Description
Book SynopsisThe current volume contains nine articles reflecting a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The nine articles in this volume reflect a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. The first four essays seek reasons for the success of various Renaissance plays: Christopher Cobb examines how Thomas Heywood casts heroic action in a positive light in his romantic dramas, whereas Lucas Erneurges that Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy owes its success to its Christian portrait of Heironimo's unsuccessful attempt to recognize a benevolent deity. Robert Reeder looks at Renaissance educational manuals in order to clarify views on precocity in Richard III, Bartholomew Fair, and Twelfth Night; and Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta investigate and refute postmodern claims about a "transvestite stage." Scott Lucas shows how several sonnets of Fulke Greville's Caelica disorient the reader, underscoring the poet's doubts about human reason and perception; and Pamela Macfie illustrates how Marlowe's ghostly allusions to Ovid's Heroides in Hero andLeander darken the portrayal of the tragic lovers' frustration. The final three essays concern the 17th-century literary giants Donne and Milton: Jay Stubblefield shows Donne's 1619 sermon to the Virginia Company to be a uniquely Thomistic commentary on the conflicting motives behind England's exploits in the New World; and John Wall and John T. Shawcross explore the effects of John Milton's poems on Renaissance and modern readers. M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University.
Table of ContentsHeywood and the Politics of Admiration - Christopher Cobb Thomas Kyd's Christian Tragedy - Lukas Erne "You are now out of your text": The Performance of Precocity on the Early Modern Stage - Robert Reeder Boy Actors and the Semiotics of Renaissance Stagecraft - Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta The Ovidian Underworld in Othello 3.3 - Pamela Royston Macfie Marlowe's Ghost-Writing of Ovid's Heroides - Pamela Royston Macfie "In Abused Sense Truth Oft Miscarries": Enacting the Limits of Human Knowledge in Fulke Greville's Caelica - Scott Lucas "I have taken a contrary way": Identity and Ambiguity in John Donne's Sermon to the Virginia Company - Jay Stubblefield The Milton Effect - John N. Wall Humor, Paradise Lost, and Its Reader - John T. Shawcross
