Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Chastity – Drama”

By all indications, the public persona of the late Restoration actress Anne Bracegirdle was built on the speculative foundation of maidenhead. A leading ingénue of multiple talents, Bracegirdle played significant roles in comedy, tragedy, and music-drama from her debut in 1688 to her retirement in 1707. In comedy, Bracegirdle specialized in marriageable young women of rank, wit, and fortune. In serious drama, Bracegirdle often played the pathetic heroine, a virtuous woman stalked by a predatory man. Though primarily an actress, Bracegirdle also called upon her impressive soprano voice in many entr'actes and the occasional musical part. A first-rank player and hardworking company member from very early in her career, Bracegirdle played some eighty roles over a nineteen-year span that kept her consistently before the public eye. Despite Bracegirdle's constant appearances on the stages of Drury Lane, Dorset Garden, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, few extant sources identify the qualities that typified her playing; commentators rarely discuss her acting as a discrete set of practices, aptitudes, or characterizations. Rather, prodigious evidence attests to the public's obsession with Bracegirdle's reputation for virginity. Called the “Romantick Virgin,” the actress was thought to be chaste, and many writers focused attention on her sexual virtue. Indeed, Bracegirdle's chastity seems to have been the cornerstone of her fame. As Colley Cibber wrote, her star status rose in conjunction with her reputation for purity:

This study aims to evaluate the commodified brother-sister relationship in Early Modern drama. It examines three different samples from three major playwrights of this time period: Isabella and Claudio in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), Charles and Susan in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and Giovanni and Annabella in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632). The three aforementioned cases are closely evaluated through a Marxist-feminist lens. The study finds out that the brothers in the three examined plays are not very different since they all encourage their sisters to sacrifice their chastity to achieve some sort of personal interest. Interestingly enough, the sisters vary in their responses to their brothers’ requests of offering their bodies to help their brothers. Obviously, Shakespeare offers the ideal version of a sister who does everything in her power to save a brother. Yet, she refuses to offer her body in return to his freedom in spite of her brother’s desperate calls to offer her virginity to Angelo to save the former’s life. Susan of Heywood is also similar to Isabella of Shakespeare since she refuses to sell herself in return to the money needed to save her brother. However, Ford offers the ugliest version of a brother-sister relationship. The brother wants to have a love affair with his sister who yields to his sexual advances and eventually gets pregnant.

Maenads in pop culture are usually women with a strong eroticism, distinguished by sexual addiction and pure lust, malice, and murders. However, the maenads in Ancient Greek iconography and drama were completely different, not connected to the sexual sphere or to the manipulation of men. Ancient Greek maenads preserve their chastity, and their task is to honor Dionysus with dances and rites. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the common thread that has led to this contemporary sexual and gloomy distinctive characterization of maenads in modern media and to understand where this dark vision of maenadism comes from. The stages on this journey through times past are the Bacchanalia scandal (186 B.C.), the black legend of Messalina, some cases of Christian condemnations, and the conception of maenads during the Renaissance and Victorian Hellenism.

Silapathikaram was created by Ilango Adigal. The speciality of silapathikaram is, it is the first epic created in tamil language. Silapathikaram presents literature, music and drama(muthamizh) and thereby bringing to light the pride of Tamil language. As characters of Silapathikaram got into a lot of discussions, a doubt arises whether the characters got famous through the epic or, the epic got famous due to the characters. For instance, the chastity of Kannagi and Madhavi has been compared and subjected to many debates. Madhavi is considered to be a crucial character in Silapathikaram. Madhavi belongs to kanigayar community. She has learnt the art of dance for seven years. She has also learnt to play a musical instrument called ‘yazh’. She has written two letters, thereby Silapathikaram exposed her art skills and literary knowledge. It is also known that women of kanigayar community learnt many art skills, thus exposing the literary, musical, and art skills of Tamil people.

The story of Susanna and the Elders, found in the apocryphal thirteenth chapter of Daniel, part of the Greek version of the Book of Daniel, is richly suggestive of its likely appeal to poets and artists. It is set during the Babylonian Captivity and recounts events concerning the Jewish community within Babylon. Susanna is the beautiful and chaste wife of a wealthy man, Joachim, whose home serves as a seat of justice for his fellow Jews. While bathing in their garden, Susanna is spied upon and accosted by two judges of Israel who frequent her husband's house. They invite her to satisfy both of them or suffer the penalty for a charge of adultery, which they will bring against her. She refuses, saying that she would rather fall into their hands than sin in the sight of God. She is tried unveiled before the people. Led off to execution, Susanna calls out to God, who stirs up the spirit of the young Daniel. Daniel's skill in separating the elders before asking for details of their evidence against Susanna reveals their perjury, and they are put to death by the crowd. The tale is certainly courtroom drama, but it is also a narrative of transgressions — of female chastity and modesty, of the household and property, of justice itself.

