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Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?”
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Rutter, Carol Chillington (2010) Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?”. Shakespeare Bulletin , Vol.28 (No.1). pp. 111-132. doi:10.1353/shb.0.0136 ISSN 0748-2558.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/shb.0.0136
Abstract
Project MUSE - Shakespeare Bulletin - Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?” Browse > Film, Theater, and Performing Arts > Theater and Performance Studies > Shakespeare Bulletin > Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2010 Download PDF Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?” Carol Chillington RutterUniversity of Warwick I take the quotation in my title from Thomas Tomkis’s “pleasant Comoedy,” Lingva, subtitled “Or, the Combat of the Tongue and the fiue Sences for Superiority,” offering the case of Tomkis’s irritably touchy Tactus as a preamble to thinking about Shakespeare’s Desdemona in Othello 4.3. Entering the combat to challenge “the Tongue” for sensory superiority, Tactus had planned to defeat his rival by bringing on a “sight of obiects” to “haue prou’d my worth.” “Wherefore,” he explains, “considering that of all the things / That please me most, women are counted chiefe,” Tactus “had thought to haue represented in [his] shew / The Queen of pleasure, Venus,” and then to have demonstrated the powerful, nay the superior, pleasures of touch by setting a male spectator stumbling after her, hands outstretched, trying to embrace her.1 But the shew-man’s plan has come unstuck. Constructing a theatrical Venus, he discovers, is as complicated a business as raising a Royal Exchange, organizing nearly as many factors to build the body as to...
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Shakespeare Bulletin | ||||
Publisher: | The Johns Hopkins University Press | ||||
ISSN: | 0748-2558 | ||||
Official Date: | 2010 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | Vol.28 | ||||
Number: | No.1 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 111-132 | ||||
DOI: | 10.1353/shb.0.0136 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||
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