Huw Griffiths

Radiocarbon-dated Holocene pollen and ostracod sequences from barrage tufa- dammed fluvial systems in the White Peak, Derbyshire, UK

Sedimentary evidence, in the form of pollen, ostracod and radiocarbon-age data from three barrage tufa-dammed systems in the White Peak area of Derbyshire, is used to reconstruct the regions environmental history from 10000 to 4000BP. The data highlight the useful role that such fluvial systems can play in environmental reconstructions, through their ability to act as sumps for a wide range of proxy indicators, in a region where environmental change during the Holocene period has been relatively poorly documented. Pollen data suggest that the period of climatic amelioration following the last (Devensian) glaciation facilitated the spread of thermophilous woodland taxa on the White Peak, although there are some indications that the first immigrant trees were not established until a relatively late date. Forest clearance commencing during the mid-Holocene, and possibly as early as the late Mesolithic, was most probably to provide land for grazing, and was virtually complete by 4000BP. Ostracod data reveal fluctuations in discharge of the River Lathkill draining the White Peak, particularly lower flow rates after 7400 BP, which are difficult to explain simply in terms of climate change.

Did changes in late Last Glacial and early Holocene atmospheric CO2 concentrations control rates of tufa precipitation

Gases trapped within Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice-cores document a dramatic increase in atmospheric CO2 levels (by almost 100%) in the period between the last glacial maximum and the late Holocene. The authors note an apparent correlation between increases in levels of atmospheric CO2 during this period and an episode of mass deposition of freshwater carbonate tufas and travertines. As changes in atmospheric CO2 levels are likely to affect carbonate deposition (Tucker and Wright, 1990), we propose the hypothesis that a relationship exists between increasing atmospheric CO2 levels and tufa deposition.

The Geographies of Shakespeare's Cymbeline

hakespeare’s Cymbeline is emphatically set in Britain. More than King s Lear, Shakespeare’s other canonical “British” play, Cymbeline continually draws attention to its own historical and geographical setting in ancient Britain. The stage directions mark the location of Cynibeline’s palace as “Britain” each time, in distinction to “Wales” and “Rome,” the other two named locations in the stage directions. The word “Britain” or related words are mentioned constantly in the dialogue while they are barely mentioned in Lear.’ I am starting then with an assumption that Cymbelirze is self-consciously concerned with the idea of “Great Britain.” The probleniatic and contested location of “Great Britain” in the period ininiediately following James VI of Scotland’s accession to the English throne informs the geographies of the play. The peculiarities of its setting are brought about by the remapping of the space of the nation that is entailed in James’s accession. By the play’s geographies, I niean both the topographies and cartographies within the play as well as the location of the perforniances of the play on stages in Jacobean London. I will be particularly concerned with the locatedness of the play in relation to wider Jacobean concerns with the space of the nation and the place of the stage. The locatedness of the theater, both its use of distinct geographical, political, and historical settings, and its own material and symbolic positions within a niap of the nation, will contribute to Cymbeline’s intervention in the Union debate.*

Infestation of the Freshwater Ostracod Cypria aphthalmica (Jurine) by the Peritrich Nüchterleinella carneliae Matthes

Summary Brief details of the seasonal occurrence and levels of infestation by Nuchterleinella corneliae on its ostracod host are given. The species is also reported from the ostracod Cyclocypris ovum for the first time.

Adapting same-sex friendship: Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Davenant's The Rivals

In adapting The Two Noble Kinsmen as The Rivals, William Davenant minimizes the affective power of same-sex love and friendship that is present in the original, at the same time as eliminating most of Shakespeares contribution to the original script. Tracing this process of adaptation allows us not only to see what happens to Renaissance idealizations of philia in the later period, but also to reexamine the relationship between Fletcher and Shakespeare. Their collaboration emerges as, itself, potentially rivalrous, as they promote quite different understandings of the values attached to same-sex friendship.

“Shall I Never See a Lusty Man Again?”: John Fletcher’s Men, 1608–1715

In 2009 I wrote an essay on Cardenio.1 I argued that in considering the nature of any play called Cardenio, written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, then one important area of investigation might be the modifications made to the narrative of interrupted male friendship between its apparent source in Cervantes and its eighteenth-century adaptation in Double Falsehood. Where the former celebrates an idealized male friendship, at times through the kinds of homoerotic representations of male beauty common to the classical and Renaissance traditions, the latter eschews this in favor of a celebration of a more domesticated and bourgeois heterosexuality. Theobald’s adaptation sidelines the homoerotic potential of early modern male philia, associating it with the rapacious aristocratic sexual appetites of the villainous Henriquez, whose characterization might readily be identified with what Thomas King terms “residual pederasty.” In the later period statusdriven homoeroticism comes to be understood as tyrannical and corrupting and, crucially, as outmoded.2 In arguing that an original Shakespeare and Fletcher play could not have worked in quite this way but, as in the Cervantes original, would have afforded much greater affective power to the friendship between Cardenio and Don Fernando, my main touchstones were the powerful portraits of male friendship available in the Shakespearian canon, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice, to the more generically comparable The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter, of course cowritten by Fletcher).

Sovereignty, Synecdoche, and the Prosthetic Hand in King John

The word “hand” appears more times in King John than in any other Shakespeare play. The focus in Shakespeare’s history plays on bodies and body parts allows for the central questions of sovereign relations to be asked over and over again: on whose behalf does a person act and to whom does their body belong? King John construes the political relations of early modern sovereignty through the “hand.” This article argues that this construal allows the play to critique sovereign agency, representing it through synecdoche and understanding sovereign agency as a form of prosthesis.

Passports and the Locations of Sovereignty in The Reign of Edward III

This article provides a critical analysis of the language and dramatic action of the anonymous 1590s play, The Reign of Edward III, alongside a discussion of Edward IIIs reputation in the Elizabethan period. Through this, it emerges that the play is more searchingly engaged with questions of sovereign power than has usually been argued in its critical reception. The idea of the “passport”, a relatively new concept in sixteenth-century Europe, is handled interestingly in the play. This and other representations of sovereign agency (warrants, oaths, even sonnets) are mobilized in the plays action and dialogue to interrogate a central question of sixteenth-century political thought and practice: where is sovereignty located, in the body of the monarch or in the workings of the state?

The Lecture as Theatre

Two students arrived at the start of one of my Shakespeare lectures in 2009 and asked if they could take some time at the start to address the class. Where I work, at the University of Sydney, this is called a ‘lecture bash’ and can be used for a number of reasons — advertising forthcoming student drama productions, requesting volunteers for charity events and, most often, as hustings in student elections. This ‘bash’ was different though. One of the students put a photograph of his girlfriend up on the two large screens at the front of the lecture theatre and, supported by his friend, asked if anyone had seen this woman, a fellow member of the Shakespeare class, as she had apparently gone missing a few days earlier. They put up phone numbers for themselves and for the local police station in Glebe in case the students heard anything about her after the lecture. But then someone from the audience spoke out, shouting ‘She’s here!’, identifying the woman from the picture as sitting in the class. At that point the two men at the front leapt up into the lecture audience and the student who had thought he had lost his girlfriend was heard to say, ‘Her natural posture! / Chide me, that I may say indeed / Thou art Hermione’ as he approached the identified Shakespeare student.