Outlandish Love: Marriage and Immigration in City Comedies

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 staged. Moreover, these plays suggest that when it came to European immigrants to England, status and wealth were far more important to the English than considerations of birthplace and ethnicity

Marion most bold : feminine transgression in the greenwood

In my project, I focus on the role and depiction of women found in the Robin Hood greenwood: specifically, those of Maid Marian. Maid Marian rarely appears in early Robin Hood texts, and especially not in a capacity in which she herself speaks, so it is striking that today she has become almost as synonymous with the greenwood in Robin Hood tales as the man himself. Indeed, one of the rare instances in which Marian plays a lead role occurs in the seventeenth-century ballad “Robin Hood and Maid Marian,” which appears in only one manuscript, after the original Robin Hood ballads of the Middle Ages, and does not seem to have been popular. This seventeenth-century ballad allots Maid Marian an agency typically reserved only for Robin’s merry men. Though I agree that Marian exhibits certain transgressive behaviors, especially in “Robin Hood and Maid Marian,” by the end of Robin Hood texts—medieval, early modern, or otherwise—though the space of the greenwood allows a certain level of freedom for the men in the texts, the “good” women in the Robin Hood texts remain noble ladies who still act as they ought to even though they live outside the confines of civilized society. The same social rules of urban society continue to apply to them, and even in the few cases where the women get to demonstrate more traditionally masculine qualities, they still must end up back in their proper role at the end of the Robin Hood ballad or play.Englis

Discandying Cleopatra: Preserving Cleopatra’s Infinite Variety in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

Taking Shakespeare’s unique use of the term “discandying” as a starting point, this essay argues that Shakespeare’s preoccupation with food preservation in Antony and Cleopatra extends and complicates a tradition interested in preservation more broadly construed, a tradition represented and embodied by the figure of Cleopatra as a medical, gynecological, and alchemical authority on renewal. Believed into the early modern period to be the author of an apparent Book of Cleopatra, Cleopatra as a figure comes to be intimately associated with preservation and the promise of immortality. Shakespeare reimagines the figure of Cleopatra as a product of an early modern preservative culture, drawing from both ancient tradition and contemporary domestic practices to produce a figure of and for consumption. Cleopatra demonstrates that far from being a process toward permanence, preservation is both dynamic and organic, requiring the potency of the “foreign” integrated with the domestic to rethink what it means to persevere in the face of discandying

“Youth is Drunke with Pleasure, and therefore Dead to all Goodnesse”: Regulating the Excess of the Erotic Early Modern Body

This article investigates the erotic and youthful body in John Fletcher’s play The Faithful Shepherdess, written for The Children of the Queen’s Revels c.1607. For many early modern scholastic, medical, and conduct manual writers, the life stage of Youth was a particularly dangerous moment in an individuals’ life, a time where the body was in a constant state of flux and ruled by unhealthy bodily excess. Fletcher’s play presents an assortment of characters who are all ruled by or obsessed with their own youthful passions. This article engages with Galenic humoral theory, an area that has been neglected in scholarship on Fletcher’s play, to provide a close analysis of Youth and erotic excess on the early modern stage

The Beauty and the Barrister: Gender Roles, Madness, and the Basis for Identity in Lady Audley\u27s Secret

This thesis examines the concept of identity in the novel Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In the mid to late Victorian period, self-definition was strongly tied to gender roles. Men were expected to be mentally active, physical strong, and morally guiding leaders of society, and women were to be their passive, pious, domestically minded followers. These expectations for behavior were so strong that those breaking them were in danger of being considered insane. In Braddon’s novel, the behavior of most characters does not align with the expectations for their gender. The exception is Lady Audley, the apparently ideal woman whose beauty and charm mask a vicious and criminal nature. Her plea of insanity, while it may offer an excuse for her unfeminine behavior, does not pardon her crimes. However, hero Robert Audley’s behavior is absolutely effeminate, but he has a strong moral sense and total devotion to his loved ones. Their deviation from or adherence to gender-appropriate behaviors does not change their essential natures. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon uses gender roles and the theme of insanity to critique the Victorian conception of identity

Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond and the arrival of Tasso's Armida in England

This essay argues that the earliest English work to offer a sustained poetic engagement with the figure of Armida, the celebrated pagan enchantress from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), is Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592). Unlike Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), who pays little attention to the enchantress herself even as he imitates Tasso directly in his construction of the Bower of Bliss, Daniel’s portrayal of his long-dead royal mistress is repeatedly, if unexpectedly, associated with Armida’s beauty. The essay considers how Daniel might have first encountered Tasso’s character in Italy, and goes on to demonstrate how frequently he translated from Tasso in describing the analogous impact of Rosamond’s beauty at the court of Henry II. A few of Daniel’s direct imitations from the Italian were detected by his contemporary Francis Davison, but many others were missed, and they have all been entirely ignored in modern criticism. This essay then seeks to demonstrate their centrality to Daniel’s conception of his spectral narrator, concluding that his translation and creative adaptation of material related to Armida from Tasso’s poem adds a significant level of interpretative ambiguity to the figure of Rosamond

Lines of Flight: Everyday Resistance along England’s Backbone

The visual and the cultural impact of ‘social industry’ has made a permanent impression on the landscape and on individual minds, whether for ill or for good, particularly in the Peak and Pennines region of northern England. In the current research we examine this impact and consider how both its visible and less apparent effects took hold and how they set in motion an ongoing process of productive/consumptive estrangement from life’s primordial forces, which continue to be alien and obscure, or else appear arcane and overly nostalgic to present-day life. Drawing on the methodology of a short film (incorporating narrative and verse) and using rock climbing as an illustration, we will invoke several, radically dynamic ‘lines of flight’ to open up and articulate an aesthetic appreciation of concrete experience in the fight against coding and to engender a call for action and passion so that we might come to a renewed belief in free activity, which can prompt us, in turn, to think about how we live and work and how we might change things

Transatlantic consumptions: disease, fame and literary nationalisms in the Davidson sisters, Southey, and Poe.

This article supplements Lawlor’s Consumption and Literature by demonstrating the complex relationships between disease and literature. Lawlor shows how the consumptive American poetesses, sisters Margaret and Lucretia Davidson, became famous for their consumptive condition and early deaths on both sides of the Atlantic, and were feted as such by prominent (mostly male) literary figures like British Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the Americans Washington Irving and Samuel Finley Breeze Morse. Edgar Allan Poe took the opportunity to convert the issue of American critics fawning over Southey’s praise from the literary motherland of Britain, into a critical space for distinctively American criticism, as dictated by himself. Poe observed that the actual quality of the Davidson sisters’ poetry was poor and that critics both British and American were seduced by the image (highly popular at the time) of consumptive femininity, poetic or not. Poe, perhaps unusually for the period, argued that a distinction should be made between text and biographical context. Lawlor suggests that the literary disease consumption became a lever for Poe to intervene in the national politics of literary criticism at a time when America was attempting to establish a distinctive national and literary-critical identity for itself

Women and the art of fiction

Women wrote about art in the nineteenth century in a variety of genres, ranging from the formal historical or technical treatise and professional art journalism, to travel writing, poetry, and fiction. Their fiction is often less ideologically circumscribed than their formal art histories: the visual arts constituted a language for writing about the social position of women, and about questions of gender and sexuality. This essay considers how women introduced the visual arts and artist figures into their fiction in critically distinctive ways, and can be said in this form to have contributed to nineteenth-century art discourse and debate