Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Fun With Palamon And Arcite: Rationale And Strategies For Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen As The Culmination Of The Shakespearean Canon, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Hardly noticed in the reception of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human several years ago was his hint that not The Tempest but The Two Noble Kinsmen makes an appropriate final accomplishment. On one level, the play is merely a stage adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, with a rather crude couple of subplots thrown in, perhaps to please the commoners. In an undergraduate forum, I am less inclined to evaluate Fletcher's contribution as distinct from Shakespeare, but I do think the play important for how it is representative of many of the co-authored English Renaissance plays …

Remixing The Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, And The Undergraduate Editor, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This essay explores the benefits and challenges of using digital editing as a platform for social knowledge production. First, I discuss the underlying impetus for the project, my choice of Scalar as a digital platform, and a number of specific assignments designed to develop skills toward the final edition. Next, I analyze examples from student work, considering the larger implications of students’ annotation choices and the thematic focus each of them chose for their acts. Finally, I outline some of the potential pitfalls of this course. My aim is to privilege students’ discovery, negotiation, and ownership of ideas. As a …

Feminine Performance In The Taming Of The Shrew: Final Speech And Missing Soliloquy, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Quevedo Y La Tupida Selva Europea Del Anacreón Castellano, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Seventeenth-Century Air History In Conversation With Antony And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

This article works to unpack the recurrences of air-related language utilized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Throughout this play, the notions of breath, wind, air, and vapor are consistently referenced, demonstrating the way in which atmospheric intangibility was a key point of exploration for contemporary scientists and philosophers. Through this analysis, it is clear that Shakespeare employs breath in three ways: the breath of (public) life, a lack of breath, and, most importantly, breath as a symbol of power and autonomy, which at times overlaps with the breath of life in ways that demonstrate contemporary conceptualizations of living beings. The …

Excremental Ecofeminism: Unearthing Waste’S Feminine And Narrative Agency In Early Modern Literature, Courtney Druzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to understand the role of forms of waste in early modern literary texts. It both offers up a theory—known as early modern excremental ecofeminism—for reading period specific texts in relation to waste and articulates how we may do so through close analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the elegies of Mary Sidney Herbert, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Mary Wroth, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, and finally, William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. It chooses a variety of genres across texts from the 1580s to the 1660s both to interrogate …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Thomas Middleton And The Plural Politics Of Jacobean Drama, Mark Kaethler

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton's dramatic works as responses to James I's governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of …

Shakespeare And The Chronicles: The Test Case Of Richard Ii, Brandon Coimbra

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Shakespeare wrote most of what we know as his English history plays rather early in his career. He was skilled at making the genre more than a copy of the published historical documents and chronicles of his day. Scholarship has long recognized his favorite sources and has established a solid collection of the material he used to bring his country’s past to life on stage. There are many scholarly studies of the influence of Froissart’s, Holinshed’s, Hall’s and Stow’s Chronicles, among others, and they usually describe what Shakespeare borrowed or sometimes even altered from those sources. What they do …

Alt Wars Of The Roses: A Guide To The Women In Shakespeare's First Tetralogy (Especially Richard Iii) For Fans Of Philippa Gregory's White Queen Series, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Since The Other Boleyn Girl made such a splash, especially with its 2008 film adaptation starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, novelist Philippa Gregory has turned out book after book of first person female narratives, historical fiction of the era of the early Tudors and the Cousins’ War. (Gregory has an aversion to calling it "Wars of the Roses" but seems to be the sole voice against that classification.) With the film series of The White Queen released in 2013, we have what some consider a fuller pop culture alternative perspective on the women who intersect with the plays that …

What Happens (And Doesn't) In Hamlet (And Who Cares?), Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This lecture, sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, uses the classic text by John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, to initiate some important considerations on appreciating and teaching Hamlet. Attached as addenda 3 is a Handout which includes the list of soliloquies, keyed to act, scene, lines, as recorded in both the Riverside 2^nd edition and Norton 3^rd edition texts.

