Grasping Kairos RSA Panel

On the 28 March 2015 members of the Grasping Kairos research network presented their work at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Berlin, Germany.

The panel began with Marina Ansaldo’s fascinating paper on the depiction of kairos in early modern printer’s devices. We got to analyse a huge range of visual representations of kairos/occasio through Marina’s paper, and we in fact returned again and again to her slides throughout the panel as a whole.

Joanne Paul then presented on the Occasion in Late Renaissance Political Thought. Her paper, carrying on from Marina’s, traced the way in which occasio was imagined by Elizabethan political actors, tracing especially the way in which the ‘opportune’ moment became the ‘exceptional’ moment in their writings and reflections. A preliminary survey, this paper examined documents from British History Online, noting the many uses of ‘occasion’ and related terms, and how a sense of emergency and urgency in the late Elizabethan period changed the use of the term. For instance, in 1596, Henry Norris writes to Elizabeth that she now has to deal with “a subtle and malicious generation, that will not spare to serve turns of all occasion”, such people, the arguments against Mary I reveal, cannot be bound with laws, and often require extra-legal methods. The occasion becomes the exception to normal, legal, proceedings.

This connected well with Sarah Lewis’s presentation on the figure of occasio in two revenge tragedies of the early Jacobean period: Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. In these plays, structures of power – the law, the court – are often corrupt, and a revenger is forced to take justice into their own hands, seizing the occasion to move against the ‘villain’, and becoming a villain themselves in the process. In her paper Sarah explored the ways in which this merging of victim and villain, cause and effect, which is central to the identity of the revenging figure on the early modern stage, is also key to conceptualisations of kairos in these plays. Kairos is often feminized in these plays, and constructed as both the elusive destroyer of men’s hopes, and the prize, should they chose to take it, that confirms their (sometimes sexual) satisfaction. The questions of cause and effect which dramatic and emblematic representations of kairos raise – who is in control, who is ‘acting’ and who is being ‘acted upon’ in the kairotic moment – seem to get right to the heart of questions about the relationship between time and identity which Sarah is interested in puzzling through in her research.

Like Sarah’s, Kristine Johanson’s paper also examined early modern English drama. Specifically, she focussed on occasio’s role as a negotiator of emotion in Shakespeare’s plays. Her explored how melancholy is mediated on stage and what a rhetorical response grounded in occasio might suggest about early modern cultural attitudes towards melancholy as an emotion and its possible attenuation. Initially Kristine discussed how writers on melancholy discuss its fluidity and need to be in balance (as a result of its humoral nature). She then turned to look at melancholy moments in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Richard II, and Hamlet to demonstrate how Shakespeare consistently uses occasio as a means of interrupting and mediating melancholy.

In the short discussion that followed, attention was drawn to the poem by Posidippus, which often accompanies the emblem of occasio [image]. The suggestion was made that the purpose of the poem/image was to suggest that, while reading it, the reader had in fact missed the occasion to which the poem alludes. Discussion also focused on the prominence of the sea in the iconography of occasio, present in all of the papers, and its connections to the emerging merchant trade. The duality Sarah Lewis had noted was tied to the image and person of Saturn, whose iconography often merged with tempus. The discussion ended on the complex discussion of how such a moment comes about, how it is placed in a broader notion of temporality, and its extension and duration. We will be returning to these discussions, and bringing in other themes and research at our next event, with the London Renaissance Seminar, autumn 2015.