The Matter of Consent in “Book of Chastity” of The Faerie Queene After #MeToo

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

In The Alchemist, Doll's faerie queen is frequently interpreted by critics as representative of Jonson's scepticism toward folkloric belief and superstition. The supernatural-monarch-come-prostitute who appears before Dapper the clerk is thought to be drawn from contemporary accounts of cozeners who would claim to be in contact with the faerie realm in order to part gullible patrons from their money. Jonson's faerie queen thus fits into wider critical discussions on the nature of faeries in Early Modern drama, in which faeries are frequently defined as deriving from rural and domestic folkloric tradition. However, whilst there is certainly some truth to the significance of folklore in representations of faeries on the early modern stage (see Shakespeare's Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example), such arguments have a tendency to downplay the significance of romance in Early Modern society and the ongoing influence of medieval romance convention in the way that faeries are incorporated into Early Modern literature and drama. This essay focuses on The Alchemist as an example of the continued importance of romance in shaping the themes and motifs that are associated with Early Modern faeries. Doll's faerie queen appears as part of a con enacted by the three cozeners, but her role and appearance still draw on certain romance motifs that equate faeries with wealth, aristocracy, and the testing of human morality. Through recognising a connection to romance in Jonson's work, this essay questions how we might better appreciate the meaning of The Alchemist's faerie queen episodes. Jonson, without relinquishing his sceptical approach to the supernatural, uses these motifs as a way of exploring themes of greed, social mobility, and new wealth, themes that permeate throughout the play and throughout his work as a whole.

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJeffrey B. Griswold is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland at College Park, specializing in early modern English literature. His dissertation, “The Political Animal: Early Modern Literature and Human Exceptionalism,” argues that the unique vulnerability of the human species was essential to a previously unexamined strand of Renaissance political thought. This project revisits human exceptionalism through the lessons of posthumanism, considering articulations of shared life that ground the polis in our deficiencies rather than in language or in sovereignty. His work has previously been published in Spenser Studies and the Spenser Review.Judith Haber is professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as articles and essays on Marlowe, Middleton, Shakespeare, and Webster. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Adoptive Strategies: Imagining Paternity in Early Modern England, which will explore texts by Cavendish and Jonson, in addition to plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare.Cole Jeffrey recently received his PhD from the University of North Texas, where he teaches literature and composition. He is currently working on a book, The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty and Depravity in Early Modern Literature, which explores the relationship between Reformed theology and Renaissance aesthetics. This book will demonstrate how theological debates about sin and depravity encouraged writers from Shakespeare to Milton to reject traditional aesthetic paradigms and develop new conceptions of beauty and taste that would prove instrumental in the shift from the classical philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics.Michael Slater is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York’s College at Brockport, where he works on Renaissance drama, the intersections between literature and the history of science, and allegory. He is currently completing his first book, Forms of Proof: Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution, which argues that the rise of mechanical science in early modernity had a profound impact on both language and literary forms. He has also published articles on Spenser, Donne, and Shakespeare.Thomas Ward is associate professor of English at the US Naval Academy, where he teaches Renaissance literature. His research examines how representations of singing and reciting poetry reflect broader questions and anxieties about textual circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He has published articles on topics ranging from Irish war cries in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to loss of voice in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, to liturgical sound in George Herbert’s The Temple. His current book project discusses media and the lyric genre in the publications of the London stationer Humphrey Moseley, focusing on the works of John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 47, Number 1Spring 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703106 © 2019 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

<i>The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe</i>. Ayesha Ramachandran. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. ix+288.

