I now want to pursue my analysis of Shakespeare's ingenuity beyond exposition of its cognitive, self-fashioning role in literary imitation and, expanding upon Leontes’ self-deluding visions, focus on its manifestation as the imaginative activity performed by a dramatized subject who enunciates that activity on the stage. In my study of Othello and rhetorical anthropology, I argued that we should make a distinction in Shakespeare's work between dramatis persona and character, following the usual practice of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights as they composed their scripts. A dramatis persona is literally a “person of the play,” required by the plot as it's sketched out—Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, for example—while character emerges from the dramatis persona when solicited by the particular circumstances of a scene that has been developed from the plot. Thus one dramatis persona can generate as many characters as scenic occasion demands, yet subtends them all, just as—outside the drama—the self, which we might think of as the substratum of the subject, holds infinite subject-possibilities which it yields up to varying interpellations—yet is itself a “residual subject,” both origin and repository of different “circumstantial subjects.”

Through this practice, Shakespeare approximates our modern sense of the self as an entity subject to multiple interpellations, and represents this condition in his plays. We can think of the Prince of Denmark as the originary if not pristine self, born into expectation and subject to his birth, hailed, as it were, into that expectation and, in the course of the plot, qualified by further interpellations—student, mourner, friend, lover, revenger, play doctor, drama critic, providentialist, and so on. This is also true of such dramatis personae as Shylock the Jew, Othello the Moor, Henry Bolingbroke, “legitimate Edgar,” the Thane of Glamis, Cressida, Desdemona, Cleopatra—the list is extensive, as we shall see, only delimited by the degree to which Shakespeare provides scenes in which a given dramatis persona is drawn by circumstances into becoming a character.

We are not likely ever to know why Shakespeare turned to the work of Robert Greene sometime in the year preceding 15 May 1611, when Simon Forman noted that he saw The Winter's Tale at the Globe. But turn he did and, as we saw in Chapter 1, not just to Greene's oft-published prose tale Pandosto, but also to The Second Part and The Third and Last Part of Conny-Catching, and to Mamillia for the name of Leontes’ son, as perhaps also for the name of her friend Florion, for his own Florizel. The result of this bodging is a bifurcated play whose tragic and comic components stand in far stronger contrast to one another than in any of the other late plays or even the mid-career “problem plays,” and is a distinctively shaped hybrid in a canon that often reflects the author's taste for serio-comic mingling. While Shakespeare's adaptation of Greene has been much commented on, studying the three elements in the subtitle of this chapter can guide us toward a deeper understanding of what he may have had in mind when he decided so drastically to transfigure Greene in his own image.

What might initially have caught Shakespeare's eye was the description and sales pitch printed in centered lines on the title page of the 1588 edition: “Pandosto. / The Triumph / of Time. // Wherein is discovered by a pleasant Historie, / that although by meanes of sinister fortune, Truth may be concea- / led, yet by Time in spight of fortune it / is most manifestly revealed. // Pleasant for age to avoyde drowsie thoughtes, / profitable for youth to eschue other wanton / pastimes, and bringing to both a / desired content. // Temporis filia veritas. // By Robert Greene, Maister of Artes / in Cambridge. // Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.”

Following a letter to the Gentlemen Readers and a dedication to George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, the prose narrative begins with a new title: “The Historie of / Dorastus and / Fawnia.” As John Pitcher observes, the two titles reflect the overlapping plots of both Pandosto and The Winter's Tale; but they also may have suggested to Shakespeare that the contiguous stories could be fashioned into two quite different plays, a tragedy and a comedy—a generic distinction that Greene seems only nominally interested in pursuing.

Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane – later Naomi Mitchison – was born on Monday, 1 November 1897, in an elegant Edinburgh townhouse overlooking the Water of Leith. Her parents belonged to the prosperous elite of Scottish society, and the milieu in which she grew up was in many ways that of the traditional, upper-class Victorian establishment. Her mother, Louisa Kathleen (née Trotter), could trace her ancestry back to Henry Dundas, First Lord of the Admiralty under Pitt the Younger, while her father, the physiologist John Scott Haldane, belonged to one of Scotland’s most eminent families, the Haldanes of Gleneagles. There were nursemaids and servants, family worship on Sundays, and a public-service ethic of noblesse oblige. There were big, draughty houses in Edinburgh and Perthshire, as well as in Oxford, where J. S. Haldane was a fellow of New College, and where, aside from frequent Scottish holidays, Naomi would spend most of her childhood. Yet the Haldanes were also a family of progressive intellectuals: scientists, jurists, writers and free-thinkers with remarkably wide-ranging interests. Naomi’s uncle, the barrister and statesman Richard Haldane, was an unseasonable admirer of Goethe and Schopenhauer, an important reformer of the British Army, and eventually Lord Chancellor in Ramsay Macdonald’s first Labour government. Another uncle, William, was Crown Agent for Scotland (the most senior prosecutorial role in the Scottish justice system), while her aunt Elizabeth – a skilled administrator who helped to establish the Voluntary Aid Detachment – wrote studies of Descartes and George Eliot, and later became Scotland’s first woman Justice of the Peace.

