Elizabethan Research Articles

The age, the stage – and Touchstone: Shakespeare and Sidney reconsidered

The Elizabethan Age was a cruel and contradictory time. Who were the Puritans? Who attacked the stage? Sidney, glamorous young courtier and sonneteer, defender of literature, had strong Huguenot and reformed connections. Shakespeare, a conformed Catholic, gave Sidney’s fruitful arguments unexpected expression. Sidney also gave Shakespeare fruitful irritation, and the humour in some of his plays relied on audiences who knew their Sidney for the full joke. Falstaff and King Arthur have walk-on parts in this tale of paradox, with its extensive backdrop of theological savagery.

Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, Emotion by Penelope Geng

Reviewed by: Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, Emotion by Penelope Geng Jessica Winston (bio) Penelope Geng, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, Emotion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, Pp. xiv + 257 + 9 b/w illus. $75.00. Studies in early modern law and literature have emphasized professional and institutional transformations in the law, exploring topics such as legal jurisdiction, institutional legal reform, legal rhetoric, and legal training. Penelope Geng's book, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, and Emotion, examines a hitherto overlooked topic, the place of popular or communal justice in early modern legal processes. As many scholars have established, the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods witnessed several important legal transformations, including the rise of the common law as the main legal system in England, a dramatic growth in litigation, and the increasing professionalization of legal practitioners. Yet, as Geng shows, these developments diminished longstanding practices and systems of lay or communal justice, and the popular drama of the period registered and responded to these trends. Geng's book is compellingly researched and lucidly written. It also deserves careful reading, since the book offers many new insights into the legal and dramatic cultures of the period. A summary can allow us to appreciate Geng's approach and argument. The Preface presents a foundational observation: early modern drama often depicts justice as communal action. Plays sometimes overtly criticize legal professionals, but equally and perhaps more often they featured "ingenious nonprofessionals solving murders, grief-stricken avengers prevailing over wrongdoers, and oppressed folks exposing corrupt magistrates" (xii). Such representations offer a "pointed refusal of the law's relentless centralization" and "fed audiences' desire to see justice unfettered by legal rules and procedures" (xii). Why might this be? The answer has to do with early modern transformations in English law. The Introduction, "A Double Obligation," describes these transformations, presenting historical, critical, and theoretical contexts that inform the book. One crucial concept comes from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social "distinction" as it relates to law. According to Bourdieu, the legal field is "the site of a competition for the monopolistic right to determine the law" (qtd. p. 6)—that is, a competition over the question of who is authorized to understand and interpret law. In the early modern period, the common law became the dominant legal tradition in England. With this growth came a rise in the sheer number of legal professionals, such as barristers, as well as the gradual coalescence of their professional identities. Such legal professionals sometimes [End Page 414] distinguished their skills and training by denigrating the capacity of ordinary people to interpret or apply law. Sir Edward Coke's Reports (1600), for instance, contended that "reading, hearing, conference, meditation, and recordation, are necessarie … to the knowledge of the common Law, because it consisteth upon so many, & almost infinite particulars" (qtd. p. 14). Also writing in 1600, William Fulbecke denigrated the average person's ability to engage in legal interpretation, writing that "magistrates are the ministers of Lawes, the Judges are interpreters, the people are the Servants," who obtain "true libertie" by subjecting themselves to magistrates and judges (qtd. p. 16). Yet, as Geng shows, while legal professionals tried to distinguish their special learning and abilities, the drama of the time often questioned such efforts, suggesting that this seemingly superior legal learning or ability was not an undisputed or inevitable fact, but something that emerged over and against popular skepticism, criticism, even scorn of those with legal expertise. Furthermore, even as the drama of the period represented popular skepticism about the legal profession, it also "shape[d] public emotions around communal justice" (21) and it sometimes "explore[d] the complicated and messy emotions inherent in … communal action" (22). The main chapters of the book examine ways that legal authors, religious figures, dramatists, and others "sought to define lay magistracy and communal justice" (23). Chapter 1, "From Assise to the Assize at Home," discusses the history of lay justice in the assize, regional intermittent or periodic courts presided over by visiting judges of higher courts based in London. The assize emerged under Henry II as an alternative to trial by battle (30...