VOLUME 52 (2022)

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Though the Renaissance map—made newly accurate and newly ubiquitous by the Cartographic Revolution—delighted, inspired, and fascinated, it also unsettled, upset, and disturbed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph to demonstrate how early modern anxieties about maps and map logics accompanied an early modern poetics of representational crisis. The book first considers the manifold ways that the cartographic provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain, and it highlights literature’s sensitivity to the map’s representational deceptions and politically menacing implications. Second, it explores how Renaissance English literature, and specifically epic poetry, mounted a sustained critique of cartographic materials, of their strategies of representation, and of their often realpolitik, strategically distortive uses. In considering the ways epic poetry channels anxieties about cartographic technologies into a critique of early modern literature’s own protocols of representation, the bookpursues an early modern poetics of anxiety, one that productively complicates concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy and other elements of literary representation. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety reads three major poems of the period—Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts inflects early modern and contemporary accounts of representation itself.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewVisionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism. Kenneth Borris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+250.Paul J. HechtPaul J. HechtPurdue University Northwest Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreVisionary Spenser emerges from a resurgent interest in Spenser’s relationship with Plato that led previously to a special issue of the annual Spenser Studies devoted to the topic in 2009, and which featured essays by a number of prominent Spenser scholars including Kenneth Borris, who was also one of the issue’s editors. Though most of its analytic energy is trained on the works of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), the book will be of general interest to scholars of early modern literature and culture because of its wide-ranging claims for Plato’s influence in the period, and how we can find, if not direct influence from Plato, then what he calls “Platonizing poetics” (1), in many more places than it has been found in the past. Indeed, Borris argues for a “line of vision” that can trace the influence of this poetics through Spenser, Milton, Blake, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Borris is well aware that in the English Renaissance Plato himself is just as likely to be associated with the famous repudiation of poets in the Republic as with any positive poetics, and so a good deal of work is devoted to adding nuance to that repudiation and arguing that Plato there, but also in the Phaedrus, Ion, and Timaeus, leaves plenty of room for a poetics that his philosophy could authorize. Against that famous shunning of poets, Borris describes what a poetic exception could look like: “A responsible poet must articulate an ameliorative agenda attractively, so as to promote a higher vision excelling public norms and imaginatively enhance the aspirations of the community, even though this program will incur some resentment” (55). Subversion is acceptable then, so long as it is constructive. Moreover, Borris argues that such a poetry-positive interpretation of Plato was available to early moderns, both through such important authors as Marsilio Ficino and Baldassare Castiglione, but also directly through readings of Plato.Much in this approach is refreshing and salutary: there seems to be no downside to having scholars of early modern literature read Plato with more attention and be more on the lookout for his influence on Renaissance poetics, especially as a corrective to the shrill voices of such writers as Stephen Gosson. And yet Borris’s attempt to correct a collective oversight can also at times appear too all encompassing. Early in the book he alludes to the religious turn in early modern studies and mentions Fredric Jameson’s phrase that religion for the period is a “master-code” (7, quoted from “Religion and Ideology: A Political Reading of Paradise Lost,” in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al. [London: Methuen, 1986], 40). In some areas it can seem as though, substituting “Plato” for religion, Borris is too committed to such a view. To demonstrate, I will examine two pieces of Borris’s reading of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender.The Calender’s Maye eclogue is a debate between two shepherds on the proper balance of work and pleasure, worldliness and unworldliness, and is identified by the notes and commentary as “ecclesiastical” in nature, a debate between pastoral lifestyles of Protestant and Catholic clerics. One of the attractions to scholars about this dialogue and many of the others in the Calender is that it is not easy to decide who wins the argument. Borris’s analysis sidesteps the selection of a winning point of view through a close reading of the woodcut that accompanies the poem. (The woodcuts accompanying each eclogue through its successive printings in the late sixteenth centuries have, since the 1980s, periodically received more attention and arguments for their significance in Spenser studies.) Borris notes the wings on the horses in woodcut, overlooked by previous scholars, and argues that these wings invoke the winged horses of Plato’s Phaedrus. Tracing this imagery through the European emblem tradition, and then interpreting the specifics of the scene in which the winged horses appear in Spenser’s book, Borris builds a case that the picture “makes Maye, in effect, a three-way