Tradition and modernity; custom and curiosity; religious observance and scientific rationalism; success within the venerable institutions of British society coupled with an open, internationalist outlook: this combination of influences would feed Naomi Mitchison’s imagination and shape a writing life that extended across most of the twentieth century. From her early childhood she acquired a strong sense of the reality of the past, and of writing as a way of bringing past, present and future together.

Naomi Mitchison has been the subject of a mixed critical reception since the 1930s. Two of the major novels she wrote in that decade, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) and We Have Been Warned (1935), elicited very different responses despite focusing on similar themes of social change and female agency. While the literary reception of British fiction in the 1930s is also now in a state of flux, until relatively recently the decade was mythologised as ‘the Thirties’, characterised by a seemingly unique conjunction of literature and communist-inflected popular-front politics. From such a perspective, Mitchison has always appeared a curiously marginal figure. She is mentioned only cursorily in influential critical texts, such as Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation (1972) and Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties (1988), and even the more extensive discussion in Janet Montefiore’s Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996), which corrects the masculine bias of earlier canonical constructions of the decade, takes pains to identify her as a liberal feminist in sharp contrast to ‘Marxist contemporaries’. In this chapter, I am concerned with situating Mitchison within a different context that allows us to judge her work for what it is rather than by the standards of what it is not. In particular, my aim is to show that The Corn King and the Spring Queen reflects Mitchison’s desire to push on from the equal voting rights for women achieved through the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 in pursuit of a much more fundamental transformation of gender roles within society.

Early on in the novel, Mitchison’s protagonist, the titular Spring Queen Erif Der, is described as having ‘her hand on the plow’. This phrase refers to the biblical verse of Luke 9:62, featured variously in gospel songs and the culture of the US Civil Rights movement.

MIRROR RECOGNITION/ANTHROPOCENTRIC VISION

Towards the beginning of her memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Virginia Woolf gives an account of ‘the incident of the looking-glass’, when she attempts to understand why, at a young age, she already seemed ashamed of her own face and would look in a mirror only if alone. She recalls the memory of a dream – or perhaps of a real-life incident, she is not really sure – in which ‘I was looking in a glass when a horrible face – the face of an animal – suddenly showed over my shoulder’ (Woolf 1985: 69). And she adds, ‘I have always remembered that other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened me’ (69).

Who or what is this animal in the mirror? We can assume it is a beast in that ‘debased’ sense referenced by Djuna Barnes, given the fear it provokes, but who, where? Is Woolf seeing herself or another as beast? Perhaps what is frightening is the indeterminate slippage between what/who I see in the mirror and what/who I am, a slippage that, as so many essays in this volume point to, pushed modernist writers to look through the taxonomies and the ‘logics of optical and literary realism’ (see Fagan in this volume, p. 110) in order to uncover the forces and sensations of an animal/human or human/animal hidden, if also disavowed, within. In this regard we might be reminded of Kafka’s protagonist, Red Peter, the ape turned human who admits in his lecture to the academy that he had to ‘whip’ the animal outside of himself to be accepted as such (Kafka 1993: 203). But every night as he returns from his work, that beastly, if humane, nature returns to allow him to find sympathy with his untrained, female ape-companion. Such sympathy is linked to the creaturely at the core of ‘beastly modernisms’, a function of the vulnerability shared between human and nonhuman animal and especially by those excluded from, othered or abused by the anthropological machine.

The Highlander Black William, in Naomi Mitchison’s wartime historical novel based on her Haldane family, The Bull Calves (1947), is listening to pipe music, and begins to feel in his body the call of history, sex and nation:

What is driving him to Kirstie is sexual attraction (so between the stomach and the feet), but is also a summoning thing, urgent as a drive or knot of drives, calling him to join in the dance with the Lowlander ‘she-Haldane’ as if by some nationalist, destinarian form of Darwinian sexual selection. It is nationalist since the conjoining of William Macintosh and Kirstie Haldane would marry the two poles of the new Scotland of the post-1745 Union, fulfilling the destiny of necessary integration after the disastrous civil strife of the Jacobite risings. The ‘wee sharp waves’ and the ‘buzz of the drone’ might be said to bring to union the drive to sociality and common future as enlightened nation (the overt music of the tune of the chanter), and the drive to fusion of the male and female moving from biological affect to kinship affection (the groundbass of the drone) – it is the tune which moves the sex drive (stomach), and the drone the social body (dancing feet), knotting together the political and erotic.

