Mischief and Magic: The Fairy King Oberon and Otherworld Encounters

Cardiff Medieval and Early Modern Reading Group

Image: ‘Oberon and Puck’, Kenny Meadows (1846), from the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.

Take heed the Queen come not within his sight,
For Oberon is passing fell and wroth

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i.19-20)

The King of the Fairies features in late medieval and early modern literature as a figure of mischief and mayhem, most often going by the name of Oberon. He is a commanding figure throughout his textual history, and one that Helen Cooper describes as a ‘judge or arbiter, though his arbitration may show more of arbitrariness than of justice’.[1] Romances explore his magical influence, and the ways in which his otherworldly fairly kingdom interacts with, and is encountered by, the more mundane world. This month, we are reading a selection of poetry, prose and drama from the fourteenth century to the late sixteenth, in which the King of the Fairies can be…

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Hype, Transmission and Truth in the Middle Ages – Bristol CMS Postgraduate Conference CFP

CMS CfP Poster

Still several days to get your abstracts in for Bristol CMS’s annual postgraduate conference…

 

Next MEMORI seminar: Derek Dunne on ‘Shakespeare’s Licence’, Nov 16 at 5.15, room 2.47

Cardiff University’s Medieval and Early Modern Research Initiative is delighted to announce our next research seminar, which is to be given by one of our newest members and colleagues, Derek Dunne.

Derek’s paper – ‘Shakespeare’s Licence: Counterfeiting Authority in Early Modern England’ – will take place on Thursday, November 16 at 5.15 in room 2.47 of the John Percival Building. As ever, a wine and soft drink reception will follow the paper.

ABSTRACT: Shakespeare’s Licence: Counterfeiting Authority in Early Modern Literature

This talk will argue for the impact that licencing has had on the composition of early modern literature. Early modern playing companies required separate licences for performing a play, going on tour, printing a playtext, and for the theatre itself. Without the Master of the Revels’ signature, no performance of early modern drama could take place. Yet early modern licences are also open to forgery and counterfeiting, as detailed in the so-called cony-catching pamphlets; for example the ‘freshwater mariner’ is famed for ‘run[ning] about the country with a counterfeit licence, feigning either shipwreck or spoil by pirates’ (Greene, The Groundwork of Cony-Catching). Therefore the document designed to control an itinerant population actually becomes the means of criminality, due to the duplicitous potential of hand-written documents.
Early modern authors frequently exploit the metaphorical richness of the ‘licence’, such as when Sir Toby Belch calls on Sir Andrew Aguecheek to ‘taunt him with the licence of ink’ (Twelfth Night, 3.2.42).  Similarly, forged documents of authority are a staple in the plots of early modern drama, from Hamlet to Bartholomew Fair. I want to explore how authors worked through the layers of ambivalence created by a document with which they would have been intimately familiar. By focusing on the the material documents that lay behind characters’ fictional interactions, I intend to draw attention to the period’s dual understanding of the ‘counterfeit’.