Renaissance Studies Commons^™

“Sad Stories Of The Death Of Kings”: Lyric And Narrative Release From Confining Spaces In Shakespeare’S Richard Ii, Jennifer C. Vaught

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The relation of Shakespeare's plays to other literary forms like lyric and narrative is a topic that continues to invite speculation. A number of his plays contain songs and sonnets, reported stories and winter’s tales. In this essay I examine lyrics and narratives in Richard II and their dialogic relation to the surrounding text. In a play about a self-enclosed King these utterances tend to occur in enclosures: Richard delivers lyrics while immured at Flint Castle and the dungeon at Pomfret, whereas his Queen laments in an enclosed garden and promises to tell the King’s story during her exile in …

“Murder Not Then The Fruit Within My Womb”: Shakespeare’S Joan, Foxe’S Guernsey Martyr, And Women Pleading Pregnancy In Early Modern English History And Culture, Carole Levin

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When the character Joan La Pucelle has been captured and is brought before Warwick and York to be condemned at the end of Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, she at first denies her shepherd father and proclaims both her noble birth and her virginity. She claims that she is issue “from the progeny of kings; virtuous and holy,” and adds proudly, “Joan of Arc hath been a virgin from her tender infancy,/ Chaste and immaculate in very thought” (5.4.38–39, 50–51). These assertions do not, however, impress York and Warwick, who order her to be taken away to her execution. At …

Review Essay: Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" In The Theatre. Studies In Theatre History And Culture Series, Lois Potter

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Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Theatare. Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, ed. Thomas Postlewait, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1997. 340 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-877-45592-9.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (1998): "The City's Usuries": Commerce And Cymbeline, Goran V. Stanivukovic

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Scholarship on early modern masculinity and male sexuality has not considered Cymbeline at any great length. Yet Cymbeline is jammed with men embroiled with the difficulties of the quest for national identity, a quest connected with the complications of shaping man's erotic identity. In Cymbeline the construction of masculinity depends upon one man's measuring of himself against another man, for example, Posthumus against Iachimo, Cloten against Posthumus; of one male community against another, of Romans against Britons. It has been a traditional tendency of gender-oriented criticism to interpret male subjectivity in Cymbeline as part of the process of forging British …

Review Essay: Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare And The Play Of Language, Frederick Kiefer

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Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1997. xix + 237 pp. $37.50.

"Make Your Proof": Interpretation And Twelfth Night'S Conclusion, Chris Roark

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That it should all depend on there being an indistinguishable twin brother always troubles me when I think about it, though never when I watch the play. Can it be that we enjoy the play so much simply because it is a wish fulfillment so skillfully presented that we do not notice that our hearts are duping our heads?

Review Essay: Marshall, Cynthia. Last Things And Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology, Richard G. Barlow

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Marshall, Cynthia. Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1991. xv + 142 pp, appendixes, works cited, index. $24.50.

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays: Hamlet to The Tempest. Routledge, London 1992. xii + 379 pp, note on the text, notes, author index, index to Shakespeare's works, subject index. $49.50 / $15.95.

The Similar Complementarity Of Othello, Maurice Hunt

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Certainly the argument that the principle of complementarity illuminates Othello is nothing new in Shakespeare studies. Over twenty years ago, Norman Rabkin, using an analogy from modern physics, described Shakespeare's characters and motifs as composing complementary wholes. The following excerpt accurately represents his reading of Othello's character: "He is what he is by virtue of what he is not. And what he is not, what he excludes from himself, rises quickly to the surface in the person of Iago. Whatever formulations we make about it, each reader senses the intimacy of the relationship between these mighty opposites, the degree to …

Review Essay: Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare's Italian Settings And Plays, Jay Farness

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Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays, St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Review Essay: Andrew Burr And John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe, Timothy P. Bryson

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Andrew Burr and John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe, Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.

Review Essay: E. A. J. Honigmann, Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly On The Tragedies And Problem Comedies, Paul R. Thomas

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E. A. J. Honigmann, Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies, St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Review Essay: Douglas Gray, Ed., The Collected Papers Of Nevill Coghill: Shakespearean And Medievalist, Paul R. Thomas

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Douglas Gray, ed., The Collected Papers of Nevill Coghill: Shakespearean and Medievalist, St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Review Essay: Leonard Tennenhouse, Power On Display: The Politics Of Shakespeare's Genres, Peggy Muñoz Simonds

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Leonaard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres, Methuen, 1986.