For Mitchison, that nationalist music of the Scottish body integrates, through kinship relations, families acting as survival zones for the communitarian potential and rootedness associated with the clan system that Culloden had destroyed. This chapter examines the Haldane family network in the eighteenth century representing a Scotland entering a transitional, experimental phase triggered by the Knox Revolution, the Union, the Jacobite uprisings and the destruction of the clan system in 1745 as communicated to Mitchison through the female, not patriarchal, line. This network is consciously attended to in relationship to the post-1945 experiments in family, nation and class under feminist and communitarian reconfigurations that Mitchison supported and advocated.

Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s proclamation that she was born a ‘female human animal’ (Carrington 1998a: 372) situates her as an artist and author who identified as a hybrid, bringing her into conversation with a posthuman and feminist politics. In her essay ‘What is a Woman?’ (1970), Carrington intimates that her human–animal positioning is not mere aesthetic choice but rather an ontological state, a political manoeuvre that disrupts humanism’s normative models of the Vitruvian white man. It signposts a call to action aimed at women in order to forge an alliance with the natural world against what she perceives as patriarchal ‘Masters’ (Carrington 1998a: 375).

Carrington’s remedy for an imminent apocalypse induced by a tyrannical male anthropos demands adopting a multiplicity of perspectives and ontologies for her proposed hybrid and ‘humanoid female’ (Carrington 1998a: 373):

Carrington’s call to action provokes both a politics of transgression and a rebellion in her attack upon the ‘destructive lies’ of ‘Our Masters’. Moreover, she catalyses a dynamic that requires alliance and sympoiesis, where she suggests that women and ‘organic life’ are kin that must come together to ensure ‘the survival of life’. As I argue in this chapter, the politics exhibited in ‘What is a Woman?’ aptly introduce the hybrid human–animal themes of Carrington’s short stories – laying the ground for characters who embody such transgressions and alliances in a manner that anticipates a posthuman approach. Crucially, I posit that Carrington employs the human–animal hybrid figure as a feminist catalyst for change: one which transgresses and subverts the ‘passive’ position that she critiques in a manner that demonstrates a strategy in confronting ecological crisis, whilst at the same time forging a feminist politics that contributes to contemporary environmental debates.

In May 1926, when Opportunity magazine announced the winners of its second annual writing contest, the Casper Holstein Awards, it was no small affair. Celebrating a range of authorial forms, from poetry to investigative journalism, the contest culminated in a dinner party at New York’s Fifth Avenue Restaurant attended by 400 writers, political actors and socialites – many of them wellknown figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson and Carl Van Vechten (‘The Awards Dinner’ 1926: 186). These awards not only bestowed recognition and cash prizes upon the celebrated, but most essentially made available a sizeable public platform for promising Black writers from around the country. From this dais, the name of one such writer then beginning to emerge as a literary voice from beyond the New York locus was announced: Anita Scott Coleman. Awarded second place for her personal experience sketch ‘The Dark Horse’, Coleman’s introduction was broadcast prominently through this prize.

A poet who also wrote fiction and essays, Coleman’s work appeared frequently in African American periodicals between 1925 and 1938, but her central occupation concerned family life on the ranch (Davis and Mitchell 2008: 24). In a short biography published in tandem with the Holstein awards, selfdescribed ‘ex-schoolteacher’ Coleman sums up her position as that of a married woman ‘engaged in raising children and chickens’ on a ranch in New Mexico (Coleman 1926: 188). This brief self-portrait not only distinguishes Coleman through geography and occupation, but it also emphasises an important theme that crops up often in her writing: a keen awareness of the side-by-side lives of humans and nonhuman animals. The unpretentious and humorous discursive parallel Coleman draws between children and chickens, who both require raising, corresponds to similar associations and linguistic dyads that appear throughout her work, which take for granted notions of interspecies linkages. For Coleman, who did indeed raise five children and untold chickens before moving to Los Angeles in mid-life, her positionality as a Black woman at home on a ranch in New Mexico would seem to foreground a perspective that surfaces often in her poetry and prose. Her work disarticulates antiblack racism and dehumanisation while it simultaneously resists the instrumentalisation of nonhuman figures as necessarily reproachable in the process.

