This interview with King Sammy Silver, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin and Terri Power, explores drag as a stage practice. A London-based actor and YouTube personality, he represents a new generation of trans artists. He has worked with Power on multiple Shakespeare productions at Bath Spa University in the UK and elsewhere, and has been…[Read more]

This interview with non-binary actor Jess Chanliau, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, explores genderplay onstage. A bilingual actor, Chanliau has played Viola, “an intrinsically trans character” in Twelfth Night and a queer Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. They spoke candidly on their experience of either being toke-nized or being cast frequently as…[Read more]

Cross-gender roles and performances permeate many of Shakespeare’s plays. This special issue on contemporary transgender performance of Shakespeare was published by the open-access journal dedicated to Shakespeare and appropriation, Borrowers and Lenders, and edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. It contains research articles and interviews of actors. S…[Read more]

This article examines Mary Magdalene’s biblical identity and poetic representation in selected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish texts. An alternative reading or “re-visioning” (Adrienne Rich’s term) of the narratives that tell her story reclaims her figure from masculinist characterizations of Mary Magdalene that have made an enduring…[Read more]

Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Shakespeare’s Sonnets challenge the binaries between gender and between the vernacular and the literary. Translators take up this challenge and turn it into an opportunity for humanist interpretations of literature, as in the case of Taiwanese essayist Liang Shiqiu’s (1903–1987) translation. Widely known in the Sin…[Read more]

This chapter argues that cultural appropriation can be an exploitative act but need not be; it all depends on what users do with Shakespeare. Due to the unequal status of the parties engaged in appropriative exchange, some appropriations deploy Shakespeare to protect conventional power structures. Appropriations are rarely negotiated on a level…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

Collaborative learning as a pedagogical method effectively reflects the communal character of the performing arts. By creating knowledge about Shakespearean performance collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when we…[Read more]

The biographical trajectory of the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez can be described as exciting and his musical contribution as transcendent in an era of sublime creativity that coincided with the artistic and intellectual rediscovery of the values of classical Greco-Latin antiquity. A contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo,…[Read more]

In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Hen…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Several of Francisco de Quevedo’s hagiographic poems are puzzling because of their irreverent tone. Edward M. Wilson and Jose Manuel Blecua both noted that “la relacion entre las dos caras de un Quevedo es cuestión difícil y delicada para los modernos;” indeed, the writer’s particular blend of “las burlas con las veras” has attracted attention s…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the work of the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson in poems by Francisco de Quevedo that concern themselves with the trope of the rending of the rocks at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, and in other poetic texts of Quevedo.

Literary translations work with, rather than out of, the space between languages. Translations evolve not only across linguistic and cultural borders but also across time. It is notable that Shakespeare’s own play texts feature translational properties that can be amplified in translation. This translingual property makes Shakespeare’s text inh…[Read more]

Focussing on the Duchy of Cornwall’s organisational structure during the Wars of the Roses, this survey examines the principal offices (which evolved around administration of its marine and terrene regalities) and personnel (administrative elite) in Cornwall and Devon. Consideration of successive Princes’ Councils and counsellors (and Councils of…[Read more]

Avery Cornburgh (d.1487) of Bere Ferrers (Devon) and Dovers (Essex) – a Lancastrian, Yorkist, and Tudor household servant – was one of the appreciable numbers of crown servants utilised in local government during the fifteenth century. Serving in Cornwall and Essex as JP, MP, sheriff, and commissioner, he was prominent in Cornish affairs as a res…[Read more]

Though English supporters of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (d.1384)—known as “Lollards”—had been drawn from academic and noble/gentry circles during the later-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries, persecution, equation of heresy with sedition, and the failure of Sir John Oldcastle’s Rebellion (1414) ensured overt abandonment of Lollard i…[Read more]

The idea of the North in Western society has a long and distinguished history. Indeed, the only ‘purely ethnographic treatise that survives from antiquity’ is Tacitus’s Germania, his description of the Germanic peoples (Mellor 1993: 14). Tacitus produced his short treatise as a way of forcing Romans to confront the luxurious decadence that he fe…[Read more]