dialogue” (108). This third Platonic “voice” in the poem finds a middle ground between one speaker’s uncritical worldliness and the other’s overzealous antiworldliness and “recuperates recreative pleasure in a positive aspect” (109): the wings in the Phaedrus “epitomize productive affinities for beauty, truth, and goodness” (106).This is a resourceful reading, to be sure, and the effort it requires may indeed be authorized by early modern love of “emblematic verbal-visual puzzles” (109). But more troubling are Borris’s efforts to convince us that Spenser must have been closely associated with the woodcuts, and that “the poet himself most probably designed them” (88). Borris does not seem aware of the circularity of an assertion like this one: that “the winged horses and coach in Maye’s illustration are so interpretively momentous for the eclogue and the whole Calender that no one but the poet could have likely conceived this remarkable image” (89). This is to say, it is not enough to find Platonic or Platonizing ideas, arguments, or imagery in Spenser’s works; Borris believes these ideas are Spenser’s, and not just some ideas among others, but reflect his most important commitments as a poet and as a thinker.To my mind, while in Maye we seem supplied with important new resources as readers, elsewhere the view of Spenser that Borris develops can lead him to present the poetry as less rich and ambivalent than it has appeared to others, and more single-minded. For example, Borris devotes almost an entire chapter to his reading of Maye, but when it comes to October, which finds that same Piers attempting this time not to shame a worldly pastor into virtuous self-denial, but instead to help a depressed poet escape his doldrums, Borris devotes just a few lines to arguing that “the Calender privileges Piers’s Platonizing standpoint” (113). In an earlier chapter, elucidating the Platonizing view of beauty, he makes a similar claim, this time attaching the view to Spenser: “For Piers in October, beauty’s ‘immortall mirrhor’ impels poetic achievements … and … Spenser privileges his view” (47). And again later in the book he quotes the same lines and calls them “a Spenserian manifesto for poetic aspiration” (157). I would argue that someone coming to October with a more open mind would find it hard to arrive at this conclusion. The poem’s dramatic context makes that Platonizing allusion just one among several that Piers tries in order to make the depressed poet feel better and perhaps start writing and singing again. Several of those other arguments may not have wings, but they have legs (e.g., a more pedestrian theory of poetic recreation and play; singing of heroic deeds of worthy figures; basic pastoral sympathy and generosity in the face of despair). Since none of these arguments are clearly effective within the poem’s dramatic frame, Borris seems to be letting his Platonic approach work too well as a filter against anything else. Undoubtedly Borris’s book will have a significant impact on readers of Spenser for some time to come, and the implications of his way of reading Plato back into the early modern period are likely to be influential as well. But one must be wary that some of the Platonizing is being executed by the writer as well as uncovered. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 3February 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700638HistoryPublished online September 28, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMatthew Ancell received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and is assistant professor of humanities and comparative literature at Brigham Young University. His interests include baroque literature and art, early modern skepticism, Montaigne, and deconstruction. His publications include articles on Góngora, Velázquez, and Derrida. Currently he is working on a study of art and theology in Calderón.Valerie Billing is a doctoral candidate and provost’s fellow in the English department at the University of California, Davis. She has published on Margaret Cavendish and collaborative authorship in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and is currently finishing a dissertation titled “Big Women, Small Men: The Erotics of Size in Early Modern Literature and Culture.”Michelle M. Dowd is associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. She is also the coeditor of Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011), and Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (2012), and her articles on early modern drama and women’s writing have appeared in journals such as Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, and Shakespeare Studies. She is currently completing a book on inheritance on the early modern English stage.Kent R. Lehnhof is associate professor of English at Chapman University, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. His essays have appeared in several edited collections as well as in journals such as ELR, ELH, SEL, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, Milton Quarterly, and Milton Studies. At present, he is editing a multiauthor volume on Levinas and Shakespeare and researching twinship in the Renaissance.Amy Rodgers is assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches courses in early modern literature and culture, film, and audience and popular culture studies. She has published essays on representations of Shakespeare’s audiences in film and contemporary fiction, early film and serial fiction, and is a codirector of the Shakespeare and Dance project. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 42, Number 1Spring 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675940 Views: 19 © 2014 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

<i>Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature</i>. Hannah Crawforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii+218.

