Mrs. Polonius Goes to Italy
TALK at the University of Pittsburgh
Thursday, November 6
*Mrs. Polonius Goes to Italy:
An Overly Intimate Guide to Shakespeare’s Europe*
A lecture with images by Julia Lupton
This entertaining and educational jaunt through Shakespeare’s Italy explores the weird and wonderful iconography of hotels, hospitality, safe sex, prescription medicine, and forbidden books in Romeo and Juliet, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Othello.
Guaranteed TMI (“too much information”) for everyone!
In conjunction with Shakespeare by Design, I want to develop the persona of Mrs. Polonius (a Renaissance Martha Stewart with a taste for severed heads and pickled violets) as a frame for exploring wit, wisdom, and material culture in Shakespeare’s plays.
Image: Portrait of a Woman as Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Agostino Carracci, 1590. In the Renaissance, it was not uncommon for mistresses to be painted holding the heads of their lovers. Usually, though, the women are quite a bit “hotter” than the melancholy matron depicted here. I was attracted to the contrast between her tightly-done hair and the loose locks of the dead general; she is contained, but he has been undone. A nice emblem of Renaissance housekeeping??
Commenting is closed for this article.