The relationship between religion and theatre is an ancient one; in fact this relationship has been the essence and raison d’être of theatre from ancient Egypt and Greece until the present day. However, in today's world, to borrow from, or be inspired by, a holy scripture is not only to debate issues pertaining to faith, but rather to aim for a dialectics between the dramatic work and the modern-day readers/spectators and their contemporary sociopolitical conditions. Indeed, it was his recourse to a Qur'anic story as plot for Ahl al-kahf (‘Sleepers of the Cave’, 1933) that helped Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm to initiate drama as an intrinsic genre into the literary canon, theatre having long been deemed an unessential art form within the Arabo-Islamic world. The subject of the current article, ʿAlī Aḥmad Bā Kathīr (1910–69), likewise wrote a substantial number of works for the stage derived from Islamic history and tradition. As a member of the cultural sector of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s and 1950s and a major contributor to al-masraḥ al-dīnī (‘the theatre of religion’) in Egypt, it is no surprise that Bā Kathīr devoted a large portion of his prolific dramatic writing to narratives inspired by the Qur'an and other religious sources. His play Hārūt wa-Mārūt (‘The Angels Hārūt and Mārūt’, 1962) is a very good example of this vein in his writing. Based in the Qur'anic story mentioned in Sūrat al-Baqara, it recounts the story of the two angels, who are transformed into humans and descend to earth, to demonstrate that sin can be combated by the practice of chastity, willpower, and self-restraint.

Pisiranthaiyar was a poet of Sangam period. He was very friendly with King Kopperuncholan. He was a devotee of Pandyan Idudai Nambi. He gave advice and political virtue to the king and earned the respect of Pandyan. Pisiranthaiyar lived in a town called 'Pisir' in Pandya country. Bharathidasan has created this drama in the twentieth century with his imaginative poetry, centering on the friendship of the devotees. During the Sangam period, the doctrine of virtue had a great influence on the society. Social life is structured through this religion. Ancient Tamil society was enriched by urban civilization. Tamil civilization was one of the pioneer civilizations of the world before this civilized way of life was built. The education seen in the people and the poets during the Sangam period makes clear the knowledge of the Tamil people. Sangam period is built on individual morality, political virtue, chivalry, arts etc. The types of food that prevailed during the Sangam period, the philosophy of nature, astronomy, mentalism, solvency, commerce, water management, life rituals etc. are the aspects of life. In Pisiranthaiyar’s play, Bharathidasan takes the life of that time in the context of the 20th century for the social development of Tamil people and building the values of life for the upliftment of the Tamil society. In the life of a Tamilian, culture, art, education, and valor are combined, hospitality, kindness, chastity, justice, friendship etc. are mixed in the life of the ancient Tamilians, and Bharathidasan has designed his concept that these values of life should be incorporated in the contemporary environment as well. This review is structured on a qualitative approach. This article examines the living norms of the Tamil people in the context of Pisiranthaiyar's era and the living norms mentioned by Bharathidasan.

Statement of the problem. Today national musicology is beginning to actively show interest in the study of Western European medieval monody. However, there is still no scientific information about the unique personality of the Middle Ages – Hildegard of Bingen and her musical creativity – in particular about the liturgical drama «Ordo virtutum», although there are some musicology methods for analyzing this music. The relevance of this study is due to the filling of this gap. Taking in account that a musical work of the 11–12th centuries is usually considered only within the context of the “historical style”, it seems interesting to have the opposite approach – to identify the characteristic features of authorship in the work of a medieval composer, whose music is becoming more and more popular in the world concert repertoire. The purpose of the article is to consider the work of Hildegard of Bingen in the aspect of the phenomenon of the author’s style and to identify the invariant features of the individual style model. The liturgical drama “Ordo Virtutum” (“Series of Virtues”) of 1150 by Hildegard of Bingen was chosen as the material for the study, in which several types of art – music, literature and theater are combined, and which is the earliest survived sample of this genre. The “libretto” of the drama is written by Hildegard own and fixed in the so-called “Rizenkodeks” – the majestic manuscript book of 25 pounds, which stored in Wiesbaden Landesbibliothek. The author of this study used the following research methods: historical and contextual due to the need to identify the specifics of creative thinking of Hildegard of Bingen in the context of the theory and practice of the liturgical monody of her time; intonation-dramaturgical analysis aimed at a holistic comprehension of the musical content as such, which is guided by the search for unifying patterns of the intonation plan, and the text-musical semantic analysis of the holy chants fot covering the synergistic aspect of understanding style. Results of the study. Theological themes were the main issues of Hildegard’s life, because from the age of eight she lived and studied in a Benedictine monastery, and later founded her own monastery in Rupertsberg. So, the work of Hildegard of Bingen, along with the music of such well-known, but much younger than her, contemporaries, masters of polyphony, like Leonin and Perotin, provides a