Wilson often gravitates to conundrums of the text. Is Hamlet fearing his own mental instability when he warns Marcellus and Horatio that he may put an "antic disposition" on? Why does Shakespeare give us two versions …

Death, Discipline, And The Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric In Early Modern English Texts, Leslie Raybuck Malland

Theses and Dissertations--English

Death, Discipline, and the Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric in Early Modern English Texts locates allusions to the biopolitical culture of Early Modern England within popular English texts. Through my examination of the period’s fascination with death—public executions, newly-authorized anatomies—and the ways in which death, as well as the treatment of the dead, was authorized by and supported the ideological aims of the state, my research identifies how those themes carry over into the most popular works of the day, reviewing instances of both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric across genres to find allusions to biopower — or, state control of the biological. …

Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding

Senior Honors Theses

Though established English history portrays Elizabeth I (1533-1603) as uniting England under the new Protestant religion, recent historical evidence reveals that extensive counter-currents still existed. This thesis examines how the politico-religious beliefs of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights manifest themselves in their drama, particularly through imagery and allusions. It draws especially from Frances Yates to assert that imagery of white magic, Christian Cabala, and alchemy in these dramatists’ works refers to the pure imperial reform movement of Elizabeth’s reign, and also from Clare Asquith to illuminate a reading of Shakespeare as a playwright who encoded in his plays a Catholic message …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund

Theses and Dissertations

My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …

“Lay Down My Soul At Stake”: Of Female Friendship In The Merchant Of Venice, Othello, And The Winter’S Tale, Audrey-Melody Cubas

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I will not only shift a critical eye on both male and female friendship, but more specifically and extensively, I will examine how Shakespeare treats female friendship in three of his plays: The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. The female pairs of focus, in play order, will be Portia and Nerissa, Desdemona and Emilia, and Hermione and Paulina. Additionally, I will give an overlook of the history of Renaissance friendship portrayal in both the literary and historical accounts. This historical background will serve to highlight the clear contrast between the emphasized …

Anti-Normative Women And Queer Space In Early Modern Drama, Chelsea Brooks

Theses

The most interesting oddity about the Early Modern English stage is the overwhelming presence of the female form despite the obvious lack of female performers. Male actors performed female characters and sometimes those female characters were subversive and tested the boundaries of their constructed heteronormative society. A common comedic trope followed the crossdressed crossgendered heroine, or the boy actor dressed as women dressed as a man. This trope appears in the plays discussed in this thesis: Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 and John Lyly’s Gallathea. By adapting Michel de Certeau’s concept of space, wherein space …

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

A Poem On The Late Massacre In Virginia. With Particular Mention Of Those Men Of Note That Suffered In That Disaster, Christopher Brooke

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

‘Framed And Clothed With Variety’: Print Culture, Multimodality, And Visual Design In John Derricke’S Image Of Irelande, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This chapter argues that the twelve illustrative plates in John Derricke's Image of Ireland (1581) were the author's primary focus, aimed at readers who practiced the kinds of ‘laudable exercises’ demanded of committed Protestants: a kind of reading that was recursive, studious, and dynamic. This essay contextualises Derricke’s Image in relation to printer John Day’s output in the late sixteenth century as well as to contemporary illustrated texts from which Derricke may have drawn inspiration as a reader and woodcarver. I focus on the seven plates containing small alphabetical keys and their impact on how and in what order we …

Sexual Slander And Working Women In "The Roaring Girl", Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's "The Roaring Girl," the play's other female characters are also of interest. The "citizen wives" of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An …

Renaissance Courtesy And Book Vi Of The Faerie Queene, Matthew S. Martini

Dissertations and Theses

Book VI of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, with its chivalric and pastoral characteristics, has confounded critics for several generations. This thesis provides a chronological reading of Book VI that addresses many of its problems in the context of conduct manuals such as Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and Stefano Guazzo's Civile Conversation. Rather than dismiss many of the tensions and contradictions in the text, this study seeks to embrace them by interpreting them with Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism as expressed in The Dialogic Imagination.

