2004 Abstracts

Andrea, Bernadette (U of Texas at San Antonio) "Gender, Empire, and Exchange in the Letters of Elizabeth I"

This presentation examines the letters by Elizabeth I in Richard Hakluyt's collection of proto imperialist propaganda, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600) to non- or (quasi-) European sovereigns. With the exception of Safiye, mother to the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed III (1595-1603), all these sovereigns are male (including "the great Sophie of Persia," "the great Turke," and "the emperour of Marocco.") I therefore propose to analyze Elizabeth I's rhetorical strategies as Protestant "female prince" addressing primarily male Muslim sovereigns and to explore how these strategies compare with her address to a female Muslim of imperial stature.

Ardolino, Frank (U of Hawaii), "Peele's Praise of Elizabeth in The Old Wives Tale"

In The Old Wives Tale, Peele depicts the struggle between Protestant England and Catholicism, as represented by Sacrapant, the evil conjuror. Delia and Venelia form a dual image of arrested identity under his control. Venelia is called upon to extinguish Sacrapant's life index after he he has been dispatched by Jack. She can do this because of her special status as "neither wife, widow, nor maide." These materials translate into Protestant meaning with the imprisoned women serving as a composite analogue of Elizabeth in her various paradoxical domestic and political guises as virgin queen and wife and mother to her country.

Bailes, Melissa (UNC-Greensboro) "Mysticism and Prophecy: Private Inspiration and Poetic Translation in Henry Vaughan's "Unprofitableness"

Through a close reading of his poem, "Unprofitableness," I argue that Henry Vaughan viewed himself as the translator of spiritual truths dictated by God. I illustrate the resulting tension between Vaughan's direct, mystical experiences and his position as a poet/prophet, communicating the words of the divine. "Unprofitableness" perfectly displays Vaughan's feelings of inadequacy as he agonizes over that crucial step from individual mysticism to poetic translation for the community. By exploring Vaughan's use of relevant scriptural text, conventions of courtly love poetry, and traditional representations of the prophet figure, I delineate Vaughan's conception of himself as God's mouthpiece.

Benson, Sean (Malone College) "Revisiting the Hamlet/Hamnet Identification"

In light of twentieth-century criticism's noted distaste for connecting Shakespeare's life and works, this essay draws upon recent attempts to reopen the question of how his life may subtly inform the plays. Though a number of connections have been made by various biographers and critics, no one has revisited James Joyce's--or Stephen Dedalus's--identification of a direct link between Hamlet and Shakespeare's deceased son, Hamnet. I argue for a more layered, refracted, identification, and I begin by linking Hegel's contention that Hamlet represents spirit's search for full consciousness. Harold Bloom has indirectly used Hegel's ideas to suggest that Hamlet reaches self-consciousness in the play--his awareness that he is in a play scripted for him by others, Shakespeare ultimately. But Hamlet's forgoes his harried attempts to stay alive when he recognizes that he cannot escape the world of Elsinore; he is embedded in a play whose ending is beyond revision. Even if he is self-conscious, it will do Hamlet no good to try to revise Shakespeare's already written work, or attempt a last-minute redaction. However self-conscious he may be, Hamlet realizes his finitude and the forces against him. He submits to his fate, be it authorial or--as he increasingly comes to believe--divine.

Bjork, Olin (University of Texas at Austin) "'A Spirit in Forme and Substance': Simulacra, Humanism, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus"

Critics who read Marlowe's Doctor Faustus as either a critique or a celebration of Renaissance ambition often overlook the fact that the use of magic in the play can be interpreted as a parody of humanist praxis. When Faustus summons shades of ancient luminaries to perform for his contemporaries, he enacts what scholars of the Renaissance refer to as "the crisis of exemplarity." Humanist attempts to re-contextualize the achievements of antiquity were countered by their growing sense of historical and cultural differences. Faustus' magical erasure of temporal-spatial distance results in the replacement of substance with superficiality: these simulacra are mute and intangible semblances that can make no contribution to the present.

Blevins, Jacob (McNeese State University) "Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Catullus, Shakespeare, and Donne"

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "dialogism" and Paul Allen Miller's concept of "lyric consciousness," the paper explores the dialogic nature of the lyric genre by examining the "collections" of three lyric poets: Catullus, Shakespeare, and Donne. A generic analysis based on dialogism and intratextuality helps reveal the significance of "others' words" and multiple discourses in the self-fashioning of the lyric subject. The lyric subject is not a private, individual voice but rather a subject whose identity is constructed and exists at any given time only in relation to its position among various public voices. The subject's own voice is predicated by the presence of other voices that circulate through and around the subject's "private" experience within the collection. It is this characteristic in lyric poetry that accounts for the private contradictions and ideological conflicts inherent in much lyric poetry.

Bradley, N. Rochelle (Texas A&M University) "'Use Mercy to Them All': Justice and Mercy in Henry V"

Shakespeare portrays Henry V as a king peculiarly attuned to the question of the balance of mercy and justice, as he seeks to assure that his war in France and ultimately his rule are just. Examining crucial moments in the play that bring questions of justice to the fore, moments at which Henry must choose between justice and mercy, I argue that Henry's balance of justice and mercy is bound to his presentation and maintenance of himself as a Christian king--not simply a king by divine right, but a sacral king who rules and acts in God's stead.

Brand, Clinton (University of St. Thomas) "Milton's Poetics of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Paradise Lost."

In Paradise Lost, the narrative sequence of the Fall is framed by an admonition to remember God's command and a reprimand for forgetting "the high injunction not to taste that Fruit" (X. 13). The Fall, then, involves a lapse of memory, and Milton punctuates the action of the poem with a number of suggestive passages on the imperatives of remembrance and the costs of forgetfulness. This paper explores the long neglected thematics of memory in the poem and argues that Milton's poetics of anamnesis owes less to the Renaissance ars memoriae than to heuristic possibilities latent in classical epic that are developed and enriched in biblical and patristic contexts to exfoliate Milton's Protestant poetics.

Brothers, Lester (University of North Texas) A Court and a Context: The Ferraboscos and the Origins of the Hexachord Fantasia

I have previously speculated that the rise of the keyboard hexachord fantasia in examples by William Byrd and John Bull was a musical response on the part of Elizabeth I's favorite musicians to support her political campaign to promote the legitimacy of herself as a virgin queen, in analogy with the Virgin Mary. The long-established Marian (and Christological) symbolism of the six-note scale in mass and motet provided an ideal vehicle to flatter the queen without calling undue attention to its Catholic sources (both Byrd and Bull remained Catholic in a repressive Protestant environment). But the keyboard repertoire was preceded chronologically by examples in the instrumental consort repertoire by an Italian import to the English court, Alfonso Ferrabosco (the elder) and continued by his son Alfonso (the younger). This paper will suggest that the symbolism of the hexachord in music would have been known by Alfonso the elder's father, Dominico Maria (1513-1574), who as a member of the papal chapel was retired in 1555 by Pope Paul IV along with Palestrina because they were married. Palestrina's hexachord mass was one of his greatest works and directly influenced a number of Roman hexachord masses written in the latter sixteenth century, one of which was titularly dedicated to Pope Clement VIII (1598). Domenico's eldest son Alfonso (1543-1588) was a prized musician in the court of Elizabeth intermittently between 1562 and 1578. His ten works for viol consort include a compositional sketch on the hexachord (the only other extant compositional sketches on the hexachord are a set of 11 "exercises" by Palestrina) and a complete Ut re mi fa sol la a 3 (a lute version is an intabulation of the consort work). The direct influence of Ferrabosco's music on that of William Byrd has been demonstrated, and the case is no less for a fantasia on the hexachord. The supreme composer of consort music was Alfonso's like-named son (c.1575-1628), left in the hands of a member of the queen's flute consort when his father left England in 1578. In 1592 the queen granted Alfonso the younger a stipend as "musitian for the violles." Alfonso's consort hexachord fantasia for four voices (a version for five voices followed, and an anonymous separate six-voiced fantasia is possibly by him) is a chromatic tour-de-force with seven enharmonic modulations, and may be considered a consort riposte to Bull's similarly harmonically audacious keyboard hexachord fantasia. In sum, three generations of the Ferrabosco family form a nexus of circumstances that allow us to understand the hitherto neglected rise of the hexachord fantasia in England and its spread to the continent in the seventeenth century.

