On 19th October we discussed Callan Davies’ ‘Matter-Theatre: Construction in Cymbeline‘ (2018) suggested by Gina Walter. Gina prepared the following prompts:

“Matter-theatre” therefore stands as a playful but precise historical counterpoint to Calderwood’s metadrama […] it points us to the materials of early modern performance – rhetorical, legal, philosophical, and technological – and to their acknowledgement by playwrights, in terms encompassed by and theorized through early modern understandings of the term “matter.” “Matter-theatre” gives us one way of articulating heightened self-conscious dramatic construction in terms appropriate to a period in which it might seem that self-referentiality is everywhere.

Davies, p.70

In this article, Callan Davies coins the term “matter-theatre”: he suggests that looking at historical definitions and concepts of the word ‘matter’ can help us to access a specifically early modern understanding of what we now call metatheatre. The early modern word ‘matter’ has applications in rhetorical, legal, philosophical, and technological spheres (although Davies predominantly concentrates on the rhetorical), and frequently crops up within Cymbeline.

I chose this article slightly selfishly as in my own work I’ve recently been grappling with the balance between deep-diving into early modern vocabulary and concepts, and not over-complicating my writing or creating a further proliferation of terminology. The prompts below speak to this interest, but please bring to the session anything which you find interesting in this article! This text is also a bit of a return to the classic RO discussion topics of stage materiality, ‘matter’, and ‘things’. 

The article focuses on Cymbeline, however you definitely don’t need to be familiar with the play to join the discussion! If anyone does have extra time, you could read the Jupiter deus ex machina scene (5.4) alongside. Please do still come along if you only have time to read part of the text – our discussions tend to end up being wide ranging anyway.

Prompts:

1. What do you think of Davies’s term ‘matter-theatre’? How might you use it?
   
2. To what extent to we need to understand things like metatheatre within the ‘frameworks’ and terminology of the early modern period?
   
3. ‘I avoid twentieth- and twenty-first-century vocabularies for “self-conscious theatre,” concentrating instead on how such materials and media were articulated and understood in their own period’ (p.70). In your own experience or research/writing, how possible is it to achieve this?
   
4. How does Davies (and how can we as early modernists) tackle writing about early modern words with expansive conceptual meanings – e.g. ‘matter’, but also terms like ‘thing’ and ‘image’?

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