Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from March 1997

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from March 1997

Questions of numismatic and linguistic signification in the reign of Mary Tudor.
March 22, 1997... Recent work by critics such as Kurt Heinzelman and Marc Shell investigating the history of the relationships among money, value, and problems of linguistic signification has demonstrated important connections between economic semiology and the...

Ben Jonson's 'Civil Savages.'
March 22, 1997... Seagull. Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her Maiden-head. Spendall. Why is she inhabited already with any English? Sea. A whole Country of English is there man, bred of those that were left there in 79. They have married...

Rehabilitating Moll's subversion in The Roaring Girl.
March 22, 1997... On 12 February 1612 in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, John Chamberlain included an account of the punishments of three women. Of the first two he writes: "The Lady of Shrewsberie is still in the Towre rather upon wilfulnes, then upon any great...

Virtue, vice and compassion in Montaigne and 'The Tempest.'
March 22, 1997... It has long been recognized that Shakespeare borrowed from Montaigne, Gonzalo's Utopian vision in The Tempest (II.i.142-76)(1) is indebted to a passage in Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals,"(2) and Prospero's speech...

Domestic politics in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam.
March 22, 1997... In early modern England, competing structures of familial authority marked the households of the upper middle classes. In many cases, women managed estates and carried out business decisions during the often frequent absences of their husbands,...

If women should beware women, Bianca should beware mother.
March 22, 1997... Oh the deadly snares That women set for women, without pity Either to soul or honour! Learn by me To know your foes. In this belief I die: Like our own sex, we have no enemy. Albert H. Tricomi interprets Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women...

Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.
March 22, 1997... In reading and writing about the books below, I have tried to be receptive and relatively humble, or at least to keep my own considerable rivalrous tendencies in check, in order to give the books a chance to surprise me. It seems to me, moreover,...

The Shakespearian Playing Companies.
March 22, 1997... Andrew Gurr's The Shakespearian Playing Companies is one of the most important books under review. Extensive, authoritative, and lucid, it collects, organizes, and adds to information on the playing companies, the immediate shaping context for...

Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England.
March 22, 1997... Another book everyone should read is Stephen Orgel's Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England. Starting with "why did the English stage take boys for women?" (p. 1), Orgel asks a series of important questions ("what did...

Resistant Structures: Particularly, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts.
March 22, 1997... I have praised Orgel's capacity to see and write the unexpected, and to do so partly by showing that Renaissance ideology does not read Renaissance texts for us. One might take this idea further by reference to Richard Strier's powerful polemic...

The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabeth Theatre.
March 22, 1997... One such critic is Louis Montrose, whose The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre reexamines materials and arguments from several influential essays of the early 1980s, especially "Shaping...

Shakespeare at Work.
March 22, 1997... Culminating in extended accounts of Hamlet, King Lear, and (more briefly) Othello, John Jones's Shakespeare at Work studies Shakespeare as a reviser of himself. Largely a book about unexpected details, it bears in fascinating ways on the kinds of...

Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context.
March 22, 1997... Patricia Parker's Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context is long, learned, playful, allusive, and hard to summarize. Parker releases Shakespearean words from limitations imposed by their immediate contexts and by received ideas...

Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama.
March 22, 1997... Frank Whigham's Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama declares its intention to take individual human plans, actions, and aspirations more seriously than recent historicist criticism, including Whigham's own, has done. Having written...

Shakespeare and the Constant Romans.
March 22, 1997... A number of books trace relations between Renaissance drama and classical philosophy or literature. Geoffrey Miles's excellent Shakespeare and the Constant Romans is a book I wish I had read when writing about Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra;...

Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?
March 22, 1997... A. D. Nuttall's Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? is an augmented version of the Northcliffe Lectures for 1992, and the book retains many qualities of a lecture script - on the down side, very rapid unargued transitions from topic to topic and no...

Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon.
March 22, 1997... In no other book under review are you likely to learn that Schopenhauer kept a poodle called "Atma" ("world-soul") (p. 60), or that Nietzsche received anonymously in the mail "a bust of Voltaire with a slip of paper which read, 'L'ame de...

Thyestes, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, and Titus Andronicus.
March 22, 1997... In no other book under review are you likely to learn that Schopenhauer kept a poodle called "Atma" ("world-soul") (p. 60), or that Nietzsche received anonymously in the mail "a bust of Voltaire with a slip of paper which read, 'L'ame de...

Shakespeare's Theory of Drama.
March 22, 1997... A book which should, in my view, pay more attention to ancient literary criticism than it does is Pauline Kiernan's Shakespeare's Theory of Drama. Kiernan believes that Shakespeare has a theory of drama which is to be opposed to a general...

