English Renaissance Literature Research Articles

The French Aesthetic of Spenser's Feminine Rhyme

David Scott Wilson-Okamura is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University. His articles on Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dante have appeared in ELH, English Literary Renaissance, Spenser Studies, and Dante Studies. He is author of two forthcoming books, Spenser's International Style and Virgil in the Renaissance.

BRIAN C. LOCKEY. Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature.

BRIAN C. LOCKEY. Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics, History and the Human

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics, History and the Human

Love's pilgrimage: the holy journey in English Renaissance literature

Love's pilgrimage: the holy journey in English Renaissance literature

Treason by words: literature, law, and rebellion in Shakespeare's England

Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England, by Rebecca Lemon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 256. Cloth $45.00. Reviewer: DENNIS KEZAR To mangle Stein on Oakland, there is not always much there here. Rebecca Lemon tantalizes us with what at certain points sounds like a compelling thesis for students and colleagues working with Renaissance English literature (historians, political scientists, and legal scholars are not encouraged by this reviewer to go any further). In its most invigorating formulation (for those of us invested in importance of words), Lemon's advertised thesis seeks to remand study of early modem treason law to language alone. What matters here is words (broadly and finally amorphously defined), and what matters much less is deeds, tyranny of things promoted by scholars such as Chicago's Bill Brown, cultural artifacts, and so forth. There is absolutely no reason I can that scholars of Renaissance literature should not - as I initially did not - find themselves immediately attracted to and sympathetic with such a project, as such a project is very much what our professional lives depend upon. The problem - or, to be more fair, my problem - is how this project of linguistic remanding devolves quickly into plot summary and diacritical recursivity (as opposed to diacritical intervention). I cannot a legal historian worth her or his salt not aware of important (and well re-documented in this monograph) transition from Edward Ill's 1352 statute defining treason as, to use Lemon's language, focused mainly on action (5). Of course this statute itself notoriously deploys problematic language - also well rehearsed in Lemon's whiggish history of what finally (in afterword, which begins with an epigraph from late Justice Rehnquist) becomes a thinly veiled allegory of presidential usurpation of republican rights: When a man doth compass or death of our lord king, of our lady his Queen ... (5). As Lemon dutifully notes, subsequent monarchs (Henry, Elizabeth, James) interpretively burden word imagine with a wealth of allegedly strict constructionist legal freight. But nowhere in this book appears a theoretical dialogue with important legal-historical scholarship on debates over mens rea in early modem common law; nor in this book could I find any evidence on continuing and neglected relevance of speech-act theory to literary scholars working on nexus of law and ethics in Renaissance. What is delivered instead sounds a bit tautological. Lemon wants to talk about the proliferation of materials and textual explosions because, well, she wants to talk about words and texts (see pages 3, 11, 13). Fair enough, but other problems become apparent when she attempts to do so. Theoretical impoverishment (not that there's anything wrong with that) can only be justified by readings of Uterary texts that justify themselves. Structurally and thematically (and effectively) this book revolves around Essex Plot and Gunpowder Plot. Textually (and mostly sensibly) this book concerns itself with Hay ward' s Henry TV, Shakespeare's R ichar d II and Macbeth, 'Donne' s Pseudo-Martyr, and Jonson's Catiline. It is of course unfair to complain about selection, but one wishes Measure for Measure, with its thematizing of mens rea v. actus reus (thoughts are no subjects) had made an appearance. More puzzling is inattention in Lemon's reading of Richard II to Exton episodes (genealogically related, of course, to Marlowe's treatment of treasonous epistolic communication/interpretation in Edward II, also ignored). One frequently gets sense that Lemon's thesis has gotten lost in local readings (again, not necessarily a bad thing). …