Bunker, Nancy (Macon State College) "The Role of Law and Equity: Marriage as Reclamation"

Producers of a new commodity in a new urban environment, Shakespeare and Middleton utilize the city's vitality and changing configuration as comedic ground for their early 1600s plays. Money and marriage, city comedy staples, inform the locale's ethos and expose its opportunities, while urban change places new demands on legal decisions in national courts and the courts of equity. In this essay, Measure for Measure and A Mad World, My Masters legitimize the role of equity by allowing it to operate as a part of the governing structure. Duke Vincentio and Mother Gullman make valid marriages and expedite inheritance distribution based upon principles of equity--mercy and leniency--in addition to the letter of the law. Equity is not in the service of overturning national laws, however, and the emerging idea of governmental tolerance factors into marriage-making and allows reclamation for females once society designated as unchaste and legitimizes males recognized as errant.

Conway, Megan (Louisiana State University at Shreveport) "Rabelais and Science Fiction: Frozen Words and Alternate Worlds"

Almost any imaginable topic comes under Rabelais's pen in his books about the giant Gargantua and his son, Pantagruel. Rabelais's lively works are stuffed with contemporary satire and bawdy vignettes. A monk and a scholar, Rabelais was also a trained physician so it is hardly surprising to find anatomical and diagnostic digressions scattered among the pages. Even more intriguing (to this reader) are the occasions when his scientific imagination intersects the story line. In this paper, I will examine a few of the more striking elements of Rabelais's scientific flights of fancy. These episodes are unusual examples of sixteenth-century science fiction and range from the humorous (the cleaning globes), to the speculative (the civilizations prospering in Pantagruel's throat), to the philosophical (the Frozen Words).

de Young, Erika (University of Texas at Austin) De' Rossi's Fountain of the Twelve Labors of Hercules: A project for the largest portrait of Cosimo I

In 1560, Cosimo I commissioned Vincenzo de' Rossi to create a fountain of Hercules. The fountain was never finished, though seven of the twelve planned sculptures survive. The commission conveys an important message about Cosimo. The Duke frequently used mythological figures as symbols of himself. The values evoked by Hercules linked Cosimo to the heart of Florence in heroic and historical tradition. Though de' Rossi worked to please the Duke, his mindset conflicted with the fast pace of his modern day. The fountain's incompletion marks the end of an artistic era, which expired before the eyes of a working artist.

Dickey, Timothy (University of Iowa) "Music and Painting in the Sienese Confraternities: Adoramus te, Christe and the Provenance of Domenico di Bartolo's Madonna of Humility (1433)"

Art historians have long recognized Domenico di Bartolo's Madonna of Humility as a crucial link between the Sienese master's style and the Florentine "Renaissance." No art-historical methodology, however, has yielded an adequate theory of the painting's provenance. Music, I argue, is the neglected key to understanding both its provenance and the deep marriage of Sienese and Florentine arts it represents. I identify the Adoramus te, Christe that Domenico painted into his altarpiece as a devotional lauda sung by Sienese flagellant confraternities. This lauda's music, furthermore, stands within a rich Florentine tradition of borrowing secular melodies for confraternal worship. Domenico's Madonna thus proves that the devotional music in Sienese confraternities mirrored better-known Florentine practices.

Dickson, Donald R. (Texas A&M University) "Henry Vaughan's Medical Translations"

One of the remaining puzzles in the life's story of the poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) concerns his medical career, in particular when he began to practice and what sort of medicine he professed. When we examine Vaughan's actual pronouncements on medicine by looking at the works he choose to translate, we can learn a great deal about his attitudes to traditional, Galenic medicine. We also learn more about when his medical self-training probably began. What this evidence will grant us is a more accurate portrait of Henry Vaughan, the rural physician.

Duncan, Sarah (Tulane U), "The Coronation of a Queen"

Although the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I has inspired a great deal of scholarship, historians have almost exclusively concentrated on what was innovative about this event. In fact, Elizabeth's coronation had much in common with that of her older sister Mary I. Mary, in the unprecedented role of regnant queen of England, was the first to adapt monarchical rituals to the novelty of a woman in a traditionally male role. Mary's coronation ceremony was both traditional and innovative in form: it both acknowledged her gender and demonstrated her sovereignty, defining the shape that Elizabeth's coronation would take five years later.

Etheridge, Charles L. (McMurry University)"Fencing in Hamlet"

For most of its history, the sword was an instrument of war. Roman solders, medieval knights, and rural farmers who wanted to protect their lands and families from a hostile world all would have owned a sword and would have, from necessity, known how to use it. The rise of firearms in 14th century made the sword largely moot as a means of warfare, but it continued as a gentleman's affectation for centuries. By the end of Henry VIII's reign, swordplay was part of an elaborate code of contact, and, more significant to Hamlet, part of the elaborate repertoire of games a nobleman would have been expected to be proficient at. This paper will identify what swordplay meant to Shakespeare's contemporaries--both noble and to theatregoers--and will analyze Act V Sc. II of Hamlet in light of what swordplay--and more specifically rapier play--would have meant to Hamlet and Laertes.

Evans, Deanna Delmar (Bemidji State U),"The Funeral of Elizabeth I in John Gwyllym's 'Book'"

Housed at Yale's Beinecke Library is a seventeenth-century manuscript catalogued with the title "Famous Funerals" written by a John Gwyllym. Within this strange "book" is a detailed account of the funeral of Elizabeth I along with descriptions of funerals of several famous men, including Philip IV of Spain. The inclusion of Elizabeth's funeral in itself illustrates that in death as in life the "Virgin Queen" had succeeded in the masculine political realm. In addition, the queen is introduced as one of the "most renouned & famous kings of all Christendome" and praised for possessing "heroicall & Princely virtues."

Filippi, Daniele V. (Universit degli Studi di Pavia - Cremona, Italy) "Palestrina's Nativitas tua Dei Genitrix Virgo"

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina published his first motets book, _Motecta festorum totius anni quaternis vocibus, in 1563: in the following decades, this collection enjoyed a wide success (13 editions in forty years) and became a model of excellence in motet composition, as testified by instances of imitatio by Marenzio, Victoria and G.F. Anerio, among others. In the Marian section of the book, the motet Nativitas tua Dei Genitrix Virgo (In Nativitate Beatae Mariae) stands out for its elegant construction and intense expressiveness. The presence of an alternative authorial version of this interesting motet in the anthology Liber primus musarum issued by Antonio Barre in the same year, gives us the opportunity to reconsider some aspects of Palestrina's idea of motet--and, on a broader level, of his creative process. This paper will try to put a basis for a new understanding of writing and re-writing in the field of Renaissance motet, showing in particular the close attention Palestrina paid to such problems as text expression and the relation between musical form and rhetorical strategies. The exposition will include analytical details useful to specialists in Renaissance musicology, as well as more general arguments open to interdisciplinary discussion.

