Lisa Hopkins

Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1580-1587: Canterbury and Cambridge 1587-1589: London and the World 1589-1592: Daring God out of Heaven 1592-1593: Tobacco and Boys A Great Reckoning: From 1593 to Immortality Index

What Makes a Marriage

In three largely dissimilar plays, and in very different ways, Shakespeare introduces an element of dubiety or disruption into the completion of a marriage — the phenomenon that Carol Thomas Neely identified in her seminal study of Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays. Postponement and improper performance of ritual, analogous to the motif of subversion of courtly entertainment so widespread in drama of the period, occur elsewhere in the canon, but they are most prominent in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing and the problem play, Measure for Measure.

Neighbourhood in Henry V

Shakespeare’s Henry V ostensibly tells a story of enmity. The main plot of Henry’s triumphant subjugation of the over-confident French seems to have its emotional dynamic of hostility subtly but tellingly underwritten by the subplot: the story of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym enacts the ever-widening breach of sympathy and circumstance between the King and his erstwhile companions of the tavern. From the outset, however, the development of the opposition is structured by a tense emphasis on the close confines of the combat. The Globe itself may be an inadequate arena for a representation of the conflict, but in one sense at least it merely mirrors an actual facet of the war itself: Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.1 The restricting ‘girdle’ of the Globe provides an apt correlative for the narrowness of the ocean, across which ‘fronts’ menacingly face each other.2

Pocahontas and The Winter's Tale

This essay argues what is on the face of it a ludicrous claim: that Shakespeares play The Winters Tale can profitably be read in the light of the story of the Algonquian princess Pocahontas. The reason that this seems ludicrous is quite simply that The Winters Tale was almost certainly written before Shakespeare can have heard of Pocahontas, and in any case, everyone knows that it is The Tempest which is interested in the New World, not The Winters Tale, which is located firmly in the classical past. Nevertheless, as many scholars have observed, the classical past and the New World were rarely far apart in early modern thought. The essay argues that there is not merely an incidental but a structural parallel, with deep roots in early modern thought systems, between the events of The Winters Tale and those surrounding the vist of Pocahontas to London some four or five years after the play was first performed, so that the later of the two events can indeed help us to read the earlier. It suggests that excessive attention to Pocahontas’ relationships with first John Smith and then John Rolfe have prevented us from noticing a much less visible but culturally no less interesting one with Henry, Prince of Wales, and above all with the mode of relationship between England and America which Prince Henry encouraged and with which he ultimately came virtually to be identified, which was one mediated through the classical past. Throughout Prince Henrys life in England there was a strong association between him and the figure of Marcellus, nephew and heir apparent of the Emperor Augustus, who died young and whose loss was lamented in the Aeneid. Pocahontas too was a figure to whom strong Virgilian resonances accrued. In The Winters Tale, the princess from a new land replaces the lost prince who had died in the old, and the discourse of the classical mingles so powerfully with that of the trade and exploration which drove the quest for the New World. To read The Winters Tale in the light of the Pocahontas story allows us a lens through which to read the culturally crucial intersection of the Virgilian with the Virginian, and of the New World with the Old.

Women’s Souls: The Duchess of Malfi and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

The intensity of the early seventeenth-century interest in the body by no means precluded an equally eager interest in the soul. Even a work like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for all the resonances of the overtly medical underpinnings invoked by its title, postulated the mind as influenced by the body but by no means entirely constituted by it. In John Ford’s 1629 tragicomedy The Lover’s Melancholy, which openly acknowledges its debt to Burton,1 the physician Corax explicitly denies that the primary cause of melancholy is physiological, or at least avers that it is so only in a highly complex way: Melancholy Is not as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind’s disease. So ecstasy, Fantastic dotage, madness, phrenzy, rapture Of mere imagination, differ partly From melancholy, which is briefly this: A mere commotion of the mind, o’ercharged With fear and sorrow, first begot i’th’brain, The seat of reason, and from thence derived As suddenly into the heart, the seat Of our affection.2 Similarly Bacon, also an influence on Ford (who used him as a source for his play Perkin Warbeck), argued that

Food and growth in emma

Abstract The events of Emma are framed by two marriages. Beneath thisofficial chronology, though, the story of Emmas maturation is underpinned by a framework of carefully counterpointed progressions away from, and towards, motherhood, obeying the narrative and emotional logic of the fairytale, with itstypical move from the loss of the mother, and its impact on the daughters life, towards the representation of that daughter herself as about to embark on the roleof maternity. Cyclical growth and nurture are also highlighted by the stress on an economy of consumption and food-gifts, with social attitudes and financial status clarified and demarcated by food in ways which counterpoint the teleologically-oriented linearity of the novels narrative progression; they also reveal an ostensibly pastoral economy of food gifts as a mystification of the realities of class and money underlying it.