unique opportunity to trace the peculiarities of the manifestation of authorship in the monody of the 12th century. The Gregorian chant became a genre that fully embodies the aspirations of the church. However, from the 11th century onwards, secular elements were gradually introduced into church music: from Easter or Christmas tropes, which contained intonations of folk songs, to theatrical episodes based on Scriptures, or “actions” called liturgical drama. The musical drama “Ordo Virtutum” (“A Series of Virtues”) was created to consecrate the Hildegard Convent in Rupertsberg and is impressive primarily because it is the first fully preserved, not fragmentary, liturgical drama. Unlike traditional liturgical drama, the work also surprises with its unusualness and multidimensionality. The text of the drama is related to the themes, characters and prophetic visions presented in one of the main theological works of Hildegard – “Scivias”. As for music, it is a monody, which, thanks to its innovations, significantly expands the tonal and intonational boundaries of music of that time. “Ordo Virtutum” is a Christian philosophical parable dedicated to the struggle for the human soul between the sixteen Virtues (Faith, Hope, Love, Humility, Docility, Innocence, Modesty, Divine Love, Divine Knowledge, Prudence, Patience, Chastity etc.) and the devil. This is the story of a “prodigal daughter” tempted by the devil, who gradually repented and returned with joy to the bosom of the Church. The manuscript of the drama is not divided into actions, but modern editions divide the work into six parts: the prologue, four scenes and the finale. There are a total of 82 different melodies, 80 of which are performed by women. The presence of a large number of female roles (as evidenced by the mostly high register of singing) indicates that the drama “Ordo Virtutum” was composed and performed for the first time in a nunnery. A peculiar struggle takes place between the features of the traditional Gregorian genre, secular influences and signs of Hildegard’s own style of singing, which leads to their synthesis in her compositional work and the opening of new musical horizons. The content of her songs is based on spiritual and cultural context, on the one hand, and personal and psychological attitudes, on the other. Hildegard’s monody is individual in relation to the models of Gregorian chants described in the scientific literature and is unorthodox. Following the text, the melody is divided into lines, which are combined into structural constructions of a higher level – stanzas. The structural and semantic unity of the whole is achieved due to the commonality of melodic motives, and the structure of lines and stanzas is determined by the motive formula. The presence of the above-mentioned integrating principle together with the multiplicity of its incarnations within the unique author’s individuality makes it possible to assert that Hildegard of Bingen’s music is a systemic phenomenon and demonstrates its own compositional style, like the music of Leonin or Perotin. On the example of the analysis of the musical characteristics of different heroes of the work, we see that the liturgical drama “Ordo Virtutum” is not just a collection of typified chorales, as it may seem at first glance. We have before us a real composer opus, endowed with its own unique authorial style, which is “lighting” through each element of this harmonious systemic compositional and semantic integrity. Conclusions. The liturgical drama of Hildegard of Bingen, in fact, was the first, which means that it is advisable to talk about the “phenomenon of a musical work” (the term of N. Gerasimova-Persidskaya), which is inevitably associated with authorship. It was also revealed that the characteristic features that add originality to the musical writing of St. Hildegard are the construction of special short intonational-motive formulas, as well as the frequent use of melismas and musical figures of ascending leaps, extended to an octave. The interaction of these and other qualities forms the uniquely individual author’s style of Hildegard of Bingen, the phenomenon of which lies in his exceptional integrity.

Introduction. The given article is devoted to study of the Ukrainian ballet continuing to produce new ways of implementation of the ideas and artistic images in the beginning of the XXI century. The production of the ballet “Peer Gynt” on the music by E. Grieg, done by People’s artist of Ukraine V. Pisarev for the troupe of Donetsk ‘A. Solovianenko’ Academic State Theatre of Opera and Ballet is a remarkable example of this process. The production’s premiere was on, 1997, May 17, in the framework of the international theatre project “Ukraine – Norway”. Twenty years later, in 2017, the new variant of the ballet has been created for Kharkiv National Opera and Ballet Theatre named after M. V. Lysenko. This “Kharkiv variant” was staged regarding specifics of Kharkiv theatre’s troupe, while retaining the choreographic text of the original; it is marked by scenography and decorations being more spectacular and modern. The work by H. Ibsen received harsh critique from literary scholars who gave plenty of negative reviews of it, and it was E.Grieg’s music that led this poetic drama to wide recognition and popularity it has today. H. Ibsen’s piece became a base for more than the ten of films, directed from 1915 until 2006. As well as E Grieg’s music, which mostly accompanies the theatrical and cinematic interpretations of the drama poem, there are homonymous opera by Werner Egk (1938) and the ballet by John Neumeier, created in a collaboration with A. Schnittke (1987). As a ballet, the “Peer Gynt” is being staged since 1922 up to present day. The object of this research is musically-plastique image of Solveig. The aim of the study is to reveal specifics of musically-plastique, choreographic means, which are used to