Was Shakespeare a Republican? A Review Essay

Was Shakespeare a Republican? A Review EssayCheney, Patrick. 2004. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. New York: Cambridge University Press. $80.00 hc. xv + 319 pp.Hadfield, Andrew. 2005. Shakespeare and Republicanism. New York: Cambridge University Press. $80.00 hc. xiii + 363 pp.Maley, Willy. 2003. Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $105.00 hc. xvii + 185 pp.Skinner, Quentin, and Martin van Gelderen, eds. 2002. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Volume One: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modem Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. $29.99 sc. xi + 420 pp.Skinner, Quentin, and Martin van Gelderen, eds. 2002. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Volume Two: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. $29.99 sc. xi + 402 pp.How do we register Shakespeare politically? For that matter, Pythagoras or Muriel Rukeyser?1 The contemporary American dichotomy of liberal and conservative does not do justice to the complexities of many a past writer and philosopher. Anachronism as well as binary thinking befuddle the mass of criticism on Shakespeare that has largely ruled him politically conservative-or neutral and invisible. A twentieth-century version of this ruling runs roughly from E. M. W. Tillyard to Blair Worden. For the former, Ulysses's speech in praise of degree or hierarchy and order in Troilus and Cressida expresses what Elizabethans-including Shakespeare-would have taken granted (1943, 9-17). For Worden, a knowledge of Renaissance politics cannot take us to the heart of Shakespeare's plays all we have on the page are speeches which conform to the characterizations of their speakers (1992, 1, 2). Shakespeare in such readings comes off as basically a conservative or pro-monarchist or as one who did not need to weigh in politically to write as poet and/or playwright.Yet what if the political relation of poetry and drama to governance was at the core of his view of his own function as a writer, as Annabel Patterson (1989, 6), Jean Howard (1994, 17-21), Constance Jordan (1997, 29-33), Laurie Shannon (2002, 7-8) and Hugh Grady (2002, 20-21) have recently contended? It is arguable that to some degree, Shakespeare saw himself as an unacknowledged legislator, an Orpheus humankind at the Global center of an unrealized public order or republic, as Pauline Kiernan has indeed argued (1996, 14-20). According to classical myth, Orpheus was the first creator of civil society a wild humanity which was tamed by the poet's music. This foundational act represents a republican moment at the very beginning of Western literature, inviting to partake in a commonweal or polity as they flock to hear the bard's song. Shakespeare recognizes this transformative power of Orphic music in The Merchant of Venice when he has Lorenzo both invoke the myth and strip it of pretensions to being an instrument of a long-lasting harmony. An unspecified poet, Lorenzo tells his beloved Jessica,Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;Since nought so hard, and full of rage,But music the time doth change his nature.The myth is a political and moral litmus-test, Lorenzo further observes, a man,not moved with concord of sweet sounds,Is fit treasons, stratagems, and spoils.(Merchant of Venice, 5. 1. 79-85)2What if Shakespeare too designed his art to convert or seduce his Globe's audience for the time, eliciting a harmony among humankind, intimating a wide-ranging wisdom regarding how people can relate civilly in personal and public ways, marrying and forming cities, example, to cite the vatic, or divinely prophetic, powers attributed to Orpheus (and Amphion) by the Roman poet Horace in his Art of Poetry? What if the poet-playwright's mission was to evoke and cast suspicion upon a universal law of nations, the way the myth of Orpheus begins in a comedy uniting humanity and ends in tragedy, with the bard literally torn apart by his own followers become stockfish, hard, and full of rage again? …

“Mounting Above the Truthe”: On Hyperbole in English Renaissance Literature

The article traces the history of theoretical definitions of hyperbole in classical and Renaissance rhetorical manuals and treatises on poetry, and explores literary uses and effects of hyperbole in a selection of literary and non-literary texts, including letters and drama, from the English Renaissance. It connects theories of hyperbole in classical treatises with those in Renaissance manuals of rhetoric, and compares those pre-modern theories to ideas about hyperbole in post-structuralist theories of eloquence. The essay also addresses the effect of hyperbole in the context of the physical stage of early modern public theatres. Some of the theoreticians included in the analysis are Aristotle, Erasmus, Quintilian, Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, John Hoskyns, Richard Sherry and Gabriel Harvey; the writers whose uses of hyperbole this essay interrogates include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, Spenser and John Dryden.

The Wisdom of Their Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the Stuart Masque

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticleThe Wisdom of Their Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the Stuart MasqueBlair HoxbyBlair HoxbyHARVARD UNIVERSITY Search for more articles by this author HARVARD UNIVERSITYPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 37, Number 1Winter 2007 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2007.00094.x Views: 49Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Blaine Greteman “Perplex't Paths”: Youth and Authority in Milton's Mask, Renaissance Quarterly 62, no.22 (Jul 2015): 410–443.https://doi.org/10.1086/599866

Recent Ecocritical Studies of English Renaissance Literature

Ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between literature and the natural world, has in recent decades made increasingly important contributions to earlier periods of literature, and has become a significant influence for scholars of the early modern world, despite specific challenges in reconstructing Renaissance ideas about nature, animals, and the environment. While a rich critical tradition in ecostudies of Shakespeare’s works has evolved, there remains much untapped but promising material in the writings of other literary figures, including women writers of the period, and in discourses from and about the local and regional material conditions of early modern England’s land, animals, plants, and environmental elements. [K.R.]

