Previous article No AccessVOLUME 52 (2022) (Winter, 2022, pp. 1–152; Spring, 2022, pp. 153–316; Autumn, 2022, pp. 317–452)PDF PLUSAbstractFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMore"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463AbstractThis essay situates George Gascoigne’s literary career against humanist commentary on a stylistic error, “patchwork writing,” that emblematizes broader concerns about imitation, originality, transgression, and novelty. It argues that Gascoigne advocated a composition pedagogy rooted in choice, lenience, and attentiveness—and that studying his work can productively revitalize the writing pedagogy of the modern literature classroom. At the turbulent start to Gascoigne’s career, he was forced to patch over his poetry in response to charges of indecorousness. Despite his performative repentance, he would also betray resentment about how such discipline would stifle his creativity. He depicts this stifling in The Glasse of Governement (1575), a closet drama depicting a pair of prodigal sons failing to do their “tedious” homework and ultimately being executed by the state. Reading this tragic outcome against Gascoigne’s poetic principles, as articulated in his verses and in his guidebook, “Certayne Notes of Instruction,” reveals the text critiquing how rigid forms of composition pedagogy reflect political moribundity. The essay concludes by taking up Rebecca Moore Howard’s defense of students’ “patchwriting” as a first step toward reconsidering how a pedagogy rooted in choice might more centrally inform the role of writing in the early modern literature classroom. [A.N.D.]AbstractIssues of scale and category are becoming increasingly urgent within early modern studies, particularly for those who work on book history or the material text. This essay considers how the scale of study shapes what we read and enables different kinds of interpretive work. The essay examines a copy of William Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece which was at some point in the seventeenth century bound with Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas’ older poem, The Historie of Judith, to create a boutique publication concerned with female agency and sexual assault. By placing this volume within a series of increasingly expansive interpretive frames, the essay explores the volume’s idiosyncratic interest as a case study, but also asks how the poems respond when they are reconceived in less isolated analytical categories. The essay begins by reading the two poems simply as texts brought together. It then considers the material evidence of this particular volume before turning to the category of the “edition,” and finally reading Lucrece as a “work” that was published in many editions. At stake throughout is the central question of what it means to read a poem at this critical moment. [B.H.]AbstractThe unstable relationship between verba and res—words and things—in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost has been widely recognized among its readers and viewers, but often without sufficient context of relevant theoretical discussions actually occurring in the Elizabethan era. This essay proposes that the drama’s obsession with numbering and misnumbering might serve as a fruitful starting place for interrogating its linguistic experimentalism. After all, while sixteenth-century arithmetic manuals introduced new semiotic discussions about the referentiality of numbers, a prominent strand of Elizabethan poetic controversy revolved around how metrical numbers become meaningful within English-language verse. In particular, arguments between the classical and native-language traditions often concerned whether poetic “number” was merely an abstract tool for counting syllables (arithmos) or whether it contributed to the proportionality of the language being used (rithmos). Shakespeare’s play indirectly examines the theoretical stakes of this controversy—especially involving the referentiality of language—by continually linking the characters’ own creation of poetry to their comic confusion about how to “do things” with numbers. [B.S.]AbstractIn western literary history, wetlands often appear as nature’s ugly mistakes. Key to understanding humans’ widespread animus toward wetlands is the perception, rooted in a teleological and anthropocentric understanding of history and enshrined in early modern discourse of wetlands, that these locales are inimical to human movement and progress. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as England and Spain, in particular, experienced an expansion in mobility that rendered the world more accessible and traversable than it had ever been, their wetland encounters threatened to destabilize their global enterprises. Taking examples from the early modern Atlantic world, this essay argues that the perceived slowness of wetlands often runs athwart the circulation of dominant cultural and religious attitudes, the fast violence of conquest, and imperatives for technological progress. These “unfast” countercurrents invite reading strategies better attuned to the categorial and temporal impurities of wetlands. I offer such a reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s History of Florida (1605), where explorers’ disorientation in swamps shows the limitations of colonial mastery, and