NJES Volume 4, No. 2 (December 2005)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/223
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Item REVIEW: Claire Asquith (2004), Shadowplay. Richard Wilson (2004), Secret Shakespeare(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Sillars, Stuart JohnItem REVIEW: Anna Swärdh (2003), Rape and Religion in English Renaissance Literature(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Hopkins, LisaItem Moors, Social Anxiety and Horror in Thomas Rawlins's The Rebellion(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Fåhraeus, AnnaIn her article, Anna Fåhraeus contextualizes race within multiple images of social horror in Thomas Rawlins’s little-discussed tragedy The Rebellion (1640). While racial representation of the Moors in the play adheres to stereotype, Fåhraeus contends that the multiple racial doubling works to interrogate the certainty of nature versus culture in relation to race, even as the image of the tailors that runs through the play does the same in relation to class. Both issues—race and class—become sexualized through the juxtaposition of male and female characters and gender itself thus becomes a third site of epistemological uncertainty: are women materially changed through sexual experience or exposure? Fåhraeus suggests that The Rebellion merits serious consideration because it links the depiction of race to upward social mobility and constructions of female purity, and all three to the loss of white male privilege.Item When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Pettitt, TomThe title of Tom Pettitt's essay alludes to the massive impact on theatre historians of Sir James Frazer's monumental work on comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890). It fostered the thesis that English folk drama preserves a pre-Christian fertility ritual, which may in turn have been the point of departure for the evolutionary process culminating with Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre. When the anthropological bough breaks, the theatrical cradle must fall, and the essay urges a reassessment of the significance of folk drama in the appreciation of Elizabethan plays, against the background of a renegotiation of its place in theatre history freed of presuppositions about ritual origins.Item The Taming of a Shrew: Composition as Induction to Authorship(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Eriksen, RoyRoy Eriksen’s essay asks the question whether the notoriously unattributed The Taming of a Shrew might not in fact bear the trace of Marlowe’s hand. Recognising the tendency of critics to dismiss the play as a mere “bad quarto” of a lost play that Shakespeare drew on, Eriksen suggests that A Shrew may be Marlowe’s original work—a claim which the long-recognised presence of Marlovian allusions and Marlowe’s own propensity for self-quotation do not reject.Item "Underplayed Rivalry": Patronage and the Marlovian Subtext of Summer's Last Will and Testament(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Sivefors, PerPer Sivefors’s article addresses the issue of Nashe and authorship from the angle of imitation and literary competition. Arguing that Thomas Nashe imitated Marlowe in his only surviving play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Sivefors concludes that due to the conditions of patronage under which the play was written and probably performed, the literary rivalry represented in this text is an “underplayed” form of the often more aggressive stance found in plays written for performance at the public theatres.Item Thomas Lodge and Elizabethan Republicanism(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Hadfield, AndrewAndrew Hadfield’s article seeks to locate Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War in the context of early modern English republicanism—a context which, Hadfield argues, was also to have a great deal of importance to the early Shakespeare. Hadfield sees Lodge’s play as a pivotal text in the formation of English literary republicanism, informed by classical sources and possibly using them for the audience to draw parallels to the dynastic struggles that characterised English history.Item George Chapman's "Oedipus Complex": Intertextual Patterns in The Conspiracy and The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Florby, GunillaGunilla Florby’s essay situates George Chapman’s two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron at the intersection between topical reference and classical intertext. In particular, Florby investigates the transformation of Seneca’s Oedipus into an eloquent debate with a bearing on current political events such as the Essex conspiracy. By exploring the double take in this double play, Florby is able to sound the text’s “dynamic interaction of positions and ideologies”—something which lies at the heart of Chapman’s obsessive exploration of the classical heritage that informed his writing.Item Disgusting John Marston: Sensationalism and the Limits of a Post-Modern Marston(Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy), 2005-12) Brown, GeorgiaGeorgia Brown’s article takes issue with the idea, argued by postmodern criticism, that Marston’s dramatic texts are primarily or exclusively loci of parody, playfulness and self-reflexivity. Instead, Brown suggests, we must search for the dynamic of Marston’s plays in the dialogues they establish—“between relativism and morality, form and content, waywardness and order, plurality and identity, hedonism and obligation, nature and culture, context and artefact.” The theoretical consequence of Brown’s position is a more rigorously historicising approach that locates the issue of disgust right at the centre of Marston’s dialogic engagement.