Early Modern Culture Research Articles

Brazen as Falstaff, Devious as Iago: Sir Ralph Lane's Approach to Holding Office in Ireland and Virginia

AbstractMuch has been made of the ideological connection between the mental world of servitors in Elizabethan Ireland and the origins of early English colonial endeavor in North America. In this vein, the case of Sir Ralph Lane, the first governor of the Roanoke colony and, later, muster-master general of Ireland, would seem to present a historiographically promising test case, one that might not only link Ireland and the Roanoke Colony but also could show, following recent suggestions, how attitudinal, behavioral, and aspirational commonalities existed between early modern English military culture and the ethos of early English colonial endeavor. Lane's record on both sides of the Atlantic, however, rather than painting a picture of the applicability of martial virtue and military discipline at times of crisis, demonstrates instead the stark reality of the impulsive and appetitive culture of the garrison in the Elizabethan period and its corrosive effects. Lane's remarkable capacity for corruption, willful mismanagement, and wily self-defense in an Irish context in fact amplifies and complements troubling tendencies that scholars have recently detected in Lane's famous discourse of his government in what was commonly termed Virginia printed in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. Lane can indeed serve as an emblem of common features shared by Elizabethan Englishmen drawn to office in Ireland and Elizabethan/Jacobean Englishmen drawn to settle in Virginia, but largely because of his mendacity, venality, and irresponsibility.

Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England.

The theory that the people of the early modern period slept in well-defined segments of 'first' and 'second' sleeps has been highly influential in both scholarly literature and mainstream media over the past twenty years. Based on a combination of scientific, anthropological and textual evidence, the segmented sleep theory has been used to illuminate discussions regarding important aspects of early modern nocturnal culture; mainstream media reports, meanwhile, have proposed segmented sleep as a potentially 'natural' and healthier alternative to consolidated blocks of sleep. In this article, I re-examine the scientific, anthropological and early modern literary sources behind the segmented sleep theory and ask if the evidence might support other models of early modern sleep that are not characterised by segmentation, while acknowledging that construction of such models is by nature limited and uncertain. I propose a more diverse range of interpretations of early modern texts related to sleep, with important implications for medical and social history and literary scholarship.

:Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

:<i>Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature</i>

Angloglobalism, multilingualism and world literature

This essay explores the rise of global anglophone as a methodological rubric, and the place of English in global literary studies. My exposition pivots around a set of interwoven claims. While contemporary globalization has led to increasing linguistic homogenization, the rise of global anglophone does not herald the end of postcolonialism nor is it a force bent on erasing the cultural and linguistic diversity of literatures of the world. Rather, its valence can be generatively explored in the context of recent debates about the provenance of comparative and world literatures, and the emergence of multilingual transregional literary enclaves that are smaller than the globe and larger than a nation. Wariness about the moral economy of the angloglobalism can often be in tension with contemporary processes of anglophone transculturation. Further, the rise of global anglophone is inseparable from current debates in translation studies and the emergence of English as a global vernacular and a target language. Lastly, the global dominance of English appears less threatening when visualized through a comparative historical lens that illuminates the role of other world languages. As scholarship on premodern and early modern cultures indicates, linguistic cosmopolitanism and vernacular expressivity have not typically existed as antinomian forces in literary history.

