Issue 1.2

The Erotic Life of Objects: "Venus and Adonis" in the Puppet Theater

Edward J. Geisweidt
University of New Haven

Famously, in the climactic moment of the puppet play within Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair, the puppet Dionysius hikes up his skirt to reveal his lack of genitalia, proving by “plain demonstration” (5. 5. 96) a verity of his fellow performing objects: “we have neither male nor female amongst us” (93-4).1 Thus the Puritans’ “old stale argument against the players”—that their cross-dressing makes abominations of them—is answered (92). Playing to a Puritan assumption of continuity between biological sex and gender, Dionysius appeals to his essential sexlessness to exculpate himself from the charge of gender transgression. Laura Levine argues that, in addition to casting doubt on assumptions about sex and gender, Dionysius’s anatomical incorrectness entails a foreclosure of erotic experience: “The puppet presents a world devoid not only of sexual difference but of the very possibility of erotic experience itself.”2 She makes explicit a presumed continuity between genitally determined sex and erotic acts and gestures: “The puppet cannot be implicated in the world of sexuality, not because he is superior to it but simply because he lacks the equipment. He stands outside the world of erotic desire not because he is able to resist its temptations but simply because he lacks the capacity to perform its actions” (emphases mine, 100).3 The too easy conflation of the erotic and sexual here implies that copulative consummation is the orbit of erotic experience. Far from confirming such a notion, the puppet theater opens up possibilities of erotic experience that not only do not require genital gratification, but also do not proceed from a sexed body. The puppet—or performing object (as current discourse calls it), or motion (as the Renaissance called it)—offers an alternative conception of eroticism free from anatomic and copulative sex. Lacking the equipment does not mean the puppet lacks the capacity. As one puppet performance of a Shakespearean text has demonstrated, the very lack of bodily equipment can contribute to a puppet’s performance of erotic action.

Although the motions at Bartholmew Fair intend to perform a vulgarized version of Christopher Marlowe’s erotic epyllion Hero and Leander, their farcical descent into pugilism denies their audience the chance to witness the erotic possibilities of performing objects in motion. In the Fall of 2004, however, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Little Angel Theater gave serious attention to performing objects with the staging of another erotic epyllion, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Director Greg Doran staged the poem with various forms of puppetry, but his eponymous characters were inspired by Japanese bunraku, in which one or more puppeteers directly manipulate the life-like objects without the mediation of strings. A tabletop provided the main playing space, backed by a diorama-like woodland setting, the frame of which surprisingly would become a performing object itself. The five puppeteers, dressed in black with black hats, often showed in their faces the emotions of the puppets they operated. They contributed sighs, neighs, and halloos, but as with traditional bunraku, the Venus and Adonis puppeteers tended to disappear, or become subsumed by the life of the puppet they operated. The performing objects moved with such a lightness and grace that they seemed to initiate movement in the puppeteers, not the other way around, as they floated through the stanzas of Shakespeare’s poem, narrated by Michael Pennington. Guitarist Steve Russell, a Westernized version of the Japanese samisen-player, accompanied the reading musically. Venus and Adonis previewed in October, 2004, at Little Angel Theatre in Islington before moving to The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in November.4 The show was revived in 2007. The production offers insight into how sexless objects can be shaped for erotic experience, and how puppets question the genitally-governed teleology of eroticism.

Venus and Adonis is among the most erotically charged poetry of the canon, despite (or perhaps because of) Venus’s failure to engage Adonis sexually.5 While critics have noted the poem’s eroticism and near-pornography,6 copulation is not the highest or most urgently pursued erotic expression in the poem. Rather, the kiss governs erotic acts, abounding in various forms: kisses “sweet” (84), kisses “long...
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The Failed Performance of Dekker's "The Whore of Babylon"

Peter Hyland
Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario

At some time in 1606 Prince Henry’s Men staged Thomas Dekker’s play The Whore of Babylon at the Fortune playhouse. It was apparently performed only once, and if we are to believe the author’s own account of it, the performance was a failure, something that Dekker clearly felt the need to explain away, for in the following year he published a quarto edition of his play with a preface, “Lectori,” in which he laid out what his intentions had been and what he thought had gone wrong. In fact “Lectori” is the sole source of information about this failure, and Dekker places the blame for it firmly at the door of the players. The “deformity” of the performance, he says, was the result of “bad handling” (39) by the players: “let the Poet set the note of his Nombers, even to Apollo’s owne lyre, the Player will have his own Crotchets, and sing false notes, in dispite of all the rules of Musick” (30-32). So insistent was he on blaming the players that he found two other metaphors to define their inadequacy: bad tailors ruining good cloth (32-3) and “ill nurses” spoiling newborn children (35).1

It needs to be noted that there are problems with accepting Dekker’s account of the shortcomings of the performance, for it appears that he was not present: “mine eare stood not within reach of their Larums” (27), he says. It is reasonable to ask why he did not attend what was obviously an important occasion for him, and (setting aside the possibility that he was ill) the most obvious explanation would seem to be that he had misgivings about the play even before it was staged. After all, his conception of the play was highly ambitious and he must have had a great deal of his own vanity vested in it, so the problem might well have been not so much that the performance was a failure, as that it disappointed him because it did not live up to his hopes. Even before the play was staged he seems to have felt some anxiety about the potential for the audience to fail to understand it, for in his Prologue, presumably written for the origin al staging, since it introduces the opening dumb show, he says:

wee present Matter above the vulgar Argument:
Yet drawne so lively, that the weakest eye,
Through those thin vailes we hang betweene your sight
And this our peice, may reach the mystery. (3-7)

It is all so well done, he insists, that even the dullest spectator will understand; but perhaps he was trying to deflect any potential objection to the opacity of his play by insisting on its clarity precisely because he had reservations about it.

Without question Dekker knew his way around a playhouse, and by 1606 he had had a long association with Henslowe’s companies and theaters. Henslowe bought a play from him for the Admiral’s Men as early as 1598, but in that year Francis Meres was already able to include him amongst those he considered “our best for tragedy.” Although he wrote a number of plays of which he was sole author, he collaborated with most of the major dramatists of the time, and Henslowe’s papers indicate that he had a hand in more than forty plays between 1598 and 1602. So the tradition that Dekker was a hack, possibly originating in Jonson’s characterization of him in Poetaster (1601) as a “dresser of plays about town,” is unfair. In fact, Dekker was a skilled writer with a seasoned professional’s understanding of how plays worked. It is worth asking, therefore what it was that he thought he was giving to the players in this particular case.

The Whore of Babylon is a glorification of Elizabeth I through a comprehensive account of the many Catholic plots against her during her reign and the apocalyptical defeat of Rome represented by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and Dekker clearly intended it to be his masterpiece. It merges his position as a militant Protestant with his profound admiration of Elizabeth. In “Lectori” he describes it as a “Drammaticall Poem” (1), though this is a post-facto definition and might have occurred to him only in his self- exoneration; however the tension between the two elements of the phrase points to one potential source of its failure. His main “dramatical” model was the allegorical moral interlude, long obsolete (but understood to be associated with native ideological concerns), which gave him characters like Truth and Time and also precedents for the satirical voice of Plain Dealing. His main poetic model was The Faerie Queene...
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