Early Modern Literary Studies

Judaizing Emilia Lanier: Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

Isak Gath — 2024-08-13

In 1973 A.L. Rowse brought Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) to much wider attention by announcing that he had identified her as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, though the claim was somewhat deflated when it was discovered that he had misread the word ‘brave’ in Dr Simon Forman’s Casebooks as ‘brown’. There was no evidence that she was ‘dark’ at all, though Rowse attempted to save his argument by emphasising her ‘Italianate’ lineage on Lanier’s father’s side (but ignoring her English mother). Six years later Roger Prior, an early supporter of Rowse, first made the claim that Lanier was in fact of Jewish extraction, the Bassano family having first moved to northern Italy (and adopted the name of the town where they settled) to escape persecution; and that they then moved to England, finding employment as royal musicians, but hiding their Jewish faith. For Prior this seems mainly to have bolstered the ‘Dark Lady’ thesis; the evidence for it was circumstantial at best, but he kept adding to and adjusting his claim for the next fifteen years until he and the musicologist David Lasocki brought out The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians in England, 1531-1665 (1995). With this Prior’s case became widely accepted, being repeated in the Dictionary of National Biography and elsewhere. A number of Italian scholars, including Giulio Ongaro, Alessio Ruffatti and Stefano Pio had in fact already challenged it on several grounds, most notably that it misrepresented the actual situation of Jews in Northern Italy in the early Sixteenth Century, that none of the documentation required of converted Jews in Venice had ever been associated with the Bassanos, and that the family could be traced back in the region to a time before the major migrations of Jews from (in particular) the Iberian peninsula from which Prior latterly claimed they came. But this has made little mainstream headway and the argument that Lanier either was, or could have been, of Jewish derivation is rarely challenged. And it has been made the basis of several highly questionable readings of her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a work of pious Protestant orthodoxy only unusual in its proto-feminist perspective. It has been the basis of increasingly extreme claims that Jewish heritage was central to Lanier’s identity (her ‘Jewish’ father died when she was only seven), that she passed on Hebrew scholarship to the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and indeed that she wrote the plays of Shakespeare. This essay is an attempt to put that genie back in the bottle.

The Passion of Lear

Michael Menase — 2024-08-13

In King Lear, feelings—especially pity and anger—are morally significant because, by motivating human behavior, affecting individuals’ attitudes, and shaping people’s ability to judge situations, they can undermine the construction of order in a community and bring harm to its members. By considering gender, the consequences of characters’ feelings and actions, and the writings of various Greek and Roman authors, I formulate three interconnected arguments that address critics’ assessments of feelings in the play and foster original insights into the play’s characters and moral implications. One, Lear does not embrace pity, because he pursues justice and power. However, two, the play does not endorse Lear’s pursuit, because it is not driven by reason. Three, King Lear endorses Stoicism by illustrating both the moral and practical dangers that emanate from pity and the decisive role of reason in creating an ordered and just society.

Preserving Women: Hospitality, Birth, and Healing in The Winter’s Tale

Heidi Cephus — 2024-08-13

Scholars have long expressed fascination with the apparent revivication of Hermione in The Winter's Tale and yet few have dwelled on the conditions that make her preservation possible. In this article, I argue that the depiction of Hermione in the final scene is part of a larger constellation of images in the play that are predicated on early modern understandings of women as preservers. In early modern England, women served as the preservers of belongings, health, food, and lineage. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina, Hermione, Perdita, and other women participate in the tradition of preservation, and yet they are often met with resistance, disparagement, and threats. I argue that Shakespeare uses depictions of hospitality, childbearing, and nursing to encourage the audience to accept women’s natural proclivity for preservation and thus avoid the “diseased” thinking that proves harmful in the play.

Gender Fluidity and Violence in Edward Herbert’s ‘Echo to a Rock’

Jean E. Graham — 2024-08-13

While the echo poems of Philip Sidney and of Barnabe Barnes have been studied in terms of gender fluidity, and Barnes’s in terms of violence, similar early seventeenth-century echo poems have been overlooked. Edward Herbert’s ‘Echo to a Rock’ continues the tradition of earlier echo poems in manipulating the feminine voice and shifting blame from the speaker to Echo so that Echo as the representative of womankind assumes responsibility for the speaker’s own actions. At the same time, not only is gender representation ambiguous in echo poems, with Echo serving as the poet’s alter ego, but also in ‘Echo to a Rock’ Echo’s gender is further undermined and confused by triangulating the conversation with the inclusion of an inanimate object, a rock which may or may not be identified with Echo, the beloved, and/or the speaker’s inmost thoughts.

‘Tis not true reason I despise, but yours’: The Influence of the Civil War ‘Satire against’ Verse Form (1640s) on the Restoration ‘Pamphlet War’ of 1679-81

Hannah Lavery — 2024-08-13

Individuals writing on the cusp of civil war show a readiness to take advantage of the print medium to circulate a suite of 'Satire against...' verses, intended for political instruction of 'the people', and incitement to action. Rochester's reinvigoration of this form in the 1670's, with his 'Satire against reason and mankind', articulates resistance to religious hegemony, and signals his primacy as a key satiric commentator of the era. The subsequent release of this poem as a broadside in 1679 marks the start of years of 'pamphlet war' in which the battle for literary and political authority rages.

Books Received

Daniel Cadman — 2024-08-13

Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, ed. by Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb and Erin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury/Arden, 2022). 296 pp. ISBN 9781350247826

Jack Murray — 2024-08-13

Bradley J. Irish, Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2023). Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Tom Rutter — 2024-08-13

David V. Urban, Milton and the Parables of Jesus: Self-Representation and the Bible in John Milton’s Writings (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). xii+316 pp. ISBN 9780271080994

Irene Montori — 2024-08-13

William C. Carroll, Adapting Macbeth: A Cultural History (London and New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 2022). xv + 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-3501-8139-7

Sean Lawrence — 2024-08-13

The Lost King (2022), a film by Stephen Frears

Kevin De Ornellas — 2024-08-13

Abridged, written by and starring Cathal J. Ferris, presented by Sixpenny Productions. Mister Shakespeare, written by Michael Barry, starring Ciaron Davies, directed and produced by Stephen Church.

Kevin De Ornellas — 2024-08-13

Holbein at the Royal Court, an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, UK 10 November, 2023 to 14 April, 2024.

Kevin De Ornellas — 2024-08-13