ABSTRACT
When Olivia describes her beloved Cesario with a stripped-down blazon, in many ways she is following the lyric tradition firmly established in Petrarch's canzone. Her love for Cesario is unrequited. She describes him as a collection of body parts rather than as a unified person, and when she does so he is offstage, absent from her view and the audience's. But as a powerful woman constructing a blazon about a subservient man, Olivia confounds the expectations of this poetic device. The blazon is also represented more figuratively as characters speak of bodily dismemberment in any number of dramatic situations, or even when body parts are presented on stage. While the stage has long been considered an important site of expression of a range of subject positions, individual and national, gendered, political, this collection contextualizes such processes of identification within the interaction of the material conditions of the theater and the textuality of the blazonic tradition.
