Although “fabulous” animals tend to be thought of as, say, unicorns, for early modern and medieval natural history, as well as the developed attention to gender and reproduction in twenty-first century science, the “fabulous” animal might be the one next door, like, say, squirrels.

Embedded masques or masques within plays exploited an audience desire to witness elite bodies, dress, and behavior in theatrical spaces. They commodified and sold a voyeuristic look at the masque and the masquing hall, access to which was normally restricted to the elite. This essay examines a selection of 17th-century plays that dramatize…[Read more]

The Irish mantle – a type of long, heavy woolen cloak – came under regular attack by writers and lawmakers in Tudor and Stuart England. This article examines how a range of early modern English texts used the Irish mantle to establish and regulate the boundaries of national identity. The Irish were problematically similar to the English; most…[Read more]

In today’s DH environment, where big data and linked data are increasingly the focus of scholars looking for ways to extend their research questions through more expansive and complementary datasets, what is the role of the individual research project? Is its value now truly in integration and association and aggregation with other d…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

Using the techniques of Symbolic Logic this paper consolidates the theories about Shakespeare’s views on human sexuality as explored in H. M. Richmond, “Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy,” reformulating them as an algorithm demonstrating that intense love seemingly depends on encounter with a powerful; obstacle to the full realization of a relationship.

John Milton is a hero to Millennials: C. S. Lewis based Perelandra on Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy mirrors the epic; Mark Morris’s best ballet is “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso”; digital artist Terrance Lindall created virtual images of Paradise Lost for the Oxford U. Press; Comus is the originator and lead Krewe for…[Read more]

Due to the interactive affordances of twenty-first century technologies, the relationship between readers and texts is often repositioned as part of a communal experience of consumption and reproduction. Inclusive in this expanding culture are user-generated adaptations of Shakespeare, most saliently fanfic. The fanfic universe prolifically…[Read more]

This essay discusses an illustration of the opening scene of an indoor Renaissance performance, from an edition of Terrence dated 1580. This is the Prologue of the comedy “Heauton Timorumenos” (“The Self-Tormentor”) by Terence (195-159 B.C.) with an actor as the Prologue in a day-lit theatre. This setting marks the beginning of a shift away from…[Read more]

Nearly all scholars who work on medieval or early modern texts at some point work from digital facsimiles. There are advantages and disadvantages to such objects: what they might offer in terms of convenience and availability, they lack in material information. We can adjust the nature of what questions we ask of which object, consulting digital…[Read more]

This article is a review of the Haan-Lewalski OUP edition of Milton’s shorter. The book, I argue, is inexcusably difficult to use, and suggests that perhaps the time has come to replace long, very expensive tomes with digital editions.

This essay was one of the first to challenge the over-stress on close reading as the key to literary appreciation, by advocating a greater stress on literature’s broader context and its achievement in social, political, and religious terms.