Stellifying Shakespeare: Celestial Imperialism and the Advent of Universal Genius

No Abstract

Angling for the "Powte": a Jacobean Environmental Protest Poem

In his monumental 1662 history of the drainage of the fens, the antiquarian William Dugdale reports that outraged locals composed “libellous songs” to protest the theft of their commons. Preserving a rare specimen of this genre, Dugdale printed an anonymous ballad entitled “The Powtes Complaint.” The song adopts a non-human point of view to bewail the destruction of both the wetlands ecology and the fen-dwellers’ economy. This essay examines four different manuscripts of the ballad in the British Library, documenting their variants and commenting on their significance. It also seeks for answers to some pressing questions: when was the song written and where? What did it sound like? What socio-historical and environmental circumstances prompted its composition? How does the ballad portray the fenland ecology, and how does it compare with other seventeenth-century literary representations of the fens? What exactly is a pout? What is the nature of its complaint? And who was the person behind the song

"Chameleon's Dish: Shakespeare and the Omnivore's Dilemma"

This essay situates Shakespeare's Hamlet within the emergent discourse of ethical vegetarianism in early modern England, challenging the prevailing assumption that the English were a nation of robust beef-eaters. Specifically, it argues that Hamlet has undertaken a commemorative fast for his father, which implies that he likely eschewed meat. It documents Hamlet's repulsion with butchery and his morbid fascination with the physiological decay of the flesh, culling further evidence in the Prince's denunciations of meat-eating in Shakespeare's source. It relates Hamlet's delay to his qualms about cold-blooded butchery, and deciphers the murder of Polonius as an ironic reenactment of the folk-play known as the Killing of the Calf. Finally, the essay unravels the metaphysical and ecocritical implications of Hamlet's fast. By blurring the animal/human boundary, the tragedy problematizes the unthinking acceptance of carnivorism as divinely ordained by the Judeo-Christian traditio