Flansburg, Margaret (University of Central Oklahoma) "The Fabriano Crucifixion Fresco in the Boston MFA: Authorship, Content and Patronage"

A Trecento fresco of the Crucifixion, from the monastic chapel of Santa Lucia in Fabriano, was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1941, conserved in 2003, and is presently on exhibit in the museum. The large narrative with eighteen almost life-size figures lacks its lower right edge but is otherwise in very good condition. The painting was executed in the decade following the construction of the convento in about 1365. In 1440, the new church of San Domenico incorporated the chapel as its chapter room. Only three detached sections of the 1365 Marian program are known to have survived--the Birth of the Virgin in Rome, the Annunciation to Zachariah in Rochester, and the Crucifixion. When acquired by the Boston museum, little work had been done on Trecento art of the Rimini-Marche region. But Italian publications from the 1990s have produced astute stylistic analyses of workshops, convincing groupings of masters, and documentation of specific painters.

The iconography of the Crucifixion also follows newly-recognized Riminesi variations. The Virgin is positioned in an unusual forward-sinking position, supported not by John the Evangelist but by her two sisters Mary, mothers of James and Salome. John stands beside the Cross with hands outstretched in a poignant gesture. Stephaton the sponge bearer strides away, followed by a boy carrying a bucket of nails. Christ hangs from a rough tree limb that has stumps of pruned branches. These and other elements of the symbolism can be understood by reading of the text of the Franciscan pseudo-Bonaventura, the meditative writing of great impact upon the Dominican Order. In this paper I will discuss the Riminese-Marchigian narrative style of the painter called the Master of the Urbino Coronation, and the iconography that expressed the message of the commissioners.

Flory, Sean (Louisiana State University) "Putting on a Pious Show: Henry V, Sacral Kingship, and Elizabeth's Religious Rhetoric"

This paper explores Shakespeare's adoption in Henry V of the religious language used by Elizabeth's governing apparatus in justifying royal power. Henry's adoption of religious rhetoric is directly parallel to Elizabeth's use of religious language as a way of imbuing her reign with an air of sanctity. This reading of the play draws on the Renaissance theories of sacral kingship articulated by Deborah Shuger and Richard McCoy, in which the Tudor and Stuart monarchs attempted to move the sacred presence out of the Church and into their own persons by a long-running campaign of religious indoctrination carried out through public pageants and carefully orchestrated sermons read by preachers loyal to the royal establishment. This paper specifically examines the role of sermons in propagating this ideology to the English subjects in order to justify royal power. The most important of these sermons are concerned with the necessity of subjects to obey their monarch and with justifying war. These two lines of argument mesh closely with Henry's own concerns in the play, and the same ideological constructs that appear in contemporary sermons appear in Henry's public speeches, especially in those that justify his war with France and his condemnation of traitors. Rather than surrounding Henry with a multitude of preachers to bombard the soldiers with this message, Shakespeare reveals one of the essential methods that Elizabeth used to control her subjects by inserting the rhetoric of the sermons into Henry's own speeches, so that the essentially theatrical nature of his regime, with its reliance on religious language to hold up a picture of a Christian monarch, is exposed more clearly than it could be if other characters were responsible for the religious rhetoric.

Ford, John (Delta State University) "Changeable Taffeta: Re-dressing the Bears in Twelfth Night"

Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical practices, as well as the playhouses in which they occurred, not only seduced audiences into the heretical pleasures of doubleness, but were themselves radical examples of such equivocation. That doubleness showed itself in a number of ways, from cross-dressed impersonations of gender and class, to open stages that allowed for quick changes from one local habitation and name to another, to thrust stages, where the individual signs distinctive that separated audiences from actors melted away as thoroughly as class and gender markings. What was especially threatening was the multi-functional nature of the public theatre itself, where the same space could met amorphose from a playing area to baiting arena with liquid ease. Any theatre space, like the actors who performed within that space, was, in a sense, cross-dressed, for one of the most important structural features of an early modern theatre was its ability to transform itself to fit one kind of entertainment or another. Such indeterminate duplicity, of course, made Twelfth Night an especially dangerous play. On an open stage, with universal lighting, with cross-dressed actors transforming themselves into all varieties of moral, social, and sexual beings, all taking place in a multi-purpose, easily changeable space, who knows what one might see or, more disconcertingly, what one might become? When one enters into such a world, nothing that is so is so. Twelfth Night, by self-consciously using language, not so much meta-theatrical as meta-playful, transforms its own playgoing pleasures into a wide variety of equally illicit, and hence equally interchangeable, games and sports, especially bear-baiting. It is as if the King's Men, in performing Twelfth Night, were baiting their anti-theatrical enemies by transforming their play and place into a disorderly succession of Puritan bete-noires, each as interchangeable and reversible as a cheveril glove.

Frost, Kate (University of Texas as Austin) "'To Penshurst': Jonson's Intentional Building"

Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" has been read principally in the light of the Stuart English country house: the politics of patronage, the social implications of ostentatious construction, and the aspirations of the Sidney family. Modern criticism has largely ignored the Scriptural underpinnings that present Penshurst as a model of the Church of England in juxtaposition to the Church of Rome. While the birthplace of Philip Sidney in its ancient simplicity exemplifies the Davidian Ark, its Spanish counterpart, the Escorial necropolis of his godfather Philip II, built following the supposed plan of Solomon's Temple, manifests the ostentation and princely exclusiveness of the Counter Reformation. The paper will analyze elements of discourse and structure that demonstrates Jonson's intentional construction of this underlying foreconceit.

Hampel, Sharon. " Tragical History or Historical Tragedy? History as Self-Fashioning in King Lear

The Tragedy of King Lear presents a puzzling negativity. A king irrationally undermines his own power. A favored daughter courts banishment All second thoughts and reprieves come too late. In explicating these disturbing plot elements, critics have characterized the play either as Christian redemption or as nihilist horrot. Viewing Shakespeare and his characters as instances of self-fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt comes closest to resolving the irrationalities of the play. Like Greenblatt's characterization of More, Lear is "tense,ironic, witty, poised between engagement and detachment." The hard facts of Lear's situation, however, obviate irony. Greenblatt portrays both Shakespeare and many of his major characters as narrators who improvise and thus control their stories. Hamlet, even in extemis, evinces such control ("Absent thee from felicity awhile/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story"). If one is to entertain the helpful definition of Lear as bildungsroman, however, one must recognize Lear's inability to control his own history and to tell his own story. Hegel observs that "We must suppose historical narratives to have appeared contemporaneously with historical deeds and events." As this observation suggests, Lear lives while he narrates and thus cannot shape or fashion his material. Rather, he is fashioned by his rootlessness, by his loss of social and moral distinctions and, finally, by his loss of his own identity. In order to clarify this view of Lear as a modern self, fashioned as a tragic witness, I will compare the quarto (1608) and folio (1623) versions of the play and gloss the storm scenes of these versions with two contemporary Yiddish translations, one written in 1937 and the other in 1947. In the cses of these paired texts, the later version is the most spare and unresolved. Written after the publication of the first English bibles and the inception of the Thirty Years' War, which was fought over territorial issues,the 1623 folio omits plot elements present in the quarto. The division of the kingdom goes unexplained. Lear's insanity is merely sketched. The 1947 post-Holocaust translation by Asen, a Jewish doctor working with refugees in the Bergen Belsen camp, omits these same elements. These emendations serve to highlight Lear's absorption in,and liberation from, history.

Harris, Mitchell M. (University of Texas at Austin) "'Minds Transfigured': Towards an Augustinian Hermeneutic in the Metadrama of A Midsummer Night's Dream"

By examining the character of Bottom the Weaver and the metadramatic moments surrounding his own character(s), I argue that Shakespeare borrows from the explicit discourse used during the concurrent Eucharistic debates of the Reformation. Through the rude mechanicals' performance of Pyramus and Thisby, Shakespeare is able to present both polemical dialects of the Reformation--Catholic and Protestant. By so doing, he engages--whether consciously or unconsciously--the epistemology of Augustinian hermeneutics and its insistence upon the evocation of caritas. By using such a hermeneutic, Bottom provides an intellectual exercise for his audience that attempts to bridge the gap between mechanical and courtier, Protestant and Catholic.

Howard, W. Scott (University of Denver) "G. M. Revealed?: Printer of the first attacks on Milton's The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce"

Two texts printed by "G. M." in London in 1644 fiercely attacked Milton's first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Herbert Palmer's The glasse of Gods providence; and the anonymous An Answer to a book, intituled, "The doctrine and discipline of divorce." Through our research, we have been able to identify with certainty "G. M". as George Miller, a printer "dwelling in Black-Friers" ca. 1644 (Estwick i). This paper argues for a link between Miller's work and that of other eminent radical figures (such as Giles Calvert) who may have been coordinating their challenges against Milton in 1644.

Note 1. This conference paper--to be presented by W. Scott Howard--emerges from collaborative research and writing that contributes toward a casebook under contract and forthcoming from Duquesne University Press, John Milton's Divorce Tracts: Texts and Contexts, by Sara J. van den Berg (Saint Louis University) and W. Scott Howard (University of Denver).

Work Cited: Estwick, Nicolas. Christ's submission to His Fathers will. London, 1644.

Hunt, Maurice (Baylor University) "Taking the Eucharist Both Ways in Hamlet"

Stephen Greenblatt, in several articles and part of Hamlet in Purgatory, has established the presence in this tragedy of an early modern English debate over the status of the Eucharist. Specifically, he has read Hamlet's meditation on a king going a progress through the guts of a beggar (4.3.16-31) as a Reformation Protestant criticism of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Greenblatt's point about Shakespeare's emphasis upon the decomposition of what should be, according to Catholic doctrine, an irreducible real presence, focuses on the king as a mutable metaphor for the "King of kings," Christ, in Hamlet's allusion to the Eucharist. In this paper, I revise Greenblatt's reading to focus on the fish in this act-four passage as more properly the mutable symbol for Christ in a commemorative, that is to say, Protestant Communion. Another reducible symbol for Christ that is relevant in this respect is the pearl in Claudius's chalice of wine. Despite this emphasis, Hamlet's fifth-act graveyard meditation (5.1.74-115, 191-209) reveals the equivalent of real presence, resistant to deconstruction and thus implicitly supportive of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Shakespeare takes the Eucharist both ways in Hamlet, suggesting a tolerance for a right of belief in a field of competing beliefs.

Isaacson, Emily (University of Missouri-Columbia) "Hal's Paschal Victory in Henry V"

This paper looks at the final play of Shakespeare's second tetralogy, positing that Prince Hal's character, when examined in conjunction with the liturgical year, develops consistently in his renunciation of his former life without a full indictment of his past. The argument for Carnival in 1 Henry IV is well established, and the ensuing Lenten denial of 2 Henry IV follows. Given this, then the final play, Henry V, works as an Easter play. Although not set at Easter time, the form and content of the play resemble the festivities and attitude of Easter, which allows for the development of Henry V as the mirror of Christian Kings.

Johnson, Christel Dawn (U of South Carolina) "Paper-doll Identity: Queen Elizabeth I and Classical Heroines"

Queen Elizabeth I has long been the focus of scholarly research. Surrounded by a veil of mystique, her persona resists encapsulation into a single, definitive subject position. This essay will argue that four stereotypes, domina, virgin, mater, and meretrix, constitute the skeleton of Queen Elizabeth's subjectivity. Through her interactions with Classical literature Queen Elizabeth I gleaned inspiration for her carefully crafted identity. Evidence of her keen interest in Classical heroines, particularly Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and the manner in which these images coalesced to form the Queen's identity may be found in three works of fine art. These works of art: the 1569 painting attributed to The Monogrammist HE entitled Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, the 1579 portrait by George Gower entitled The Plimpton "Sieve" Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, and a parchment from 1603 entitled Elizabethan Conceit, will be examined.

Kendall, G. Yvonne (University of Houston) "Dancing through a Man's World: The Role of Women in Renaissance Dance"

Much concerning the arts of the renaissance were a man's world. There was, however, one - dance - in which women were prominent. Even when found in theatrical events, women were a vital component of this intimate activity. Among other sources, evidence is found in extant dance manuals that contain instructions that are specific to women, include steps and gestures particularly appropriate for women, and use women in both illustrations and text. Through explanation and demonstration, this presentation will examine the steps women took in cinquecento dance, placing them in their proper historical contex.

Keyes, Flo (University of Iowa) "The Plurality of Revenge Morality"

Some Renaissance revenge tragedies, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy in particular, maintain verbal and situational ambiguity regarding the morality of revenge, thereby placing the onus of moral judgement entirely on the audience. The official, decisively anti-revenge policy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods has been made clear to us by the work of Lily B. Campbell. Fredson Bowers' work, however, reminds us that the opinion of the general population, particularly the nobility, still ran in favor of righting one's own wrongs. Therefore, a Renaissance dramatist could be placing himself in political jeopardy by advocating personal revenge and financial jeopardy by condemning a practice condoned by the wealthier patrons of his art. Given the complex and volatile nature of the controversy surrounding revenge, it is not surprising to find dramatists presenting works with ambiguous messages about revenge which force the audience to decide the moral issue for themselves. Both The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy exhibit this dramatic ambiguity. One group of critics has argued that each is play is an example of the justice of revenge, and other critics have argued that each play is an example of the evil of revenge. Sometimes they use the same pivotal scenes to make their conflicting cases. Consideration of the critical arguments coupled with analysis of the plays themselves reveals a careful blending of the two prominent attitudes toward revenge which allows the audience to justify either stance.

Levin, Carole (U of Nebraska at Lincoln), "All the Queen's Children: Elizabeth I and the Meanings of Motherhood"

During Elizabeth I's reign there were frequent rumors that she had had children. One young man, calling himself Arthur Dudley, claimed in the 1580s to be Elizabeth's son. Today, serious scholars of the period are in agreement that Elizabeth bore no children, never experienced pregnancies. But the counterparts to the scandal mongers of the sixteenth-century are the romance novelists one the one hand, and those of the far shore of the Shakespeare authorship controversy on the other. For them, what is the most important statement about Elizabeth and the secret into her personality was the fact of motherhood. This paper examines Elizabeth's own use of language to imply her motherhood in a metaphorical sense, the rumors about her during her reign, and the theories about her that are still bandied about today. The comments about her sexual behavior and supposed children, both then and now, also open a curtain to people's attitudes toward powerful women, especially ones, like Elizabeth, who ruled unmarried.

