Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Primary Source 1


A False Jew by Thomas Weld, 1653

In beginning my research, I was interested in how conversion could be different for Jewish men and women. While I didn't find any specific accounts of women converting, this text presented two interesting questions. This convoluted tale gives the testimony of a man who was found pretending to be a converted Jew and who later admitted to be a spy for the Vatican.
Thoughts it raised:
1) Part of the draw of this story for readers at the time seems to be the fact that a Jew was found to be speaking perfect English. Although this was later found to be non-applicable as he was lying about his identity, it calls into questions notions of English identity at the time. So much of England's view of self seemed to be tied into the idea of separateness from the continent, being above the taint of Catholicism and Judaism. It seemed they were astonished that a Jewish tongue was physically capable of perfect English pronunciation and speech. While few Jewish people at the time would have been able to speak English, given that they were expelled centuries earlier from England, the "proof" that there was nothing linguistically unique about English was troubling.
2) The willingness of this man to be circumcised is intriguing. Although it is rather common now, circumcision was only a mark of Jewishness at the time and was seen as akin to genital mutilation. In many ways, he was not only switching religions as he pleased, but was also blurring traditional views of masculinity. He became something without category, almost "queer" in the same sense as John Rykener is referred to by David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras.
Richard Pickersgill's Orsino and Viola

As hermaphrodites/transvestism in regards to Twelfth Night was our presentation group's focus, I was left with a lot to think about as we began to read this work. The secondary title of What You Will suggests that Shakespeare was intending for this to be purely a playful piece. But moving towards the end, as we see the characters pair off heterosexually, it seems the resolution to all problems comes too easily, as if what Shakespeare was playing with didn't sit all too well with him once he considered the resolution. If gender roles were as fluid during his time as our research suggests, maybe Shakespeare was experiencing a homosexual panic himself like some of his viewers after writing about this confluence of identity.
Another thing I noticed was the emphasis, not so much on cross-dressing, but rather merging sexual identity as seen in the androgyne, and I was glad we went that route with our research. When Sebastian says, "Nor can there be that deity in my nature,/Of here and every where,"
and "You are betroth'd both to a maid and man," it seems to be harkening back to the idea of the idealized spiritual aspect of the androgyne. And perhaps it is this, rather than worry about homosexuality, that Shakespeare was trying to emphasize - the return to the natural order seen in Plato's Symposium.

Titian's Venus and Adonis

This portrait makes the attack on Adonis a little less disturbing, as he's shown to be a full-grown man rather than the boy that Shakespeare describes. Reading this poem really makes me reconsider Shakespeare's stance on gender roles. While before I would have thought of his play on gender as a stage device for entertainment, there's really no reason to take things to the extent he does here unless he genuinely wants to examine what society has in place for men and women. In a way it's just baudiness, considering his audience - a teenage boy might find a lot of amusement in a sexual epic about a lust-crazy older woman attacking a young innocent - but his depiction of Venus says a lot about fear of female sexuality in this period. Perhaps this fear of the devouring mother/womb, or the underlying fear about the possibility that at any given moment a woman could reveal herself to be a man underneath her clothes (either on stage or in real life in the case of hermaphrodites), is why there seems now to be a lot of homosocial behavior in this era - male romantic friendships were less threatening than having equal relationships with females.