Volume 51 (2021)

Abstract

Previous article FreeVolume 51 (2021) (Winter, 2021, pp. 1–152; Spring, 2021, pp. 153–330; Autumn, 2021, pp. 331–502)PDFPDF PLUSAbstractFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAbstractThis essay examines James Bell’s narrative of the Swedish princess Cecilia Vasa’s journey to England in 1564–1565 with focus on the representation of Elizabeth I and Cecilia. The essay argues that the narrative is best understood as a travelogue whose rhetorical function is that of an encomium, celebrating first of all Elizabeth, but also Cecilia and the two women’s relationship. In doing this, the text partakes in contemporary constructions of Elizabeth as potent yet female ruler through its deployment of the so-called rhetoric of love and through its use of iconography that depicts Elizabeth as wise and legitimate ruler. By positing Cecilia as lover of Elizabeth, Bell extends the discourse of love to foreign royalty and a potential political ally; a special bond between the two is set up in ways that would have been accessible to contemporary readers more broadly but also through imagery that would have connected the two in ways open to a more select readership. While the relative status between Elizabeth and Cecilia is maintained throughout the travelogue, Bell celebrates the venture of the journey itself, and thus the meeting of the two women in a way that defines it as a diplomatic exchange with the specific purpose of furthering contact, dialogue, and goodwill between the two countries. [A.S.]James Bell’s Narrative of Cecilia Vasa’s Journey to England: Travelogue as Encomium (pages 1–30)Anna SwärdhAbstractThis essay revisits Leander’s abduction in the Hellespont with a focus on the geopolitical significations in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. The imagery of the abducted boy, often recast as the iconic Ganymede, as object of desire is prevalent in early modern literature. Tracing representations of the abducted boy within the historical context of abductions in the Ottoman Mediterranean, the essay argues that the abducted boy is not just a classical prototype from a Greco-Roman lineage, but is also a reflection of the boys actually abducted in the early modern period, especially the boys who were objects of cross-cultural circulations generated by imperial hierarchies in the greater Mediterranean space. In his addition of a homoerotic abduction plot to the classical story from Musaeus and Ovid, Marlowe deploys the figure of Ganymede as well as a rhetoric of Mediterranean trade to imprint on Leander’s body an erotic-cultural history of abducted boys. Pursuing Leander in the Mediterranean waters and thus traveling between English and Ottoman contexts, this essay offers a relational reading strategy in exploring sexual, racial, and imperial components of literary and historical abductions in a global context. This approach ultimately reveals a connected history of homoerotic desire and imperial violence between English and Ottoman cultures in the global Renaissance. [A.A.]Leander in the Ottoman Mediterranean: The Homoerotics of Abduction in the Global Renaissance (pages 31–62)Abdulhamit ArvasAbstractThis essay re-examines the meaning of Shakespearean soliloquies in light of both historical context and performance practice, arguing that they stage the interpersonal dimensions of identity in early modern culture. Solo speeches in Richard II and Hamlet offer textual evidence of their intended performance not as mere inward contemplation but as direct encounters with the playhouse audience. As dialogic speech acts, they constitute a deliberate ontological paradox: the act of speaking “alone” onstage becomes a dynamic interpersonal process in which the audience plays a crucial role. This key stage-audience exchange resonates with the practice of Augustinian “soliloquy” as exemplified in contemporary religious texts. Augustine’s own Soliloquies are alive with the paradox that his fullest act of self-speaking is inherently a dialogue, voicing not just subjective experience but the reciprocal recognition of an interlocutor. By the late seventeenth century, however, the neoclassical disparagement of direct-address soliloquy as unnatural and ridiculous reflects a radical shift toward conceptions of the self as a more discrete and self-contained entity. Critical readings of Shakespearean soliloquy have often followed that post-Renaissance view, missing the significant role of the audience that Shakespeare writes into the action of soliloquy. Today’s players have helped to recover that dramaturgy of interplay. [N.S.]Interpersonal Soliloquy: Self and Audience in Shakespeare and Augustine (pages 63–95)Nancy SelleckAbstractThis essay revisits Othello’s jealousy to detail the politico-theological significance of this dramatic affect. In the Hebrew Bible, jealousy maintains a covenant between God and a holy nation. When Pauline teaching defines marriage as an index of Christ’s love, this redefinition promises to replace exclusivity with a supposedly universal truth. Yet jealousy persists to reveal a clash between individual realities and corporate truths. Jealousy performs this by underscoring the fictive nature of the identification of a husband with Christ. Before The Winter’s Tale relates the problems of jealousy to a hereditary monarchy, Othello locates them within a republic. The Venetian state sidesteps the effects of tragedy because its perpetuation exists at a remove from marriage. Yet for this reason, it cannot assist Othello in occupying the fictions of Christian marriage. Othello shows