McClintock, Michael (McKendree College), "Rhetoric and Revenge in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy"

This paper attempts a reconsideration of the role of rhetoric in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy by shifting attention away from rhetorical schemes and tropes, which have preoccupied most earlier discussions of the play's use of rhetoric, and towards a broader consideration of rhetoric as a feature of Elizabethan culture. To accomplish this goal, this paper will illustrate the ways in which Kyd's characterization of the play's protagonist, Hieronimo, draws on the figure of the orator as presented in sixteenth-century English rhetoric treatises. It will also examine a pivotal scene in the play, Hieronimo's Vindicta mihi soliloquy, in order to illustrate the way in which the art of rhetoric as taught in the Elizabethan grammar schools is central to Hieronimo's revenge in the final acts of the play. The paper will argue that Kyd views Elizabethan rhetoric as both a means by which talented and eloquent men could rise to positions of social prominence and a means by which these same men could radically undermine society.

McKinney, Timothy R. (Baylor University), Exempli Gratia: The Musical Debate between Nicola Vicentino and Ghiselin Danckerts

The famous 1551 debate between Nicola Vicentino and Vicente Lusitano concerned whether contemporary music was written in the diatonic genus, as Lusitano claimed, or whether it represented a mixture of the genera, as Vicentino maintained. The judges ruled against Vicentino, who in 1555 published a full exposition of his views on the genera and a description of the debate and its aftermath, prompting an unpublished response from Ghiselin Danckerts, one of the judges. The paper examines the subtexts that may be read in the contrapuntal structures of Vicentino's and Danckerts's polyphonic exemplars of the diatonic genus in their respective treatises.

McMurray, Price (Texas Wesleyan University) "As if they were Dantesque devils...": Giordano Bruno's Candelaio and the Ethics of Comedy

The sole dramatic work of a philosophical heretic who remains arguably one of the most remarkable and underappreciated figures of the Renaissance, Il Candelaio is both a stinging critique of humanism and a proto-modern meditation on the relationship between language, knowledge, and ethics. Set in a Naples of thieves and tricksters, Bruno's play chronicles the misadventures of a middle-aged pederast who finds himself unexpectedly enamored of a courtesan, a would-be alchemist in search of the magical pulvis Christi, and a pedant so foolish that he is tricked into being whipped like a schoolboy. Of more than local interest, however, the haplessness of Bruno's unlucky trio functions as a critique of the major cultural institutions of the Italian Renaissance, namely, Petrarchanism, science, and philology. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Il Candelaio is its linguistic inventiveness. If Bruno's nearly Baroque poetics serves to suggest (avant la post-structuralist letter) that language can neither capture nor represent reality, what complicates this skepticism (and animates the play) is a concern with ethics. As is observed more than once, the protagonist of Il Candelaio carries an aptly ironic name--Bonifacio--and the drama culminates in a literal travesty of justice, with rogues masquerading as the police while the painter Giovan Bernardo offers an extempore disquisition on Virt and Fortuna. This iconoclastic linguistic inventiveness, I would argue, underwrites an ethics of exploration. In a decentered cosmos of which the Neapolitan underworld is a fit emblem, sexual, disciplinary, and aesthetic boundaries are arbitrary. Even if Bruno did not allude to "diavoli danteschi" in play's dedicatory epistle, it would take little imagination to find this story--set in a Naples long rumored to be adjacent to the mouth of Hell--reminiscent of Cantos XXI-XXII of Dante's Inferno. While Dante contains the ambiguities created by the so-called "commedia dei diavoli" through analogy, likening the corruption of public office to the degrading effects of laughter, and contrasting the pitchy darkness of diabolic play to the radiant "angelici ludi" of Paradiso, Bruno's play imagines a world of less epistemological certainty, one where we may do no more than hold a candle in the dark.

Malpezzi, Frances M. (Arkansas State University), "Building a City of Ladies with Christine de Pizan and Arkansas State University Honors Students"

The focus of this paper is pedagogic as it presents an overview of an Honors course on medieval and early modern women taught at Arkansas State University in the Fall of 2003. Expanding the Canon: Medieval and Early Modern Women Writers covered works by Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, Aemilia Lanyer, and Elizabeth Cary. With The Book of the City of Ladies as its model, the course was designed to dispel misconceptions that medieval and early modern women were always silent and submissive, that their literary, artistic, and cultural contributions were nil or at best insignificant. This paper describes the readings and assignments that provided students with the building materials for their city of ladies.

Marquez, Pearla Irene (University of North Texas), "The Poetics of Masculinity in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella"

In this examination of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, the author draws upon the work of various critics, including Susan Gubar and Jonathan Goldberg, on the longstanding literary emblem of the phallic pen inscribing on a feminized text. The author uses this definitive image of the hypermasculine (even violently so) nature of writing to discuss Astrophil's impotence as a love poet, what he laments as his "ink's poor loss." The discourse of gender that takes place throughout the sonnet sequence also plays out in Astrophil's own negotiation of his status as a poet. The perceived failure of his verse becomes a masculine one; his phallic "truant pen" is essentially unable to serve its purpose and inscribe upon the problematic blank page that is Stella.

The author also invokes Mark Breitenberg's discussion of anxious masculinity in Renaissance England. Breitenberg's paradigm of staged masculine loss serves as a model for examining the seemingly masochistic self-presentation in which Astrophil compulsively traffics. Breitenberg argues that, by performing their own masculine anxieties (through cuckold jokes and the like), men maintain control of their gendered identity. Astrophil's self-conscious publication of his inky loss, a loss that is the source of emasculation, is an attempt to wrest agency away from the figure of Stella. In publicly scripting his own crisis of gender identity, Astrophil controls it.

In the broader context of Elizabethan culture, Astrophil's negotiation of his relationship with Stella becomes a synecdoche of Elizabeth's subjects, especially her courtiers, and the anxieties that informed their tenuous relationships with the female regnant. Sidney himself was a frustrated member of "Queen Virtue's Court" who often lamented being at the mercy of an impenetrable queen. As many critics have already established, Stella can be read as a figure for Elizabeth. Thus, Astrophil's ultimately failed attempts to "script" Stella in turn reflect Sidney's own thwarted ambitions in Elizabeth's court.

The author's reading follows many New Historic studies of the sonnet sequence by placing Sidney's verse in a distinctly political and historical context. By examining the complicated discourse of gender and poetics that informs Astrophil's anxieties about his writing, the author hopes to shed light on the complexities of Sidney's own poetic workings. What the sonnet sequence reveals about the Sidney's relationship to Elizabeth's court, not to mention Elizabeth's relationships with her subjects and her own traffic in self-presentation, further adds to the cultural resonance of Astrophil and Stella.

Mengozzi, Stefano (University of Michigan), "When Humanism Didn't Help: the Term 'Hexachordum' in Renaissance Music Theory"

The musical term "hexachord" (= six strings) traditionally associated with the writings of Guido of Arezzo (XI century), was largely a creation of the Italian Renaissance. Guidonian theory did develop a widely successful solmization system of six pitch names (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la) as an aid to musical instruction, but medieval theorists referred to this set of names as a deductio, not a hexachordum. It was only in the 1480s that the widely influential Franchino Gafori consistently referred to the Guidonian deductio as a hexachordum, thereby ascribing to the six Guidonian syllables a structural significance that they were never meant to have. More importantly, by systematically adopting the Greek-sounding "hexachordum," Gafori wished to highlight the achievements of the Christian age vis a vis those of ancient Greece, whose musical system was grounded on the more limited "tetrachordum." Gafori's peculiar account of solmization may be understood as an implicit response to contemporaneous theorists who opposed the Guidonian system. To a cleric like Gafori, a critique of Guido amounted to calling into question the auctoritas of the Church itself, which had continued for centuries to endorse six-syllable solmization. Thus, the marked structural and classicizing tone of Gafori's presentation of Guido aims to magnify the historical background and foundational significance of the Guidonian tradition with the ultimate goal of defending a well-established ecclesiastical practice. Gafori's pseudo-humanistic prose on the Guidonian system is of interest to Renaissance historians in that it uses the classics for safeguarding a portion of the medieval curriculum under attack, rather than--contrariwise--for re-grounding knowledge and education on a new epistemological and historical basis.

