Shakespeare and the Landscape of Death: Crossing the Boundaries of Life and the Afterlife

This essay explores how denying or ignoring the meanings of the spaces scripted for the dead, or “deathscapes” as anthropologist Lily Kong calls them, can lead Shakespeare’s characters to a spiritual death as well as a bodily one. I examine the cultural meanings of deathscapes in the early modern era--specifically the grave, graveyard and church--through the lens of the schism of Christianity caused by separation of Protestantism and Catholicism. When Hamlet, for example, makes the mistake of treating the spaces of the dead in ways that speak more to how Catholics define and use them, he puts himself in deadly peril. I argue, however, that this in no way makes Hamlet a “Catholic play,” as some critics have in the past claimed. Instead, I show how Shakespeare reinforces the tenets and ideas of Protestantism by punishing Hamlet’s lapses with such a thorough and unavoidable harshness that Hamlet’s anti-Protestant actions and behaviours serve as a warning to audience members. The fact that Hamlet appears to treat the deathscape with more than a nod to the medieval notion of le danse macabre reinforces his weak and unstable nature, and leaves the audience in some doubt as to his chances of meeting with a favourable outcome in the afterlife

Playing God: The Landscape of Resurrection in Romeo and Juliet

"Playing God" explores Shakespeare's use--or rather, misuse--of specific landscapes from the perspective of the transgression of morality through oppositional representations, actions, and beliefs that result in moral and physical destruction. That is, when his characters attempt to recreate the miracle of reincarnation upon those spaces scripted solely for the dead, they are punished not only for their inability to recognize the culturally acceptable meanings of the landscape but are also mirroring Satan’s sin by taking upon themselves the power of resurrection, which is meant for divine application only. By having his protagonists “playing God,” as it were, Shakespeare adds layers of both tragedy and flaw to their characters. Through his use of interior and exterior spaces, physical objects, and metaphysical understandings of religion and the religious canon, Shakespeare distances the concept of resurrection from the more accepted Christian meanings of redemption and rebirth, and redefines it through the use of what early modern Protestants would term witchcraft and black magic, forms of supernatural power against which the early modern English playgoer was vigorously indoctrinated. Characters such as Friar Lawrence, Romeo, and Juliet, then, are placed in both physical and metaphysical danger as they overreach their strictly human abilities and attempt to access the powers of the divine. It is possible, Shakespeare shows us, that we can misuse landscape in terms of both the dead and those who are seemingly brought back to life

“Thou Map of Woe”: Mapping the Feminine in Titus Andronicus and King Lear

In this article, I claim that Shakespeare moves beyond the archetypal early modern definitions of land, and the maps that represent it, as benefitting from masculine intervention and argue that he envisions unnecessary masculine interventions regarding the performativity of the feminine in terms of landscape and cartography to be harmful to both the perpetrator and object of the intervention. He acknowledges that there is a connection between how his male characters—specifically, fathers—define their nations and their daughters, but warns that demonstrating a lack of trust or understanding in the agency of women and attempting to overwrite them the way boundaries are changed on a map results in tragedy for all involved. I use Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of gender to demonstrate that such masculine interventions often cannot differentiate between normative and subversive acts, which compounds the dangers of such interferences. Using both his early and later plays, specifically Titus Andronicus and The Tragedy of King Lear, I show that Shakespeare portrays the desire to treat women as territories or blank maps and to deny his female characters the ability to make their own choices as problematic and dangerous

Straddling Genres: McKillp and the Landscape of the Female Hero-Identity

This is a discussion of Patricia McKillip's "Fool's Run" using a feminist critique

Traversing Monstrosity: Power and Peril upon Shakespeare’s Roads

Sharon Emmerichs examines how Shakespeare uses roads not only as a means to get from one place to another, but also as a means to go from one state of being to another. Using references from As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, and Twelfth Night, Sharon Emmerichs explores how in Shakespeare comedies women change from "natural" to "monstrous” and then are able to recover from this change. However, in Shakespeare tragedies such changes lead women to their death, on a road that cannot be diverted. Dr. Sharon Emmerichs teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and poetry in the UAA English Department. She received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Oregon and her M.A. and PhD. D. from the University of Missouri

Celebrating Shakespeare Four Hundred Years On

English professors Toby Widdicombe and Sharon Emmerichs, UAA students, and staff share favorite Shakespeare sonnets

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Celebration

Dramatic reading of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with UAA English faculty: Toby Widdicombe, Sharon Emmerichs, Jennifer Stone, and others