Moors, Race, and the Study of English Renaissance Literature: A Brief Retrospective

AbstractIn thirty years the study of race in early modern literature has moved from the margins of scholarship to occupy its now central role in the analysis of English Renaissance culture. Narrow typological interpretations of blackness dominated Renaissance racial studies in the past. Feminist criticism in the late 80s opened up the field in its examination of how gender and class inform constructions of racial differences – both black and white. In the past fifteen years, scholars have recognized the necessity of tracing the emergence of racial differences in a wider range of disciplines and contexts, including scientific discourse, geography, religious identity, and trade relations.

Eating Air, Feeling Smells: "Hamlet's" Theory of Performance

Previous articleNext article No AccessEating Air, Feeling Smells: "Hamlet's" Theory of PerformanceCAROLYN SALECAROLYN SALE Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 352006Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern Drama and Performance Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.35.41917445 Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2006 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Robert Stagg Humoural Versification, (Sep 2021): 13–30.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_2Chloe Kathleen Preedy The Smoke of War: From Tamburlaine to Henry V, Shakespeare 15, no.22 (Feb 2019): 152–175.https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2019.1570968Naya Tsentourou Hamlet’s ‘Spendthrift Sigh’: Emotional Breathing On and Off the Stage, (Feb 2019): 161–176.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03795-6_8Naya Tsentourou Wasting Breath in Hamlet, (Oct 2018): 39–63.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7_3Daniel L. Keegan Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet's Dramatic Theory and Ours, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 133, no.11 (Oct 2020): 71–87.https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2018.133.1.71Vin Nardizzi The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London, (Jan 2012): 119–136.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015693_8 Hee-Won Lee “By Indirections Find Directions Out”: Indirect Words as Political/Artistic Bullets in Hamlet, Journal of Classic and English Renaissance Literature 20, no.11 (Jun 2011): 149–182.https://doi.org/10.17259/jcerl.2011.20.1.149Holly Dugan Shakespeare and the Senses, Literature Compass 6, no.33 (May 2009): 726–740.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00636.xAllison P. Hobgood Pondering playgoers, (): 1–33.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139649483.002

Biography, Mythography, and Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe

Previous articleNext article No AccessBiography, Mythography, and Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe*Lukas ErneLukas ErneUniversity of Geneva Search for more articles by this author University of GenevaPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 103, Number 1August 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/499177 Views: 150Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mario Digangi Marlowe, Christopher, (Sep 2017).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118297353.wbeerlm005Jonathan Walker Reading Materiality: The Literary Critical Treatment of Physical Texts, Renaissance Drama 41, no.1/21/2 (Jul 2015): 199–232.https://doi.org/10.1086/673904Holger Schott Syme Marlowe in his moment, (Jul 2013): 275–284.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139060882.030Adam Hansen Marlowe and the critics, (Jul 2013): 346–356.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139060882.037 이철희 Eliot’s Understanding and Critical Evaluation of Marlowe, The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature 55, no.11 (Mar 2013): 349–366.https://doi.org/10.18853/jjell.2013.55.1.015Timothy D. Crowley Arms and the Boy: Marlowe's Aeneas and the Parody of Imitation in Dido, Queen of Carthage, English Literary Renaissance 38, no.33 (Nov 2016): 408–438.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2008.00131.xPaul Dean Was this the face?, English Studies 87, no.55 (Feb 2007): 539–543.https://doi.org/10.1080/00138380600779814

Shakespeare Minus 'Theory' by Tom McAlindon Bawdy and Soul: A Revaluation of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Frank Erik Pointner (review)