Review Essay: Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives, Peggy Muñoz Simonds

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Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives, St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Shakespeare's Romance Of Knowing, Maurice Hunt

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From time to time literary critics have claimed that Shakespeare's undisputed last plays—Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest—are, to varying degrees, concerned with the main characters' learning experiences. These claim range, for example, from Stephen Orgel's aargument that adversity schools Alonso and Prospero in humility to Northrop Frye's assertion that education provides the means for the protagonists of the last plays to recover some sort of paradise. In other words, critics over the years have claimed in different ways that the last plays are either educational or epistemological romances. And yet no one, to my …

What The Gardener Knew: Pruning And Power In The Troublesome Raigne Of King John And Richard Ii, Dorothea Kehler

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Lack of knowledge is a chief concern of Richard II. Throughout, whaat the audience knows is provocatively matched or exceeded by what it does not know. Information seemingly deferred remains undisclosed in a discourse of permanent deferral. Bolingbroke's purpose in accusing Mowbray, the duration and extent of Bolingbroke's ambition, Richard's reasons for exiling Mobray, Richard's feelings towards him, Richard's sexual predilections, the truth or falsity of Bagot's accusation of Aumerle, York's reasons for demanding Aumerle's death–such questions as these the play refuses to answer. In consequence, from the onset, personal and political motives in Richard II are murky; the …

Gulled Into An "I"-Word, Or Much Ado About A Pronoun, D'Orsay W. Pearson

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Despite the warning of the editors of the 1975 New Arden Twelfth Night the M.O.A.I. sequence of Maria's riddle for Malvolio is "a sequence of letters expressly designed to make Malvolio interpret them as he does, thus prolonging the comic scene," and that "attempts to wring further meaning from them are misplaced" (Lothiam and Craik 68), there is a strong probability that the letters, rather than being a meaningless sequence, were intended by Shakespeare as a fairly simple orthographic joke—one which expands Malvolio's characterization as a socially ambitious closet sybarite, deficient in a social accomplishment expected of those who would …

Review Essay: Eric Sams, Ed, Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside", Charles L. Squier

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Eric Sams, ed., Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside," St. Martin's Press, 1985.

The Seven Ages Of Pericles, Cynthia Marshall

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Pericles, swept along by the wave of interest in Shakespeare's romances, has lately received its due share of critical and theatrical attention, but it remains something of a bastard child. Pericles was originally labelled a "problem" because oof the textual controversy—exclusion from the 1623 folio, evidence of joint authorship—and the label sticks because of the common complaint that the play somehow feels different from the other plays in the canon. Uneven in style and random in structure, it seems almost to provoke disengagement. It actively resists expectations of casual plot and frustrates the urge to identify with characters on …

The Syllables Of Time: An Augustinian Context For Macbeth 5.5, John S. Tanner

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Among the most familiar lines in all Shakespeare are these Macbeth utters upon hearing the Lady Macbeth's death:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(5.5.19-28)

So familiar, indeed, is this speech …

The Sense Of An Ending In Shakespeare's Early Comedies, Deborah T. Curren Aquino

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About Shakespeare's endings, Samuel Johnson wrote:

in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labor to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented. (71-72)

In the twentieth century, Ernest Schanzer has echoed Dr. Johnson's opinion in his commentary on A Midsummer Night's Dream: "For sheer economy and multiplicity of effect it [the first scene] has no equal in any of …

Review Essay: David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances And The Royal Family, Dorothy C. Jones

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David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, University of Kansas Press, 1985. $25.00

"Use And Abuse" In Romeo And Juliet, Maurice Hunt

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Near the midpoint of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence formulates an authoritative-sounding concept which seemingly lends itself to interpreting tragedy. Gathering "baleful weeds" and "precious juiced flowers," the Friar states that everything earthly has a virtuous use and a potential abuse:

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies

In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live

But too the earth some special good doth give;

Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,

Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied, …

Shakespeare's And Plutarch's Brutus: Shakespeare's Dramatic Strategy To Undercut The Noble Image, Shirley Rish

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Modern critics of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar frequently challenge the view that Brutus was in fact "the noblest Roman of them all,' but only rarely do they completely repudiate Brutus' characterization as a patriotic idealist. They are of course aware of ironic and ambiguous elements in the tragedy, but they fail to take the step that would seem obvious: to note how Shakespeare undercut Brutus' noble image by carefully manipulating materials from the principal source for the play, Sir Thomas North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives.

Catharsis In Aristotle, The Renaissance, And Elsewhere, Thomas Clayton

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In an essay on "Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama," Stephen Orgel presents an appealing and sympathetic view of Renaissance dramatic-generic theory and practice as original, capacious, and flexible, concluding that, "like Scaliger, Shakespeare thought of genres not as sets of rules but as sets of expectations and possibilities." In relation to this finding, we should perhaps be content to be "unclear about tragic catharsis," because "at least we know it is there, convincing us that tragedy works—even if we do not know how or on whom" (p.120). As the Renaissance read Aristotle, "tragedy achieved its end by purging …