The friends, followers, and fans of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, made no small contribution to the world of early modern English letters. This essay contributes to our growing understanding of the Essex circle’s literary afterlife by contextualizing BL Additional MS 18638, an early seventeenth-century manuscript containing a partial English…[Read more]

The friends, followers, and fans of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, made no small contribution to the world of early modern English letters. This essay contributes to our growing understanding of the Essex circle’s literary afterlife by contextualizing BL Additional MS 18638, an early seventeenth-century manuscript containing a partial English…[Read more]

In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the dramatic function of Thomas of Woodstock (King Richard’s murdered uncle) has long been a source of contention and confusion. This essay argues that Woodstock’s role in the play cannot be understood without reference to Richard II’s “prehistory”: the complex series of political circumstances and events that predat…[Read more]

Though it is a critical commonplace that English revenge tragedy began with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, there has been little systematic discussion of how revenge fared as a dramatic theme before Kyd’s inaugural work. This essay reexamines the importance of revenge in early Elizabethan drama, by broadly surveying its thematic and rhe…[Read more]

The late Elizabethan Period was marked by socio-economic discontent. Amid this,
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) featured a prominent debate: whether or not
tyrannicide could solve problems. Around 1599, Essex formulated a like-minded
political revolution only to dismiss it until 1601. Yet, as providentialist and
republican debates failed t…[Read more]

BL Additional MS 17492, the so-called Devonshire Manuscript of Henrician courtly verse, is a prime example of how social and cultural phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture. Among the treasures of the Devonshire MS is a series of lyrics that chronicles a fascinating courtly intrigue of the 1530s: the illicit, clandestine marriage…[Read more]

This essay argues that humanist reading practices, methods of analysis, and aesthetics transformed traditional morality drama in the 1560s and 1570s in a way that accounts for the form’s resurgence. The essay looks closely at Ulpian Fulwell’s “Like Will to Like” (1568), William Wager’s “The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art” (1569) and…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has focused on the flowering of poetry that engaged with geographic and spatial logics in the United States in the years following the Second World War, notably in Lytle Shaw’s 2013 study Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Alongside such works as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maxim…[Read more]

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

A focus on Launcelot Gobbo as middleman and unfaithful servant enables an expanded reading of discourses of economics in The Merchant of Venice. In addition to the mercantile modes of Antonio and Shylock, the play also includes a transactional perspective in Launcelot as well as Portia’s fantasy of cornucopia. The chapter is part of Linda…[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]

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]