768 Reviews hungry theatregoers of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, if the author's claims for the unique treatment of Shakespearian comedies are treated with caution, this monograph provides a valuable detailed study of a range of texts that have received little serious scholarly attention. Oxford Brookes University Rebecca Rogers Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'. By Tom McAlindon. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 2004. xii +210 pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-3981-9. Bawdy and Soul: A Revaluation of Shakespeare's Sonnets. By Frank Erik Pointner. Heidelberg: Winter. 2003. 226 pp. ISBN 3-8253-1504-5. Shakepeare Minus 'Theory' is very largely a collection of previously published es? says and, as with all such collections, particularly given the increasing availability of journals on-line, the general and bald question of 'why republish?' raises itself. For McAlindon, the answer is a clear one: these essays are gathered together the better to present his challenge to what he sees as the current radical yet hegemonic orthodoxy in criticism of English Renaissance literature, an orthodoxy constituted in the main of the work of New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics of the 1980s and 1990s. That challenge is necessary for reasons beyond the personal; McAlindon does a good job of avoiding giving the impression that he is simply a disappointed traditionalist, raging against his tribe's loss of power. He is, as he is happy to declare, a traditional liberal humanist but he takes pride in that label not because it identifies his critical position but rather because it identifies the principles he wishes to demonstrate in his criticism?in particular the belief in scholarly standards that may be shared between opposed critics and opposed schools of criticism, standards whose sharing guarantees both intellectual tolerance and intellectual honesty, and allows productive debate. For McAlindon, the reign of the current orthodoxy is worrying as it has narrowed, homogenized, and impoverished the practice of criticism. This is a serious matter not only as it damages the profession but also because it threatens to deny undergraduates the liberal and liberating pleasures of the text that traditional humanist criticism has celebrated. Many?though, pace McAlindon, perhaps not most or all-but-a-few?have challenged this picture of the role of traditional humanist criticism, and particularly its belief in the possibility of standards that are more obviously objective than they are the self-interested means of legitimation of particular groups' practices. McAlindon does not engage directly in the theoretical arguments that centre on such issues; in? stead, in five of the nine chapters, he offers readings of Shakespeare's plays and, in a sixth, of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. These are intended to expose the limitations of the current radical but orthodox readings by offering themselves as evidence of the more productive practice of a traditional and humanist criticism. They are all interesting essays, respectively dealing with: the complexity of the Henry of Henry V; Falstaff's quasi-religious (Oldcastlean) grace under questioning; the tragedies' wonder at human nature; Coriolanus's essentialism; the importance of worship and love in The Tempest, and of setting Caliban's cursing within a dialectic of prayer; and the importance of human nature, and not just the nature of society, in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. However, while they give good evidence of McAlindon's willingness not simply to tear down but also to build up, and so demonstrate well the intellectual honesty he calls for,as essays they are more effective in exposing the limitations of other readings, generally New Historicist and Cultural Materialist, than they are in demonstrating the clear superiority oftheir own readings. This is particularly so when they suggest that anti-essentialist arguments may be discounted if we acknowledge MLR, 100.3, 2005 769 properly the importance of an Empedoclean view of nature. McAlindon's point that one can have an essentialist view of nature which nevertheless sees nature as radically unstable is an important one, and was well elaborated in Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); I am not convinced, though, that such a view provides a satisfactory explanatory model for the psychology of Shake? speare's dramatic persons. Given that, I wonder whether McAlindon's aim might have been...

The “antique guize”: Persia in The Faerie Queene

As part of a larger project investigating the figurations of Persia in Renaissance English Literature, this essay traces the matter of Persia in The Faerie Queene and attempts to address some of th...

Women, Law, and Dramatic Realism in Early Modern England

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticleWomen, Law, and Dramatic Realism in Early Modern EnglandSUBHA MUKHERJISUBHA MUKHERJICAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY Search for more articles by this author CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITYPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 35, Number 2Spring 2005 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2005.00059.x Views: 52Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Cicero on Stage: Damon and Pythias and the Fate of Classical Friendship in English Renaissance Drama

Male friendship is the source of some very bad behavior on the English Renaissance stage. All that was mine Silvia I give thee, says Valentine to his Proteus the conclusion to Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona (5.4.83). Valentine's offer of his fiancee to Proteus would be disconcerting even if it did not take place, as it fact does, on the heels of Proteus's failed attempt to rape Silvia. An equally troubling invocation of friendship appears George Peele's The Old Wives Tale, which the protagonist, Eumenides, makes a bargain to divide half of his possessions with the ghost of his Jack; when Jack lays claim to half of Eumenides' wife Delia, her husband is ready to cut his mate two rather than falsify my word unto my friend (line 933). Marlowe's Edward II ignores his queen for his Gaveston, to whom he offers access to the royal treasury and permission in our name [to] command / Whatso thy mind affects or fancy likes (1.1.168-69). And Beaumont and Fletcher's The Coxcomb, the title character demonstrates his dedication to altruistic male friendship by insisting that another man sleep with his wife.1 Each of these bizarre moments is enabled, at least part, by the ideological power of a highly theorized tradition of ideal male friendship stretching from Aristotle to Montaigne and best known sixteenthand seventeenth-century England through numerous translations and adaptations of Cicero's influential treatise on friendship, Laelius de amicitia. The nature of Renaissance friendship is receiving increasing attention by scholars of early English literature. Since Laurens J. Mills's landmark 1937 survey, One Soul Bodies Twain, which remains an indispensable resource for establishing the ubiquity of friendship medieval and especially Renaissance English literature, scholars have explored the practice of friendship the context of humanist letters, kinship, companionate marriage, economic and political alliances, monarchy and mignonnerie, patronage, artistic collaboration, and sexuality.2

Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of "the East" (review)

Reviewed by: Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of “the East”, 1576–1626 Ania Loomba Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of “the East”, 1576–1626. By Richmond Barbour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Although colonialism has been central to the analysis of early modern Europe, literary and cultural critics have been slower to turn their gaze eastwards. In the 1980s, critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Hulme made the Americas central to the study of early colonial relations, and English literary critics for a generation after tended to privilege the ‘New World’. The dominant model of colonial relations that emerged from this scholarship was that of asymmetry between powerful Europeans and the natives whom they regarded as linguistically and culturally ‘naked’.1 Coincidentally, this model of colonial relations dovetailed with Edward Said’s influential study of the relations between Europeans and non-Europeans in a different era and in a different part of the world—Orientalism also dealt with the ways in which Europeans inscribed, silenced and represented those whom they had colonized, and it too inspired a large body of postcolonial critique. Not surprizingly, literary critics who have, over the past decade or so, begun to examine the contact between early modern Europe and the East have critically engaged both these bodies of work. They have found alternative models of cross-cultural contact in hitherto neglected literary criticism, such as Samuel Chew’s The Crescent and the Rose (Oxford University Press, 1937) which offered an account of English Renaissance literature’s obsession with Muslims; in medieval literature and history, via books like Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 1977) and in world-systems theorists such as Janet L. Abu-Lughod Before European Hegemony; The World System AD 1250–1350 ( Oxford University Press, 1989). As several recent books and articles have argued, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Asians were hardly Europe’s silent other, and nor was Europe’s encounter with Asia either new or startling for either party.2 Rather, European encounters with the East had a long and complex history, and early modern Europeans both feared and admired Eastern monarchies, most notably the Turks, even as they were desperate to gain a toehold in the great Asian trade circuits. The English especially were plagued by their own belatedness and ineffectuality in these attempts. This is also the central argument of Richmond Barbour’s Before Orientalism, which examines assorted literary and cultural texts from early modern England—most notably, Richard Knolles’s massive and influential account of the Turkish empire, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603); Christopher Marlowe’s blockbuster Tamburlaine the Great (1597); William Shakespeare’s rewriting of a classic cross-cultural encounter, Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7); various Jacobean masques and mayoral pageants including Ben Jonson’s famous The Masque of Blackness, (1605) which featured Queen Anne and her maidens in blackface; the travel writings of Thomas Coryate, England’s first ‘tourist’ in Asia ( 1612–1617); as well as documents pertaining to Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1615–18). All of these writings, Barbour shows, betray both English insularity and English insecurity vis-à-vis the East. Placing these texts within the contemporary contexts of travel, trade and the theatre, Barbour traces in English writings a growing rhetorical binarism between East and West, between Muslim/ Turk and Christian, and between the contemporary decay and hoary past of the Orient. Barbour explains the disjuncture between such rhetoric and the actual position of England by asking us ‘to distinguish early modern Europe’s strategic and economic relations with, from its domestic constructions of, Asia. Agents committed to sustained negotiations in Asia typically learned more plaint, polyvalent attitudes towards various ‘others’—including those Europeans who ‘turned Turk’—than did consumers of their adventures at home in England (5). Thus its is not surprising to find that writers who never left England, such as Knolles, were more binaristic in their thinking than those who, like Coryate and Roe, actually negotiated overseas travel, or that most travel writings were more open to cultural differences than most domestic theatricals which catered to the demands of a local audience...