The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell, by D. K. Smith. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 254. Hardback, $99.95. Over the last decade or so, a number of influential histories of early modern cartography have forged compelling links between early modern English and place, such as, to name just two, Andrew McRae's 1996 The Map of Agrarian England, 1500-1660, and Lesley Cormack's 1997 Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620. These and other studies have rendered virtually impossible any effort to talk about early modern England's status as a nation or an emergent empire without also taking into account developments in early modern English cartography - its growing preoccupation with increased precision in scope, scale, perspective, and the accurate measuring of space. Fueling this spatial preoccupation were the sophisticated advances in theoretical mathematics (and their subsequent pragmatic applications to the growing science of navigation), and more accurate techniques for surveying the land. Because these technological advances were becoming available to an increasingly literate public, they also created ever greater desires for cartographic precision and accuracy. Cartography, in short, became a national imperative. Perhaps the first study of the matrix of the new cartography, the new sense of ideological nationalism this cartography engendered, and the imaginative space of literature was Richard Helgerson's landmark 1992 Forms of Nationhood, and, more recently, Andrew Gordon/Bernhard Klein's 2001 collection Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland. More particularly, John Gillies' s 1994 Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference and Garrett Sullivan's 1998 The Drama of Landscape have, among others, been instrumental in positioning early modern English drama within the ways in which the new cartography enabled the imagining of space. Picking up where these studies have left off, D. K. Smith's book delves further into the following overarching questions: how did early modern English literature reflect this new spatial organization, what Smith terms early modern England's And how did this emergent spatial consciousness work its way into, or become assimilated by, the early modern English prose, poetic, and dramatic imagination? The third and fifth chapters of Smith's book are, respectively, studies of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and studies of Marvell's poems Bermudas and Upon Appleton House. Because readers of this journal will, in all likelihood, be more interested in Smith's discussion of drama, I will offer only brief summaries of these chapters. Smith's third chapter offers valuable insights into the relationship between geography and allegory, i.e., how Spenser converts the vague geographical of medieval romance into a less fictive, mappable allegory of Fairy Land. The fifth chapter investigates how the intriguing collisions between old and new world maps made their way into Marvell's geographic poetry. Smith exposes the tensions between the demands of cartographical precision and the growing anxieties and uncertainties spawned by mid-seventeenth-century political upheavals (the English Revolution, regicide, etc. …

The argument of Parris’s Vital Strife could have been simple: the surrender of Seneca’s irate Hercules to the assuaging therapies of sleep is an intertextual thread drawn in different directions but nonetheless uniting a variety of early modern texts from Jasper Heywood’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules furens (1561) to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. But it is complicated by Parris’s insufflation of intertextuality with pneuma, the breath or spirit in Stoic metaphysics which interfuses man with fellow humans, nature and the cosmos and is therefore claimed to have ethical and biopolitical significance. Part of that significance, according to Parris, is early modernity’s subversive championing of sleep against the stringent calls of Renaissance humanism for the permanent wakefulness, watch or vigil which characterized the scripturally authorized model of the pastoral king. To extol sleep was to undermine prevailing socio-political structures as well as, more abstrusely, to hoist the standard of biological normativity, here in its particular instantiation in stoic oikeôsis or care of oneself and consequently, on the panpsychic view of things, of one’s fellow humans, nature, etc.: ‘Insomnia becomes, in early modern literature, an ethical problem that makes the care for physical life a biopolitical concern’ (79).

