Early Modern Literary Studies

Books Received

Daniel Cadman — 2025-12-17

The Talented Mr Shakespeare, written and directed by Wilf Scolding

Kevin De Ornellas — 2025-12-17

Titania and the Things that Go Bump in the Night

Lee Raye — 2025-12-17

A major plot in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ‘distemperature’ of the seasons caused by a row between Titania and Oberon. Within the play Titania and other female characters express concerns about the environment reminiscent of eco-anxiety. One example of this is fear of snakes, which can be linked to the early modern motif that the animals sometimes slither into sleeping people’s mouths. Another example is Titania’s lullaby, a kind of magic bug-spray, sung to banish all ill-omened creatures. At the end of Act II, Oberon’s fairy eye-drops seem to act as an anti-anxiety medicine and for a short time the Fairy Queen along with others, is once again able to relate to the environment in a freer, less fearful way.

‘The Sweet Marjoram of the Salad’: Abortifacient Plants and the Shakespearean Bed Trick

Will Steffen — 2025-12-17

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, in which Helena uses a resurrection, a bed trick, and a pregnancy announcement to furnish her unwilling husband’s fidelity, has long troubled critics because Bertram’s faithless act of sleeping with a woman he thinks is not his wife seems like a poor foundation for a happy marriage. However, Helena’s knowledge of botanical pharmacology has been overlooked as a subversive solution to the play’s problematic ending. What if Helena’s pregnancy announcement is false, or prelude to an abortion? Helena’s extensive knowledge of plants and their medicinal uses (including abortifacients such as iris, rue, sweet marjoram) could procure what she really wants: financial stability through social mobility. This essay proposes that Helena has not only good reasons (plague and war) to want to avoid pregnancy with Bertram, but also the means of accessing birth control and abortifacient medicine through her knowledge of plants and their medicinal qualities. Helena’s real trick is to achieve financial security within a patriarchal framework where she may enjoy sex without the obligation of procreation. I trace Shakespeare’s bed trick from its origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where bed tricks are also fashioned as pragmatic and educational narratives about plants useful in reproductive health care. This connection between the problems caused by bed tricks and the potential solutions afforded by abortifacient plants also has potential for further exploration in other popular bed trick plays of the period, including Measure for Measure.

The Heretical Foreign Woman, the ‘Raging Turk’, and Martial Figures in Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed and The Island Princess

Sarah Johnson — 2025-12-17

John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (1609-11), a farcical domestic comedy, and The Island Princess (1619-21), a romantic tragicomedy and travel drama, share several structural similarities despite their generic differences. In a domestic setting, the earlier play presents a reverse taming narrative while also giving voice to the rampant misogyny of the would-be wife-tamer and his allies. Set in the islands of Ternate and Tidore, The Island Princess stages Malukan resistance to European resource exploitation while also portraying the Portuguese colonizers’ vituperative contempt for the islanders and their religion. The similar attitudes of patriarchs and colonizers in these plays exemplify the interconnectedness, which scholars have long pointed out, of gender and colonial discourse. This discursive connection alone, however, does not account for specific plot similarities between the plays, nor do the source materials that the plays draw upon. These similarities include the lead female character’s attempt to convert a male love interest to her ‘faith’ and the male character’s disproportionate rage in response. In each play, the male character – Petruchio in The Tamer Tamed and Armusia in The Island Princess – receives advice from his allies to rape Maria and Quisara respectively. Each play ends with the male character’s mock martyrdom and the ambiguous restoration of gender and colonial hierarchy. I argue that theatregrams are behind these structural parallels, namely, the tropes of the heretical foreign woman and of the “raging Turk.” Apart from Quisara in The Island Princess, Fletcher’s use of characters not overtly identified as a heretic or “Turk” as iterations of these well-worn tropes in effect destabilizes the tropes themselves. This destabilization, however, fails to undo the associated constructions of race as they apply to women. In each play, moreover, a civilian character appropriating a military identity embodies one of these two tropes, which contributes to the increasingly complex and varied representations of martial identity in the period.

A Tragic Hero in Epic: Satan’s Relapse into Hamlet’s ‘Problems’ in Paradise Lost

Christina Wiendels — 2025-12-17

This paper reconsiders the infamous ‘problems’ of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of the emergent self and Rachel Eisendrath’s understanding of aesthetic form. Building on Eisendrath’s claim that ‘the play [Hamlet] points toward a coherence that lies, paradoxically, beyond the play itself’ (595) and Curtis Perry’s assertion that ‘what Shakespeare does in Hamlet is better understood as part of a complex intertextual conversation than as an isolated lightning strike of appropriative genius’ (81), I show that this coherence lies in a future literary work – in this case, John Milton’s Paradise Lost – that can better, but never completely because literature is process, contain that coherence. Specifically, Satan’s tragic template is a throwback to the secular revenge hero, which is in the process of being outmoded by the Christian epic heroism that Adam and Eve represent. There is a kind of chasm between Hamlet and Satan: Hamlet’s incongruity with his setting looks forward to a more advanced, introspective (in a word, ‘modern’) kind of tragic heroism but which his secular world is unable to accommodate, and Satan’s incongruity with his setting looks back to a heroism being superseded and which is now become tragic. Further, Milton’s constellation with Shakespeare ex post facto claims a kind of Christianity in Hamlet. My analysis of these two hyper-canonical texts reveals that the ‘secularism’ of Hamlet and Satan that critics such as Harold Bloom have marked as prescient of our modern subjectivities has all along been misleading.

William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams, eds. Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Pp. 311

Andrew Griffin — 2025-12-17

Darren Freebury-Jones, Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer (Manchester University Press, 2024). ISBN 978-1-5261-7732-2

Goran Stanivukovic — 2025-12-17

David Anonby, Shakespeare on Salvation: Crossing the Reformation Divide (Pickwick Publications, 2024). xiii+292pp. ISBN 979-8-3852-0299-7; Hardcover 979-8-3852-0300-0; Ebook 979-8-3852-0301-7

Sean Lawrence — 2025-12-17

Natalia Pikli, Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture (Routledge, 2022). 272 pp. ISBN 9780367515195

Lisa Hopkins — 2025-12-17

Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, ed. by Nic Helms and Steve Mentz (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). 314 pp. ISBN 9789463724791

Ellie Donnelly — 2025-12-17

Kelly Lehtonen, Heroic Awe: The Sublime and the Remaking of Renaissance Epic (Toronto University Press, 2023). 252 pp. ISBN 9781487545369.

Irene Montori — 2025-12-17

Lorna Hutson, England’s Insular Imaginings: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland (Cambridge University Press, 2023). xii+322pp. ISBN 978 1 009 25357 4.

Christopher Ivic — 2025-12-17