Volume 50 (2020)
2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/710821
ISSN1475-6757
ResumoPrevious article FreeVolume 50 (2020) Winter, 2020, pp. 1–172; Spring, 2020, pp. 173–334; Autumn, 2020, pp. 335–484Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSharon Achinstein“Here at least / We shall be free”: The Places of English Renaissance Literature (pages 1–7)Bloom, GinaTheater History in 3D: The Digital Early Modern in the Age of the Interface (pages 8–16)Chakravarty, UrvashiThe Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies (pages 17–24)Digangi, MarioRethinking Early Modern Sexuality through Race (pages 25–31)Dolan, Frances E.Hester Pulter’s Renaissance (pages 32–39)Dowd, Michelle M.Breaking Form in Early Modern Literary Studies (pages 40–46)Guibbory, Achsah“What’s Religion Got To Do With It?” (pages 47–53)Hadfield, AndrewWhere Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (pages 54–60)Hawkes, DavidBawdry, Cuckoldry, and Usury in Early Modernity and Postmodernity (pages 61–69)Howard, Jean E.Renaissance Studies for A Different Time (pages 70–75)Kewes, PaulinaA World Well Lost? (pages 76–82)Lesser, ZacharyThe Material Text Between General and Particular, Edition and Copy (pages 83–92)Magnusson, LynneConstruing Literary Texts, Constructing Linguistic History (pages 93–101)Marino, James J.Future Shakespeares (pages 102–108)Orlin, Lena CowenThe Canon and Elizabeth Carter (pages 109–115)Pangallo, Matteo“A Great Deale of Good Stuffe”: The Cyberspace Renaissance Continues (pages 116–123)Poole, KristenPainting Milton by Numbers (pages 124–130)Prescott, Anne LakeThe World of Renaissance Scholarship (pages 131–136)Sanchez, Melissa E.Woke Renaissance Studies? (pages 137–144)Smyth, AdamThe Scale of Early Modern Studies (pages 145–152)Stern, TiffanyTrencher Poetry: Non-Paper Literature, How it Means, and Why it’s Lost (pages 153–160)Yachnin, PaulScholarship at the Edge of Doom (pages 161–172)McKeen, ChristopherChristopher Marlowe, Literary History, and the Lyrical Style of Blank Verse (pages 173–203)This essay contextualizes the versification of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine among sixteenth-century efforts to reform English vernacular verse on the model of Latin unrhymed quantitative meter. Literary histories of unrhymed verse in the poetic and rhetorical theory of Roger Ascham, Gabriel Harvey, and others align the disappearance of unrhymed meter with the fall of civilizations and propose a return to classical metrics as a means of transferring the cultural and political authority of ancient Rome to Tudor England. Marlowe, however, offers in Tamburlaine an alternative literary history of unrhymed poetry through the formal affordances of blank verse. As an open form, blank verse lends itself to expansive speeches that, in the mouth of Tamburlaine, can paradoxically both produce action and arrest time. The form of blank verse thus resists the imperial teleology of its origins in the classicizing projects of the Tudor humanists. [C.M.]Dunlop, AlexanderFooles of Nature: The Epistemology of Hamlet (pages 204–232)Hamlet was written near the peak of a crisis of epistemological thinking for many Europeans. This essay argues that concern with epistemology is the central structural principle of the play, uniting many details of plot and language in ways not generally acknowledged in a modern critical discourse concerned rather with issues of individual identity and personal psychology. Reading the play with this focus, with particular attention to the broad range of assumptions and expectations of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, also helps to clarify the playwright’s values with regard to prior tradition and emergent trends, revealing the great innovator in language, drama, and verse to be staunchly and systematically resistant to some of the most important modernizing tendencies of his day. [A.D.]Edelstein, GabriellaCollaborating on Credit: Ben Jonson’s Authorship in Eastward Ho! (pages 233–255)Although the importance of Ben Jonson’s 1616 folio to the emergence of the author is already well established, the significance of collaboration to his early career has been somewhat overlooked. This essay argues that when considering Jonson’s authorship through early modern credit culture, his participation in the collaborative mechanisms of the playhouses becomes clearer. This is particularly the case with the play Eastward Ho! (1605), written alongside George Chapman and John Marston. Jonson’s early experiences of social credit in the playhouses is examined, especially his relationship with the impresario Philip Henslowe and the Admiral’s Men, as well as his later partnership with the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Close reading of Eastward Ho! reveals how Jonson, Chapman and Marston wrote the kinds of debt and credit relationships they experienced in the