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Previous article FreeVolume 50 (2020) Winter, 2020, pp. 1–172; Spring, 2020, pp. 173–334; Autumn, 2020, pp. 335–484Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSharon Achinstein“Here at least / We shall be free”: The Places of English Renaissance Literature (pages 1–7)Bloom, GinaTheater History in 3D: The Digital Early Modern in the Age of the Interface (pages 8–16)Chakravarty, UrvashiThe Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies (pages 17–24)Digangi, MarioRethinking Early Modern Sexuality through Race (pages 25–31)Dolan, Frances E.Hester Pulter’s Renaissance (pages 32–39)Dowd, Michelle M.Breaking Form in Early Modern Literary Studies (pages 40–46)Guibbory, Achsah“What’s Religion Got To Do With It?” (pages 47–53)Hadfield, AndrewWhere Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (pages 54–60)Hawkes, DavidBawdry, Cuckoldry, and Usury in Early Modernity and Postmodernity (pages 61–69)Howard, Jean E.Renaissance Studies for A Different Time (pages 70–75)Kewes, PaulinaA World Well Lost? (pages 76–82)Lesser, ZacharyThe Material Text Between General and Particular, Edition and Copy (pages 83–92)Magnusson, LynneConstruing Literary Texts, Constructing Linguistic History (pages 93–101)Marino, James J.Future Shakespeares (pages 102–108)Orlin, Lena CowenThe Canon and Elizabeth Carter (pages 109–115)Pangallo, Matteo“A Great Deale of Good Stuffe”: The Cyberspace Renaissance Continues (pages 116–123)Poole, KristenPainting Milton by Numbers (pages 124–130)Prescott, Anne LakeThe World of Renaissance Scholarship (pages 131–136)Sanchez, Melissa E.Woke Renaissance Studies? (pages 137–144)Smyth, AdamThe Scale of Early Modern Studies (pages 145–152)Stern, TiffanyTrencher Poetry: Non-Paper Literature, How it Means, and Why it’s Lost (pages 153–160)Yachnin, PaulScholarship at the Edge of Doom (pages 161–172)McKeen, ChristopherChristopher Marlowe, Literary History, and the Lyrical Style of Blank Verse (pages 173–203)This essay contextualizes the versification of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine among sixteenth-century efforts to reform English vernacular verse on the model of Latin unrhymed quantitative meter. Literary histories of unrhymed verse in the poetic and rhetorical theory of Roger Ascham, Gabriel Harvey, and others align the disappearance of unrhymed meter with the fall of civilizations and propose a return to classical metrics as a means of transferring the cultural and political authority of ancient Rome to Tudor England. Marlowe, however, offers in Tamburlaine an alternative literary history of unrhymed poetry through the formal affordances of blank verse. As an open form, blank verse lends itself to expansive speeches that, in the mouth of Tamburlaine, can paradoxically both produce action and arrest time. The form of blank verse thus resists the imperial teleology of its origins in the classicizing projects of the Tudor humanists. [C.M.]Dunlop, AlexanderFooles of Nature: The Epistemology of Hamlet (pages 204–232)Hamlet was written near the peak of a crisis of epistemological thinking for many Europeans. This essay argues that concern with epistemology is the central structural principle of the play, uniting many details of plot and language in ways not generally acknowledged in a modern critical discourse concerned rather with issues of individual identity and personal psychology. Reading the play with this focus, with particular attention to the broad range of assumptions and expectations of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, also helps to clarify the playwright’s values with regard to prior tradition and emergent trends, revealing the great innovator in language, drama, and verse to be staunchly and systematically resistant to some of the most important modernizing tendencies of his day. [A.D.]Edelstein, GabriellaCollaborating on Credit: Ben Jonson’s Authorship in Eastward Ho! (pages 233–255)Although the importance of Ben Jonson’s 1616 folio to the emergence of the author is already well established, the significance of collaboration to his early career has been somewhat overlooked. This essay argues that when considering Jonson’s authorship through early modern credit culture, his participation in the collaborative mechanisms of the playhouses becomes clearer. This is particularly the case with the play Eastward Ho! (1605), written alongside George Chapman and John Marston. Jonson’s early experiences of social credit in the playhouses is examined, especially his relationship with the impresario Philip Henslowe and the Admiral’s Men, as well as his later partnership with the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Close reading of Eastward Ho! reveals how Jonson, Chapman and Marston wrote the kinds of debt and credit relationships they experienced in the companies into the play’s plot. In a play deeply interested in the social effects of performance, the characters constantly enact collaborative devices to add to their credit. The play’s comic ending, dependent on performing collaborative credit, mirrors Jonson’s own immersion in the economy of obligation in the theatres. His eventual literary singularity, and his commensurate sociality, were not separate parts of his career but central to his playwriting practice. [G.E.]Munro, Lucy“As it was Played in the Blackfriars”: Jonson, Marston, and the Business of Playmaking (pages 256–295)This essay places Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! at the center of a set of textual, theatrical, and financial negotiations that are revealed by a hitherto overlooked lawsuit in the Court of Chancery. It reveals for the first time that Jonson—like Marston—had a financial stake in the Blackfriars playhouse where Eastward Ho! was performed, and it argues that the play both epitomizes and scrutinizes a set of social and literary transactions surrounding the playhouse. In doing so, it reappraises three important contexts for the production of Eastward Ho! First, it revises our understanding of the Blackfriars enterprise and its investors. Second, it reassesses the careers of Jonson and Marston in the years 1604–1606—revisiting their collaboration with Chapman, their interpersonal relationships, and the revision of Jonson’s The Case is Altered and Every Man in his Humor—and offers a new picture of Jonson as a company man. Third, it offers fresh insights into city comedy’s engagements with London during a crucial period of its development. A coda turns to Jonson’s The Alchemist, suggesting that this play glances back at Jonson’s own contractual and emotional involvement with the Blackfriars venture and its entangled financial structures. [L.M.]Streete, AdrianPolemical Laughter in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) (pages 296–333)Contemporary accounts note that audiences laughed heartily at Thomas Middleton’s scandalous play A Game at Chess. But do we really know what they were laughing at? Only partially. Drawing on recent research in early modern wit, I reconsider the place of laughter in the play and its polemical source texts by exploring significant late-Jacobean debates about religious laughter, mockery, personation, and theater. These debates enable a clearer understanding of how laughter works in the play, allowing us in turn to reassess A Game at Chess as a response to the political crisis of 1624 when war between Britain and Spain seemed imminent. [A.S.]Dimmock, MatthewTudor Turks: Ottomans Speaking English in Early Modern Sultansbriefe (pages 335–358)A distinctive Ottoman voice was near-ubiquitous in late Elizabethan England, appearing in books and on stages with remarkable regularity. This essay questions the dominant assumption that such a voice emerges, fully formed, in the first part of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587). Turning to largely unknown Henrician sources in print and manuscript—in particular a letter from the Emperor of Babylon to Henry VIII—it argues for the importance of a continental Sultansbriefe (“Letters of the Sultan”) genre in which fictional letters from various Eastern potentates to Christian monarchs and the pope circulated widely. Such letters took on new forms in English contexts and reveal the different registers that voice could occupy: they could be read as satire, as travel accounts, or as news, and might be belligerent, bombastic, heroic, or pathetic. They offer a means to defamiliarize the standard “Turkish” voice of the end of the sixteenth century and show it to be a late and productive reinvention of an earlier Sultansbriefe tradition. [M.D.]Borris, KennethSpenser’s Panthea and Lucian’s: Elizabeth, Gloriana, and The Faerie Queene’s Protocols of Encomium (pages 359–390)Spenser and his friend Gabriel Harvey enjoyed reading Lucian, and at that time this ancient writer’s two dialogues celebrating Panthea were prominent exemplars of encomium for an exalted woman. Although the name Panthea also appears in The Faerie Queene, explicitly linked with Cleopolis and Gloriana, its Lucianic implications there have been hitherto unnoticed. Spenser thereby strategically invites comparison of his epic’s panegyrical enterprise with Lucian’s in those dialogues, as well as with their assessments of appropriate encomiastic expression that avoids mere flattery. Hence The Faerie Queene incorporates means of evaluating its own celebratory project, limits its praise of Elizabeth I, and ensures that its homage to her is definitively provisional. This new perspective on Spenser’s major text clarifies the significance of its fundamental conceit, Elizabeth’s idealization as Gloriana, illuminates the distinction between these two queens, and confirms the advisory and critical functions of Spenserian encomium. So as to ensure that England’s Queen remains open to instructive critique and that his own depiction of faery’s indicates a far higher standard, the poet significantly distances his actual Queen from her “true glorious type” manifested in Gloriana (I.pr.4). [K.B.]Walters, JohnJohn Donne’s Sermons: Counsel and the Politics of the Dynamic Middle (pages 391–416)I draw attention to a consistent but sometimes overlooked trait in John Donne’s sermons (delivered between 1615 and 1631): his effort to enumerate and defend the powers of preachers. Donne regularly emphasizes the preacher’s obligation to speak boldly to all members of the congregation and to set forth a message of repentance and consolation. This constant feature of Donne’s preaching, moreover, offers insight into his ambiguous political ideals. Donne cites the preacher’s duties in order to authorize his efforts to define England and its established church as privileged sites of honest counsel and amicable debate. He uses his visible, venerable position in the pulpit to recall and embody