Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco

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Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco

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Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco

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Universidad de Murcia. Departamento de Filología Inglesa

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Dissident feminism at the end of the Franco dictatorship. The new taming of the shrew (1975)
(Bloomsbury (The Arden Shakespeare), 2021) Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco; Filología Inglesa; Facultad de Letras
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Time’s up, Tarquin: the rape of Lucrece in the age of #Metoo
(University of Porto Press, 2024) Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco; Filología Inglesa; Facultad de Letras
The emergence of cultural materialism in the 1980s provoked a substantial reevaluation of Shakespeare’s work, as critics felt the ethical need to renegotiate the values and discourses of early modern culture as they circulated in late Western societies. Certain plays, such as The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus and Measure for Measure, have received especial scrutiny from the perspective of gender. Instead, inhabiting a rather peripheral space within the Shakespeare canon, his poetry has received little attention as much as its resonances are of similar relevance to the concerns of late gender debates. This chapter extends this presentist reevaluation of early modern literature by examining the poem The Rape of Lucrece in the light of current discussions of feminism and gender violence. Shakespeare’s treatment of rape – an otherwise central concern of early modern culture – and of Lucrece – a character that also fascinated Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower amongst others – is here analysed in relation to (post)modern conceptions of feminine empowerment. Ultimately, the question is whether Lucrece’s bravery can be taken on by the brave new worlds, peoples, and women of the twentieth-first century. The Rape of Lucrece is currently not amongst Shakespeare’s most popular works.1 It can be argued that 1855 lines of iambic pentameter distributed among 265 septets of steady “rhyme royal” (ababbcc) is not the most fashionable format in the Netflix-obsessed late-modern cultural climate of 2019. But this wasn’t always the case. Together with numerous editions and praising references by fellow poets, in 1598 Gabriel Harvey annotated in the margin of his copy of Chaucer that “[t]he younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, have it in hem to Facing Europe in Crisis please the wiser sort” (apud Hehmeyer, 2013: 140). This illustrates the intellectual depth and popularity with which the poem was perceived at the time. A high regard which contrasts with the marginal position the poem holds nowadays within the Shakespeare canon. Even specifically, within the specialized circles of Shakespearean scholarship, the poem has not fared too well and, as Katharine Eisaman Maus has suggested, such limited attention can be at least partly attributed to how modern critics have “persistently object[ed] to its elaborate rhetoric” (Eisaman Maus, 1986: 66). This is, I believe, an accurate characterization of much of what has been written about the poem. A line of inquiry that is to a large extent exhausted or, at least, outdated since debates about the rhetorical quality of Shakespeare’s works have become rare in a research community that now tends not to evaluate, but to historicize Shakespeare’s writing. However, a different approach has kept the poem alive, that is (what I should broadly term) feminist criticism. It is not a surprise that feminism would have something to say about a poem that re-versifies the semi-historical, semimythical account of the rape of Lucrece, the virtuous, chaste and beautiful wife of the nobleman Collatine, at the hands of Tarquin, son of the last Roman king: a poem that provides an extensive and intensive representation of the psychological processes involved in a sexual assault; a poem that ends with Lucrece’s suicide, the banishment of Tarquin and the rest of the royal family, and the establishment of the Roman republic. Sustained attention to the motivations, processes and consequences of rape make the poem worth revisiting in 2019, a time in which sexual violence – from the Harvey Weinstein scandal to the Spanish “Wolfpack” / “La Manada”, just to name two high-profile cases – has taken up a specially relevant space within the preoccupations of late-modern feminism.
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Shakespeare and the european heritage. The legacy of Ángel-Luis Pujante
(Editum, 2022) Pujante, Ángel-Luis; Gregor, Keith; Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco; Campillo Arnaiz, Laura; Calvo, Clara; Filología Inglesa; Facultad de Letras
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Shakespearean performance in catalán: Adrià Gual and the emergence of the theatre director (1903–1940)
(Taylor and Francis Group, Routledge , 2019-12-11) Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco; Filología Inglesa; Facultad de Letras
From 1898, the year of the foundation of the theatre company Intimate Theatre, to his work at the New Company of Catalan Theatre around the 1910s, to his last stagings as head of the Catalan School of Drama in the early 1930s, Adrià Gual is recognized as a pioneer of Spanish and Catalan theatre direction. In this period of over thirty years, Gual produced dozens of shows that ranged from the classical plays of Greek theatre to the latest texts from European, Spanish and Catalan playwrights. And among these, strategically translated into Catalan, a few of Shakespeare’s dramas helped Gual to develop his project to renovate the Barcelona stage and provide a theatrical model that would encourage the development of Catalan culture. This article analyses the way Gual’s Shakespearean productions were intimately connected at the local level with the educated Catalan elites and the establishment of their cultural identity while, connected to a larger continental perspective, Shakespeare’s plays functioned within Intimate Theatre, New Company of Catalan Theatre and the Catalan School of Drama as an instrument to renovate theatrical practice by resorting to the models provided by European stage directors.
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Early feminist shrews: gender truce in World War I and the interbellum
(Editum, 2022) Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco; Filología Inglesa; Facultad de Letras