‘Large complaints in little papers’ : negotiating Ovidian genealogies of complaint in Drayton's Englands Heroicall Epistles

Taking as its starting point Michael Drayton's reworking of a key Heroidean topos, the heroine's self-conscious reflection on letter-writing as an activity fraught with anxiety, this essay examines the cultural and literary factors that conspire to inhibit or facilitate the emergence of a distinctive feminine epistolary voice in Englands Heroicall Epistles. In particular it seeks to explain how Drayton's female letter-writers manage to negotiate the impediments to self-expression they initially encounter and thus go on to articulate morally and politically incisive forms of complaint. It argues that the participation of Drayton's fictional writers in the authorial business of revising Ovid for an altered historical context plays a crucial role in supporting that process. This allows Drayton's heroines to recover a degree of textual authority through an independent critical engagement, by turns resistant and identificatory, with his Ovidian sources, including the Metamorphoses as well as the Heroides. A comparative analysis of the ways in which intertextual allusions to these sources are deployed by his male and female writers reveals them to be governed by a different dynamic and used for different ends. It is primarily by means of their complex, intersecting dialogues with their male correspondents and with the Ovidian models upon which they draw that Drayton's heroines are able to formulate a compelling counter-perspective on the politics of love and history

Shakespeare and the Wandering Mind

Cognitive scientists are beginning to explore the important work our minds do when attention wanes. In particular, it seems that orientation of the individual in relation to past, present, and future may be developed and maintained during periods of distraction. Shakespeare works with the potential for productive mind-wandering in characters and in audiences. In Henry V, they and we think beyond present business into the ideologies and costs of the underlying plans and possibilities. The King himself embodies the interaction of wandering and selfhood. In Much Ado About Nothing the friends and audience of Beatrice and Benedick may not be fully absorbed by their witty exchanges; there is another story to be told, in the gaps Shakespeare creates in the action of the play, in which they end up taking their inevitable roles as lovers

Sexual and political liberty and neo-Latin poetics: the Heroides of Mark Alexander Boyd

This is a post-print version. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.comThis article examines responses to the Heroides by the Scottish neo-Latin poet Mark Alexander Boyd, composed whilst in ‘exile’ in France during the 1580s and early 1590s. Boyd’s engagements reflect the priorities of contemporary humanist interpretations of the Heroides , on the one hand positioning Ovid’s poems as models for elegant Latin verse composition, and on the other reading them as guides to female sexual (mis)conduct. Such an approach tended to reinforce Renaissance prejudices about sex and gender, as Boyd’s efforts amply reveal. Yet the exorbitance of female love elegy also permitted a limited critique of such norms, and this is demonstrated in Boyd’s second set of responses, the Heroides et Hymni (1592), which suggestively collocate his personal political difficulties with women’s sexual freedom

Cuf2 Is a Novel Meiosis-Specific Regulatory Factor of Meiosis Maturation

Meiosis is the specialized form of the cell cycle by which diploid cells produce the haploid gametes required for sexual reproduction. Initiation and progression through meiosis requires that the expression of the meiotic genes is precisely controlled so as to provide the correct gene products at the correct times. During meiosis, four temporal gene clusters are either induced or repressed by a cascade of transcription factors

Reading for Evidence of Faith in Herbert's Poems

In this essay George Herbert’s representations of inward life are seen in the context of (i) the recommendations for self-examination made by theologians of his own time, and (ii) critical terms derived from modern psychological accounts of ‘Theory of Mind’. Lisa Zunshine’s emphasis on ‘embodied transparency’ and ‘metapresentation’ helps capture the way that Herbert exposes his readers to difficult but salutary self-analysis. This is not just a matter of trapping the unwary: the poems are designed for re-reading, re-voicing, and re-thinking, for considering especially the timing of discoveries about one’s own faith, and the origins of the voices that console and cajole the speakers of the poems. In Herbert’s hands, lyric form and the practice of self-scrutiny both respond dynamically to the pressures that resulted from the religious and cultural environment

Shakespeare’s Animals: Is There Anything It Is Like To Be Adonis?

This essay argues that Venus and Adonis deserves to be taken seriously as a foray into philosophical territory. When Venus acknowledges Adonis’ wish to ‘grow unto himself’, our attention should be drawn to the opacity of what human fulfilment is, and what its completion and purpose might be. The poem guides our thinking in this direction by being much more vivid in depicting the inward lives of animals and of Venus herself: where in this world is Adonis to be found, or to find himself? The substantial nature of this question, in contrast with the poem’s overall lightness, is put into context into relation to (i) modern discussions of the difficulty of inter-species ‘heterophenomenology’, (ii) scholarship on the human-animal boundary in Shakespeare and early modern culture more generally, (iii) Shakespeare’s principal source, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which offers its own configuration of animals, humans, and gods. The outcome is a reading of Venus and Adonis that sees it reach positions on the problem of the human animal that recur more manifestly and portentously in King Lear, and makes a case for a flexible understanding of the profundity of Shakespeare’s early works

Signal and Noise in Skelton

Predictive processing is one of the most significant emerging schools of thought in cognitive science. With its emphasis on anticipation and modifications as the result of ‘prediction error’, it has much to offer literary criticism, which itself has much to offer in return. This essay explores the particular pertinence of predictive processing to poetic form and to satire, with reference to three poems by John Skelton: Ware the Hauke (c. 1505), Speke Parott (1521) and Why Come Ye Nat To Courte? (1522). One key aspect of the cognitive model, the distinction between signal and noise, proves particularly germane to understanding the ways that Skelton complicates and enables readerly responses

Sonnets and the First Person Plural

This essay considers the pronoun 'we' in the love sonnets of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, in the light of developments in the study of social cognition. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists have developed the idea of an 'individual we', a state of the individual mind that is transformed by interaction with others. This idea is parsimonious, in that it does not posit, for example, a group mind, but it also allows for changes in the individual as a result of shared experience. It proves illuminating as a prompt for rethinking pronominal assertions of mutuality (some convincing, some not) in sonnets, and the poems themselves reflect back on what it is to say 'we'