In chapter one, connections are made between the opening …

The Renaissance Movement In The Irish Theatre, 1899-1949, Margaret Flaherty Diehl

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The New England Primer Improved, Unknown

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

Full title: The New England primer improved, for the more easy attaining the true reading of English. To which is added the Assembly of Divines, and Mr. Cotton's catechism. Boston, Printed by E. Draper and sold by J. Boyle, 1777

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The Wonder Of Wonders, Or, The Remarkable Discovery Of An American Hermit; : Who Lived Upwards Of 200 Years, James Buckland, John Fielding

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

Chapbook description:

The hermit was purportedly discovered by Capt. James Buckland and Mr. John Fielding, who in 1785 "agreed to travel into the western parts of this vast country, to explore the regions which belong to the United States which are yet unknown to us."

Printed in Kennebunk prior to Maine's statehood.

For more information, please refer to the library catalog.

Prieres Ordinaires Des Soldatz De L'Armee Conduite Par Monsieur Le Prince De Condé, Accommodees Selon L'Occurrence Du Temps, Louis Prince De Condé (1530-1569)

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

Morning and evening prayers for the use of soldiers, according to Calvinist rites.

Full title: Prieres ordinaires des soldatz de l'armee conduite par Monsieur le Prince de Condé, accommodees selon l'occurrence du temps = Zwey schone Gebet welche die Soldaten die unter dem herrn Printzen von Conde ligen beide Abends vnd Morgens wenn sie auf vnd von der Wacht zihen sprechen

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Bulla Reductionis Generalis Concilii Ad Civitatem Tridentinam Cum Monitione & Requisitione Prælatorum, Pope Julius Iii

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

Pope Julius III's bull announcing the re-opening of the Council of Trent in 1551 following the death of Paul III in 1549.

Full title: Bulla reductionis generalis concilii ad civitatem Tridentinam cum monitione & requisitione Prælatorum, ad illius prosecutionem p. S. D. N. D. Iulium III. pont. max

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Historia Vnd Beschreibung Des Magdenburgischen Kriegs, Sebastian Besselmeier

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

A news pamphlet detailing the various events during the siege of the Protestant city of Magdeburg by imperial forces in 1551.

Full title: Historia vnd beschreibung des Magdenburgischen kriegs, von anfang biss zum end, was sich die zeit der belegerung, innen vnd ausserhalb der Stadt zugetragen vnd verloffen hat, auch von der Schlacht vnnd furnembsten scharmutzlen thaten vnd angriffen zu beyden theilen geschehen im Iar der mindern zal, 50. vnd 51., auffs kurtzest verfasst

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Commentariorum De Bello Germanico, Luis De Avila Y Çuñiga (1500-1564)

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

A description of Charles V's war war against the Protestant league in 1546-1547, when the League was defeated at the battle of Muhlberg.

Full title: Commentariorum de bello Germanico, à Carolo V. Caesare Maximo gesto, libri duo / à Gulielmo Malinaeo Brugensi latinè redditi, & iconibus ad historiam accommodis illustrati

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Abtrucke Der Verwarungs Schrifft, Der Chur Vnd Fürsten, Auch Graffen, Herrn, Stette Vnd Stende Der Augspurgischen Confession, Unknown

Albert A. Howard Book History Collection

The Protestant nobles state their grievances against Charles V, pointing out that in arming against them he is in violation of the oath he gave when elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Full title: Abtrucke der verwarungs schrifft, der Chur vnd Fürsten, auch Graffen, Herrn, Stette vnd Stende der Augspurgischen Confession Eynungs verwandten, Jhrer yetzigen hochgenottrangten, vnd verursachten Kriegssrüftung halben, an Keyserliche Mayestat aussgangen, vnd beschehen

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