‘PEAK’ PRODUCTION

Between 1958 and 1959 four significant international feature films were shot in Australia: On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Season of Passion, Leslie Norman, 1959), The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959) and The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960). In many respects, this represents a period of peak production ‘down under’ prior to the near cessation of feature filmmaking in the early to mid-1960s. The final of these films, Fred Zinnemann's episodic pastoral, The Sundowners, released in the US in early December 1960, is the last large-scale feature made in Australia prior to Michael Powell's They’re a Weird Mob in 1965–6 and represents the final completed attempt to make a high-budget, mainstream and multi-star-driven popular success in Australia – other than the very differently appointed Ned Kelly (Tony Richardson) in 1970 – until the tax concession driven push of the early 1980s.

Three of the four films mentioned above are based on significant and highly successful Australian literary properties. They reflect a maturing of ‘locationist’ and transnational film production practices as well as the broader trend of independent production companies, with the support of major Hollywood or British studios, optioning bestselling novels and widely performed plays. For example, the decision to relocate Ray Lawler's ground-breaking and distinctively Carlton-set play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, to the more cosmetically attractive hot-house climes around Sydney Harbour, drawing on an array of performance styles and starring a startling mix of American and British actors – Anne Baxter, Ernest Borgnine, John Mills and Angela Lansbury – was predicated on the international exposure of the source material and its apparent correspondences with thematically and stylistically equivalent US models such as Marty (directed by Delbert Mann in 1955, and also starring the Oscar-winning Borgnine) and the work of Tennessee Williams, then a highly popular source for screen adaptations including A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958). This small ‘boom’ is also symptomatic of the increased desire of Hollywood-based actors, writers, directors, producers and other significant filmmaking personnel to seek control of development and production and make films largely outside of immediate studio jurisdiction.

The anti-Muslim sentiment that engulfed India in the early 1990s, following the demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid by right-wing Hindu militants on 6 December 1992 and the subsequent Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay, prompted Shyam Benegal to articulate his profound compassion for the Muslim minority through the medium of cinema. Shaken to the core, the secular-minded auteur made three critically acclaimed films – Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996), and Zubeidaa (2001) – relating the soul-stirring tales of three Muslim women. The eponymous protagonist of each film is doubly marginalised as a Muslim and a woman. Although Benegal competently dramatises this double marginalisation, it is not the feature that renders these films significant. Rather, the significance of each film lies in its remarkable delineation of the strength of spirit that characterises its heroine. Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa are women who strain against the stifling barriers set around them. They are rebels who dare to carve out their own destinies, for better or worse. Together, they remind us that Benegal, celebrated as the trailblazing father of parallel cinema, is a progressive feminist who unflinchingly prioritises agency-seeking women in his meaningful cinema, delving deep into their complex psyches with exemplary sensitivity. While the Bollywood industry is crowded with liberal male filmmakers winning plaudits for churning out women-centric classics, no one, in the opinion of a Benegal aficionado like me, matches Benegal in his clear-sighted exploration of the position of women in modern-day India.

Although the present chapter focuses on Zubeidaa, some mention must be made of Mammo and Sardari Begum, especially because both Mammo and Sardari Begum make brief appearances in Zubeidaa. Mammo revolves around Mehmooda Begum aka Mammo (Farida Jalal), a dynamic veil-clad Muslim widow, who suddenly arrives in Bombay from Pakistan to reside with Fayyazi (Surekha Sikri), her sister, and Riyaz (Amit Phalke), the adolescent grandson of Fayyazi. The film engagingly chronicles the day-to-day life of Mammo and her tireless attempts to extend her visa as a foreign national. Misfortune strikes when Mammo is unceremoniously deported to Pakistan by the police as she has overstayed her terms of visit.

Brynner played King Mongkut on stage from 1951 to 1955 and, intermittently, from 1976 to 1985, onscreen in 1956, and on television in the 1972 thirteen-episode series, Anna and the King. The kingly trope continued in biographies; the 1987 Yul Brynner: The Inscrutable King and the 1989 Yul: The Man Who Would Be King; in the co-authored 1983 Yul Brynner Cookbook: Food Fit for the King and You; the 1995 made-for-television documentary, The Man Who Was King; and in a virtually endless array of newspaper and magazine articles addressing the actor and his legacy (see Chapter 9). Despite the spectrum of parts that Brynner played during his career, he remained tenaciously associated with his excessive and stylized interpretation of King Mongkut, the historical Siamese ruler made Broadway character. In journalistic mentions of Brynner spanning from the 1950s to the current day, only mentions of his bald head repeat with the same frequency as kingly allusions.