indigenous habitation practices demonstrate how humans might accommodate themselves not just to the unique ecomateriality of the terraqueous, but also to the augmenting shakiness of planetary and intellectual life. [H.E.]AbstractThis essay proposes a reinterpretation of Lady Mary Wroth’s cryptic monogram based on the discovery of the first extant printed book from her personal library: an early seventeenth-century edition of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. After an autograph manuscript of Wroth’s pastoral drama, the Penshurst Loves Victorie, Cyropaedia is only the second extant volume bearing her monogram. The symbol, whose letters unscramble to spell the names of Wroth’s fictional personae for herself and her lover, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, has long been a site of negotiation between her life and fiction. That negotiation is ongoing and more flexible than previously thought. Putting bibliography into conversation with monogramming moments in the Urania, this essay revises past readings of the monogram, arguing that the cipher incurs a shift in meaning across the two surviving volumes on which it features, from romantic to elegiac. Along the way, the essay identifies Wroth’s bookbinder for the first time and locates her within networks of material exchange. These analyses suggest a provenance for the Cyropaedia, that it was a gift copy for William, Wroth’s son by Herbert. The never-ending story of Wroth’s monogram is an example of the complex dialogue between text and physical object which is abroad in the early modern period more generally. [V.B.]AbstractThis essay argues that Edmund Spenser makes a major intervention in the Renaissance reception of the Hippolytus myth: he joins the classical imitation of humanist poetics with the theological arguments of the post-Reformation Church. Spenser forms his Hippolytus story from familiar sources, including Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium. But he also owes, as we show, a significant, underestimated debt to Seneca’s Phaedra. Spenser derives from it a language of fragmentation and tragedy relevant for both the inset narrative in Faerie Queene I.v.37–40, as well as the book’s larger representation of Redcrosse’s spiritual renewal. Spenser develops his revision of Seneca, we suggest, through the mediation of Prudentius, who in Peristephanon XI had already combined Hippolytus’ classical with his Christian significance. Prudentius adapts Seneca’s Phaedra to narrate the dismemberment of St. Hippolytus, a third-century martyr whose bodily reliquiae were enshrined in Rome’s catacombs. Like Prudentius for a late antique Spenser rewrites the Hippolytus story for the Reformed Church, representing a second Hippolytus no longer worthy of veneration. The result is a Spenserian myth more capacious in its classicism and theology than scholarship has acknowledged previously. Revising Senecan tragedy and Prudentian martyrology, Spenser extends his imitation beyond the familiar sources of Augustan poetry, his critique beyond the familiar target of Roman Catholic works. [J.E., D.A.]AbstractMuch scholarly attention has been paid, deservedly, to the metatheatrical device of the play-within-the-play. However, in this essay I attend to the scenes surrounding the play-within, in which traveling players are received and made welcome. I suggest that the repeated representation of hosts welcoming uninvited players constitutes a distinct metatheatrical device, which I term the theatrical hospitality scenario. By staging the theatrical hospitality scenario, early modern plays theorized various ways that the professional theater might (and might not) fit into different forms of hosting and guesting that fell under the aegis of early modern hospitality. Using Sir Thomas More and Hamlet as primary examples, I demonstrate that the theatrical hospitality scenario offered a discursive testing ground in which to negotiate the place of professional entertainment both within, and in opposition to, dominant notions of sociable and charitable hospitality. In Sir Thomas More, the theatrical hospitality scenario complicates the form of hosting depicted in earlier scenes of an anti-immigration riot, while in Hamlet it deconstructs the meaning of “welcome.” Across these and other examples, I argue, playwrights deployed the theatrical hospitality scenario not only as a form of pro-theatrical defense, but also to intervene in ethical questions about the meaning of hospitality itself. [K.B.]AbstractBeginning with Iago’s insults against Cassio as both “arithmetician” (1.1.18) and “counter-caster” (1.1.30), this essay explores the deep epistemological divides that the two terms suggested in the period. The essay turns to another mathematical conceit in the play, the word “gross.” Although suggesting stupidity, stolidity, and other terms of weight, the paper locates the associations of “gross” within debates on mathematical representation in the period. The essay focuses on the term gross in the period’s mathematical handbooks, particularly in John Dee’s preface to Euclid’s The Elements (1570). It shows how Dee is juggling complex epistemic issues in positing a third category between the material and the immaterial. This third category, mathematics, relies upon metaphors of the gross and ideas of movement in order to gain