Debora Shuger

Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603

Sometime in the sixteenth century the English began to sing in church. They sang from a psalter now (misleadingly) known as ‘‘Sternhold and Hopkins,’’ about which (so I was told) the less said, the better. Taking the hint, I, and others, ignored the stuff. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that we who thought of ourselves as cultural historians overlooked these metrical psalms since, as Beth Quitslund notes, The Whole Book of Psalms (WBP ) went through around 150 editions during Elizabeth’s reign alone —close to a thousand before it was laid aside in the heyday of Romanticism (1, 273). Although the Jacobean avant-garde found it sorely lacking, under Elizabeth it remained ‘‘a truly popular book’’ across social and doctrinal boundaries (243, 260). Given its spectacular and lasting popularity, the critical neglect does seem hard to justify. In light of Quitslund’s Reformation in Rhyme, however, the neglect may have been a felix culpa, since her study of the Elizabethan metrical psalter approaches the Platonic idea of monograph. It was worth the wait. The book never loses its focus on the sixteenth-century metrical psalters, but these turn out to present a myriad of technical and interpretive problems, all handled with exemplary clarity, precision, and intelligence. Moreover, although the focus is tight, the implications of Quitslund’s study are anything but narrow. The book seeks to ‘‘reattach the history of the English metrical psalter to that of the Reformation in the sixteenth century’’ (5), which requires, first of all, dating and distinguishing the dozen or so psalters published in the fifteen-year span separating Thomas Sternhold’s psalm paraphrases of 1547–48 from the multiauthored 1562 WBP brought out by John Day.

‘In a Christian Climate’: Religion and Honor in Richard II

This chapter is about Richard II, but I want to start from left field with the question of why in the late sixteenth century Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (c. 370 bc) became so important. Spenser’s letter to Raleigh cites the Cyropaedia as the model for The Faerie Queene, announcing that, as Xenophon ‘in the person of Cyrus ... fashioned a governement, such as might best be, …[s]o have I laboured to doe in the person of Arthure.’ Sidney’s Apology for Poetry hinges on the power of fiction ‘to make many Cyruses,’ and Frances Meres notes the relation between Xenophon’s Cyrus and Sidney’s own princes in his 1598 Palladis Tamia.1

Spider Search: An Efficient and Non-Frontier-Based Real-Time Search Algorithm

Real-time search algorithms are limited to constant-bounded search at each time step. We do not see much difference between standard search algorithms and good real-time search algorithms when problem sizes are small. However, having a good real-time search algorithm becomes important when problem sizes are large. In this paper we introduce a simple yet efficient algorithm, Spider search, which uses very low constant time and space to solve problems when agents need deep (but not exhaustive) path analysis at each step. We expect that Spider search is the first in a new class of tree-based rather than frontier-based search algorithms.

The King of Souls

Why does Shakespeare’s Duke attend primarily to the good of individuals? In Tudor–Stuart England (as throughout pre- and early modern Europe), this concern for the individual good was held to be a distinctive feature of ecclesiastical justice.1 As Richard Cosin explains in his 1593 An Apology for … Jurisdiction Ecclesiastical, the typical penalties imposed by the church courts were not, strictly speaking, punishment at all, since, whereas punishment aimed either at compensating the injury, avenging wickedness, or deterring would-be offenders, canon law penalties were ‘a medicine, tending to the reformation of the delinquent.’ If they were punishment, it was of a distinctively non-punitive sort: such punishment as especially aimeth at his bettering upon whom it is inflicted, being a punishment tempered with mercy … [For] the party is indeed punished as an offender, yet the rigor of the penalty is spared, & he commiserated and pitied as a man and therefore apt enough to offend through human frailty.2

The Throne of God: Absolutism, Equity, and Christian Justice

Sacral kingship presupposed the Elizabethan conception of the state as primarily a juridic rather than a constitutional order. Of the sixteenth-century texts that describe the institutions of central government, none focuses on the respective functions of Crown, Lords, and Commons — or on the tensions between them. For Sir Thomas Smith, whose De republica Anglorum1 is the sole Tudor work to give a comprehensive account of English polity, ‘the framework of a commonwealth consists almost entirely of its courts, its judicial system, and its methods of police.’2 This juridic conception of the state likewise informs the one other important Elizabethan treatise on national governance, William Lambarde’s Archeion: Or, a Discourse upon the High Courts of Justice in England (written c. 1591; first edition 1635). Archeion deals exclusively with the central courts — including Parliament, which Lambarde regards as England’s ‘chief and highest court.’3 As Holdsworth points out, Lambarde’s focus, like Smith’s, is political rather than legal.4 Both men, that is, are attempting to explain how England is ruled; they analyze the courts because these represent the principal institutions of the state.

The Rebel Codpiece and the State

It seems odd that neither the Duke nor Escalus nor Isabella nor even Claudio thinks to point out that the ‘hideous law’ (I. iv. 63) punishing fornication with death is appalling. They question Angelo’s rigid enforcement, but it does not seem obvious to them that the statute violates fundamental moral rights. The play, clearly, does not endorse the law — in the end, the Duke simply ignores it — but only Vienna’s pimps and johns find the whole business of sexual regulation absurd. We, of course, also have trouble viewing ‘the rebellion of a codpiece’ (III. ii. 100–1) as seriously problematic, which is one reason why Measure for Measure is, for us, a problem comedy: the play wrestles with a law that seems basically fruitloops.