Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from March 2006

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from March 2006

The Jew of Malta and the diabolic power of theatrics in the 1580s.(essay)(Renaissance theater in England)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... The Jew of Malta (ca. 1589) has a typical "Stage Machiavel," Barabas, who possesses exceptional powers of impersonation and manipulates others by means of theatrical fictions. The emergence of such a protean villain par excellence may be partly...

Breeching the boy in Marlowe's Edward II.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Though Christopher Marlowe's Edward II (c. 1592) has long received copious, imaginative, critical attention, the significance of one aspect of the play has been quite neglected. As if he had been sent to stand in an obscure corner, the boy...

Too many Blackamoors: deportation, discrimination, and Elizabeth I.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... In 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued an "open letter" to the Lord Mayor of London, announcing that "there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie," and ordering that they be...

Performing historicity in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday.(essay)(Thomas Dekker)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... In a recent book on Shakespeare and genre, Lawrence Danson writes that most Elizabethan plays labeled as histories represent "a tiny sliver of the past," and "deal mainly with the public realm, with political events, and specifically with the...

Marking difference and national identity in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... In one of the most unusual scenes in Elizabethan city comedy, Vandalle, the lovesick Dutch merchant in William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1616), climbs into a basket to ascend to the chamber window of Laurentia, the woman he desires,...

Metropolitan resurrection in Anthony Munday's Lord Mayor's shows.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Few ideas are more unsettling to the imagination than the notion that human bodies, once dead, might return to life; yet in Jacobean London, Anthony Munday devised not one but two Lord Mayor's shows in which blaring trumpets summon forth...

Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter's Tale.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Toward the end of Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece comes across "a piece / Of skilful painting" that depicts the events of the fall of Troy. (1) The action of the poem breaks off, and the narrator offers a lengthy...

The puritan dialectic of law and grace in Bartholomew Fair.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... A delicate balance: the words have often been used to describe Ben Jonson's artistic achievement in Bartholomew Fair (1614), as in W. David Kay's argument that the playwright achieves a "delicate balance between sympathy and judgment" similar...

Chaste bodies and poisonous desires in Milton's Mask.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... RAVING AT CLUB COMUS Milton's Mask (1634) has long been acknowledged by critics as an argument that virginity may serve women as a protective shield from the dangers of seduction. But just as the characters use disguises to make themselves...

Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.(essay)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... It is impossible to complete the reading for this review and continue to believe there is a crisis in scholarly publication that involves the production of too few books! All complaining aside, in the field of Tudor and Stuart drama, I found...