us how politico-theological meaning can be communicated artistically, and in a way that thwarts any interpretation that locates real meaning in a forward-looking trajectory of state power. This essay concludes by arguing that Othello helps us to pinpoint the deficiencies in Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet—and, more generally, in the way Schmitt conscribes the power of Shakespearean tragedy for his tendentious view of political history. [E.S.]Othello and the Political Theology of Jealousy (pages 96–120)Eric SongAbstractThis essay posits that, on the early modern stage, dance was a powerful communicative modality which performed racializing work. Focusing on The Spanish Gypsie (1623), this essay argues that Middleton, Rowley, Ford, and Dekker’s play innovatively deployed around Gypsy characters an animalizing choreographic discourse called “antics.” That discourse, given the early modern understanding and uses of dance, had the ability to downgrade its dancers in the Great Chain of being by kinetic means long before the development in the Enlightenment of the racist taxonomic systems with which we usually associate such downgradings. Ultimately, the essay brings to light the relational logic of early modern theatrical racecraft by tracing the popular extension of that new animalizing choreographic device to another ethnic group in the repertory of The Queen of Bohemia’s Men from 1623 to 1642: Blackamoors—who were similarly entangled in the processes of exclusion from ownership and self-ownership at play in the rhetoric of animalization, both on stage and off stage. [N.N.]“Come Aloft, Jack-little-ape!”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie (pages 121–151)Noémie NdiayeAbstractThe history of the English reception of Petrarch’s works is one that has been told without reference to the reign of Queen Mary. This is despite the fact that a history of Marian literary culture cannot be told without reference to Petrarch. Indeed, the English Petrarch had a distinctively Marian phase that manifested itself in three works, two in print and one in manuscript. These are: Tottel’s Miscellany, Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes, and William Forrest’s The Seconde Grisilde. All three appearing during Queen Mary’s short reign, and as products of a particular moment, these works point to a specific idea of Marian literary culture that sought to deliver Petrarch from a less worthy Henrician age. Henry VIII’s sexual and political excesses were sharply criticised at this time, and the moralizing and philosophising Petrarch assumed fresh importance as a model for this critique. Petrarch’s example was therefore also central to a broader cultural renaissance that was both Marian and Catholic, and that helped to establish in poetry what the Marian return to Rome established in politics and religion: a rapprochement of cultures. [O.W.]Marian Literary Culture: Petrarch and the Rapprochement of Cultures (pages 153–189)Oliver WortAbstractThis essay explores the relationship between Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. There are a number of significant connections between the two writers: although Marlowe is known primarily as a dramatist and Nashe as a “proser,” evidence from the hostile Gabriel Harvey reveals that the two were connected in his mind. Nashe appears to have been eager to represent himself as Marlowe’s literary heir, in part through their joint admiration of Pietro Aretino. Both their names are printed on the title-page of Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), unusual for drama published at that time. Nashe appears to have known Doctor Faustus, not published until 1604, as annotations in his hand demonstrate, and he may have played some role in the authorship of that play. Nashe pays homage to the dead writer in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599), refiguring the doomed relationship between Hero and Leander narrated in Marlowe’s unfinished poem published posthumously in 1598 in the tale of the love between a red herring and a ling. Through this literary transformation of an Ovidian tale Nashe has fashioned Marlowe in his own image. [A.H.]Marlowe and Nashe (pages 190–216)Andrew HadfieldAbstractThis essay offers a reassessment of the famous bells in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and suggests that we should read these bells as one kind of dissolvable body among many. Donne builds on the established understanding of bells as subjects, with voices and identities; he joins conversations about their tenacious survival as objects, practices, and sounds in the post-Reformation church. In the 1620s, bells were objects that were always potentially on the point of being melted down and reformed: their bodies, like Donne’s own, were vulnerable to dissolution but could also generatively be re-made. Bells help Donne to develop an artisanal poetics, drawing on sculptural metaphors in which matter is continually melted and re-formed, to model the continuous work that the Devotions demands of its readers. I suggest that we might pay more attention in literary study not only to form and matter but also to the processes of formation—these moments of (re-)making—that act as a middle term between the two. [K.H.]Processes of Reformation in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Bells, Brass, and the Reader’s Work (pages 217–242)Katherine HuntAbstractThe central character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is not the embodiment of mercantile or proto-capitalist values that many readers have taken him for, and