portray Solveig’s image in V. Pisarev’s production of ballet “Peer Gynt” regarding literary source. The article uses such methods as: 1) historical, allowing to place selected work into the perspective of development of ballet theatre in XXI century; 2) genre approach conditioned by specifics of means of expression used in choreographic art; 3) stylistic, used to regard given ballet in the context of choreographic art. The research results. H. Ibsen elevated the story to the level of philosophical parable about man’s freedom to choose his own path and about the price this freedom comes with. A psychological portrait of the protagonist, wanderer Peer Gynt, combines traits of both humanist and insane. The playwright creates opposition between him and Solveig, majestic in her spiritual martyrdom. According to H. Ibsen’s conception, it is Solveig, being an incarnation of the very best feminine traits, such as chastity, fidelity and kindness, who saves the prodigal soul of the protagonist. In the end of his earthly path, Peer Gynt finally finds what he has been looking for his entire life – self-sacrificial Love, saving him from the eternal suffering near his death. The libretto is written by Yu. Stanishevsky, historian of ballet. The author significantly abridges the text of the dramatic poem, reducing the number of acts from five to two. The First act consists of 4 tableaus, the Second has only two; Yu. Stanishevsky omits several situations in order to make the spectacle more dynamic. The libretto features the image of Solveig only six times: thrice in the First act and thrice in the Second. But despite sporadicity and brevity of Solveig’s presence on the stage, this image plays a leading role in the dramaturgy of the ballet, no less significant than Peer Gynt. Today the poem “Peer Gynt” by H. Ibsen is hardly imaginable without E. Grieg’s music. Its score (op. 23) consisted of 28 numbers , and it included dance intermedia and introduction to every Act; dance fragments, genre scenes, portraits, fantastic episodes and landscape sceneries. Later, the composer compiled the most interesting and self-sufficient numbers into two Suites. Conspicuous Romantic style of the score might be compared to the image of blonde-haired maiden Solveig, who betokens pure femininity. The ballet of V. Pisarev consists of 8 tableaus and 3 numbers. In order to create this ballet spectacle, its author used several types of choreographic art to reveal its idea more profoundly. V. Pisarev embodied the plot of H. Ibsen’s poem using a fusion of classical and neo-classical dance as well as a reconstruction of the folklore-scenic Norwegian dance. Ballet master draws attention to the inner world of a protagonist, who is facing a dilemma: either to remain for fix the situation, or to run away once again. Significance of Solveig’s image is emphasized by the choreographic text of the ballet, as her role becomes a plastique leit-motiv of the whole work. Choreographic lexicon of Solveig is founded upon traditional Classical dance and occasional movements of contemporary dance. Conclusions. The image of Solveig is a demanding one, both technically and psychologically as the ballerina must demonstrate advanced technique and high artistry. Solveig’s dance is plastique, sculpture-like, filled with profound psychologism and elaborated expressiveness. Solveig is one of the most powerful and iconic examples of femininity and self-sacrificial love in romantic art keeping its actuality until today.

President Yoon Suk-yeol's campaign for the presidency embraces the anti-feminism movement that has further fueled the misogynistic culture in South Korea. South Korea is quite thick with patriarchy and misogyny because there is a lot of criticism of women, especially feminists. This article analyses the phenomenon of misogynistic culture in South Korea using document-based research and internet-based research techniques. It employs Foucault's discourse of power and the concept of misogyny to analyse the impact of history on misogynist culture in contemporary South Korea. The findings show that as Confucian teachings are the basis of state ideology in South Korea, Korean society believes in the chastity of women. In the Koran history, a negative connotation was given to women who are considered to have damaged the country’s ‘Joseon-ness’ and the standard of femininity in South Korean society. Given South Korea's high level of sexism and low level of female empowerment, the representation of males in dramas as caring and empathetic is unfortunately not representative of the real world. Sexist behaviour in South Korea is founded on Confucian ideology.

Over the centuries, the theatrical and pretentious activities of African Political leaders have culminated in the evolution of a thick skin of carelessness and indifference guided by fuzzy and visionless eyes that stare hopelessly into the future. It is certainly difficult now to determine what could stair her to realize her precarious situation and act. Time and again African nations have proven unable to solve petty problems, thoughtless of managing weightier matters of the current century, while her keen and expectant citizens behold, distressed with disillusion and frustration. Employing a constructivist paradigm the studyfocuses onthe works of artists whose works reference issues of the continent of Africa, as means to lambast satirize and chastise her to wake up. The work is organised on the basis of Stream - Write,a qualitative method of research through art that share qualities of prose, poetry and drama to benefits from the expressive qualities available in same, and to allow for the liberty needed in exploring the domain of the intuitive, creative and sometimes illogical writing impulse. From all historical indications I submit in conclusion that indeed Africa is gleefully willing and hopeful to embrace an end far worse than her most dreadful past.

