Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on English drama and the cultural anxieties it expresses.

Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on English drama and the cultural anxieties it expresses.



Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2015 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with a trio of reconsiderations of the impact of patronage on theater under the Stuarts, the role of the audience inHamlet, and the role of King Arthur inThe Faerie Queene. The heart of this year's journal is English drama, featuring essays on anxieties about nationhood inThe Spanish Tragedy, generic anomalies and Chaucerian echoes inAll's Well That Ends Well, the inversion of the hagiographical tradition in Shakespeare'sRichard III, and the complexities coalescing around authorial identity under the Stuarts. In the penultimate essay, the focus shifts to the non-dramatic with a reconsideration of Milton'sParadise Regained and its relationship to the court masque. The last offering is a historical essay on the intersection of the personal and the political in John Wray'sThe Pilgrim'sJournal. The volume concludes with four book reviews.

Contributors: David M. Bergeron, William A. Coulter, Timothy D. Crowley, Melissa Geil, Lainie Pomerleau, Robert Lanier Reid, Emily Stockard, Lewis Walker, John N. Wall.

The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of Georgia.

The Stuart Brothers and English Theater
"You would pluck out the heart of my mystery": The Audience in Hamlet
Spenser's Reformation Epic: Gloriana and the Unadulterated Arthur
Nationhood as Illusion inThe Spanish Tragedy
The Wife of Bath andAll's Well That Ends Well
A Necessary Evil: The Inverted Hagiography of Shakespeare'sRichard III
Deny, Omit, and Disavow: Becoming Ben Jonson
"What strange parallax or optic skill":Paradise Regained and the Masque
A Protestant Pilgrim in Rome, Venice, and English Parliament: Sir John Wray
Book Reviews