Paulina Kewes

Authorship and appropriation : writing for the stage in England, 1660-1710

A Note on Dates and Texts Prologue 1. The Playwright and the Marketplace 2. The Proprieties of Appropriation 3. Plagiarism and Property 4. Collaboration 5. The Canon Epilogue Appendix A: Dramatic Collaboration, 1590-1720 Appendix B: Collected Editions of Plays, 1604-1720 Bibliography Index of Plays General Index

Roman History and Early Stuart Drama: Thomas Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece

If wee present a forreigne History, the subiect is so intended, that in the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the vertues of our Country-men are extolled, or their vices reproved.

The 1553 succession crisis reconsidered

This article offers a new perspective on the context and significance of the 1553 succession crisis precipitated by the Protestant Edward VIs abortive bid to exclude his Catholic sister Mary in favour of his evangelical cousin Jane. Challenging the view of Janes coup as an evangelical crusade, and of Marys victory as the only successful Tudor rebellion, it analyses the constitutional principles behind the new settlement of succession, demonstrates how it was justified to the public and uncovers its Elizabethan legacy. By closely reading a series of key texts, it reshapes our understanding of this seminal event in Tudor history.

“I Ask Your Voices and Your Suffrages”: The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

This essay provides a contextual reading of Titus Andronicus, paying close attention to the play’s collaborative authorship. Peele and Shakespeare are shown to have manufactured a superficially compelling but in reality utterly fake image of the Roman state as an imaginary laboratory for political ideas, especially the elective principle. Topical allusions and deliberate anachronisms encourage the audience to relate the subject matter to the present, viz., late Elizabethan England in the throes of a succession crisis and rent by confessional divisions. Unlike Peele’s solo works, which exhibit a potent anti-Catholic bias, Titus remains confessionally aloof. The play invites the audience to reflect on the viability of particular modes of succession without committing itself either way, and shows that it is not institutional structures and processes but those who use and abuse them that make the difference to the state of the polity.

‘A mere historian’: Patrick Collinson and the Study of Literature

Patrick Collinson experienced a ‘cultural’ or more specifically a ‘literary’ turn in mid-career (the early 1980s) which had a profound effect on how he ‘did’ history. He rarely wrote about overtly ‘literary’ texts, but he helped to shape the area in which historians and literary scholars could have fruitful dialogue (sixteenth-century histories and sermons, for example). This essay explores three aspects of this story. First, it examines when, where, how and with whom he came to experience a new and transformative relationship with English literature and its scholars. Second, it scrutinizes the precise forms of that relationship. Third, it considers which of his publications have most influenced English studies and why others, arguably no less important, have been relatively neglected. It finds him at once passionate and strangely diffident, deeply hostile to the New Historicism, for example, but never willing to define his own position against those of whom he was so wary. Despite this, the essay seeks to demonstrate how deeply influential his empirical studies have been in a multi-disciplinary context.

Godly Queens: The Royal Iconographies of Mary and Elizabeth

Mary and Elizabeth Tudor are routinely cast in opposition to one another. Unlike Elizabeth, the supreme icon of Protestantism and Englishness, the Catholic Mary is judged to have failed to capture the hearts and minds of her subjects or to win for herself a reputation as a powerful godly queen. She was hopeless, we are told, at self-promotion and her government backward in exploiting the resources of spectacle and print. But is that how things looked at Elizabeth’s accession?