How will immersive virtual reality (VR) cognitively affect the audiences who interface with it to interpret Shakespeare performances? Current theories of performance and cognition are based on theatre and film audiences, but VR performances combine features of both media: a disembodied spectral presence, like a theatrical audience; and a flexible…[Read more]

English 412 is, in its official description, “A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” In this version from 2017, students focused on six revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre: plays filled with bloody violence, elevated rhetoric, and ghosts imploring…[Read more]

Sophisticated digital platforms and infrastructures offer scholarly editors opportunities to make textual materials accessible and negotiable online. Still, we feel pressure to reify the passive reading experience within a web browser. The challenge lies in constructing (or reconstructing) our texts to best provide for dynamic text and data…[Read more]

This essay argues that feminists can productively use theories of intermediality to consider postmodern representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia fabricated by women (or by creators self-identified as female, in the case of online avatars), in order to explore the following questions: under what circumstances might we imagine femininity as…[Read more]

This essay argues that feminists can productively use theories of intermediality to consider postmodern representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia fabricated by women (or by creators self-identified as female, in the case of online avatars), in order to explore the following questions: under what circumstances might we imagine femininity as…[Read more]

The belief that Francis Bacon was, from the start, a stalwart defender of royal absolutism has prevailed in scholarship despite occasional comments about Bacon’s pluralist or collaborative legal and political imagination. Building on recent revisionist work, this article questions the standard historiography. It argues that Bacon’s jur…[Read more]

Alfonso de Toledo (15th century) was, indeed, a curious guy. But he was doing something with his curiosity. He was researching and translating. He was focusing on particular themes and institutions, and giving a legal and juridical reading of them –he, as he confesses, has very little theology to forget, so even theological inventions are, for h…[Read more]

This chapter examines narratives that reflect the impact of epistemologies of otherness upon our understanding of race. Race intersects with other social factors such as class, cultural citizenship, and gender. This chapter draws on case studies of artists in exile or diaspora who interrogate their own identities, because exile brings racial…[Read more]