Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain, and: English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (review)

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
Hilaire Kallendorf
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
English Renaissance Drama

Nobody, Somebody, and King Lear

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Womack
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
The University

The approximately contemporary Jacobean plays, King Lear and Nobody and Somebody, share an ancient British setting, a preoccupation with instability in the state, and an unsettling interest in negation. Peter Womack here suggests that by reading them together we can retrieve some of the theatrical strangeness which the more famous of the two has lost through familiarity and naturalization. The dramatic mode of existence of the character called ‘Nobody’ is paradoxical, denaturing – an early modern visual and verbal Verfremdungseffekt, at once philosophical and clownish. His negativity, which is articulated in dialogue with the companion figure of ‘Somebody’, is matched in King Lear, above all in the role of Edgar, but also by a more diffused state of being (withdrawal, effacement, folly) which the play generates in reaction to its positive events. Ultimately the negation in both plays is social in character: ‘Nobody’ is the dramatic face of the poor and oppressed. Peter Womack teaches literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is English Renaissance Drama (2006), in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series.

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