Formulation of the problem. In the chamber-vocal genre, the composer exists in two images: he is both the interpreter of the poetic composition and the author of a new synthetic music and poetic composition. The experience of the style analysis of one of the best examples of Ukrainian vocal lyrics of the first third of the 20th century shows that the cycle op. 20 characterizes the mature style of the composer, which was formed, on the one hand, under the influence of European Romanticism. On the other hand, the essence of the Ukrainian “branch” of the Western European song-romance (“solo-singing”) is revealed by the prominent national song-romance intonation, filled with not only a romantic worldview, but also with some personal sincerity, chastity, intimate involvement with the great in depth and simplicity poetry line, read from the individual position of the musician. The paradox is as follows. Although Pushkin’s poetry is embodied in a “holistic adequacy” (A. Khutorskaya), and the composer found the fullest semantic analogue of the poetic source, however, in terms of translating the text into the Ukrainian language, the musical semantics changes its intonation immanence, which naturally leads to inconsistency of the listeners’ position and ideas about the style of Russian romance. We are dealing with inter-specific literary translation: Pushkin’s discourse creates the Ukrainian romance style and system of figurative thinking. The purpose of the article is to reveal the principle of re-semantization of the intonation-figurative concept of the vocal composition by V. Kosenko (in the context of translating Pushkin’s poetry into the Ukrainian language) in light of the theory of interspecific art translation. Analysis of recent publications on the topic. Among the most recent studies of Ukrainian musicology, one should point out the dissertation by G. Khafizova (Kyiv, 2017), in which the theory of modelling of the stylistic system of the vocal composition as an expression of Pushkin’s discourse is described. The basis for the further stylistic analysis of V. Kosenko’s compositions is the points from A. Hutorska’s candidate’s thesis; she develops the theory of interspecific art translation. The types of translation of poetry into music are classified according to two parameters. The exact translation creates integral adequacy, which involves the composer’s finding a maximally full semantic analogue of the poetic source. The free translation is characterized by compensatory, fragmentary, generalized-genre adequacy. Presenting the main material. The Zhitomir period for Viktor Kosenko was the time of the formation of his creative style. Alongside the lyrical imagery line, the composer acquired one more – dramatic, after his mother’s death. It is possible that the romances on the poems of A. Pushkin are more late reflection of this tragic experience (op. 20 was created in 1930). “I Loved You” opens the vocal cycle and has been dedicated by A. V. Kosenko. The short piano introduction contains the intonation emblem of the love-feeling wave. The form of the composition is a two part reprising (А А1) with the piano Introduction and Postlude. The semantic culmination is emphasized by the change of metro-rhythmic organization 5/4 (instead of 4) and the plastic phrase “as I wish, that the other will love you” sounding in the text. Due to these melodies (with national segments in melo-types, rhythm formulas and harmony) V. Kosenko should be considered as “Ukrainian Glinka”, the composer who introduced new forms and “figures” of the love language into the romantic “intonation dictionary”. In general, V. Kosenko’s solo-singing represents the Ukrainian analogue of Pushkin’s discourse – the theme of love. The melos of vocal piece “I Lived through My Desires” is remembered by the broad breath, bright expression of the syntactic deployment of emotion. On the background of bass ostinato, the song intonation acquires a noble courage. This solo-singing most intermediately appeal to the typical examples of the urban romance of Russian culture of the 19th century. “The Raven to the Raven” – a Scottish folk ballad in the translation by A. Pushkin. V. Kosenko as a profound psychologist, delicately transmits the techniques of versification, following each movement of a poetic phrase, builds stages of the musical drama by purely intonation means. The semantics of a death is embodied through the sound imaging of a black bird: a marching-like tempo and rhythm of the accompaniment, with a characteristic dotted pattern in a descending motion (like a raven is beating its wings). The middle section is dominated by a slow-motion perception of time space (Andante), meditative “freeze” (size 6/4). The melody contrasts with the previous section, its profile is built on the principle of descending move: from “h1” to “h” of the small octave (with a stop on S-harmony), which creates a psychologically immersed state, filled by premonition of an unexpected tragedy. In general, the Ukrainian melodic intonation intensified the tragic content of the ballad by Pushkin. The musical semantics of V. Kosenko’s romances is marked by the dependence on the romantic “musical vocabulary”, however, it is possible to indicate and national characteristics (ascending little-sixth and fifth intervals, which is filled with a gradual anti-movement; syllabic tonic versification, and other). Conclusion. The romances (“solo-singings”) by V. Kosenko belongs to the type of a free art translation with generalized-genre adequacy. There is a re-semantization of poetic images due to the national-mental intonation. Melos, rhythm, textural presentation (repetitions), stylization of different genre formulas testify to the rare beauty of Kosenko’s vocal style, spiritual strength and maturity of the master of Ukrainian vocal culture. Entering the “Slavic song area”, the style of Ukrainian romance, however, is differenced from the Russian and common European style system of figurative and intonation thinking (the picture of the world).

This paper argues that illegitimacy is a concept that relates to almost all of the fundamental ways in which Western society has traditionally organised itself. Sex, family and marriage, and the power of the church and state, are all implicated in the various ways in which society reproduces itself from generation to generation. All employ the concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy to define what is and what is not permissible. Further, the creation of the illegitimate can occur in more or less legitimate ways; for example, through acts of consent, on the one hand; and force, on the other. This paper uses the study of an English Renaissance text, Shakespeare’s Henry V, to argue that these concepts remain potent ones, regularly invoked as a means of identifying and denouncing perceived threats to the good ordering of the social fabric. In western societies, many of which may be constructed as post-marriage, illegitimate is often applied as a descriptor to unlicensed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In countries subject to war and conflict, rape as a war crime is increasingly used by armies to create fractures within the subject community and to undermine the paternity of a cohort of children. In societies where extramarital sex is prohibited, or where rape has been used as a weapon of war, the bastard acts as physical evidence that an unsanctioned act has been committed and the laws of society broken, a “failure in social control” (Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, 5). This paper explores these themes, using past conceptions of the illegitimate and bastardy as an explanatory concept for problematic aspects of legitimacy in contemporary culture.Bastardy was a particularly important issue in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when an individual’s genealogy was a major determining factor of social status, property and identity (MacFarlane). Further, illegitimacy was not necessarily an aspect of a person’s birth. It could become a status into which they were thrust through the use of divorce, for example, as when Henry VIII illegitimised his daughter Mary after annulling his marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Alison Findlay’s study of illegitimacy in Renaissance literature lists over 70 portrayals of illegitimacy, or characters threatened with illegitimacy, between 1588 