companies into the play’s plot. In a play deeply interested in the social effects of performance, the characters constantly enact collaborative devices to add to their credit. The play’s comic ending, dependent on performing collaborative credit, mirrors Jonson’s own immersion in the economy of obligation in the theatres. His eventual literary singularity, and his commensurate sociality, were not separate parts of his career but central to his playwriting practice. [G.E.]Munro, Lucy“As it was Played in the Blackfriars”: Jonson, Marston, and the Business of Playmaking (pages 256–295)This essay places Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! at the center of a set of textual, theatrical, and financial negotiations that are revealed by a hitherto overlooked lawsuit in the Court of Chancery. It reveals for the first time that Jonson—like Marston—had a financial stake in the Blackfriars playhouse where Eastward Ho! was performed, and it argues that the play both epitomizes and scrutinizes a set of social and literary transactions surrounding the playhouse. In doing so, it reappraises three important contexts for the production of Eastward Ho! First, it revises our understanding of the Blackfriars enterprise and its investors. Second, it reassesses the careers of Jonson and Marston in the years 1604–1606—revisiting their collaboration with Chapman, their interpersonal relationships, and the revision of Jonson’s The Case is Altered and Every Man in his Humor—and offers a new picture of Jonson as a company man. Third, it offers fresh insights into city comedy’s engagements with London during a crucial period of its development. A coda turns to Jonson’s The Alchemist, suggesting that this play glances back at Jonson’s own contractual and emotional involvement with the Blackfriars venture and its entangled financial structures. [L.M.]Streete, AdrianPolemical Laughter in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) (pages 296–333)Contemporary accounts note that audiences laughed heartily at Thomas Middleton’s scandalous play A Game at Chess. But do we really know what they were laughing at? Only partially. Drawing on recent research in early modern wit, I reconsider the place of laughter in the play and its polemical source texts by exploring significant late-Jacobean debates about religious laughter, mockery, personation, and theater. These debates enable a clearer understanding of how laughter works in the play, allowing us in turn to reassess A Game at Chess as a response to the political crisis of 1624 when war between Britain and Spain seemed imminent. [A.S.]Dimmock, MatthewTudor Turks: Ottomans Speaking English in Early Modern Sultansbriefe (pages 335–358)A distinctive Ottoman voice was near-ubiquitous in late Elizabethan England, appearing in books and on stages with remarkable regularity. This essay questions the dominant assumption that such a voice emerges, fully formed, in the first part of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587). Turning to largely unknown Henrician sources in print and manuscript—in particular a letter from the Emperor of Babylon to Henry VIII—it argues for the importance of a continental Sultansbriefe (“Letters of the Sultan”) genre in which fictional letters from various Eastern potentates to Christian monarchs and the pope circulated widely. Such letters took on new forms in English contexts and reveal the different registers that voice could occupy: they could be read as satire, as travel accounts, or as news, and might be belligerent, bombastic, heroic, or pathetic. They offer a means to defamiliarize the standard “Turkish” voice of the end of the sixteenth century and show it to be a late and productive reinvention of an earlier Sultansbriefe tradition. [M.D.]Borris, KennethSpenser’s Panthea and Lucian’s: Elizabeth, Gloriana, and The Faerie Queene’s Protocols of Encomium (pages 359–390)Spenser and his friend Gabriel Harvey enjoyed reading Lucian, and at that time this ancient writer’s two dialogues celebrating Panthea were prominent exemplars of encomium for an exalted woman. Although the name Panthea also appears in The Faerie Queene, explicitly linked with Cleopolis and Gloriana, its Lucianic implications there have been hitherto unnoticed. Spenser thereby strategically invites comparison of his epic’s panegyrical enterprise with Lucian’s in those dialogues, as well as with their assessments of appropriate encomiastic expression that avoids mere flattery. Hence The Faerie Queene incorporates means of evaluating its own celebratory project, limits its praise of Elizabeth I, and ensures that its homage to her is definitively provisional. This new perspective on Spenser’s major text clarifies the significance of its fundamental conceit, Elizabeth’s idealization as Gloriana, illuminates the distinction between these two queens, and confirms the advisory and critical