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Dido (part 2) and Staging Pleasures - Coggle Diagram
Dido (part 2) and Staging Pleasures
Phillip Stubbes'
The Anatomy of Abuses
: "All Stage plays. Enterludes, and Commedies are either of divine or profane matter". What's so dangerous about the stage?
god's blood is not here for entertainement; it's blasphemy; "to be derided, and iested" making a joke out of religious discourse
plays pull people out of the holy spaces/churches: "they not draw the people frō"; "flocking and rūning to Theaters & curtens, daylie and hourely, night and daye, tyme and"-- the logic is this displaces the church, and it also relies on a binary way of thinking; it also is a way of shaping the self as mindless and not thinking for themselves;
What about the content is bad: "kissing and
bussing" being tempted by what they're SEEING; it's a space for bodies to be with other bodies;
here's the problem with THE ACTORS BODIES: putting wrong idols on stage and direction the wrong intention;
the fears of seeing and internalizing queer content into practice: "they play ye Sodomits, or worse."
what specific scenes, stage
Act 1.1: the staging of childhoods, gift-giving, and proper/improper desire sets up a framework for encountering Dido and Aneas.
3.1: Cupid to Dido to fall in love; this is about using a child actor to curate "desire", how does this get us to think about power. "Then shall I touch her breast and conquer" (3.1.6). But this model is flipped;
desire (not love) and unaccountable
obsession
: (5.1.170): Dido imagining Aneas does, dies, and his corpse comes back for her to adorn. Yikes. There is anxiety here as SHE is the one setting the (violent) terms of desire; claims Aneas?
there is a concern about owning men's bodies (the blazon tradition; (3.1.80-90) breaking Aeneas' body into parts for her ownership/pleasure (
blazon
)
so, if this is a rhetoric about visual consumption, we also have a very frank language of gazing, looking, and turning Aeneas into passive object to be looked at. 5.1.110
Dido's death scene: 5.1: is this death scene a radical reclamation of spectacle and resistant to objectification: "Now, Dido, with these relics burn thyself,/ And make Aeneas famous through the world/ For perjury and slaughter of a queen" (5.1.293-6). It's also about the traffic of gendered materials (the cloak, etc.)
it's a "private sacrifice"
What do we do with this play?
1) Even if this is about Dido's agency and rulership, the ending backfires to confirm ideas about women's out of control desires
2) The opening framework is about the two men being interrupted by Juno, so "normal" gendered and sexual roles aren't given here. The use of myths open up resistant to tropes of women as out of control; the queer use of myths to render a queer mythology/cosmology
plays in on the literary and cultural histories of same-sex relations
this opens up larger concerns about fate and autonomy