and 1652 (253–257). In addition to illegitimacy at an individual level however, discussions around what constitutes the “illegitimate” figure in terms of its relationship with the family and the wider community, are also applicable to broader concerns over national identity. In work such as Stages of History, Phyllis Rackin dissected images of masculine community present in Shakespeare’s history plays to expose underlying tensions over gender, power and identity. As the study of Henry V indicates in the following discussion, illegitimacy was also a metaphor brought to bear on issues of national as well as personal identity in the early modern era. The image of the nation as a “family” to denote unity and security, both then and now, is rendered complex and problematic by introducing the “illegitimate” into that nation-family image. The rhetoric used in the recent debate over the Scottish independence referendum, and in Australia’s ongoing controversy over “illegitimate” migration, both indicate that the concept of a “national bastard”, an amorphous figure that resists precise definition, remains a potent rhetorical force. Before turning to the detail of Henry V, it is useful to review the use of “illegitimate” in the early modern context. Lacking an established position within a family, a bastard was in danger of being marginalised and deprived of any but the most basic social identity. If acknowledged by a family, the bastard might become a drain on that family’s economic resources, drawing money away from legitimate children and resented accordingly. Such resentment may be reciprocated. In his essay “On Envy” the scientist, author, lawyer and eventually Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon explained the destructive impulse of bastardy as follows: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.” Thus, bastardy becomes a plot device which can be used to explain and to rationalise evil. In early modern English literature, as today, bastardy as a defect of birth is only one meaning for the word. What does “in everything illegitimate” (quoting Shakespeare’s character Thersites in Troilus and Cressida [V.viii.8]) mean for our understanding of both our own society and that of the late sixteenth century? Bastardy is an important ideologeme, in that it is a “unit of meaning through which the ‘social space’ constructs the ideological values of its signs” (Schleiner, 195). In other words, bastardy has an ideological significance that stretches far beyond a question of parental marital status, extending to become a metaphor for national as well as personal loss of identity. Anti-Catholic polemicists of the early sixteenth century accused priests of begetting a generation of bastards that would overthrow English society (Fish, 7). The historian Polydore Vergil was accused of suborning and bastardising English history by plagiarism and book destruction: “making himself father to other men’s works” (Hay, 159). Why is illegitimacy so important and so universal a metaphor? The term “bastard” in its sense of mixture or mongrel has been applied to language, to weaponry, to almost anything that is a distorted but recognisable version of something else. As such, the concept of bastardy lends itself readily to the rhetorical figure of metaphor which, as the sixteenth century writer George Puttenham puts it, is “a kind of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or coueniencie with it” (Puttenham, 178). Later on in The Art of English Poesie, Puttenham uses the word “bastard” to describe something that can best be recognised as being an imperfect version of something else: “This figure [oval] taketh his name of an egge […] and is as it were a bastard or imperfect rounde declining toward a longitude.” (101). “Bastard” as a descriptive term in this context has meaning because it connects the subject of discussion with its original. Michael Neill takes an anthropological approach to the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil. In “In everything illegitimate: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Neill argues that bastards are “filthy”, using the term as it is construed by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be, it is “matter in the wrong place, belonging to ‘a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications,’ a source of fundamental pollution” (134). In this argument the figure of the bastard aligns strongly with the concept of the Other (Said). Arguably, however, the anthropologist Edmund Leach provides a more useful model to understand the associations of hybridity, monstrosity and bastardy. In “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, Leach asserts that our perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions; that an object is one thing, and is not another. If an object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the interlapping area will be suppressed so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another but “liminal” (40), becomes the object of fear and of fascination: – taboo. It is this liminality that creates anxiety surrounding bastards, as they occupy the repressed, “taboo” area between family and outsiders. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet as the child of a family member it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and a consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is “a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order” (147). The concept of the liminal figure, however, recognises that while a by-product can be identified and eliminated, a bastard can neither be contained nor excluded. Consequently, the bastard challenges the established order; to be illegitimate, it must retain its connection with the legitimate figure from which it diverges. Thus the illegitimate stands as a permanent threat to the legitimate, a reminder of what the legitimate can become. Bastardy is used by Shakespeare to indicate the fear of loss of national as well as personal identity. Although noted for its triumphalist construction of a hero-king, Henry V is also shot through with uncertainties and fears, fears which are frequently expressed using illegitimacy as a metaphor. Notwithstanding its battle scenes and militarism, it is the lawyers, genealogists and historians who initiate and drive forward the narrative in Henry V (McAlindon, 435). The reward of the battle for Henry is not so much the crown of France as the assurance of his own legitimacy as monarch. The lengthy and legalistic recital of genealogies with which the Archbishop of Canterbury proves to general English satisfaction that their English king Henry holds a better lineal right to the French throne than its current occupant may not be quite as “clear as is the summer sun” (Henry V 1.2.83), but Henry’s question about whether he may “with right and conscience” make his claim to the French throne elicits a succinct response. The churchmen tell Henry that, in order to demonstrate that he is truly the descendant of his royal forefathers, Henry will need to validate that claim. In other words, the legitimacy of Henry’s identity, based on his connection with the past, is predicated on his current behaviour:Gracious lord,Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;Look back into your mighty ancestors:Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit…Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,And with your puissant arm renew their feats:You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,The blood and courage that renowned themRuns in your veins….Your brother kings and monarchs of the earthDo all expect that you should rouse yourselfAs did the former lions of your blood. (Henry V 1.2.122 – 124)These exhortations to Henry are one instance of the importance of genealogy and its immediate connection to personal and national identity. The subject recurs throughout the play as French and English characters both invoke a discourse of legitimacy and illegitimacy to articulate fears of invasion, defeat, and loss of personal and national identity. One particular example of this is the brief scene in which the French royalty allow themselves to contemplate the prospect of defeat at the hands of the English:Fr. King. ‘Tis certain, he hath pass’d the river Somme.Constable. And if he be not fought withal, my lord,Let us not live in France; let us quit all,And give our vineyards to a barbarous people.Dauphin. O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,And overlook their grafters?Bourbon. Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!...Dauphin. By faith and honour,Our madams mock at us, and plainly sayOur mettle is bred out; and they will giveTheir bodies to the lust of English youthTo new-store France with bastard warriors. (Henry V 3.5.1 – 31).Rape and sexual violence pervade the language of Henry V. France itself is constructed as a sexually vulnerable female with “womby vaultages” and a “mistress-court” (2.4.131, 140). In one of his most famous speeches Henry graphically describes the rape and slaughter that accompanies military defeat (3.3). Reading Henry V solely in terms of its association of military conquest with sexual violence, however, runs the risk of overlooking the image of bastards themselves as both the threat and the outcome of national defeat. The lines quoted above exemplify the extent to which illegitimacy was a vital metaphor within early modern discourses of national as well as personal identity. Although the lines are divided between various speakers – the French King, Constable (representing the law), Dauphin (the Crown Prince) and Bourbon (representing the aristocracy) – the images develop smoothly and consistently to express English dominance and French subordination, articulated through images of illegitimacy.The dialogue begins with the most immediate consequence of invasion and of illegitimacy: the loss of property. Legitimacy, illegitimacy and property were so closely associated that a case of bastardy brought to the ecclesiastical court that did not include a civil law suit about land was referred to as a case of “bastardy speciall”, and the association between illegitimacy and property is present in this speech (Cowell, 14). The use of the word “vine” is simultaneously a metonym for France and a metaphor for the family, as in the “family tree”, conflating the themes of family identity and national identity that are both threatened by the virile English forces.As the dialogue develops, the rhetoric becomes more elaborate. The vines which for the Constable (from a legal perspective) represented both France and French families become instead an attempt to depict the English as being of a subordinate breed. The Dauphin’s brief narrative of the English origins refers to the illegitimate William the Conqueror, bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and by designating the English as being descendants of a bastard Frenchman the Dauphin attempts to depict the English nation as originating from a superabundance of French virility; wild offshoots from a true stock. Yet “grafting” one plant to another can create a stronger plant, which is what has happened here. The Dauphin’s metaphors, designed to construct the English as an unruly and illegitimate offshoot of French society, a product of the overflowing French virility, evolve instead into an emblem of a younger, stronger branch which has overtaken its enfeebled origins.In creating this scene, Shakespeare constructs the Frenchmen as being unable to contain the English figuratively, still less literally. The attempts to reduce the English threat by imagining them as “a few sprays”, a product of casual sexual excess, collapses into Bourbon’s incoherent ejaculation: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” and the Norman bastard dominates the conclusion of the scene. Instead of containing and marginalising the bastard, the metaphoric language creates and acknowledges a threat which cannot be marginalised. The “emptying of luxury” has engendered an uncontrollable illegitimate who will destroy the French nation beyond any hope of recovery, overrunning France with bastards.The scene is fascinating for its use of illegitimacy as a means of articulating fears not only for the past and present but also for the future. The Dauphin’s vision is one of irreversible national and familial disintegration, irreversible because, unlike rape, the French women’s imagined rejection of their French families and embrace of the English conquerors implies a total abandonment of family origins and the willing creation of a new, illegitimate dynasty. Immediately prior to this scene the audience has seen the Dauphin’s fear in action: the French princess Katherine is shown learning to speak English as part of her preparation for giving her body to a “bastard Norman”, a prospect which she anticipates with a frisson of pleasure and humour, as well as fear. This scene, between Katherine and her women, evokes a range of powerful anxieties which appear repeatedly in the drama and texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: anxieties over personal and national identity, over female chastity and masculine authority, and over continuity between generations. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost – Further Explored points out that “the engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure was never, or almost never, a present possibility” (154) at this stage of European history. This being granted, the Dauphin’s depiction of such a “wave” of illegitimates, while it might have no roots in reality, functioned as a powerful image of disorder. Illegitimacy as a threat and as a strategy is not limited to the renaissance, although a study of renaissance texts offers a useful guidebook to the use of illegitimacy as a means of polarising and excluding. Although as previously discussed, for many Western countries, the marital status of one’s parents is probably the least meaningful definition associated with the word “illegitimate”, the concept of the nation as a family remains current in modern political discourse, and illegitimate continues to be a powerful metaphor. During the recent independence referendum in Scotland, David Cameron besought the Scottish people not to “break up the national family”; at the same time, the Scottish Nationalists have been constructed as “ungrateful bastards” for wishing to turn their backs on the national family. As Klocker and Dunne, and later O’Brien and Rowe, have demonstrated, the emotive use of words such as “illegitimate” and “illegal” in Australian political rhetoric concerning migration is of long standing. Given current tensions, it might be timely to call for a further and more detailed study of the way in which the term “illegitimate” continues to be used by politicians and the media to define, demonise and exclude certain types of would-be Australian immigrants from the collective Australian “national family”. Suggestions that persons suspected of engaging with terrorist organisations overseas should be stripped of their Australian passports imply the creation of national bastards in an attempt to distance the Australian community from such threats. But the strategy can never be completely successful. Constructing figures as bastard or the illegitimate remains a method by which the legitimate seeks to define itself, but it also means that the bastard or illegitimate can never be wholly separated or cast out. In one form or another, the bastard is here to stay.ReferencesBeardon, Elizabeth. “Sidney's ‘Mongrell Tragicomedy’ and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 29 - 51.Davis, Kingsley. “Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939).John Cowell. The Interpreter. Cambridge: John Legate, 1607.Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost - Further Explored. London: Methuen, 1983.Laslett, P., K. Oosterveen, and R. M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” E. H. Lennenberg, ed. New Directives in the Study of Language. MIT Press, 1964. 23-63. MacFarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.Mclaren, Ann. “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire.” History of Political Thought 24 (2004): 446 – 480.McAlindon, T. “Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 92 (1995):411 – 438.Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on English Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowe, Elizabeth, and Erin O’Brien. “Constructions of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Political Discourse”. In Kelly Richards and Juan Marcellus Tauri, eds., Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2013.Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.Shakespeare, William. Henry V in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: Norton, 2008.

