This article discusses an early modernSammelband(collected volume) that compiles epithalamia celebrating the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart with two translations, William Vaughan’s “The new-found politicke” and Robert Ashley’s “Almansor.” By highlighting the varied uses of Muslim exemplarity and alterity within one compilation, this article reveals the effects of recontextualization invited by the process of book building in the larger context of the Thirty Years’ War. ThisSammelbandstudy argues that translation, repurposing, and the material processes of compilation unsettle narratives of religious difference used by European writers to make sense of political conflict in the early seventeenth century.
Scholarly attention to Francis Bacon’s The History of the Reign of King Henry VII has missed the political import of the text’s criticisms of Henry VII’s relationship with his wife, Elizabeth York, while approaches to John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck have overlooked the play’s intertextual engagement with The History ’s view of royal marriage. In this essay, I argue that Bacon identifies a monarch’s policies toward his queen consort as central to that monarch’s successes or failures through an intentionally fictive account of Henry VII’s oppression and estrangement of Elizabeth, a view of monarchal politics that emerges in response to James I’s negotiation of relationships with his female kin. As Perkin Warbeck answers the questions about royal marriage posed in The History by promoting a fantasy of apolitical queenship, it also critiques the political influence of Queen Henrietta Maria in the early years of Charles I’s reign.
This article examines student experiences of studying Shakespeare’s first tetralogy through viewing and writing about Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2017 Bring Down the House, a successful two-part adaptation of Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 directed by Rosa Joshi and the upstart crow collective, a Seattle theater company dedicated to producing classical works with diverse all-female and nonbinary casts for contemporary audiences. Through reflection on students’ responses to the adaptation’s all-female cast, as well as the analytical work they produced for an upper-level course titled Shakespeare: Context and Theory, this article articulates the pedagogical value of students’ experiences of representation in live theater performances of Shakespeare. The author argues for both the ethical imperative of introducing students to radical, inclusively cast productions and the enlivened learning that emerges in the literature classroom from students’ creative and analytical engagements with the diverse voices of modern all-female and cross-gender cast Shakespearean performance.
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