...Holly A. Crocker This article argues that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida continues an important late medieval poetic tradition that highlights the troubling consequences of virtue’s performativity for idealized women. If Chaucer is pessimistic about the potential for Criseyde’s ethical agency...

...Paul A. Kottman Shakespeare’s career moves from an explicit concern with theatrical drama to an increasing concern with what John Vyvyan called “the science of life.” This article argues that this increased concern with ethics led Shakespeare to stop writing tragedies. Shakespeare’s plays indeed...

...Patrick Gray Efforts to describe Shakespeare’s tragedies and place them within the history of the genre have been long misled by dubious assumptions about Shakespeare’s secularism dating back to the influence of German Romanticism. The use of concepts drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics has been...

... into dialogue with their early modern counterparts. This special issue focuses the conversation at an especially rich point, that of Shakespearean theater. These essays explore “premodern Shakespeare”: how Shakespeare's drama addresses and expresses the cultural revolution of the relatively recent past, and how...

... Shakespeare uses elsewhere) to “see,” “discover,” “know,” or “pluck out” mystery? The mystery of things seems here to beckon God’s spies not toward acts of apprehension but rather toward an act of assumption. This essay seeks to make sense of Shakespeare’s language of assumption by looking to a cluster...

... to political language and Timothy Hampton’s literary analysis of diplomacy, this essay examines Shakespeare’s mirror of diplomatic speech featured in Henry V (ca. 1599) in light of Jean Hotman’s reflections on parrhesia in The Ambassador (1603). Analyzing theoretical and dramatic views of parrhesiastic speech...

... heavily on the conventions of comedy. They are therefore fraught with difficult questions. When is retribution hilarious, and when is it lamentable? On what imaginative and moral conditions do tragedy and comedy depend? These questions likewise haunted dramatists such as Shakespeare, who drew heavily...

...Catherine Sanok While recent arguments for the saint play as a formal influence on the Shakespearean history play rely on a teleological notion of “secularization,” they may encourage us to rethink the genealogy of Shakespeare's earliest history plays, plays about the reign of Henry VI, who...

..., using the example of Mankind , this essay examines how the actor, seen as engaged in both collaborative and competitive play, can illuminate certain strategies in Shakespeare's work. Examples drawn from Richard III, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing , and King Lear illustrate how different kinds...

...Thomas Fulton The accession of James I triggered an outpouring of religious literature, including Shakespeare's Measure for Measure , which was performed before a royal audience on December 26, 1604. With over thirty biblical allusions and a conspicuously scriptural title, Shakespeare's most...

...Amy Appleford Shakespeare's compassionate presentation of Katherine of Aragon in All Is True is part of a conscious Catholicization of the history of the English Reformation. Neither deliberately inconsistent nor merely a representative of one historical tradition presented by a Holinshedian...

...David Schalkwyk Posing the unusual question of what Shakespeare's speech might be in relation to the texts that go under the name “William Shakespeare,” this essay puts to the question a number of assumptions in literary theory about character, subjectivity, genre, the place of the author...

... across the Atlantic as represented by De Bry and the writings of Bartolomé Las Casas, relating these rituals to Catholic ceremonies of the Eucharist, and ultimately considering the role of sacrifice in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar . Mexica sacrifice, as constructed by the discourses of discovery in De...

... by or acquired from a Chester guild that had once used it to advertise the artisanal skill of its craftsmen-players? Tracing the ass’s cultural associations implicates long-held views of the medieval/early modern divide and of Shakespeare as an author. For once the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded...

...Helga L. Duncan This essay examines Shakespeare’s representation of sacred space in As You Like It and argues that the play should be read as Shakespeare’s imaginative commentary on a changing culture of sacred spaces at the end of a century of religious reformation. Drawing on J. Z. Smith’s work...

... altered by the dissolution: prayer, otium , and withdrawal. As Tudor society sought to reshape or relocate these elements, writers including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare explored and appropriated them, crafting within their literary texts a place for the monastic impulse. Writers of the period...

...Barbara Fuchs This essay uses the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio and its eighteenth-century redaction, Double Falshood to think through the problem of Spanish sources in early modern English drama. I argue that the search for Shakespeare's hand in the texts has occluded the significance...

... the form of paintings, such as Pieter Saenredam’s St. Bavokerk with Fictive Bishop’s Tomb , or of poems recollecting vanished monuments, such as Shakespeare’s sonnets, Drayton’s Poly-Olbion , and Spenser’s Ruines of Time . A clutch of early seventeenth-century poetic memorials to lost tombs and shrines...

...Julia Reinhard Lupton This essay explores the Erasmian humanism and ecosociable sensibility of As You Like It . Both Shakespeare and Erasmus cultivated recreation and play, practiced an irenic and ecumenical approach to wisdom, respected women's virtuous capacity, and acknowledged their kinship...