a foothold in Dee’s cosmic system for all forms of thought. The essay thus shows how Shakespeare’s tragedy picks up on the mathematical and representational difficulties of the term “gross” to both point to and play with the productive limitations of language. In Othello’s persistent use of “gross” to describe the inability of representation to fully reach its auditors, the essay uncovers a similar concern with the gaps between language and mental apprehension. Both mathematics and Othello, that is, traffic in the concerns over what is gross, what can never be gross, and characters’ need to imagine objects and ideas as gross in order to theorize computations. [K.W.]AbstractThis essay argues that the famously ambivalent treatment of popular representation in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608) is rooted in the play’s examination of a specific class of political representative: the plebeian tribunes of ancient Rome. It begins by tracing the extensive and deeply polarized reception of these officers in English prose before discussing their role in several earlier plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In both print and performance, the imagined figure of the tribune lent historical specificity and human weight to early modern debates about the abstract idea of popular representation, increasingly understood during the period as a political structure through which the material needs of the common people—and perhaps even their distinctive habits or ways of living— might be integrated into government without plunging it into the chaos of direct popular rule. Guided by these contemporary engagements with the tribunate, the essay demonstrates that the tribunes of Coriolanus neither straightforwardly defend nor subvert the political agency of the play’s Roman citizens. Instead, the play advances a more self-reflexive, theatricalized vision of popular representation that opened up new intellectual and aesthetic avenues for exploring this topic in the following decades. [A.B.]AbstractThe tabernacle became an early modern European emblem in the works of John Donne, John Milton, and the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573). An emblem had long been understood as a mosaic artwork rather than the word-and-image genre it came to be in Renaissance emblem books. The emblematic tabernacles are mosaic: they are inlaid, three- dimensional, objets d’art that express the ongoing Divine Presence in the post-Tridentine world of their makers. The centerpiece of my essay is a substantial analysis of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible’s emblematic tabernacle, which was based in a Christian Hebraist interpretation of the tabernacle in the Book of Exodus and inflected by the emblematic mindsets of its creators. This Bible includes a neo-Latin treatise on the tabernacle and an engraving of it: both are crucial for understanding its tabernacle-as-emblem as well as understanding Donne’s and Milton’s. All their emblematic tabernacles engage the transmission of the Divine Presence from Mount Sinai, through the Word-Made- Flesh in Christ, to the doctrinal controversies in their own post-Tridentine Europe. All figure Scripture or scriptural exegesis. And all resonate with the biblical tabernacle and reverberate with issues of sacred philology important to Christian humanists, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. [T.G.]AbstractThis essay surveys criticism on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, from 1999 until 2020. Work in this area has continued to expand over the past two decades along with broader establishment of the field of early modern women’s writing. Shifting away from biographically centered analyses, recent scholarship has demonstrated the formal and stylistic innovation, rich intertextuality, and material history of Pembroke’s writings, as well as Pembroke’s literary influence and the creative significance of her editorial work. Pembroke’s writings also foreground important issues related to form, genre, and textual transmission in the early modern context, including musical performance. The essay concludes by outlining some areas for further work. Pembroke’s engagement with transnational networks warrants further exploration, as does the question of how Pembroke scholarship might further contribute to field-changing conversations about race in premodern studies. Digital scholarship has the potential to further illuminate the complex circulation and reception history of Pembroke’s writings; future scholarly and pedagogical work on Pembroke will likely also be shaped by online tools and modalities expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent studies that have demonstrated how Pembroke’s writings complicate established categories of gender, form, and authorial and editorial practice are also opening up important avenues for further study in relation to book history, the new formalism, and gender and queer studies. [M.H., K.L., C.D.]"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463"VOLUME 52 (2022)." English Literary Renaissance, 52(3), pp. 455–463DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 52, Number 3Autumn 2022Renaissance Fictions Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722216 Views: 9Total views on this site Crossref reports no articles citing this article.