An Elizabethan Philosopher and Machiavelli
By Sergio Mazzarelli
@John Case's Sphaera civitatis (1588) contains the most extensive discussion of Machiavelli's theories to be found in any Elizabethan work. It is undoubtedly regrettable that this discussion has been largely neglected by Elizabethan scholarship. As the Sphaera civitatis was used as a university textbook both at Oxford and on the Continent, the views it contained were certainly influential. Moreover, Case published his manual with the full backing of political and academic authorities, which suggests that his ideas were shared and approved by members of the ruling elite of his country. This paper is an attempt to clarify Case's position on Machiavelli, and to highlight its significance for a better understanding of Elizabethan ideology.
The Sphaera civitatis contains numerous attacks against Machiavelli that can only be defined as vicious. In an Elizabethan work this is not surprising. What is remarkable is that, although Case rails against Machiavelli, his own political doctrines contain Machiavellian assumptions. For example, Case accepts that it is sometimes legitimate for a king to kill an innocent person for the good of the state. Therefore, Case's vehement condemnation of Machiavelli seems contradictory if not hypocritical. In practice, he taught Machiavellian doctrines at Oxford while pretending to condemn them. This suggests that perhaps we should think twice before taking any Elizabethan attacks against Machiavelli at face value.
Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Theater and Prose
By Michael Guest
@This essay examines the idea orgembodimenthin relation particularly to reception of the work and to thee of original treatment of form in Samuel Beckett's theater and prose. After a brief review of cridcism on Beckett's use of the bodyCwithan emphasis on fragmentation and the pertinence of Lacan, I turn to the short stage piece Breath. Here I demonstrate how Beckett is able to invert the dramatic experience and to thrust the aesthetic illusion back upon the spectator, thereby heightening an awareness of embodiment. Breath exhibits an alienated "limiting condition" of embodiment, since there are no actors on stage, but an illusion of human consciousness is generated by stage technics alone. My analysis of the play Happy Days goes on to show precisely how Beckett's application of stagecraft and dramatic art assaults and inverts the traditional perception of the objective human figure at the center of the aesthetic illusion. I examine the humanistic implications of Beckett's practice with reference to Theodor Adorno (regarding modernist aesthetics) and Elaine Scarry (regarding a semiotics of the body) and generalize the relevance of my analysis to Beckett's later theater.
The latter half of my essay analyzes Beckett's novelistic writing in relation to embodiment. I show how Beckett's development toward the portrayal of figures that are barely recognizable as human is in keeping with an aesthetics and semiotics of embodiment. With reference to philosophical and psychological approaches to the body, I show how Beckett's characters enact an anti-Cartesian exploration of the body-self relationship, implicating the reader's own act of reception. As in the theater technique discussed, Beckett's application of embodiment in prose compels reflexive references to the reader's own proprioceptive experience of the limits of body and self. I extend this idea as a basis for close analysis of sections of Beckett's trilogy of novels and his later prose, such as Worstward Ho.
Beckett's work is intrinsically attuned to fine operations of perception, thought and inner reference on the part of the reader or spectator. Beckett adapts form to portray an experience that surpasses the limit of conventional linguistic reference. There is a deep humanistic relevance to this project that embraces the "alienating" effects of many of his works. In collapsing the divisions between subject and other, form and content, Beckett writes not grammatically, but in relation to the conventions of predicated grammar. He redetermines the possibilities for literary transmission itself, implicating the reader as part of the very content of the literary work. My essay shows how Beckett's techniques of embodiment are related intimately to the difficult formal aspect of his work and are part of a deep concern that extends across the literary genres within which he writes.