functions of Spenserian encomium. So as to ensure that England’s Queen remains open to instructive critique and that his own depiction of faery’s indicates a far higher standard, the poet significantly distances his actual Queen from her “true glorious type” manifested in Gloriana (I.pr.4). [K.B.]Walters, JohnJohn Donne’s Sermons: Counsel and the Politics of the Dynamic Middle (pages 391–416)I draw attention to a consistent but sometimes overlooked trait in John Donne’s sermons (delivered between 1615 and 1631): his effort to enumerate and defend the powers of preachers. Donne regularly emphasizes the preacher’s obligation to speak boldly to all members of the congregation and to set forth a message of repentance and consolation. This constant feature of Donne’s preaching, moreover, offers insight into his ambiguous political ideals. Donne cites the preacher’s duties in order to authorize his efforts to define England and its established church as privileged sites of honest counsel and amicable debate. He uses his visible, venerable position in the pulpit to recall and embody Christian humanist ideals of good advice and orderly dialogue, urging England to set aside factional strife at a time of increasing sectarian discord. Yet, while Donne powerfully articulates his vision, his idealism proves increasingly outmoded as the British Isles lurch toward the catastrophe of the Civil Wars. [J.W.]Whewell, Esther OsorioA Doctor of Another Facultie: Robert Aylett and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Poetics (pages 417–449)Despite having written hundreds of Spenserian stanzas, appearing in multiple volumes of divine poetry throughout the mid-seventeenth century, ecclesiastical lawyer Robert Aylett has been little remarked by Spenser scholars. His poems, it is widely agreed by his few commentators, are not very good. Aylett’s own texts and paratexts, however, plead indulgence of their readers on the grounds that their writer is neither a poet nor a divine but a lawyer, meddling amateurishly, with Kate Narveson’s “bible readers and lay writers,” in the domains of both literary and theological professionals. As well as one of the period’s overlooked Spenserians, then, Aylett is also useful as a figure for disrupting Richard Helgerson’s “literary system” of professional, amateur, and laureate poets, to find a space instead for the committed interdisciplinarian who commits his interdisciplinarity chiefly by way of poetics. This essay sets Aylett’s writing in the light of current and contemporary critical approaches to interdisciplinarity, to consider the motives and mechanics of borrowing rhymes to speak devotion. [E.O.W.]Gouws, JohnKairic Complexity in Fulke Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (pages 450–484)Fulke Greville’s major prose work has for many generations puzzled and misled its readers. In this essay I suggest how often-occluded rhetorical presuppositions may be used to clarify the nature of historically embedded textual conduct. In particular, I deploy the resources of rhetorical agency to trace the exigencies of ethos, occasion, and audience through Greville’s composition and revision of his Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, and to suggest that a work composed for a select Jacobean readership resorted to the attitudes and language of Elizabeth’s last decade to represent selectively people and events in the earlier years of her reign. The work has come down to us as an amalgam of two projects—a dedication to Sidney and a summary history of Elizabeth—which was subjected to one major revision and many minor ones in the processes of preparing separate working copies. Greville changed his mind often, but did not revise systematically, and much of the puzzlement induced by the Dedication arises from his working habits. One further change of mind had far-reaching consequences: Greville’s decision to abandon composition and revision. It was not published with the bulk of his literary works in the posthumous Certain Learned and Elegant Workes of 1633, but had to wait almost two decades to be repurposed by another agent in 1652 as The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. Because agency is constitutive of holistic understanding, there are implications for how textual, including rhetorical, literary, critical, and editorial, conduct proceeds: we, as self-interpreting agents, are bound reciprocally to acknowledge and respect the self-disclosures and self-enactments manifested through conduct other than our own. [J.G.]Joseph Moxon, A Tutor to Astronomy and Geography (1686) in the collection at the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 50, Number 3Autumn 2020 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710821 Views: 164 © 2020 by English Literary Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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