Abstract
In Guillemette Bolens’s work on literary narrative, kinesis is mediated from writer to reader through written language, where it is stripped of the rich multi-modality of speech and gesture. In the case of theatre, the trained body of the actor—an expert in movement and animation—mediates the kinesic skill of the playwright. The art of gesture in early modernity was a true bodily discipline, in which the playwright’s words are taken into body, animated through the spirits of the actor, and communicated—literally—to the audience. This chapter explores the kinesic intelligence of players in the children’s companies. While the subject of boys playing women has received enormous attention, playing across age lines remains underexplored; kinesic intelligence provides an illuminating model for analysing this phenomenon.
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Notes
- 1.
Spolsky, “Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures,” Poetics Today 17 (1996): 157–80.
- 2.
Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 19.
- 3.
John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health” (Cambridge England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 36.
- 4.
Bolens, Style of Gestures, 10.
- 5.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture: How our Hands Help Us Think (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005) and David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
- 6.
Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 37.
- 7.
Downey, “Educating the Eyes: Biocultural Anthropology and Physical Education,” Anthropology in Action 12 (2005): 58.
- 8.
Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (London: 1604), M8v.
- 9.
Heywood, “An Apology for Actors (1612),” in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 213–54.
- 10.
Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985).
- 11.
Heywood, “Apology for Actors.”
- 12.
David Edelstein, “The Truman Show Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Brilliant Capote,” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2005/09/the_truman_show.html.
- 13.
Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 14.
Jonson, “Epigram 120,” in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5: 182–3.
- 15.
Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels.
- 16.
Doris V. Falk, “Proverbs and the Polonius Destiny,” Shakespeare Quarterly 18 (1967): 28.
- 17.
Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 44.
- 18.
Cathcart, “Borrowings and the Authorial Domain: Gostanzo, Polonius, and Marston’s Gonzago,” Comparative Drama 37 (2003): 159–174.
- 19.
William N. West, “Intertheatricality,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 151–72.
Bibliography
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Tribble, E. (2018). Kinesic Intelligence on the Early Modern English Stage. In: Banks, K., Chesters, T. (eds) Movement in Renaissance Literature. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_11
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