Marriage as Comic Closure

The most outstanding feature of Shakespearean comedy is its pervading obsession with marriage. In many instances single or multiple marriages are used to provide comic closure, as in As You Like It and Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which four couples marry or are expected to marry, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, in each of which three couples marry, and Much Ado About Nothing and Two Gentlemen of Verona, in each of which two couples marry. In other examples the very fact of marriage is used as the mainspring of the comedy, as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the very title of the play indicates the importance of marriage, or, to a lesser extent, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew, in each of which a marital relationship plays a central part. Indeed, marriage is so central a topic in Shakespearean comedy that it is the presence of marriages in their plots which has problematised the genre classifications of both the late romances and the two ‘dark’ comedies, Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well, and which provides the main justification for whatever claim they are accorded to be treated as comedies.1 We know, moreover, that many of Shakespeare’s comedies bear clear marks of having been written expressly for performance as part of the celebrations surrounding the solemnisation of actual marriages, so that the connection would have been still more obvious to their original audiences.

A man with a map: The Millennial Macbeth

A. J. Hartley and David Hewson’s Macbeth: A Novel was published in 2012, the year in which it was agreed that a referendum on Scottish independence would be held. (The proposal having first been mooted in January, the Edinburgh Agreement was finally reached in October.) Hartley and Hewson’s book certainly looks at Macbeth, but it looks too at what it has meant to be Scottish in the past and also, by implication, glances at what it may mean to be Scottish in the future. In this Hartley and Hewson’s use of Macbeth has something in common with that of the late twentieth-century Scottish author Dorothy Dunnett, whose King Hereafter (1984), like her better-known Lymond and Niccolo chronicles, self-consciously positions itself as writing Scotland’s story in ways which draw on both Scottish literary tradition and Dunnett’s own quasi-public position as wife of the editor of The Scotsman; however, while Dunnett’s Macbeth is half-Norse with roots in Orkney as well as Caithness, Hartley and Hewson’s is a wholly Scottish figure who repels Viking invaders and considers himself a flag-bearer for a distinctively Scottish national identity with solidly established traditions and clearly defined territorial borders. In this essay, I examine these two very different uses of Macbeth alongside Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter and Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth: A Novel and situate their cultural constructions of Scotland’s past, present, and possible futures within the broader history of appropriations of the play.

Caterina Cornaro and the Colonization of Cyprus

Married as a teenager to the last Lusignan King of Cyprus, James II, Caterina Cornaro achieved the surprising feat of translating her initial position of queen consort into that of queen regnant. Although she was always little more than a puppet of the Venetian Republic in whose favor she was eventually induced to abdicate, she and her story exercised an extraordinary fascination over both contemporaries and posterity; moreover, her principal rival for the crown of Cyprus was another potential queen regnant, Carlotta de Lusignan, James’s sister. This chapter examines the way these two women attempted to negotiate queenship, the conducting of trade, and the vexed question of whether Cyprus would be forced into the status of a colony of Venice .

I am Ìyálóde of tì still: A Yoruba Duchess of Malfi

This article examines Debo Oluwatuminus Iyalode of ti (An Original Adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi By John Webster), produced by Utopia Theatre in Leeds, Sheffield and Doncaster in autumn 2016. Oluwatuminus play takes the story of The Duchess of Malfi and transposes it to nineteenth-century Yorubaland. This inevitably leads to major changes to names and situations, yet there are some even more striking similarities and continuities. The essay compares Iyalode of ti with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ([1958] 1996) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun ([2006] 2014) to argue that the interest in twinning found in both these three texts and The Duchess of Malfi itself is played out in the relationship between adaptation and original: Iyalode of ti may take its inspiration from Webster, but it, like its heroine, is itself, and even if it knows that the precolonial Yorubaland it shows us is trembling on the edge of extinction, it also shows us that the customs and stories of that land still have vibrancy and force. Iyalode of ti may be Kehinde to The Duchess of Malfi’s Taiwo, but it is a second-born with power, and it is Iya´lo´de of ti still.