Shakespeare and the Jews.
March 22, 1997... A number of books under review set drama in the context of social attitudes toward the other, whether partly foreign partly domestic others such as Africans and Jews or othered members of English society such as beggars and witches. James...

Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England.
March 22, 1997... As Kim F. Hall shows in her substantial, thoughtful, and important Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, black people also served purposes of contrastive self-definition in the English Renaissance. When James...

Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare.
March 22, 1997... William C. Carroll's thoughtful and informative Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare studies beggary in Tudor-Stuart England and its cultural representations, with special reference to Shakespeare. Carroll...

Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England.
March 22, 1997... Deborah Willis's scrupulously-argued Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England maintains that "early modern men and women were most likely to fear a specifically magical danger when they got angry at someone who...

Shakespeare in China: A Comparative Study of Two Traditions and Cultures.
March 22, 1997... In 1903 Shanghai's Da Wen Press published an anonymous translation into classical Chinese prose, Strange Tales from Overseas, which included ten stories with such titles as "Proteus Is Being Lecherous in Betraying His Honest Friend," "Trick after...

Shakespeare and South Africa.
March 22, 1997... Certainly this comes to mind as one turns to David Johnson's Shakespeare and South Africa, in which the materialist critical approach taken is delineated by way of a quotation from The German Ideology and in which literary humanism is...

Endymion.
March 22, 1997... There are, as usual, many fewer studies of other playwrights than there are of Shakespeare. Nor have many editions of other playwrights been published, though I would like to mention David Bevington's Revels edition of John Lyly's Endymion, Paul...

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton.
March 22, 1997... Swapan Chakravorty, in Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton, takes on the problem of Middleton's bewildering variety and attempts to historicize Middleton without reducing him. After a compressed and rather dazzling account of...

Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy.
March 22, 1997... Douglas Cole's Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy, part of a series of scholarly introductions to the work of major dramatists, supplies an intelligent and detailed account of the evidence about Marlowe's life and death and also a...

The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe.
March 22, 1997... Matthew N. Proser, in The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe, begins with an extensive largely Freudian psychobiography of Marlowe, which he summarizes as follows: The interpositions he felt between himself and his...

The Mirror of Confusion: The Representation of French History in English Renaissance Drama.
March 22, 1997... In The Mirror of Confusion: The Representation of French History in English Renaissance Drama, Andrew M. Kirk explores English appropriations of a history neither entirely their own nor entirely other to them. Kirk is comprehensive and learned in...

Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books.
March 22, 1997... Three studies set drama in the context of the Reformation and its texts. Frederick Kiefer, in Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books, explores staged writing quite comprehensively, beginning with a long...

The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England.
March 22, 1997... In The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England, Bryan Crockett argues that "Reformation theology and Renaissance drama were mutually influential" (p. 131), sharing a preoccupation with paradox and with the difficulty of...

The Trick of Singularity: "Twelfth Night" and the Performance Editions.
March 22, 1997... Laurie E. Osborne's lively The Trick of Singularity: "Twelfth Night" and the Performance Editions bridges performance and textual criticism by taking seriously as texts a variety of versions of Twelfth Night in performance, especially the...

Shakespeare in Production: Whose History?
March 22, 1997... H. R. Coursen's Shakespeare in Production: Whose History? offers a lively, breezy account of the problems of resetting Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Coursen relies throughout on an extended metaphoric use of Robert Weimann's already...

The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents.
March 22, 1997... I have assigned Russ McDonald's The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents in a Shakespeare course for first-year honors students beginning in eight days. This is an endorsement. Of course, teaching being unpredictable,...

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies, 1594-1603.
March 22, 1997... Michael Mangan's A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies, 1594-1603 aims at roughly the same audience, supplying a substantial critical and historical context and sensible commentaries on Dream, Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. I liked...

Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender.
March 22, 1997... I have slighted essay collections and editions in this review in order to give single-authored books the space I think they deserve, but I would be remiss if I failed to note several collections which are in effect and sometimes name...

The Insufficiency of Virtue: " Macbeth" and the Natural Order.
March 22, 1997... Jan H. Blits's The Insufficiency of Virtue: "Macbeth" and the Natural Order offers a scene by scene, almost line by line, reading of Macbeth, a didactic commentary. Blits is clearly very interested in political systems, and he has some acute...

Shakespeare's Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role Playing and Acting.
March 22, 1997... Another book that locates its argument rather vaguely is Peter B. Murray's Shakespeare's Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role-Playing and Acting. Murray takes it as a norm of modern criticism that characters should not be thought of as...

Who Wrote Shakespeare?
March 22, 1997... Anybody reading this review who has not come to it specifically to find out what I have to say about John Michell's Who Wrote Shakespeare? probably agrees with me that this is not a good question. Reading Michell's book, if you are a serious...