Examining Orientalism and masculinity in both the narrative of The King and I and in Brynner's screen presence, this chapter zooms in on the royal trope cutting through his star image. In doing so, it further examines the kingly reverberations in his roles as Pharaoh Rameses II, the ‘buccaneer king’ Jean Lafitte, and King Solomon in top-budget 1950s Hollywood studio spectacles that marked the early part of his career and fame.

An Oriental attraction

Steeped in myth, cosmopolitanism, and exoticism from the outset, Brynner's star image framed him as imported goods, a ‘product of the Mysterious East’ operating with a different kind of logic – and constraint – than that governing the lives of regular Americans. Within 1950s American culture, Brynner, in his son's words, ‘almost constituted a new species. Even his name was a mystery: one cannot confidently guess from which continent those three syllables emerged, for they are neither European nor Oriental.’ Brynner himself argued that the name was ‘common enough in Outer Mongolia.’ His was a project of self-exoticizing that made use of broad Orientalist tropes, often in highly playful, over-the-top manner.

We have seen Shakespeare's ingenuity at work bodging two of the visual arts—engraving (or woodcut) and painting—into the text of The Winter's Tale by means of ekphrastic dialogue. I now want to explore his incorporation of a third—sculpture—by examining the text to determine what it can tell us about the play's onstage presentation. I shall begin by asking what we know about the appearance of Hermione's “statue” when it is revealed in Act 5, Scene 3. Next, I will inquire into a related matter: is there any historical evidence to support Shakespeare's attribution of the supposed sculpture to Giulio Romano, beyond Vasari's report that Giulio's epitaph claimed that he made “sculpted and painted bodies breathe”? Finally, I shall propose a reader's ekphrasis of Hermione's statue, based on the evidence gathered. Let us address these three issues in the order of their appearance.

More than 400 years after the original production of the play, and with no contemporary eyewitness accounts save that of Simon Forman, who says nothing about the statue, we must glean what we can from the text's first printing. The Folio provides scenic facts concerning the statue's authorship, state of finish, substance, and posture, which can be gathered from dialogue that supplies oblique stage directions. Our first piece of evidence addresses its provenance and verisimilitude: it is “a Peece many yeeres in doing, and now newly perform’d, by that rare Italian Master, Julio Romano,” who “so neere Hermione, hath done Hermione, that they say one would speake to her, and stand in hope of answer” (5.2.93–5, 98–9). The Third Gentleman has identified the statue as the work of a sixteenth-century artist who—fictionally—is still living, but who actually died sixty-five years before The Winter's Tale was produced. He has labored over it for a very long time and just recently put the finishing touches to it. Among its other functions, the line serves to reinforce the early modern setting of a play whose historical context Shakespeare shifts in accordance with the thematic value he wishes to emphasize.

A: INTRODUCTION

An unprecedented endeavour of legal reform in the 1260s and 1270s resulted in the promulgation of a code of law for Norway in 1274: the Code of the Norwegian Realm, by King Magnus “the Lawmender” Hákonarson (1263–1280). Often regarded as an afterthought was the equally unique codification of urban law that was promulgated two years later, in 1276. This codex appears to have been initially constructed for Norway's largest town and most important export hub, Bergen. However, through processes that are obscure to us, versions of the urban codex were adapted for three other important towns within a few decades: the metropolitan Niðaros and the royal seats of Oslo and Tunsberg. Although the patterns of organisation in these towns do not contradict regulations of the new urban laws, the question remains whether they also implemented the codex into their legal procedures. This article analyses the urban legal procedure in the three towns in cases where the town citizens were involved to better understand how law worked after the promulgation of the Code of the Towns of 1276 (the urban code).

The structure of the article is formed of three sections. First, the concept of Norwegian urban law will be explained. Secondly, urban law will be located in terms of the question of “law in the books” versus “law in action”. The final part considers procedures in the towns of Niðaros, Oslo and Tunsberg from case studies that serve to illuminate this in terms of space of urban law, transaction, torts, urban women as litigants and finally trade related cases. The description of legal procedure that we can obtain from the surviving documents disclose that cases and their documentation were drawn up much in accordance with the Code of the Towns. More precisely, the procedure in practice rarely went against the procedure given by the urban code. Urban legal procedure was still performed in a rational way, a way that took into consideration the experiences of the towns in question, their institutional structures and the requirements of the urban legal subjects.

B: NORWEGIAN URBAN LAW

Urban settlements comprised a minor part of Norwegian society, compared to other regions of medieval Europe. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the kingdom is thought to have included fifteen, mostly small, towns within the mainland of the realm.