English Department at the University of Sydney/ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Laughter, Cruelty and Emotional Excess in Early Modern Drama and its Contemporary Revisions”, Bridget Escombe, Queen Mary, University of London

Date: Wednesday 30 July 2014,
Time: 1:00-3:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Enquiries: Craig Lyons at craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

Bridget Escolme explores a range of recent productions and revisions of early modern objects of laughter. Turning to comedies and treatises on laughter from the early modern period she discusses how ideas of cruelty and kindness, propriety and excess have changed and remained across four hundred years. Malvolio is treated as mad in his dark house, and Escolme focuses on the ‘mad’ as subjects and objects of humour in the early modern drama. Drawing on her recent monograph, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage, she interrogates historical and cultural assumptions around the treatment of the mad as comic spectacle, arguing that these comic figures are more powerful and theatrically dynamic, less pitiful and objectified, than scholarship has hitherto figured them. There is a long stage and critical history of ‘notoriously abused’ Malvolios who are revealed in the ‘dark house’ as bewildered and tortured; in early productions he would likely only to have been heard.

Dr Bridget Escolme is a Reader in the Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London and a member of the Centre for the History of Emotion at QMUL. Escolme works on the performance and reception of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and their place in pedagogical practice. She has worked as a director, a performer, a dramaturge and a theatre and education practitioner.