in fact repudiates those values. In a real sense, he is not a merchant at all. Barabas is never interested in profit or in money as it is commonly understood; he is spectacularly economically irrational from the first scene to the last. His famous celebration of “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37) is profoundly hostile to the very idea of money. Barabas defies economic logic, whether mercantile or Marxist, because he does not seek gain. He can best be understood through Georges Bataille’s concept of pure expenditure, the drive toward loss and waste as ends in themselves. Barabas is an enemy to profit, the scourge of Malta’s marketplace. He represents an archaic anti-Semitic fantasy that tropes Jews as economically irrational, and promotes a set of xenophobic nationalist fantasies that reject bargaining or trade. [J.M.]Stranger to Profit: Waste, Loss, and Sacrifice in The Jew of Malta (pages 243–269)James J. MarinoAbstractFor scholars of literature and the law, early modern women’s life writing offers a rich but often overlooked opportunity to explore the lived experience of the law in early modern England. This essay turns to one such example of overlooked life writing: Mary Honywood’s “A Briefe Historicall Narration” (1635). In her tendentious narrative account, Honywood depicts a gentry family torn apart by inheritance disputes. As she describes her family’s infighting, she challenges patrilineal principles within English law by arguing for a more equitable distribution of her father’s estate. As this essay argues, early modern women were deeply involved in estate matters and litigation, regardless of whether or not they appear in the official legal records. Honywood details her many behind-the-scenes actions as well as those of her mother and sister-in-law as they attempted to sway the direction of their family’s land disputes. Thus, early modern life writing like “A Briefe Historicall Narration” is key to understanding the pervasiveness of the law in everyday life and the crucial but extra-legal means by which women attempted to intervene in legal disputes. [E.F.]“The Law of thy Mother”: Contesting Inheritance in Seventeenth-Century England (pages 270–302)Emily FineAbstractThe study of rhetoric in the English Renaissance has been an important area of investigation since the 1920s. Literary scholars, however, did not fully recover the centrality of eloquence to the literature of the period until the mid-twentieth century. While remaining a locus for discussions of form and content, Renaissance rhetorical theory has also since the late 1970s become central to the study of race and gender, the formation of religious and national identities, and the relationship between literature and early modern colonialism. Charting this history, this bibliographic essay focuses on recent scholarship on the subject, attempting to be reasonably comprehensive with work published after 1971. As this essay shows, rhetorical theory has become increasingly important for contemporary understandings both of reader reception and theories of interpretation. In more recent years, Renaissance rhetorical poetics have become a touchstone for literary scholars wishing to consider the place of the humanities in the twenty-first century. [D.K.]Recent Studies of Rhetorical Poetics (pages 303–330)David A. KatzAbstractThis essay argues that we can enrich our understandings of form and formalisms if we return to early modernity’s rich variety of physics. The central object of study is the relationship between physics and poetics in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although this translation is commonly cast today as the work of an unsophisticated or moralizing Puritan, Golding claimed that Ovid’s work offered a “dark philosophy of turnèd shapes,” a natural philosophy of substance and change. As Golding translates, he systematically reshapes the physics he finds in Ovid, converting Ovid into a crypto-Neo-Platonist and, in the process, offering a new physics and poetics revolving around the concept of shape—a concept similar to but not identical with our modern understanding of form. In Golding’s translation, poetics becomes not just a way of communicating or elaborating natural philosophy, but the mechanism for exploring the nature of the universe. [L.B.]The Physics of Poetic Form in Arthur Golding’s Translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (pages 331–355)Liza BlakeAbstractDiscussions of Titus Andronicus have often treated myths as literalizations of metaphor, meaning the staged embodiment of Ovidian myth, despite the fact that a literal meaning is one still in letters. Distinctions between language and physical act or between mind and matter bear both on the aestheticizing and sensationalizing of physical violence and on the metaphor pervading Titus. The speech in Titus that has caused the strongest assertions about the disparity between poetic rhetoric, notably metaphorical symbolism, and the representation of physical violence and human suffering is uttered by Marcus when he unexpectedly sees Lavinia in the near distance, following her rape and mutilation. My essay focuses on this long speech, its rhetorical, poetical, and mythic context, and then its aftermath, the revenge of the Andronici and Lavinia’s death. It notes that Lavinia is conscious, not the dumb object of Marcus’ speech, as commonly assumed, and that her awareness is a game changer. In the aftermath of Marcus’ speech, Lavinia’s reception by Titus and her role in the Andronici’s revenge is again remarkably and mythically crucial. [J.A.]Staging