Despite prevailing stereotypes, the Muslim women in Cervantes’ captivity plays are forthright, ambitious and endowed with considerable agency. Though there is no evidence that Cervantes had read Erasmus, yet his portrayal of women shows them as standing their ground during adversity.

El reflejo del islam en dos obras de Lope de Vega.

Portrayal of Muslims in Cervantes drama

Portrayal of Otherness in Lope’s dramas

In this work I show how the writings of Spanish historians such as José Antonio Maravall, Américo Castro y Dominguez Ortiz have been useful in the teaching of Calderon’s drama in India.

In this work I show how the writings of Spanish historians such as José Antonio Maravall, Américo Castro y Dominguez Ortiz have been useful in the teaching of Calderon’s drama in India.

This article examines the conversion to Christianity of the prince Tayco in the comedia de santos Los mártires del Japón by Lope de Vega and the creation of the Dominican missionary Alonso de Navarrete as a dramatic character. Lope portraits Tayco as a young prince who has to learn how to become a king, having Navarrete as a role model. Lope c…[Read more]

Sepharadim participated in the Hispanic vernacular culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Even in the time of al-Andalus many spoke Hispano-Romance, and even their Hebrew literature belies a deep familiarity with and love of their native Hispano-Romance languages. However, since the early sixteenth century the vast majority of Sepharadim have never…[Read more]

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]

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]

Review for The Seventeenth Century of Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, _The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Changed the World_ and Marco Barducci, _Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718_