Moss, Grant (Virginia Tech) The First Virgin Queen: The Impact of Mary Tudor's Iconography on Elizabeth I

When reading accounts of the life and reign of Elizabeth I, it is easy to forget that she was not England's first queen regnant. In addition to demonstrating that an unmarried woman could take power in a relatively peaceful succession, Mary's reign also provided a number of important artistic precedents. In fact, when examined in detail, the imagery, iconography, and impresa of Mary's brief reign had a significant influence on the early years of Elizabeth's career as queen and ultimately helped to establish many of the virgin and maiden tropes that we now associate solely with Elizabeth.

Nydam, Arlen (University of Texas at Austin) "Thomas More, Conscience, and Heresy"

Utopia contains statements about religious freedom that seem to contradict More's later prosecution of Lutherans. I suggest that More did not swing from liberal in 1516 to conservative in 1529: his pre- and post-Luther positions are the same. At issue are More's and Luther's competing understandings of "conscience," and the implications of these for the maintenance of social order. After tracing the role of tradition and collective reasoning through Utopia, selected polemical works, and the Tower letters, I observe how the differences between More's and Luther's theories of the Church relate to their differing stances on the burning of heretics.

Oakes, Margaret J. (Furman University) "'Yet I am a great emulator': The Authorial Portrait of Margaret Cavendish."

In the three frontispieces to her texts, Margaret Cavendish is always attired in modest or vaguely classical garb nothing like her real life dress, and is surrounded by conflicting references to classical authorities. They reveal her attempts to move from a culture in which significant female authority was based on social standing into one of scientific or literary authority from which she was excluded by her sex. As an author, she could create an image of a classically-educated, authoritative voice. Her frontispieces show the attempts of an early modern woman to create a viable role for female intellectuals to express themselves.

Palmer, Allison Lee (University of Oklahoma) "The Construction of an Artful Identity in Renaissance Landscape Painting"

The Renaissance has been well-studied within the context of its flourishing art culture in Europe as well as through the exportation of these cultural values into new colonies found in the Americas and Africa. In light of this broader world-view, Europeans sought to re-evaluate and sometimes to redefine their own social identity. Artists played a role in the cultivation of this new identity, and landscape painting in particular can be seen to demonstrate the continued assertion of superiority in this cultivated, Catholic continent. European views on nature, the wilderness, the Classical "golden age," and Eden were seen to be in direct contrast to the uncivilized land of the "others," where reason too often succumbed to passion. In this paper we will see that Renaissance landscape paintings continued to be informed just as much by these medieval notions of the land as they were by the new scientific methods of observation.

Paul, Ryan (Texas State University-San Marcos), "Spenser's Psychological Allegory: The Palmer as Superego"

This paper examines Book II of Spenser's epic Faerie Queene in light of modern psychological theories. It starts from the observation that Spenser's work contains few fathers in contrast to the many mothers, brothers, and children that populate its pages. The relationship between Guyon and the Palmer is the crucial exception, presenting one of the few father-son pairs in the work, and the only one of any substantial length. With the Palmer as a type of patriarch, the paper discusses the psychological effects of the patriarch upon the individual, and how those effects manifest in the text. Focusing on a few incidents that demonstrate the inability of the Palmer to maintain full control over Guyon, the paper concludes that the difficulty in establishing morality in the knight rests in the political realm, which is problematized by the reign not of a patriarchal king, but the female Elizabeth.

Pennington, Giles (Albuquerque Academy) "Fulfilling Their Desires: Understanding Piero's Appeal in the Tuscan Countryside"

Piero della Francesca painted his hometown of Sansepolcro into his first major commission for a local church around 1450. The Baptism of Christ, now in the London National Gallery, must have brought great delight to the people of Sansepolcro. For, on closer examination, it becomes evident that Piero sketched the scene from the walls of archrival Anghiari, a town set high on a cliff five miles away. Later on, he'll paint himself into local prominence when he places his own portrait on the face of a Roman soldier sprawled at the risen Christ's feet in a large fresco in Sansepolcro's town hall. This painting will dominate public life in the town for the next three centuries and probably save the town from destruction during World War II. A few miles from Sansepolcro, in his mother's hometown of Monterchi, Piero will leave a lasting tribute to motherhood that even today stirs deep emotions in local women. The Madonna del Parto has been an object of devotion for pregnant women from all over western Tuscany for the past five centuries. Piero's early habit of placing his viewers' needs and desires ahead of all other considerations will result in his popular masterpiece, The Legend of the Cross, done for the church of San Francesca in Arezzo. In this fresco cycle Piero will reflect back on to the faithful of this provencial town their own deep spirituality, their uniquely Tuscan passion for life and, unfortunately, their darkest prejudices.

Rasmussen, Shane (University of Louisiana-Lafayette), "Hamlet's Rite of Passage through Grief"

In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, we are thrown in medias res into Hamlet's grief. Hamlet is working through the first stages of a heartfelt mourning "which passes show" (1.2.85). His grieving process is greatly complicated by the Ghost's message from Purgatory and its twin commands of remembrance and vengeance. Any headway Hamlet has made in progressing through the stages of a normal grieving process is upset as a result. His grief is exacerbated by his suspicion that his father has been murdered. The Ghost orders Hamlet to take revenge post-haste, and to act as a bloodthirsty Senecan avenger. Yet Hamlet is no "antique Roman" (5.2.323), but a Christian, who is loath to endanger his eternal soul. The Ghost's commands to Hamlet from the liminal space of Purgatory place Hamlet's grief and filial duty within a similarly dangerous liminal status. Ironically, the Ghost's purgatorial torments combine to act as both a goad to Hamlet to seek vengeance and contrarily to check its fulfillment. The crux of Hamlet as a revenge tragedy is thus made clear, and Hamlet is perceptive and sensitive enough to be halted by the fear of damnation: As a God-fearing Christian, he risks damning himself in order to avenge his father. His "To be or not to be" soliloquy expresses his reluctance to commit violence against Claudius because of such fears. Hamlet must feel that he is acting righteously in order to perform the revenge. When Hamlet perceives that his actions are in line with Providence, his moral hesitancy not only vanishes but also reverses; he determines that if he were not to act he would "be damn'd" (5.2.68). Only after completing the rite of passage of grief does he attain this sense of providential grace. Having finished mourning, Hamlet's motivations shift from vengeance to responsibility and conscience. No longer in a liminal status, Hamlet acts as a cleanser of the throne. Rather than simply an avenger, he is a true "scourge and minister" (3.4.175).

Razovsky, Helaine (Northwestern State University), "A Political Case of Conscience."