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

The Invention of Shakespeare and Other Essays by Stephen Orgel (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Shakespeare and Other Essays by Stephen Orgel Fran Teague THE INVENTION OF SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS. Stephen Orgel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; pp. 192, 7 halftones. The Invention of Shakespeare gathers twelve of Stephen Orgel’s essays. In his opening essay, he declares the collection’s theme to be “the invention of Shakespeare, the creation of an author suited to [End Page 113] the increasing canonicity of the works” (1). The book steadily resists canonization, however, for the pleasure of the glitches (Orgel’s term). In chapter one, the glitches include the way that rumor, forgery, and misjudgment have forged our understanding of Shakespeare’s life and works. If a teacher talks about what the Chandos portrait tells us about Shakespeare the man, how sailors staged Hamlet off the coast of Sierra Leone, or why Shakespeare used Don Quixote in his lost play Cardenio, the class learns things likely to be false. The history of how the myth of Shakespeare’s life and works came to be, so well discussed by scholars like Schoenbaum and Taylor, is an important part of this book, but unlike his predecessors, Orgel uses the textual glitches as a heuristic, generating new ways of understanding why the glitches matter. Orgel remarks early on, after noting that the text as we have it today is a script: “The script is not the play, it is only where the play starts. The actors turn it into a play, and every revival of the play—and indeed, every performance—is different. There is never a “final version” (2). In literary discussions, critics often want to believe in a master-text and may resist the idea that editing a play, reading a play, and watching a play differ from editing, reading, or experiencing prose fiction or poetry or other forms. Chapter two, “The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole,” focuses on canonicity. Specifically, it concerns editors and the way that they imagine and improve on Shakespeare in the guise of improving on previous editions. The dizzying way that certain plays are in the canon, out of the canon, ping-ponging back and forth, makes for fascinating (and sometimes comic) reading. After the first chapter, however, the essays are varied: Orgel writes some in his role as a textual editor, some as a sophisticated reader, and some as a play-goer. In his introduction, Orgel groups together five of the essays, “No Sense of an Ending,” “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility,” “Two Household Friends,” “Getting Things Wrong,” and “Revising King Lear.” These essays “focus in various ways on the sorts of problems I have termed glitches, whether typographical, grammatical, or discursive” (3). He also mentions that two essays, “Food for Thought” and “Venice at the Globe,” were written for groups that share an interest in early modern culture. Two others, “Danny Scheie’s Shakespeare” and “Shakespeare all’italiana,” consider performance from the perspective of an audience member. One essay, “Lascivious Grace,” is perhaps the most personal, but goes unmentioned in the introduction. Chapter three, “No Sense of an Ending,” concerns Shakespeare’s poetry (and that of others) and the way that a poem may seem incomplete rather than the product of an artistic or printer’s choice. The argument also suggests that the sonnets are personal, autobiographical, in what they say about homosexual and adulterous relationships. The following chapter, “Lascivious Grace,” presents Orgel as a reader, analyzing character (especially Iago) in Othello and picking up on threads from the previous essay. This chapter is a revised version of work published in Orgel’s Spectacular Performances, and it shows him as reader, as textual editor, and as a director who “stages the play in my own mind” (50). But he also writes that “two friends to whom I have proposed this [character analysis of Iago] haven’t liked it; both objected that making Iago gay explains too much, that malignity ought to be left motiveless” (51). As a reader, I have no problem acknowledging that productions may certainly offer homoeroticism as an important part of the play, but I think other important elements are race and Desdemona’s choices (and agency), which the essay does...

John Donne and the Legacy of Early Modern Testamentary Verse

This article explores John Donne's contribution to the relatively overlooked genre of early modern testamentary verse. I use Donne's work to show that poetic wills and testaments do not simply constitute poems that are structured as lengthy inventories of complaints and bequests. My study instead demonstrates that the formal features of his testamentary poems relate to and deviate from the egocentrically commemorative impulses of elegiac, epitaphic, and lyric verse. I argue that testamentary poems provide a unique textual site for self-display and self-commemoration because they function to communicate and fulfill the will of the (soon-to-be) dead. In sum, this article aims to advance our knowledge of the wider role that the composition of poetic legacies played in early modern English literary culture.

Donald A Beecher and Grant Williams (eds). Henry Chettle, ‘Kind-Heart’s Dream’ and ‘Piers Plainness’: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade

Henry Chettle is probably best known to scholars of early modern literature as the author of a Hamlet-esque revenge drama, The Tragedy of Hoffman; as a co-author of a few other extant plays including Patient Grissel and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon; and as a bit-part-player in the history of Shakespeare’s early career, thanks to his authorship of Kind-Heart’s Dream. In the prefatory epistle to this 1593 pamphlet, Chettle responds to the charge that he is the real author of the Groatsworth of Wit attributed to the late Robert Greene, in which Greene had warned fellow dramatists about a certain ‘upstart Crow’; Chettle denies being anything more than Greene’s editor and transcriber and apologizes to the (unnamed) injured party, having since ‘seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes’ (88). It is fair to say that critical discussion of this text has struggled to escape the shadow of Chettle’s illustrious contemporary. Donald A. Beecher and Grant Williams’ edition brings Kind-Heart’s Dream together with Chettle’s 1595 pamphlet, Piers Plainness’s Seven-Years Prenticeship. Although the editors inevitably make reference to the Groatsworth and its aftermath, their focus is very much on Chettle’s two pamphlets in their own right and particularly on their status as products of—and reflections upon—early modern print culture.

The Nose Plays: Nasiform Negotiations at Newington Butts

ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s Shylock, Marlowe’s Barabas, and other Jewish characters are often thought to have been portrayed on early modern stages with a large false nose. This essay will explain how this commonplace view began as a falsified proposition by John Payne Collier in 1836, which subsequent scholarship has failed to properly dispel, instead projecting a post-Enlightenment stereotype onto early modern culture. I argue that by studying the use of the false nose in recycled fashion across contiguous plays in repertory it becomes possible to recognise that this stage property called on its audiences to negotiate its meanings from a range of possible sources, including the other plays in the same sequence. Using the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Chamberlain’s Men at Newington Butts in 1594, I discuss some of the ways in which the stage nose represented villainy, risibility, and ribaldry without necessarily signifying Jewishness at this time. That Barabas could signify all of these things and also be a Jew may nevertheless have contributed to later generations identifying the nose as one of the stereotypical features of the early modern depictions of Jews on stage.

The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England. Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby, eds. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 40. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2021. xvi + 434 pp. $99.

The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England. Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby, eds. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 40. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2021. xvi + 434 pp. $99.

The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689. Chris R. Langley, ed. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 37. Rochester, NY: Boydell &amp; Brewer, 2020. xii + 252 pp. $130.

