CLOTHES MAKE THE (WO)MAN
In the Pauline letters a new rhetorical aspect of body is presented with the imagery of
being clothed with a person, with Christ or a new a[nqrwpo" (Gal 3:27; Rom 13:14; Col
3:10; Eph 4:24). While body and clothing imagery was well-known in the ancient
Mediterranean world, the picture of putting on a person is new with these passages.
Clothing has implications for movement and identification, but there is also interweaving
between body, mind and clothing related to how humans present themselves,
how they interact socially, how they are empowered morally and politically, and how
they produce rhetorical and political discourse. This essay offers a socio-rhetorical
interpretation of the texts that speak of being clothed with a person, considering the
implications for those who become so clothed. This clothing refashions bodies with new
religious, social and political roles. Refashioned bodies become agents of social
change. The new clothing makes new persons and a new social reality.
'Naked as she was bore': Naked Disenchantment in Lybeaus Desconus
The central disenchantment scene in Lybeaus Desconus raises two significant medieval concerns, the nature of women and marital consent. The enchantment casts the Lady of Sinadoun into the form of a serpent/dragon-woman with its implications of original sin and female blame. Her disenchantment removes this symbolic covering, and in her naked innocence the Lady offers herself in marriage to Lybeaus in language reminiscent of medieval legal terminology for female marital consent. Other marriages depicted in the text, including the Lady's own marriage to Lybeaus, evoke the constraints medieval marriages placed on women – paternal authority, male coercion, and the loss of legal status for women. The disenchantment scene, however momentarily, inscribes female freedom within this marital context.
Creative Uncreation In King Lear
THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, FROM THE SAINTLY Henry VI sitting on his molehill during the battle of Towton to Prospero breaking his staff and drowning his book, Shakespeare was apparently fascinated with the concept of abdication and truancy. Prince Hal plays truant from his royal studies, Hamlet from his revengeful duties, and Antony from his Roman wars. The academicians in Love's Labor's Lost retreat from the world and women, King John tells the Bastard Faulconbridge "Have thou the ordering of this present time," Richard II deposes himself with histrionic relish, Duke Vincentio retreats into dark corners, and Lear formally abdicates. Perhaps we may sense in these depictions of royal withdrawal an impulse on Shakespeare's part to abandon not necessarily London for the rusticity of Stratford, but his own responsibility as playwright exercising authority over his theatrical subjects. In any event, on at least one occasion, when he composes the choruses of Henry V, we find him explicitly renouncing his authority as sole creator and regarding the play as issuing from the cooperative imagination of his audience as well. What then of King Lear, where the formal abdication of the hero might suggest a similar abdication on the part of the playwright? Examining the play from this standpoint suggests, I think, that Shakespeare is engaged in a kind of creative uncreation. First, some qualifications. Obviously Shakespeare can never wholly abdicate from his role as creative authority. Since forms and meanings do not fall from the sky, not even from an intertextual sky, he remains responsible for his art and for what it does to us. We are inevitably his subjects in the Globe-subjects, not slaves, as Brecht would have it-obliged by our "bond" to honor his authority and by an act of poetic faith to endow his illusions with an air of reality. Hence when I say that Shakespeare uncreates King Lear I can hardly mean that, swept up by a passion for entropy, he abandons his play to disorder, and us to early sorrow. The patterns of imagery, the double plot, verbal echoes, and structural parallels, all the Biblical allusions, proverbs, aphorisms, sententiae, and other suggestions of communal wisdom testify to Shakespeare's ordering presence. Still, while remaining within the bounds of artistic form, Shakespeare manages, I suggest, both to unmake as well as to make King Lear.