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A pleasant tragicomedy, the cat being scap’t”?: William Sampson’s The Vowbreaker (1636) and the instability of genre
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Grant, Teresa (2018) A pleasant tragicomedy, the cat being scap’t”?: William Sampson’s The Vowbreaker (1636) and the instability of genre. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 38 (2). pp. 113-129. doi:10.1080/14682761.2018.1451947 ISSN 1468-2761.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2018.1451947
Abstract
William Sampson’s 1636 play The Vow Breaker presents us with what looks like generic confusion: a cat (of all the creatures the least likely to stick to the script) seems to offer us comic relief in a play which, though intended as tragedy, descends into melodramatic sub-Kydian fustian. This essay discusses how the genre of early modern drama is affected by the employment of cats as actors, focusing on Sampson’s play which seeks to consolidate tragic effect by emphasising the parallels between a persecuted or helpless animal and the tragic protagonist, in the person of Ann. The cat in the original production was almost certainly real (though we can’t prove this), and the essay will argue that tone and genre are crucially influenced by this casting decision. The play is rescued from its fustian, made more troubling, by the uncomfortable stage effects resulting from its feline performer. The essay interacts with Nicholas Ridout’s reading of the ‘affect’ of real animals on the stage, arguing, though, that the early modern stage cat resists a clash between semiotics and phenomenology by not conforming to Ridout’s competing binaries. Ridout argues – following Vidal-Naquet – that ‘sacrifice is intrinsic to tragic form’. In The Vow Breaker neither sacrificial victim accepts her fate willingly, and it is this return to the pre-tragic, ‘known of old’ as Freud might have it – holy, wild, live, phenomenal, magic – which Sampson struggles to contain. The final act of the play seeks to restore the ritual of tragedy, disturbed by the various uncontrollable variables in the main plot, by means of ritual animal disguise and by the effacing of the pre-tragic and the feminine.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Sampson, William, 1590?-1636, Cats in literature , Characters and characteristics in literature, English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism, Human-animal relationships in the performing arts | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Studies in Theatre and Performance | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Routledge | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 1468-2761 | ||||||||
| Book Title: | Studies in Theatre and Performance | ||||||||
| Editor: | Alonso Recarte, Claudia | ||||||||
| Official Date: | 2018 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 38 | ||||||||
| Number: | 2 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 113-129 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1080/14682761.2018.1451947 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 13 March 2018 | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 23 September 2019 | ||||||||
| Related URLs: |
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