Two Emendations to Measure for Measure

The purpose of this note is to attempt to justify two original emendations in my text of Measure for Measure for the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare

'The Comedy of a Duke of Ferrara' in 1598

The 'Comedy of a Duke of Ferrara' is a title of convenience for a lost play associated with the Englische Kömedianten in Germany in 1604. It appears to be linked to an extant German play, Tiberius und Annabella, and therefore to John Marston's The Fawn. This essay discusses a hitherto unnoted reference to the play in English print. The allusion acts as an anchor for all the other records and has implications, not just for the 'Comedy of a Duke of Ferrara', but also for Tiberius und Annabella, The Fawn, and - arguably - Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

Philip Henslowe's Artificial Cow

All scholars of early modern theatre history know Philip Henslowe's "Enventary tacken of all the properties for my Lord Admeralles men, the 10 of Marche 1598". This wonderfully evocative and much-discussed list of stage properties includes several objects which are linked to Thomas Dekker's lost play "Phaethon", and one which sounds particularly strange: "Item, j hecfor for the playe of Faeton, the limes dead". The entry is a long-standing puzzle in theatre history, which has been variously called "mysterious", "unexplained", and even "inexplicable". This paper is narrowly focussed on that single entry: it reopens the question of what this property was, and reconsiders what it was for

Prospero and plagiarism : Early Modern Studies and the rise of Wikipedia

In recent years, Wikipedia has emerged as one of the most prominent sources, of any sort, of information and ideas relating to what one might call early modern studies. This article considers Wikipedia's troubled relationship with conventional academic authority, and also the paradox whereby Wikipedia articles are at the same time very mutable and very persistent. As case studies, it looks in detail at the evolution and dissemination of two Wikipedia articles, on The Tempest and on the minor writer Gervase Markham. Wikipedia, it will be argued, is a project whose conflicted attitudes to knowledge and authority have parallels with the early modern

Challenges facing the Family Farm - proceedings of a seminar

The papers put forward should be valuable reference to all farmers in the wheatbelt. to bridge the gap between experts and farmers. My aim in organising this seminar was an attempt to bridge the gap between experts and farmers

Digital humanities and the lost drama of early modern England : ten case studies

This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays’ authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies