This article revisits contemporary critical debates surrounding the presence of cross-dressed boys as women on the early modern stage – in particular the question of whether or to what extent boy-actors could or should be said to represent ‘women’ or ‘femininity’ – through the Shakespearian emblem of the bloody rag or handkercher. In all but one…[Read more]

Published in #Bard, special issue of _Shakespeare Quarterly_ edited by Douglas Lanier, this essay combines the arguments of present-day neuroscience about “hard-wired” letter-recognition in the brain and theories of “intermediality” or movement between or among aesthetic methods of sensory communication with the mystical early twentie…[Read more]

Much critical ink has been spilled in defining and establishing the terms of discussion: appropriation, adaptation, off-shoot, recontextualization, riff, reworking, and so on have been used interchangeably or under erasure. This paper both examines the utility of such nice distinctions, and critiques existing taxonomies. It takes as its starting…[Read more]

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial a…[Read more]

Section of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Penn Press, 2005)

In _King Lear_ the power Goneril and Regan desire and the violence in which they participate defy orthodox notions of appropriate feminine conduct. Because power as a feminine attribute is rejected as a violation of nature, they become “evil.” Rather than assuming that real women, or good women, will not defend their own power or the sov…[Read more]