The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689. Chris R. Langley, ed. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 37. Rochester, NY: Boydell &amp; Brewer, 2020. xii + 252 pp. $130.

Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England. Robert Tittler. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 43. Woodbridge: Boydell &amp; Brewer, 2022. xiv + 288 pp. $99.

Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England. Robert Tittler. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 43. Woodbridge: Boydell &amp; Brewer, 2022. xiv + 288 pp. $99.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics

Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura, eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. xii + 226 pp. $130.

Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura, eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. xii + 226 pp. $130.

The Agency of Muslim Women and ‘the Muslimwoman’ in Early Modern England

Abstract: Acknowledging that women from Muslim backgrounds arrived on British shores well before the first record of an openly Muslim woman in the 1830s, but that they would have had no real option other than to assimilate to English mores, including religious ones, this article investigates the ‘Muslimwoman’ (miriam cooke’s neologism) as constitutive of English culture from the sixteenth century and into the eighteenth century. Examples include representations of elite women from the Ottoman dynasty in histories, polemics, and plays. Deploying ‘the Muslimwoman’ as a heuristic allows us to assess the impact of historical Muslim women on early modern English culture.

Atanasije Stojkovic - European paths of modern Serbian homo novus

In the article, the attempt is to shed light on Atanasije Stojkovic, as a prominent figure of early modern Serbian culture, a recognized scientist, and not least as a private person, since this also had an impact on his multifaceted socio-historical engagement throughout then-Europe. Stojkovic was personally a fairly ambitious man, but still with a heightened sense of duty towards his nation. That is why he made noteworthy contributions in the area of national culture, even though he was a nature scientist by education and profession. The example of his existence can be seen as paradigmatic for the entry/return of Serbs into the cultural arena of modern Europe. In the paper, a brief description of Stojkovic?s efforts in the field of physics and philosophy/metaphysics of nature is also given.

Big Data Studies: The Humanities in Uncharted Waters

Abstract: This article discusses the formidable challenges that the advent of big data brings to the digital humanities broadly and proposes some ways the Korean studies community can prepare to navigate these uncharted waters. Standard digital humanities training in data mining, text analysis, mapping, network science, and machine learning will be developed and refined over the coming years, as will research concerning the ephemeral nature of new media, web archives, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Yet I contend that established responses to the digital transformation of the humanities, while timely and necessary, will prove inadequate for handling petabyte- and exabyte-scale born-digital sources. In the Zettabyte Era, more data is processed in real time than all of the records produced from early times to the 2010s. To make sense of the current information regime, we need critical reflections and comparisons to the classical internet age of the 1990s, the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, and early modern print cultures. This exercise will allow us to situate the humanities in an age of big data as an extension of traditional humanities research and at the same as something foreign.

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice. Katherine Ibbett and Kristine Steenbergh, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xii + 306 pp. $99.99.

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice. Katherine Ibbett and Kristine Steenbergh, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xii + 306 pp. $99.99.

Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750 by Nicole Howard

Reviewed by: Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750 by Nicole Howard Rienk Vermij (bio) Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750 By Nicole Howard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 218. The invention of the printing press has generally been described as an unambiguous boon for the development of early science and scholarship. Scholars themselves, however, were often less sure about the benefits of the new invention. A scholarly work typically was not written for all and sundry, but printing meant that it went public. This introduced the possibility of corrupt editions and misunderstanding, thereby damaging the author's reputation. In Loath to Print, Nicole Howard investigates how scientists developed various mechanisms to keep control of their work in the age of print. Some of these were purely literary. Prefaces and dedications could bring a work to the attention of appropriate readers and keep away inappropriate ones. In some cases, editors formed a necessary intermediary between a reluctant author and the public. Probably the most interesting chapter, certainly for readers of this journal, is the fourth one. Here, Howard describes how some scientists attempted to take the whole printing process into their own hands, either by running a complete printshop, as in the well-known cases of Tycho and Hevelius, or by inventing their own alternative printing or reproduction techniques, fit only for limited print runs of short texts and images. In an interesting move, Howard discusses the cases of John Evelyn, William Petty, and Christiaan Huygens, placing these scientists' interest in etching and related techniques in the context of the concerns about authorial control. It does not appear, however, that these scholars made more than incidental use of such techniques, and their work certainly did not overturn the regime of commercial publication, as Howard herself admits. Howard illustrates her book with many examples from different countries and contexts. Somewhat disappointingly, however, she hardly refers to non-English-language historiography. Recent work by Karl Enenkel, for [End Page 258] instance, could have further strengthened her case. People familiar with the period will not really be surprised by her findings, but it is a clear and nuanced overview of an aspect of early modern print culture that is not always given sufficient consideration. Rienk Vermij Rienk Vermij is a professor in the Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent book is Thinking on Earthquakes in Early Modern Europe: Firm Beliefs on Shaky Ground (Routledge, 2021). Copyright © 2023 Society for the History of Technology