This article argues that there is an implicit colonial rhetoric in images of headlessness associated with early travel narratives, especially Ralegh’s Discovery of Giuana, but also early maps, etc. The earliest draft included a bit about the same headless image coming up in one of Freud’s analyses, but the editors thought it detracted from the…[Read more]

Overview of the field soft peddling my own take on the area of study.

This article questions the orthodox reading of early English city comedies that such plays
exhibit intense national or proto-national fervor, especially articulated in terms of anti-alien
sentiment. A close examination of The Dutch Courtesan and Englishmen for My Money
shows that English playgoers were keen to see their cosmopolitan city…[Read more]

This article argues that theories of race in the early modern period worked in tandem with national identity. This can be traced not only in the various travel narratives and speculative essays about complexion difference in the period, but also in the dramatic literature through a study of plays like The Battle of Alcazar, Titus Andronicus, and…[Read more]

This article is about petitioning scenes on the early modern English stage.

Through close-readings of Mary Tudor’s royal entry, the anonymous interlude Wealth and Health, and John Christopherson’s Exhortation alongside anecdotes of popular resistance to Mary Tudor’s antiimmigrant proclamations, this article shows that rather than a strong identification with the monarch or some sense of Englishness, Londoners more closely…[Read more]