A group of English pamphlets published during the years 1642-44 exemplify the connection between the political and the spiritual at that time in English history. In a pamphlet skirmish begun by Henry Ferne, a royalist who argued that the English people did not have the right to take up arms against their monarch, four writers (Ferne and William Bridge, Charles Herle, and Philip Hunton) all use the Bible, and three use the form of spiritual conduct book called a case of conscience as vehicles for arguing their own points of view on the question of civil war.

Reiner, Martha L. (Miami-Dade College) "Madness and the Heath, Territoriality and Personation in King Lear"

This cultural materialist analysis looks at personation through character names and juxtapositional discourse in King Lear. The play represents residual conflicts in spatial and trade configurations from Roman Britain including Oswald in the 7th century, Edgar in the late 10th century, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II in the 12th century, Henry III and his wife and his sister and Simon de Montfort in the 13th century, and Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and James I in the transition from Tudor to Stuart England.

Riehl, Anna (University of Illinois at Chicago) Artesia's Arresting Art and the Rhetorical Mystery in Philip Sidney's New Arcadia

Focusing on the Artesia and Phalantus episode in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, I suggest that the entire production associated with the portraits of Artesia's defeated rivals throws into relief the rhetorical peculiarity of her effort to create for herself a reputation of unsurpassable beauty. Rhetorical tensions are most evident in two major displacements that occur in this episode: 1) the agreement that male martial prowess can serve as the means of measuring female beauty; 2) Artesia's requirement that the portraits be treated as substitutes for the women they depict. Rhetorical mystery is carried over from promises to actions, from female beauty to male strength, from bodies to pictures, and from visual testimonies to verbal descriptions.

Ronan, Clifford (Texas State University) "Shakespeare's Jewelry and What It Tells Us"

Caroline Spurgeon claims that "Jewels" are a frequent source of figurative images of "Domestic" life in Shakespeare, and help highlight theme in at least one play (Richard II, where she says it points to Englishmen's honor, love, and patriotism). I would change and expand her methods and include consideration of crowns and chains of office, as well as of presentational and virtual imagery. For what the mind pictures on its own, or what the bodily eye observes onstage, is as much a part of an image cluster as what a poetic metaphor can induce. On this basis, I find that the dramatist was very sensitive to the presence of jewelry in his written sources, imitating and complicating the references wherever he found them. Further, he discovered what a useful site jewelry provided in which to locate stress within a government, marriage, or love relationship.

Sambras, Gilles (University of Rheims) "Pastoral Dilemma : Christ or the Shepherdess?"

This article explores the religious (and incidentally political) implications of two of Marvell's poems in which the characters or speakers appear to make choices between a pastoral life whose pleasures are embodied in the enticing shepherdess and a stern acceptance of Christ. The two poems are "Clorinda and Damon" and "The Coronet." After studying the general outline of the first poem, I will show that the renunciation to the happy pastoral which seems to be the moral point of the poem appears to be partly inconsistent with the details of the text. In many ways, the poem reveals a fascination for what it sets out to denounce and reject. The study of the "The Coronet" is more developed. Against the most frequent readings, I will not concentrate on the orthodox end of the poem (denouncing the vanity of life in general and of secular poetry in particular) but on lines 7-8 where the speaker declares that turning to Christ implies turning away and 'dethroning' (or 'decrowning') his 'shepherdess.' After showing the similarities between this and the previous poem, I will replace this text in the context of contemporary paintings of crowns of flowers. This will allow me to unveil the specifically religious significance of this poem, not so much in terms of a universally human choice but of a historical dilemma in which the poet has to choose between the charms and the glories of the Anglican/Catholic Church and a more austere Puritan calling. Against the generally held view of Marvell as Puritan, I will endeavour to show that the final Puritan choice is the result of a difficult process of introspection and imaginary evaluation which takes place precisely in the process of poetic writing.

Scheick, William J. (University of Texas at Austin) Glorious Imperfection in Heemskerck's Lukean Portraits of the Virgin

Heemskerck's art, revered in its time, is generally dismissed today as a provincial Northerner's inadvertent parody of the Italian manner. What we perceive as artistic ineptitude, however, can be appreciated as an aesthetics of calculated distortion, a technique situated between 16th-century Reformed iconoclastic strictures and Roman Catholic iconographic expression. This aesthetic strategy employs a pattern of disorienting imperfection, a "glorious" incongruity, that references Christ's redemptive divine intervention in the natural world as a miracle that cannot be directly or "rationally" represented in mimetic terms. Heemskerck's manner, a humble admission of human incapacity, reflexively addresses the nature of artistic perspective and the limitations of pictorial representation.

Scott, Sarah (University of Arkansas) "Despoiling Candido's Daughter: Corrupting English Commerce in The Honest Whore: Part I"

Critics have often regarded Candido, the "patient madman" of Dekker and Middleton's popular 1604 drama The Honest Whore: Part I, as an embodiment of Christian patience. What has been overlooked, however, is that the play's attempts to move the linen-draper to anger are used as a means to question notions of English identity through depictions of alien corruption. This paper will focus upon the comic scene in which three courtiers demand that Candido cut a penny's worth of lawn from the middle of the shop's most expensive bolt, lawn that is described in elaborate detail by Candido's apprentice George as a "virgin" with a browe "as even as the browe of Cynthia" whom he invites the courtiers to "finger." The feminizing of the lawn and the corrupt courtiers' desire to mar the fabric can be understood as a cynical commentary upon social and commercial conditions of the early years of James I's reign.

Smetana, Zbynek (Murray State University) "Subject or Object? Some of Titian's Self-Portraits Revisited"

Titian was likely the greatest and most celebrated portraitist of the sixteenth century. He was immensely prolific in this genre, counting the most powerful figures of Europe among his sitters. He also created a number of self-portraits remarkable for their subtle exploration of self. Unfortunately, these remain, in general, far less understood than his investigation of other subjects. This paper focuses on the qualitative changes in Tititan's self-portraiture, especially evident in the period from the 1550s to the end of his life. The period was marked by an increasing number of self-portraits indicative of an apparent shift in self-representation. I argue that in these images, Titian reaches a deeper subjectivity by the seeming objectification of self, toying with the audiences' expectations. As such, Titian's self-portraits pave the path to seventeenth-century Baroque evolution of the genre while still being solidly based in the Renaissance tradition.

Spinrad, Phoebe (The Ohio State University) "The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio's Revenge"

Among all John Marston's plays, Antonio's Revenge seems to be the hardest to pin down. Critics have long disagreed about whether the play is moral, immoral, or amoral; whether it accepts or rejects the idea of revenge; and even whether it is meant to be a serious play, a comic parody, or an early version of the Theater of the Absurd. To be sure, it follows many of the conventions of the revenge play of its time--a blood-crime to avenge, a ghost, a ranting hero, feigned and real madness, a long-suffering woman or two, and, finally, the drawn-out death of the villain--but it also violates many of the conventions, the most important of which is that the revenger himself must die at the end of the play. What I present here is not so much an attempt to settle the larger questions about authorial intent as a closer scrutiny of three important scenes, the anomalous ending of the play, the killing of Julio, and the conversion of Pandulpho, fitting them not just into the context of their own play but into that of the contemporaneous revenge plays. Within those contexts, for whatever reason, it appears that Marston is going beyond the attempts of other playwrights to justify the sensational violence in their plays and even to allow the audience to retain some admiration for the revenger without falling afoul of the censor. Through the visual effects of the Julio and Pandulpho scenes, together with the closing scene in which the revenge quartet takes leave of Venice and the audience, Marston uses both Old and New Testament imagery to sacralize revenge.