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England ed. by Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England ed. by Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

『파우스투스 박사』에 함축된 종교적·정치적 저항과 도덕극의 재해석

From a religious perspective, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has primarily been analyzed in two contrasting ways. Some critics have claimed that this play advocates orthodox Christianity and others have argued that Marlowe defies Christianity and the Elizabethan England in the 16th century. There are several reasons why the interpretation of this play has been divided into conflicting views: the confusion in the aftermath of the Reformation, the unexplained notoriety for Marlowe being an atheist, and much of his life and death that has remained a mystery. Both sides have taken a confrontational stance. Accordingly, these conflicting aspects have imposed limitations on analyzing his life and works from an objective perspective. In this paper, the author reinterprets the meaning of the morality play in Marlowe’s own position and conclude that Marlowe capitalized on the morality play as an effective way to ardently criticize the harsh and strict Christianity of England while avoiding the accusation that he is an atheist.

Shakespeare at work. On J. Shapiro’s book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599

The article prefaces the publication of chapter 8 (Is This a Holiday?) from J. Shapiro’s book on W. Shakespeare and examines the architecture of the intellectual docu-novel which carefully reconstructs a period in the English playwright’s life and work and shows how the social and political developments of the Elizabethan era as well as specific facts of the Bard’s biography found their way into Shakespeare’s plays dated 1599. Drawing on documentary evidence, Shapiro pieces together the events of the year that marked a turning point in Shakespeare’s work. In terms of its genre, the book follows the traditions of W. Scott’s historical novels. The author succeeds in rendering the spirit of the daily life in a 16th-c. London, and discusses, along with Shakespeare’s plays, the city’s news and gossip, sermons and pamphlets, as well as curious incidents at the court theatre, etc. On the whole, Shapiro paints a portrait of a playwright who shuns debauched London pastimes.

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England Edited by Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin. Cultures of Play. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021; pp. 332. $136 cloth, €108.99 e-book.

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England Edited by Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, and Erika T. Lin. Cultures of Play. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021; pp. 332. $136 cloth, €108.99 e-book. - Volume 63 Issue 3

Theater of Shame: The rise of online humiliation

Theater of ShameThe rise of online humiliation Charlie Tyson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On the internet, people can be selected at random and held up for the instant scorn of thousands. [End Page 122] men punish with shame," wrote the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Wyatt. It is the "greatest punishment on earth, yea! greater than death." Other forms of punishment—torture, solitary confinement—may do more to break the body and spirit. But the primitive power of shaming, and the reliability with which shame punishments are administered informally by the community as well as formally by the state, make it an especially disturbing mode of discipline. The ubiquity of shame punishments across many cultures—from the penal tattooing of [End Page 123] slaves and criminals in ancient Rome to the stocks, pillory, and cucking stool of early modern England to the practice in modern China, only recently outlawed, of roping together suspected sex workers and forcing them to march barefoot through the streets—alerts us to the likelihood that we are dealing with a human propensity that can never be banished, only contained. Shame is a consequence of many punishments. Being branded as a criminal, a deviant, or an outcast, whether with a hot iron or an orange jumpsuit, inevitably entails a humiliating loss of status. But there is a class of punishments in which shaming is the primary objective. In Shakespeare's England, for instance, the stocks and the pillory were only part of an elaborate roster of humiliations. Convicted persons, writes the historian Keith Thomas, might be branded, whipped, mutilated, carted through the streets to the sound of bells, stripped half-naked or dressed in embarrassing clothes, made to wear placards describing their offenses, or forced to ride backwards on a donkey while onlookers jeered. The feature that unites these penalties is the exhibition of the offender to the public. Shame punishments are a kind of theater in which the suffering is real and the audience is encouraged to participate. At their core is the agony of coerced display. Humiliating costumes and props or various forms of disfigurement (a shaved head, a sliced-off ear, an insignia carved into the forehead) underscore the kinship between shaming rituals and the structure of drama. Public shaming is one of humanity's most revealing categories of spectacle, a radical form of theater in which the community expresses its moral views by inflicting real injuries. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault claimed that from the nineteenth century onward, punishment for crimes became more secret, less theatrical. In post-Revolutionary France, the open cart transporting convicts to the guillotines was replaced by a closed carriage. At last, the guillotine was moved inside prison walls. "Punishment," he wrote, "had gradually ceased to be a spectacle." The cruelest punishments in contemporary American society indeed occur away from public view, in prisons, detention camps, [End Page 124] and border facilities. But the public's hunger for disciplinary spectacles has not dwindled for lack of food. In the digital world that we are building together, we have given rituals of public correction a central place. An ambient culture of shame saturates the online social environment. On such platforms as Twitter or TikTok or YouTube the risk of humiliation is ever present. Some online performers have neutralized the threat of cringe through stylized self-embarrassment: comedians riff on their own narcissism; dancers engage in cartoonish slapstick, reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin (as if, on the internet, the history of cinema is replaying itself), ensuring that they pie themselves in the face before anyone else can. The rest of us, fated to play "ourselves" before an unknown and fickle audience, must improvise other defenses. Cancel culture, callouts, online harassment, mob justice, accountability: all of these terms refer to structurally similar phenomena (the targeting of the one by the many, in front of an audience), yet none offers a neutral description. What is decried as "cancel culture" is sometimes just spirited criticism; what is endorsed as "accountability" is sometimes gratuitous and cruel. Given the confusion and sophistry that mar discussion of online shaming, it is worth keeping two facts in mind. The first...

