Center or Margin

These essays challenge received wisdoms about the English Renaissance. Like the work of the scholar to whom the volume is presented, they touch on critical theory, formalist literary criticism, intellectual history, gender studies, and archival research. The first section, “England at the Margins,” investigates the island nation’s precarious global status in the early modern period ad some of the ways in which the commercial theater worked to negotiate England’s sense of its place in the world. The second section, “Researching the Renaissance,” turns to the domestic scene with a particular emphasis on gender relations, presentational modes, and cultural anxieties. The third section, “The Human Figure on the Stage,” deals with Shakespeare’s strategies for distinguishing characters in groups, and in particular with individual attributes of masculinity, charisma, and voice. The fourth section, “Artificial Persons,” addresses the subjectivities and heightened realities of fictionalized and meditated experience. Main concerns throughout are how the academy centers some issues, what it marginalizes, and why these practices have consequence for our historical understandings.

The concluding chapter, by Barbara Stafford, discusses wonder cabinets-with which this volume has affinities. It seeks to provide not a comprehensive examination of the Renaissance but rather a collection of revisionist views on familiar subjects. A linking thread is engagement with the scholarship of Leeds Barroll. Catherine Belsey writes on the uses of psychoanalytic theory in literary interpretation; Harry Berger, Jr., on Othello, Dutch portraiture, and the privileging of regiocentrism and theatrocentrism in traditional narratives; Philippa Berry, on the idea of Venice in Elizabethan England; Raphael Falco, on characterization in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy; Jean E. Howard, on Shakespeare’s strategies of masculinity and the role of theater in early modern culture; Lena Cowen Orlin, on new histories from familiar documents regarding treason; Patricial Parker, in the tragdy of Antony and Celopatra; Phyllis Rackin, on the place of women in Shakspare’s plays and Renaissance society; Bruce R. Smith, on the aural decentering of Hamlet; Peter Syallybrass, on the marginality of England in the Renaissance world; Barbara Stafford, on visual technologies and artificial realities; and Susanne Woods, on Paradise Lost and the polymorphism of the early modern state.

ISBN 1-57591-0985

Printed in the U.S.A.

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