Stripling, Mary (Rice U), "Elizabethan Constructions of Maternity"

As Marie Axton has noted, the Inns of Court performed a series of plays, including Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc (1561) and George Gascoigne's Jocasta (1566), with the intention of urging Elizabeth to settle the succession debate, ideally through marriage and procreation. Rather than persuading Elizabeth to embrace domesticity, however, these early didactic dramas confirmed the very fears Elizabeth voiced regarding parenting. She articulated one such fear to Parliament: "For although I be never so careful of your well doing...yet may my issue grow out of kind, and become perhaps ungracious." Both Jocasta and Gorboduc confront Elizabeth with versions of her maternal nightmare, but with a twist. While the plays depict queen mothers who produce sons who "grow out of kind," the destruction redounds not only upon the mothers, as Elizabeth feared, but also upon the sons themselves--a fate which did not bode well for a nation obsessed with royal succession.

Thomas, Chad (University of Michigan) "The Discourse of Pleasure in Salmacis and Hermaphroditus"

In Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Francis Beaumont initiates an erotic discourse indebted to pleasure instead of desire. Reacting to a precedent set by Arthur Golding in his 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Beaumont removes the moralizing aspects of the tale (found in Golding's preoccupation with the harmful effects of desire) and concentrates instead on a celebration of erotic pleasure and how bodies respond to it. I shall argue that Hermaphroditus functions as the epicenter of pleasure in the poem. He exemplifies, through voluntary activities such as watching and involuntary responses such as melting, how pleasure replaces desire in Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.

Thomas, Jennifer (U of Florida), "The Shadow of the French Court in the Renaissance: A Gathering of Evidence"

In 1988, Richard Sherr postulated, "composers of the French court were influential (perhaps even more influential than is at present believed) in creating and spreading a new style of polyphony." The dearth of French primary sources seriously obscures our understanding of possibly the most vital Renaissance musical center. The lacuna may also deprive us of documentation for the career of Josquin Des Prez.

Other evidence may help complete the picture: 1. Documentation gaps for some composers probably occur precisely because of their presence at the French court, including some mentioned in laments commemorating Ockeghem's death, notably Josquin. 2. A core repertory of widely circulated motets exhibits two noteworthy features pertinent to the status of that court and Josquin's possible tenure there: Most of the works that formed the nucleus of this repertory between the years 1480 and 1520 were composed by Josquin; Most of the remaining works were by composers with arguable links to the court. 3. The source history of Mouton, a known entity at the court, provides a credible source template for other composers of merit working at the court. An astonishing 71 per cent of the sources containing works by Mouton also contain works by Josquin. Though few of these sources emanate directly from the French court, reason suggests that most original sources for Mouton's works must been French; Josquin thus looks French by association.

Taken together, these and other circumstances can inform our view of Josquin's biographical profile and the court's musical impact.

van den Berg, Sara (St. Louis University) "G. M. Revealed?: Printer of the first attacks on Milton's The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce"

Two texts printed by "G. M." in London in 1644 fiercely attacked Milton's first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Herbert Palmer's The glasse of Gods providence; and the anonymous An Answer to a book, intituled, "The doctrine and discipline of divorce." Through our research, we have been able to identify with certainty "G. M". as George Miller, a printer "dwelling in Black-Friers" ca. 1644 (Estwick i). This paper argues for a link between Miller's work and that of other eminent radical figures (such as Giles Calvert) who may have been coordinating their challenges against Milton in 1644.

Note 1. This conference paper--to be presented by W. Scott Howard--emerges from collaborative research and writing that contributes toward a casebook under contract and forthcoming from Duquesne University Press, John Milton's Divorce Tracts: Texts and Contexts, by Sara J. van den Berg (Saint Louis University) and W. Scott Howard (University of Denver).

Work Cited Estwick, Nicolas. Christ's submission to His Fathers will. London, 1644.

Vanhoutte, Jacque (U of North Texas), "'Cynthia Is No Stepmother': Surrogate Parenthood at the Court of Elizabeth I"

Stepmothers and foster mothers recur frequently in what Louis Montrose calls the Elizabethan "political imaginary." This paper argues that Elizabethan subjects used representations of surrogate mothers to offer commentary on the queen's strategies and fitness for rule, including her usurpation of masculine privilege and her adaptation of domestic models of authority to monarchical purposes. Elizabeth had made herself vulnerable to this form of critique; by offering herself "as a good mother," she (unwittingly) construed herself as a stepmother--a surrogate, a replacement, a substitute. Writers associated with her court--including Aylmer, Lyly, Sidney, and Shakespeare--in turn developed existing ideological connections between surrogate parenthood and political usurpation to reflect on the transgressive nature of Elizabeth's rule.

Villeponteaux, Mary (U of Southern Mississippi), "Elizabeth's Mercy"

Queen Elizabeth was admonished by some of her godly subjects who regarded her as too merciful, especially when she faced threats to the Church. I argue that this anxiety over the queen's clemency is partly a product of her gender. The Faerie Queene suggests an imaginative connection between Queen Elizabeth's virginity and her mercy in its portrayal of Belphoebe and use of Britomart, Knight of Chastity, to represent mercy in Book 5. These and other figures such as Mercilla, virgin queen of mercy, and the veiled Venus of Book 4, suggest Spenser's assessment of his queen's mercy as dangerous, both to her subjects and herself.

Weaver, Andrew (University of Notre Dame) "Toward a Rhetorical Analysis of Large-Scale Structure in Seventeenth-Century Music: A Case Study using Works by Giovanni Felice Sances"

Although musical analyses based on the principles of Classical rhetoric have become something of a commonplace in modern scholarship, our analytical approaches have been limited by the dominance of the early-seventeenth-century writings of Joachim Burmeister. Burmeister's style-based approach, which emphasizes the manipulation of stock figures to the exclusion of the other branches of rhetoric, did not necessarily apply, however, to the compositional process outside of Protestant Germany. Using as a case study two related motets on the same text by the Roman composer Giovanni Felice Sances (ca. 1600-1679), this paper offers a new model of rhetorical analysis focused on the rhetorical branch of dispositio (arrangement) and founded on the writings of Cicero.

Wolffe, Lisa (Northwestern State University) "On Earth As It Is in Heaven: God, Class, and State in 16th Century France"

French life and government in the 16th century were profoundly shaped by the dominant Christian (Catholic) beliefs of the French people. These beliefs gave the seal of divine approval to royal power and class privileges, but they also placed serious constraints on state power that is often and incorrectly called "absolute." Democratic, bureaucratic, and capitalistic tendencies created a more dynamic and civil society than is often supposed, and this was largely to the benefit of the French people. Class lines were rendered porous, ambition was encouraged and rewarded, and the monarch could only with great difficulty comport himself as a tyrant.

Zirpolo, Lilian (Rutgers University) "Christina of Sweden: Pier Francesco Mola's Patron"

Pier Francesco Mola entered into the service of Queen Christina of Sweden soon after her arrival in Rome in 1655. Two paintings by the artist are listed in the inventory of the Queen's possessions taken after her death in 1689: the Head of Medusa and the Death of Archimedes. Of these two works, only the Death of Archimedes is extant, now in a private collection in Rome, and dates to soon after Mola was hired by the Queen as her court painter. This painting has been little-studied in current art history scholarship and, while the focus has been on its visual elements, possible precedents, and dating, an iconographic interpretation of the image has never been proposed. This paper examines Mola's work in detail, relating its iconography to Queen Christina's interest in philosophy and her use of the image to fashion an identity for herself as an intellectual.