Shakespearean England

In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship, and expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. She reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of the major literature of Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England.

"ABSTRACT:
This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life."

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature—how-to books on self-improvement—this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers, including but not limited to “blackness,” indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call “racism.” A careful reading of Shakespeare's plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, and Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened and otherwise indelibly marked as un-cultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism and the global early modern world.

Shakespeare and Costume is a collection of essays, edited with Patricia Lennox for Arden Press, that covers the history of costume and the Shakespearean stage from original practice to productions of the nineteenth century to the present as well as interviews with contemporary costume designers.  Bella Mirabella wrote the introduction (with Pat Lennox) and contributed the chapter entitled "'Apparel oft proclaims the man:' Dressing Othello on the English Renaissance Stage."

Although Shakespeare's Hamlet is hardly a king, he does use the royal plural. As it is usually suggested, the first and the only time when he does so is when responding to his pseudo friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern concerning his mother's demand to see him. 1 He says: "We shall obey, were she ten times our mother. Have you any further trade with us?" (Hamlet 3.2.320-1). The assumption of the royal plural has been explained as the prince's deliberate attempt to distance himself from the inquisitive interlocutors who are no longer his friends. 3 But Hamlet's subsequent "I lack advancement" (3.2.327) reveals his actual resentment at having been denied the throne. 4 The prince does not seem to mislead the king's spies by offering them "the explanation which [they] had previously suggested"when searching for traces of ambition in his character (2.2.254-64) -"and which he had denied." 5 Instead, as Marvin Rosenberg points out, this is Hamlet's "outright political declaration that he knows will get back to Claudius." 6 It should be noted that his uncle grants Hamlet the right to "Be as ourself in Denmark" (1.2.122), which may imply a status in between a prince and a king. In fact, Laertes perceives Hamlet as "the head" of the state (1.3.24), as if he did not need to "have" Claudius's voice to succeed to the throne in the future at all (cf. 3.2.328-9). Thus, in the dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Hamlet controversially puts on "the voice of the King" (3.2.328-9), using the royal prerogative of speaking in the plural, which he can consider to be one of his hereditary rights. 7 That granted, I would like to argue that the above-mentioned exchange is not the first occurrence of Hamlet resorting to the royal plural. Whilst responding to Claudius's inquiry about the title of the play, the prince says: