From the Editors

Abstract

From the Editors Bruce Boehrer, Thomas DiPiero, Devoney Looser, and Daniel Vitkus This issue of JEMCS—our pre-1660 issue for 2005—returns us to one of the journal's perennial interests: Shakespeare in particular and the early English drama in general. Recognizing the very fluid historical circumstances that underlie the theater of Renaissance England, each of the essays focuses upon the drama's ability to confront and assimilate various kinds of social ambiguity, as manifested in the human bodies that comprise the English body politic; in the vocabulary of economic advantage that binds those bodies together; in the historical narratives through which they elaborate their relations with the past; and in the models of space through which they structure their moment-to-moment interactions. In "Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory," Ronda Arab turns to the neglected first Henriad in order to study Shakespeare's representations of the common sort: the laborers whose obedience made possible the myth of Tudor supremacy, and whose capacity for rebellion could therefore strike Tudor apologists as nothing less than apocalyptic. For Arab, Jack Cade's character in 2 Henry VI provides a pattern of the anxieties, and benefits, attendant upon the dramatic construction of a virile and capable laboring class in late Elizabethan England. In an essay that one of our readers predicted "should soon become required reading . . . for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare's histories," Arab calls on scholars to rethink their understanding of Shakespearean workers and their relation to questions of political agency. [End Page 1] Moving from Shakespeare's early histories to an early tragedy, Bryan Reynolds and Janna Segal explore Romeo and Juliet from the standpoint of recent developments in transversal criticism. For Reynolds and Segal, the language of economic value in Romeo and Juliet works not only to determine the subjective territory of the play's Veronese society, but also to enable various alternative responses to the delineation of that territory. The result—not only for the play's characters but for its viewers and readers as well—is a discursive formation the authors call R&Jspace: the configuration of meanings "through which Romeo and Juliet resound in various manifestations, ranging from emblems of romantic love, legitimators of forbidden desire, [and] icons of teenage angst" to "subversive agents of dominant ideologies substantiated by the names they themselves are so eager to doff." Michele Ephraim's essay "Jephthah's Kin" examines The Merchant of Venice—one of Shakespeare's most enduringly controversial plays about racial and ethnic prejudice—through the lens of biblical hermeneutics. Reading Shylock as a typological echo of the daughter-sacrificing Jephthah from Judges 11, Ephraim contends that the figure of Shakespeare's Jew is conditioned by early modern responses to the story of Jephthah—a scriptural tale that provoked deep ambivalence in Renaissance readers. For Ephraim, the figure of Jephthah conflates sacred and profane matter in a way that complicates Shakespeare's treatment of Judaism and anti-Semitism, a fact brought into particular focus by his story's seeming endorsement of murder as an expression of spiritual commitment. Finally, Adam Zucker's "Laborless London: Comic Form and the Space of the Town in Caroline Covent Garden" attends to the dynamic nature of London itself as a seventeenth-century urban construct. Examining the comedies of Richard Brome and Thomas Nabbes, Zucker argues that they participate in the construction of a new kind of urban topography for the London elite: one made possible by the Italianate model of the piazza introduced for the first time to the citizens of London through the construction of Covent Garden. For Zucker, this space stands at an extreme remove from the anxiety- provoking paradigm of the laborer's body that Arab discovers in Shakespeare's first tetralogy; rather than drawing attention to the unease surrounding the performance of labor in an aristocratic social order, Covent Garden exists as a fundamentally "laborless space" corresponding to the relatively elite character of the Caroline theater audiences for whom Brome and Nabbes composed their plays. [End Page 2] Thus, while pursuing interests as diverse as the theatrical depiction of working people, the language of profit and loss, the representational history of Judaism, and the growth...