British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (review)

Reviews 175 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Reviews Baker, David J. and Willy Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2002; cloth; pp. xvi, 297; 10 halftone illustrations; RRP A$140, US$60, £42.50; ISBN 0521782007. This volume aims to provide a new multi-focal perspective of early modern literature and culture, one that actively engages with recent developments in historical research into the diverse significance and contradictions attached to ideas of Britishness in that period. It focuses not only on England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but also beyond their frontiers, on continental Europe and the New World, wherever people hailing from these territories – with a range of competing political and religious allegiances – happened to be. Challenging and wide-ranging, the 15 essays in this volume have been organized around the primary camps of history and literature, but by further addressing a series of themes, such as ‘Contested Peripheries’, ‘Union Questions’, and ‘Britain’s Brave New Worlds’, they fulfill the editors’ aims to promote ‘disciplinary cross-pollination’ founded on a ‘flexible, trans-island paradigm’ of British history ‘that is capable of highly nuanced elaboration’ (p. 2). The project to elaborate on, or complicate, grand narratives is evident in ‘Revising criticism: Ireland and the British model’, in which Andrew Murphy challenges the ‘Atlanticist’ model of Ireland’s colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whereby Ireland and the Irish were shown to have been counterparts of the NewWorld and its natives.Arguing Ireland’s distinctly European identity in early modern English colonial discourse, Murphy also positions his work in contrast with both the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, both of which he suggests ‘engage primarily with large-scale structures and systems of power within cultural history’ (p. 33). One of the most fascinating essays in the collection is Christopher Highley’s discussion of the intersections between religious and nationalist modes of collective identity as manifested in rivalries between Welsh and English Catholics in Rome. By extension, Highley addresses the predominance of nationalism – even of localism – in preventing successful collaboration between English Catholics and their counterparts, not only in Spain and France, but also in Ireland and Scotland and Wales. 176 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) The section on ‘British Shakespeare’ is a mixed bag. Matthew Greenfield presents an interesting discussion of 1Henry IV, which addresses its ambivalent, pluralist treatment of the national-imperial motif, and the range of shifting communities and alliances illustrated in the play, the essay preceded by a suggestion that ‘we will not have fully demonstrated the new British history’s value to literary critics until we can bring it to bear on Twelfth Night as well as Henry V’ (p. 71). Patricia Parker’s reading of the latter play, ‘Uncertain Unions: Welsh leeks in Henry V’fails to rise beyond the inevitable quibbling about ‘leeks’and ‘leaks’, or ‘breaches’; but, by contrast, Mary Floyd Wilson’s discussion of Cymbeline and the implications of the of the Briton acceptance of Roman rule and civilization as a ‘model of submission for Scotland to emulate in its union with England’ (p. 108), is a fine example of interdisciplinary work. There are significant points of convergence between some of the diverse essays in the collection, continuities which shed light on the merits of the mode of research proposed in this collection. Thus,Andrew Hadfield uncovers a similar use of the theme of the Roman colonization of ancient Britain in early modern justifications of the British colonization of the New World (pp. 164-9). Titled ‘Historians respond’, the closing section of the book provides some of the even-handed criticism of the limitations of this project. Thus, Derek Hirst argues the need for historians to incorporate some of the methodologies already established in literary study, by being ‘open to the permeability of generic and disciplinary distinctions among texts’ (p. 256). Jane Ohlmeyer, in turn, questions the perhaps excessive attention paid to Shakespeare in the volume in preference to non-canonical literature, while she also stresses the need to pay much more attention to polemical material in the Gaelic languages – and in Latin (pp. 2479 ). This is, of course, a bias which is...

Flaying Bartholomew: Jonson’s Hagiographic Parody

Next article No AccessFlaying Bartholomew: Jonson’s Hagiographic ParodyAlison A. ChapmanAlison A. ChapmanUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham Search for more articles by this author University of Alabama at BirminghamPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 101, Number 4May 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/423632 Views: 16Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: In-Hwan Doh Reading Bartholomew Fair from the Perspective of Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism, Journal of Classic and English Renaissance Literature 26, no.22 (Dec 2017): 71–98.https://doi.org/10.17259/jcerl.2017.26.2.71Eugene Giddens Recent Research on Ben Jonson, Shakespeare 12, no.44 (Aug 2016): 473–485.https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2016.1211732Andrew Moran An Emetic upon St. Bartholomew's Day: Purging, Stripping, and Reclothing the Pauline Body in Bartholmew Fair, Ben Jonson Journal 22, no.11 (May 2015): 23–40.https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2015.0120

British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, edited by David J. Baker and Willy Maley

<i>British Identities and English Renaissance Literature</i>, edited by David J. Baker and Willy Maley