Alla luce dell’Enciclica di Papa Benedetto XVI , Deus Caritas est, l’articolo cerca di mostrare che il desiderio umano di essere amato per se stesso e di amare profondamente non è un’utopia, ma, se segue un cammino di armonizzazione e di guarigione, diventa veramente atto a rendere l’eros non solo forte nel tempo, ma anche bello, perché integro e pieno. Si tratta infatti di un cammino nel quale lo sguardo della persona diventa limpido e capace di vedere nella carne la persona dell’altro, in grado di unificare i vari vissuti destati nell’amore – l’attrazione sessuale, l’emozione, la scelta della volontà, il ragionamento – in un agire sempre rivolto al bene vero dell’altro. Se invece questi elementi preziosi immanenti dell’amore non custoditi congiunti, l’eros non è soltanto impoverito, ma è minacciato dalla disintegrazione morale. L’uomo ha bisogno di trovare quelle vie di unificazione, di armonizzazione del vissuto amoroso, che sono le virtù, soprattutto la virtù della castità. Le virtù umane sono veri serbatoi di quelle maestrie interne che ci aiutano a trovare la qualità nell’amore, a tendere alla sua pienezza ed eccellenza. Le virtù non ci rendono immuni o opachi al reale, non ci tolgono quella vulnerabilità ontologica rispetto al mondo e alle persone. Esse ci aiutano invece a sradicare quella malattia che ci disintegra moralmente e ci lascia soli con le nostre fragilità, che diventano poi ferite non guarite che ci immergono nel dramma dell’eros frammentato, che non potrà mai raggiungere ciò che promette. L’amore umano armonizzato è un eros toccato e rinato dall’Eterno, che abbraccia il tempo e trova in esso il modo prediletto di costruire un amore forte, genialmente creativo, giusto, senza negare la propria corporeità. L’agape non distrugge l’eros, ma lo custodisce e lo esalta, offrendoci dunque quella libertà autentica necessaria per amare: per amare nella differenza, rispondendo al dono con il dono di noi stessi e accogliendo la fecondità dell’amore vero che non è mai sterile. ---------- In the light of Pope Benedict the XVIth’s Deus Caritas est, the article seeks to show that man’s desire to be profoundly loved for himself and to love is not a utopian one; if it follows a path of healing and of harmonization with the other goals of human life, this desire becomes whole and complete, thus permeating and rendering human eros strong and beautiful. It is a path that leads and helps the person to achieve a limpid gaze, capable of seeing the person in the flesh of the beloved, unifying the various elements the make up the rich experience of love – sexual attraction, emotions, the will’s choice, reason – within an action that is ordered towards the true good of the other. If these precious elements are not kept together though, love is not just impoverished, but most importantly it is threatened to fall apart. Man needs therefore to find those ways of unification and harmonization of love, which are none other than the virtues, especially the virtue of chastity. Human virtues are true resources for acquiring the art of a qualitative love, which continues to seek its fullness and excellence. Thus the virtues do not render us “immune” or “opaque” towards reality, they do not do away with the ontological vulnerability to the world and to the other people. Instead, they help us to eradicate that malady which disintegrates us morally and which abandons us to our weaknesses, which then become wounds that can never heal; a fragmented eros make us drown in the tragedy of not being able to reach what eros promises. Human love thus harmonized is in fact an eros touched and reborn of Eternity, which embraces time – instead of escaping it – edifying a strong and genially creative love, a love which always affirming its bodily mediation. Agape does not destroy eros, but it cherishes and exalts it, offering man the necessary freedom to love: to love preserving the concept of difference involved in a relationship; to love responding to the gift with a gift of self; to love the fruitfulness that true love implies, since true love is never sterile.