‘The story shall be changed’: antique fables and agency in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This essay explores the role of the story – allusion, paradigm, precedent and narrative structure – as an agent of change in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With a particular focus on women, this essay analyses the pivotal role that story telling provides in Shakespeare’s construction of both opportunity and imagination

Before we sleep : Macbeth and the curtain lecture

Macbeth is unusual in its representation of marital intimacy and in its central dynamic of a husband and wife working together in partnership. The article argues that this intimacy is realized in the imaginary private space of the curtained bed and through the speech form known as the curtain lecture.PostprintPeer reviewe

“Underwor(l)ds”, l'Ancien et le Nouveau : de Virgile à Ben Jonson

This piece explores, first, the transition to modernity as this is marked by the emergence into the lexis of the word underworld and the elaboration of its semantic boundaries from the first decade of the XVIIth century to the last decade of the XXth; second, the anticipation of the modern sense of the word (to denote the urban criminal class) in the work of Ben Jonson. Associating the universe of the world-as-spectacle with the Virgilian place of the dead from the outset of his career as a playwright (in the 1590s) Jonson subsequently inflects this association in the direction of the modern sense of underworld (without using the word itself), as critics' use of the word to characterise the universe of Bartholomew Fair (1614) signals. By tracing the development of this association in his writing we thus trace the emergence of an ideologically loaded topography of the “new world” of modern, urban London