced by the final example of Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman.
Keywords: prisoner's base, barley-break, Brome, Chettle, Jonson, Marlow, Shakespeare
I
Ye lovers of pleasure, give ear and attend,
Unto these few lines which here I have penned,
I sing not of sea fights, of battles nor wars,
But of a fine game, which is called “Prison Bars.”
David Studley, poet laureate of Ellesmere, Shropshire, wrote the ballad excerpted throughout this chapter about a game played 8 August 1764 between teams of local married men and bachelors. Studley's term, “Prison Bars,” was a common alternate name for prisoner's base, and this game certainly had time to develop variants, as it was one of the most popular catching games in England from the fourteenth century until its decline in the twentieth. It was played by two teams, each with their own safe base and designated prison for captured opponents. The goal was to capture as many prisoners as possible in order to empty and eventually occupy the other team's base. Distinctively, each player left base in order to chase one specific adversary and was, in turn, targeted by someone else from the opposing team. All the players were simultaneously pursuer and pursued.
In the eighteenth century, as Studley's poem testifies, prisoner's base could be a formalized match between adult men, but in the seventeenth century it was often characterized as a boys’ country game. However, over generations it engaged a wide range of participants: children, youth, and adults; male and female; rural and urban.
9 - Maybe Baby: Pregnant Possibilities in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
- Edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks
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- Book:
- Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 02 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2018, pp 213-234
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Summary
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This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of ‘maybe maternal’ literary figures in medieval and early modern texts. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Webster all write women characters whose maternal status they never totally resolve. Taken together, these authors and their female characters illustrate the extent to which potential pregnancy amplifies the inscrutability of women's bodies and highlights the thwarted efforts of other characters, readers, and audiences to interpret them. By introducing the possibility of these women's pregnancies but leaving their maternal status unverified, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Webster confront the intersections of epistemology and embodiment associated with pregnancy and motherhood. Thus they play seriously with the question of how interpretable the female body is as a potentially meaningful, or morally pregnant, text.
Keywords: Geoffrey Chaucer; William Shakespeare; John Webster; pregnancy in literature; motherhood in literature; ‘pleading the belly’
Premodern pregnancy was inherently precarious and uncertain. Even whether a woman was pregnant was, to some degree, unknowable. A pregnancy's terminus was its surest verification, yet health risks and diagnostic uncertainties inherent in premodern medicine meant that any pregnancy's outcome was always at issue. At the same time, the patriarchal logic of early English society necessitated some degree of certainty about pregnancy, or at least performances of such certainty. This experience of time, in which a pregnancy could not really be confirmed until it ended, and its outcome in turn provided the only certain evidence of the pregnancy's realness, is infused with epistemological uncertainty and temporal complexity. At the crux of the interpretive challenges posed by pregnancy was the maternal subject, who was at once in a position of explanatory authority, privy to the embodied experience of pregnancy, and objectified by that state, rendered as a text that others could decipher. While literary scholarship has tended to focus on unequivocally pregnant characters and definitively maternal bodies, this chapter explores some of the possibly maternal literary characters that appear in premodern texts by Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), and John Webster (c. 1580–c. 1626–34). In these works we find women whose ambiguous maternal statuses present interpretive dilemmas for narrators and characters within texts and for their readers and audiences. These potentially pregnant characters embody epistemological uncertainties animated by female agency and the temporality of pregnancy. Across genre and time period, English writers ask how interpretable the female body is as a potentially meaningful, or morally pregnant, text.
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