Shakespeare was not a citizen of London. But the language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London 'freemen' and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. Through three chapters, the book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major...

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama explores textual representations of love and desire between female characters in a number of plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed richly diverse tropes of female homoerotic desire. This book analyzes a significant body of dramatic texts, many identified for the first time, that reveal the way playwrights conceived of desire between women, including Philaster, Hymen's Triumph, The Lover's Melancholy, The Doubtful Heir,...

The essays in this volume explore the Mediterranean both as a physical and cultural space, and as a conceptual notion that challenges the boundaries between East and West. It emphasizes the Ottoman Mediterranean, by exploring a variety of literary and non-literary texts produced between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth centuries.

Romance was the preeminent narrative form through which medieval Christendom imagined its encounter with the world. But in the early modern period, religious war and commercial and colonial expansion radically changed the terms of that encounter. This book traces the process through which Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others adapted, revised, or resisted romance, mapping a world of increasingly uncertain allegiances and affiliations. Early modern romance re-imagined the world, and in the process decisively rearticulated the relations between "Christendom," "Islam," and "Europe." By...

This book reveals that seventeenth-century women's very marginality to traditional institutions of church and state made them catalysts for imagining an expanded public culture beyond these institutions. Women authors such as the conduct writer Dorothy Leigh, the prophet Sarah Wight, and the poet Katherine Philips recast sites of private dialogue-the extended family, the religious coventicle, and the poetic coterie-as the bases of public debate that crossed national borders. By revealing women writers' key role in the heated controversies of this period, Gray offers a new reading of those...

Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures in the early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of that experience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that the English encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representations inspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire, but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of...

This book engages in an interdisciplinary study of the establishment and entrenchment of gender roles in early modern England. Drawing upon the methods and sources of literary criticism and social history, this edited volume shows how politics at both the elite and plebeian levels of society involved violence that either resulted from or expressed hostility toward the early modern gender system. Contributors take fresh approaches to prominent works by Shakespeare, Middleton, and Behn as well as discuss lesser known texts and events such as the execution of female heretics in Reformation...

This book surveys the genesis of the modern conception of memory where gender becomes crucial to the processes of memorialization and suggests ways in which technology opens a new chapter in the history of memory.

This book argues that the sixteenth-century preoccupation with rehabilitating English tells the larger story of an anxious nation redirecting attention away from its own marginal, minority status by racially scapegoating the 'barbarous' African.

This volume offers a unique historical perspective on the ways that everyday life in early modern London both challenged and constituted manhood. Through the close examination of literary texts, primary sources, and the material artifacts of urbanity, leading authors in the field of early modern studies explore a range of bad behaviors--binge drinking at taverns, dicing at gaming houses, and procuring prostitutes at barbershops--in order to challenge the notion that a corrupt city ruined innocent young men. This collection shows that alternative modes of manhood radically revised the...