To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of…[Read more]

The article focuses on the adaptation strategies used by Lope de Vega in his play El Gran Duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido (1617). This tragedy, built on material acquired from travelogues, represents the first depiction of the Russian Time of Troubles in fiction. In it, one can follow Lope de Vega’s shift from preserving the factual d…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

This course considers literary experiment instigated by the Internet and exercised on both analogue and digital platforms. When we think of “hacking,” we frequently think of solitary computer programmers in dark rooms. But hacking also implies a culture of profane disruption that closely mirrors developments in literary experimentation over the…[Read more]

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]

This essay investigates Walter Scott’s writing, across several genres, as a contribution to an environmental historiography of Scotland. One of the main research questions is whether that writing provides any evidence for an early land ethic that anticipates Aldo Leopold’s twentieth-century use of that term. Scott’s response to aesthetic…[Read more]

The idea that the US media is biased against organized labor may seem too obvious to require comment and research, but the details are quite important to understanding to to communicate more effectively between voices of the labor community and voices of management. The common assumption that labor media coverage became more skewed with the…[Read more]

Can we entertain the idea that The Taming of the Shrew can be performed and received as comedy in the post-Women’s March US? If so, would the laughter be empathetic and solidary rather than callous? The answer lies in physical theater which is uniquely poised to activate elements of farce in the play. Shrew is one of the Shakespearean comedies t…[Read more]

Can we entertain the idea that The Taming of the Shrew can be performed and received as comedy in the post-Women’s March US? If so, would the laughter be empathetic and solidary rather than callous? The answer lies in physical theater which is uniquely poised to activate elements of farce in the play. Shrew is one of the Shakespearean comedies t…[Read more]

Burial rites are social affairs, and in Africa, political actors are cultural agents whose existence, decisions and rites have been inscribed into the social fabric, history and life of the society. Their life rites, death rites and burial rites are factors of social change and factors for the renewal of life’s affirmative essences, which if…[Read more]

Early works of dramatic criticism seeking to draw parallels between ritual and drama in Africa concentrated on examining the dramatic characteristics of ritual to see how drama evolved from ritual. However, a closer application of the theories of Girard, Schechner, Smith, Hubert Mauss and Turner reveal new perspectives on the interaction between…[Read more]

Early works of dramatic criticism seeking to draw parallels between ritual and drama in Africa concentrated on examining the dramatic characteristics of ritual to see how drama evolved from ritual. However, a closer application of the theories of Girard, Schechner, Smith, Hubert Mauss and Turner reveal new perspectives on the interaction between…[Read more]

The Stage 3 revision sets up the Theory Palette with hues and tones of green (author, history, and nature), yellow (culture), purple (psyche), grey (text), red (reader), dark blue (literature), light blue (language), rose (embodiment/perception), and hot pink (intersectional feminisms).

Airbrush and pencil tools suggest color blending without…[Read more]

The first international journal of comparative literary studies, entitled Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1877-1888), was published in Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg (in former Hungary, today in Romania). The research on the pioneering multilingual journal usually foregrounds only one of the editors, Hugo von Meltzl, the young university…[Read more]

A clean copy of the Theory Palette http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6581T, this (almost) blank canvas is open to artistic and textual interventions, variations, and compositions with the intersecting concerns of author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception as blendable paint colors.