the Literal in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: Lavinia’s Suffering and Marcus’ Speech (pages 356–382)Judith H. AndersonAbstractThis essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. Whereas Davies conveys a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the possibility of self-knowledge, an ambivalence rather obscured by his confident and polished iambic pentameter, Chambers explicitly and repetitively rejects that possibility. But whenever Chambers tries to engage with the details of Davies’ theological tenets—that every soul was created directly and individually by God, that man was made in the image of God, and that the soul exists entirely in every part of the body—he arrives at inarticulate and even nonsensical rival formulas. In other words, Chambers’ poem seems unwittingly to demonstrate his own argument that spiritual self-knowledge is impossible. I read these two poems together as a sort of parable about the potential value to readers of accidental inarticulacy, alongside the deliberate counterfeit sort of inarticulacy that we have long prized. [A.O.R]Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum in Conversation (pages 383–408)Anthony Ossa-RichardsonAbstractOn account of its setting and its emphasis on domesticity, critics traditionally recognize The Merry Wives of Windsor as Shakespeare’s “English comedy.” Building on the work of scholars interested in the play’s non-English elements, however, this essay argues that the cacophonous mixture of foreign words and phrases represents precisely the comedy’s objective. Merry Wives looks different when read in relation to the multiplicity of polyglot dictionaries and phrasebooks circulating in the playwright’s moment, some of which—such as Noël de Berlaimont’s ultra-popular Colloquia et Dictionariolum—drew a link between translation and seduction. Against this book-historical background, the essay examines how Merry Wives’ accented immigrants and crafty women join forces against the lascivious monoglot (and colonizer) Falstaff, whose plans to “translate” Mistress Ford and Mistress Page “out of honesty into English” end up reversing upon him. At the center of these dealings is Mistress Quickly, an immigrant-employed “go-between” whose language can be understood not as “malapropism,” but rather as playful mixings of foreign wines and words. Seen freshly in these terms, this play stands as Shakespeare’s “cosmopolitan comedy.” [A.K.]Windsor’s World of Words: Multilingualism in The Merry Wives of Windsor (pages 409–441)Andrew S. KeenerAbstractAs topical, satirically charged plays proliferated on London stages around the turn of the seventeenth century, playwrights became increasingly concerned about the threat of overactive interpretation distorting the intended meaning of their dramatic fictions. In Poetaster, his third and last “comical satire,” Ben Jonson calls upon Horatian and Erasmian precedents to construct an elaborate system for protecting authoritative interpretations of satire from the envy of libelous and ignorant auditors. The system as constructed revolves around a clear moral distinction between “well digested” literary creation, which Poetaster purports to embody, and undigested “crudities,” which characterize the inferior poetry of hack writers, the excrescences of inaccurate interpretation, and above all, personal attacks against real people. Jonson falls short of his own ideal, however, when he has the poetaster Crispinus vomit up the neologisms of John Marston: an obvious lampoon, and therefore an “envious” reading that compromises the moral authority of his hermeneutic system. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare uses metaphors of digestion to interrogate the relationship between Authority and Envy, exploring what happens when hypocrisy makes them indistinguishable. Specifically, the well digested literary tradition of Cressida’s falsehood ends up authorizing the jaundiced view of her undigested, “o’ereaten faith,” corrupting the audience’s judgement and impoverishing theatrical imagination. [M.J.]Stomaching Satire: Poetaster, Troilus and Cressida, and the Hermeneutics of Hypocrisy (pages 442–475)Marc JubergAbstractIn Hamlet the crisis of political authority that famously rots Denmark is registered as an aesthetic crisis—a crisis of perception, feeling, and experience. This essay recovers this broken regime of feeling under the tradition of “majesty,” which in the period described the conventional set of affective and sensible experiences one was supposed to have in the presence of a sovereign prince. Whereas other contemporary plays such as Richard II often dispelled majesty as theatrical illusion, this essay argues that Hamlet takes majesty seriously but redescribes its enchantments to fit a new, post-Reformation decorum of sensibility characterized by dissensus. Here feelings of majesty most indicate sovereignty’s divine authority when, paradoxically, they fail, unable (precisely as exceptional feelings of exceptional authority) to command common agreement. This essay thus counters readings that overemphasize the epistemic nature of Hamlet’s crisis and resituates its aesthetic modernism at the intersection of phenomenology and political theology. [E.G.]The Experience of Authority: Hamlet and the Political Aesthetics of Majesty (pages 476–502)Ethan John Guagliardo Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 51, Number 3Autumn 2021 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716484 Views: 256 © 2021 English Literary Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.