VOLUME 52 (2022)

VOLUME 52 (2022)

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: Madness as a Literary Motif in World Literature

Abstract The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The work explores the brief literary history of mania, of divine madness as it appears in antiquity. In the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare depicts the world as a stage and the human characters and their behaviours as important pieces of the puzzle that Freud would later describe in his work dedicated to the human psyche. The article is named after Doris Lessing’s novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a novel that imagines the fantastical “inner-space” life of an amnesiac, a man supposed to be mad. Madness and moreover its depiction are mere performances of imagination on our part, because all literary endeavours on depicting madness are attempts to understand a universe, a reality, a pathology so different from our reality or what we consider to be real.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

“[S]ome vicious mole of nature”: Hamlet’s Erratic Behaviour and Brain Neurotransmitter Imbalance

The aim of this paper is to investigate, from a neuroscientific perspective, the complex but still unravelled mystery of Hamlet’s inconsistent conduct in Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. Adopting the ‘medical diagnosis’ method, the paper contends that such manifestations of Hamlet’s eccentric comportment as depression, social isolation, impulsiveness, sleep disorder, aversion to women, and procrastination, are all salient symptoms of low levels of dopamine, a vital brain neurotransmitter responsible for reward and motivation. The paper concludes that ‘dopamine deficiency’ in Hamlet’s brain has a devastating impact on his mood and outlook on life. It aggravates his depression, adversely affects his disposition, focus, cognition, and motivation and subsequently deprives him of the incentive to act. The significance of this study is that it identifies the reason for Hamlet’s hesitation, enhances understanding of the play and enriches representations of the leading role in the play on stage. Shakespeare portrays Hamlet as severely afflicted with such an intricate neural illness (not identified in Elizabethan England then), expertly dramatizing the devastating impact on his protagonist of the acute clash between will and inability. Hamlet’s hamartia is, consequently, not a fault of his making, not a commonplace Aristotelian tragic error of judgment, or a psychological personality flaw, but – as Hamlet intuitively prophesies – a birth defect, the result of ‘some vicious mole of nature

Literalising Metaphor in the Poetry of Robert Southwell☆

AbstractThis article focuses on a distinctive feature of Robert Southwell's poetic technique, namely, his approach to metaphor. I argue that a number of Southwell's metaphors have a surprisingly literal quality where their vehicles are given greater prominence than their tenors. For instance, in my reading of ‘The Burning Babe’ and ‘Christ's Bloody Sweat’, I draw attention to how the metaphor of ‘the fires of love’ comes to describe the literal burning of recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England. Here, the intense feeling figured by the tenor is actually secondary to the burning evoked by the vehicle – an inversion of the usual operation of metaphor. I connect this approach to Southwell's political context as a dissident poet, showing that our tendency to look past the vehicles of metaphors to their referents allowed him to hide political statements in plain sight. I also highlight how ‘literalising’ metaphors served Southwell's aesthetic project to reform the neo‐Petrarchan love lyric in service of religious ends. Selecting certain hyperbolic metaphors from amorous verse, Southwell charged these platitudes with new force by making them literal and so uncovering darker meanings within them.

Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England

Heather James, <i>Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England</i>

Rhetorical Swordfighting and Satire in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia

Abstract Thomas Watson’s critics have suggested that The Hekatompathia, Or Passionate Centurie of Love ambitiously aspired to be a pedagogical text, but if this work is designed to teach, then this essay suggests Watson’s manipulations of genre, style, and intertexts combine to offer a pedagogy for poets, a compilation of rhetorical postures one may employ to simultaneously deliver and disguise socio-political satire in Elizabethan England. This essay first discusses how Hekatompathia additionally signals its satirical aims by participating in the pasquinade tradition, and positioning a “pasquine piller” at the volta of this sequence of one hundred passions. Next, it shows how Watson’s “passions” intertextually recall Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des Misères de ce Temps, a collection of lyrics satirizing the French factionalism that has led to civil war, as well as Thomas Jeney’s later English translation that turns a mirror to princes toward Queen Elizabeth. Upon recognizing the Ronsardian subtexts of courtly factionalism and civil unrest associated with Watson’s “passions,” one may see how they are compounded as the poet sets them forth in the “pathetical style” of Seneca and Lucan. The civil wars of ancient Rome and subsequent imperial tyranny are frequently held up as a cautionary tales for early modern English and European rulers, but Watson’s simultaneous translation of the French Wars of Religion relocates these civil broils in England, implicating Elizabethan court dissidence and hypocrisy.

The Works of John Webster, vol. IV: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Macdonald P. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Works of John Webster, vol. IV: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Macdonald P. Jackson Andrew Hiscock The Works of John Webster, vol. IV: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn. Ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Macdonald P. Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. xxiv+641 pp. £130. ISBN 978–0–521–76601–2. In this fourth volume of the works of John Webster published by Cambridge University Press, the reader is guided expertly through the collaborative and most neglected works of his output. The editors announce in their prefatory remarks to the volume that the series had originally been conceived as a triple decker, but as time elapsed they had cause to revisit this decision. Initially, there had been no editorial (or Press) inclination to supplement the extensive editorial work accomplished by Fredson Bowers for his Dramatic Works: Thomas Decker and Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon produced in the post-war decades. Nonetheless, when the third volume of their own series rolled from the presses in 2007, the critical lie of the land had changed so radically with regard to these co-written works that attention now turned to a fourth volume covering the period 1602–24. Throughout this volume, the theatre practitioner as well as the student and the lecturer will find ample editorial support for exploring these texts often overlooked even among those of collaborative authorship in the early modern period. Interestingly, this emphasis upon the performative has led the editors to offer greater detail of punctuation and stage direction than is to be found in the original texts. More generally, each of the plays is preceded with critical, theatrical, and textual introductions from the editors as well as a sustained commentary and brief discussion of possible sources. In this way, the reader finds him- or herself in safe hands throughout. The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat. With the Coronation of Queen Mary, and the coming in of King Philip is, to all intents and purposes, a distillation or abbreviated version of a two-part play dealing with the life of Lady Jane Grey, written by Webster, Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, and Wentworth Smith and published in 1607 (2nd quarto 1612). As David Gunby points out in the Critical Introduction, this kind of biographical history play may be more familiar to readers of early modern drama in the shape of Thomas of Woodstock or Sir John Oldcastle. In fact, in the surviving version of this work, Grey is not central to the dramatic action that concentrates on Wyattʼs rebellions: the first opposing her claim to the throne; the second opposing Philip II as royal consort (perhaps training the attention of the Jacobean audience upon the rather more recently attempted rebellion by the late Earl of Essex). The rather truncated text which has come down to us may result from 'clumsy abridgement or perhaps from [End Page 282] a muddled memorial reconstruction' (p. 9), but there are nevertheless elements worthy of attention. Gunbyʼs Critical Introduction is particularly useful here in carefully pointing out the unhistorical elements that are introduced in order to generate greater dramatic energy for the intrigue. As David Carnegie points out in the Theatrical Introduction, readers should not underestimate the potential for visual splendour in this production where there is a remarkable number of aristocratic roles (as well as some rustic clownery). The opening phases of the text clearly engage with the romance genre so evident in a wide number of plays surviving from the late Elizabethan period (Grey: 'What care I though a Sheep-cote be my Pallace | Or fairest roofe of honour' (ii. 16–17, p. 50)), but of most interest to this reader was the remarkably even-handed dramatization of Mary I, who enters in scene iii 'with a Prayer Book in her hand, like a Nun' (p. 51) and then declares at court in scene xi: Wee heere release unto our faithfull peopleOur intire Subsidie, due unto the CrowneIn our...

SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR THE SYLLABUS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE COURSE IN ELT DEPARTMENTS

Using literature in language teaching as authentic material has many advantages such as developing learners’ intercultural competence, personal involvement, proficiency in the target language, creativity, critical, and analytical thinking, interpreting, speaking and communication skills. Correspondingly, the purposes of this study are to explore how many state universities have the syllabus for English Literature courses on their official websites and to find out the most preferred topics of English Literature courses in ELT programs. As a part of the qualitative data collection, online curriculums of 59 state universities were explored to find the most preferred topics of these courses. Based on the findings of the study, out of 59 universities, only 37 universities’ online syllabi of “English Literature Course I and II” were available. Also, common topics in English Literature courses’ syllabi of 37 universities were listed. Medieval English Literature - The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer, Old English Period - Beowulf, and Elizabethan Era - Shakespeare were among the most preferred topics, while Middle Age period: historic, social, literary events, Contemporary English Literature, 20th-century literature were the least preferred ones. In the conclusion part of the study, some suggestions were presented for syllabi of English Literature courses in ELT departments of universities.

Bishop Morley of Winchester, 1598–1684: Politician, Benefactor, Pragmatist, by Andrew Thomson

Born at the end of the Elizabethan era, George Morley played pivotal roles in the turbulent political and religious developments of the Restoration period. This book paints a detailed portrait of Morley’s life and deeds, from his early life, through his exile and subsequent career as dean of Christ Church Oxford, bishop of Worcester and bishop of Winchester, to his death and benefactions. The book’s subtitle, ‘Politician, Benefactor, Pragmatist’, encapsulates Andrew Thomson’s three main strands of inquiry. He focuses particularly on Morley’s involvement in debate about whether the re-established (Anglican) Church should pursue uniformity, comprehension or toleration. Some believed that doctrinal uniformity was the only way to regain control following the restoration of the bishops, while others felt that the best course was to compromise with, or even tolerate, other Protestant groups. Previous commentators have concluded that Morley was determined to enforce uniformity and quash dissent, whereas Thomson suggests that...

Female resistance to patriarchal ideology: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Through the lens of Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Sinfield

English society was patriarchal at the beginning of the modern era. The extent of masculine conventions in the Elizabethan age shows women as creatures in need of control and dominance by men. Although Elizabeth I was of great power, during her time, women were of little independence, influence and credibility. They were assigned their status via the position their husband or father held in society. Quite ironically, Elizabethan era was an epoch when women were mostly restricted in terms of social, economic and political rights. Society expected them to be wordless and obedient to their husbands. In most of Shakespeare's plays, the contrast between woman and patriarchal ideology has been portrayed. Some women’s opposition to patriarchal ideology in Shakespeare's plays and the aftermath of these tensions in literary work, are considered as the point of contrast between Stephen Greenblatt - one of the main theorists of New Historicism - and Alan Sinfield – a Cultural Materialist. As claimed by Greenblatt, the opposition of women in Shakespeare's plays is ultimately digested by patriarchal ideology. On the other hand, Sinfield and other Cultural Materialists are optimistic about the end of these oppositions in Shakespeare's plays. According to them, the contradiction within the patriarchal ideology is evinced by the presence of some women like Paulina. The present article is a study to usher how a woman's voice challenges a superior ideology.

Music and Instruments of the Elizabethan Age: The Eglantine Table Michael Fleming and Christopher Page

Renaissance woodwork, both decorative and functional, offers intriguing evidence for music history. Notable examples include the c.1480 studiolo from the ducal palace of Gubbio, its design attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini, executed by Giuliano da Majano, and now installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the study’s intricate intarsia walls show a variety of instruments in remarkable detail, together with books, scientific and mathematical devices, and other furnishings redolent of high aesthetic sensibility. Equally fascinating, an anonymous Venetian spinet also at the Metropolitan Museum, dated 1540 and commissioned by Eleonora della Rovere, bears exquisite carvings and marquetry along with a humanistic inscription testifying to the fraught relationship between instrument and player: translated, it reads, roughly: ‘I’m rich in gold and rich in tone; if you lack goodness (del buono), leave me alone.’ Here, ‘goodness’ implies personal virtue, virtuosity, and a good tune; the rhyming couplet warns the player, who must come close to the keyboard to read the inscription, that she is about to engage in intimate dialogue with an instrument possessing riches and integrity in its own right, not to be violated.