Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from March 2007

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from March 2007

Lost conventions of godly comedy in Udall's Thersites.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... While much scholarship is currently engaged in revising anachronistic notions of Tudor evangelicals as proto-Puritans in all respects, particularly in light of their early embrace of theater, more work remains to be done. (1) Notably, although...

Wager's drama of conscience, convention, and state constitution.(William Wager)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... In the spring of 1559, the young queen took it upon herself to draft a proclamation tightening control of popular English drama. This early indicator of Elizabeth's political acumen charged local "officers" beholden to the Crown to suppress...

Language, magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Discussions of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors eventually tend to find their way to Dr. Pinch: although Pinch is "lean-fac'd," he casts a wide shadow. (1) He may appear only in one scene and speak only some dozen lines, but he registers an...

Henry vas a royal entry.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Critical literature on the chorus of Shakespeare's Henry V has mainly focused on its politics or on its structural impact but has rarely considered it as part of a larger aesthetic design. The chorus, from the start, actually appears to have...

Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the politics of the union.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... I The nation, Benedict Anderson tells us, is an imagined community, constructed by individuals and social groups immersed in the shifting historical and political moment and not a static, harmonious entity. (1) It must of necessity be a...

The character of credit and the problem of belief in Middleton's city comedies.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Emerging in the late 1590s, English city comedies satirized merchant-citizens and gentlemen-gallants alike. Rejecting the idealizing celebration of the London citizen in earlier plays by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood, the city comedy used...

Performing devotion in The Masque of Blacknesse.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... On Twelfth Night, 1605, Dudley Carleton attended a performance of Ben Jonson's Masque of Blacknesse, an entertainment that not only featured James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, but also originated in her conceit: "to haue [the masquers]...

Jonson's masque markets and problems of literary ownership.(Ben Jonson)
March 22, 2007... Books can be owned simultaneously by the author, the merchant, and the purchaser, making it possible, as Lucius Annaeus Seneca observes, "for Titus Livius to receive his own books as a present, or to buy them from Dorus," a bookseller. (1)...

The domestication of religious objects in The White Devil.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... It seems obvious to state the centrality of the crucifix, the material representation of Christ's sacrifice, to pre-Reformation worship in England. The large wooden crucifixes that stood atop the rood screens in parish churches literally framed...

Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.
March 22, 2007... Between January and December, 2006, I received and more or less read ninety-one books that represent the year's scholarship in early modern English drama. Depending on one's age, occupation, and personal commitments, one could view this...