Departing from earlier studies which regarded incest as a literary topos or dramatic metaphor foregrounding political, social, or legal issues, Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy argues that the presence of incest on the Renaissance stage is a strategy for the enactment of the spectator's tragic experience. Incest is explored neither as a sin nor as a crime, but as an "unspeakable" experience filtered through dramatic words and deeds. The incitement of desire, visual pleasure, and unconscious fantasy, as well as traumatic rejection, pain, and horror, are...

Abraham Fraunce's The Shepherds' Logic (c. 1585) is one of the first English adaptations of Petrus Ramus's Dialecticae libri duo (1556). Preserved in a manuscript also containing two shorter essays on Ramist dialectic, the work was later modified and enlarged for publication as The Lawyers' Logic (1588). But Fraunce's substantial and almost exclusive use of Edmund Spenser's The Shepherds' Calendar (1579) as the source for practical examples makes the manuscript treatise a unique document revealing the influence of the Ramist reform of the arts of discourse on the new literary elite led by...