Christian humanist ideals of good advice and orderly dialogue, urging England to set aside factional strife at a time of increasing sectarian discord. Yet, while Donne powerfully articulates his vision, his idealism proves increasingly outmoded as the British Isles lurch toward the catastrophe of the Civil Wars. [J.W.]Whewell, Esther OsorioA Doctor of Another Facultie: Robert Aylett and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Poetics (pages 417–449)Despite having written hundreds of Spenserian stanzas, appearing in multiple volumes of divine poetry throughout the mid-seventeenth century, ecclesiastical lawyer Robert Aylett has been little remarked by Spenser scholars. His poems, it is widely agreed by his few commentators, are not very good. Aylett’s own texts and paratexts, however, plead indulgence of their readers on the grounds that their writer is neither a poet nor a divine but a lawyer, meddling amateurishly, with Kate Narveson’s “bible readers and lay writers,” in the domains of both literary and theological professionals. As well as one of the period’s overlooked Spenserians, then, Aylett is also useful as a figure for disrupting Richard Helgerson’s “literary system” of professional, amateur, and laureate poets, to find a space instead for the committed interdisciplinarian who commits his interdisciplinarity chiefly by way of poetics. This essay sets Aylett’s writing in the light of current and contemporary critical approaches to interdisciplinarity, to consider the motives and mechanics of borrowing rhymes to speak devotion. [E.O.W.]Gouws, JohnKairic Complexity in Fulke Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (pages 450–484)Fulke Greville’s major prose work has for many generations puzzled and misled its readers. In this essay I suggest how often-occluded rhetorical presuppositions may be used to clarify the nature of historically embedded textual conduct. In particular, I deploy the resources of rhetorical agency to trace the exigencies of ethos, occasion, and audience through Greville’s composition and revision of his Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, and to suggest that a work composed for a select Jacobean readership resorted to the attitudes and language of Elizabeth’s last decade to represent selectively people and events in the earlier years of her reign. The work has come down to us as an amalgam of two projects—a dedication to Sidney and a summary history of Elizabeth—which was subjected to one major revision and many minor ones in the processes of preparing separate working copies. Greville changed his mind often, but did not revise systematically, and much of the puzzlement induced by the Dedication arises from his working habits. One further change of mind had far-reaching consequences: Greville’s decision to abandon composition and revision. It was not published with the bulk of his literary works in the posthumous Certain Learned and Elegant Workes of 1633, but had to wait almost two decades to be repurposed by another agent in 1652 as The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. Because agency is constitutive of holistic understanding, there are implications for how textual, including rhetorical, literary, critical, and editorial, conduct proceeds: we, as self-interpreting agents, are bound reciprocally to acknowledge and respect the self-disclosures and self-enactments manifested through conduct other than our own. [J.G.]Joseph Moxon, A Tutor to Astronomy and Geography (1686) in the collection at the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 50, Number 3Autumn 2020 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710821 Views: 164 © 2020 by English Literary Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in examples of Renaissance drama and cultural artifacts. Whiteness exploits this fluidity between animal-human classifications as a power differential. Metaphors of animal-human speciation elicit anxieties around difference through a poetics of contagion. Spread through animal metaphors, animal-human distinctions circulate dehumanizing constructions of race, gender, and sexuality via affective influences in early modern English playhouses and by extension, affects cultural constructions of identitarian difference. England’s emergent settler-colonialist logics in the Renaissance positioned animal-human differences on hierarchies such as the Great Chain of Being where crossing the porous boundary between human and animal constituted a form of contagion. Actors’ imitations of animality through material performance and metaphor on stage spread through spectators’ senses—in other words, theatergoers felt animality as an affective, embodied, and material experience. In this vein, I approach animal studies in dialogue with pre-modern critical race studies, queer theory, and affect studies to address the circulations of difference through contagion and animality in early modern English literature and culture. By close reading dramatic and cultural materials, I argue that animal metaphors in early modern literature and culture represent forms of racial, sexual, and gendered difference in early modern England as something transmittable, showing their incredibly flexible and exploitable capabilities. In other words, the uncertain distinctions between what constructed an “animal” and a “human” were dangerously transmissive in early modern contexts.