Shakespeare’s Promise: Articles from Johann Gregory and Richard Wilson

The latest issue of the journal Shakespeare is a rather special one as far as Cardiff is concerned because it includes articles from both Johann Gregory and Richard Wilson at Cardiff University.

Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets”, Troilus and Cressida and the Odcombian Banquet: An exploration of promising paratexts, expectations and matters of taste – Johann Gregory

This study centres on the promises that the first printed paratexts of Troilus and Cressida seem to be making before the action of the play begins. These promises are not identical to the promises made between people or characters, but, like these promises, they create expectations and make associations. This exploration, therefore, begins by taking “Sonnet 107” as an example of a text that makes promises, in order to set up the notion of promising texts. It then focuses on the Sonnets‘ dedication, before moving on to consider the title pages and the epistle to Troilus and Cressida. Finally, it attempts to make sense of the culinary terms in the paratexts to Troilus and Cressida by using the Folio prologue to the play and the Odcombian Banquet to show that readers’ and playgoers’ experiences were often imagined as a matter of taste that seem linked to a burgeoning consumer culture.

“When Golden Time Convents”: Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise – Richard Wilson 

At the British Museum’s Shah Abbas exhibition quotations from Twelfth Night reassured visitors Shakespeare was as familiar with ‘the Sophy’ as with Elizabeth. One of four dedicated to empire and globalization, the show used Shakespeare’s ‘universalism’ in the debate about ownership of cultural property, to illustrate director Neil MacGregor’s idea of the museum as ‘the world under one roof’. But critics of the series object that an emphasis on ‘the food of love’ effaces Islamic or Aztec violence, and by taking the quotations out of context curators also elided religious conflict in Elizabethan England. They ignored the way references to the Shirley brothers in Twelfth Night encode Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. But a Tate Gallery Van Dyck exhibition showed Robert Shirley in his silk suit as ‘fencer to the Sophy’ and Persian ambassador to Rome; and it is this complexity that Shakespeare stages in his Epiphany play, with its hope for ‘golden time’ but suspense that like Robert’s ambiguous suit from Abbas, ‘What’s to come is still unsure’.

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