Hostile Makeovers

Not every playwright appreciated the diva’s gifts. When the actress-driven innamorata entered the scene, some saw her as a threat that challenged their hold over the stage. The most common countertactic was to equate actresses with whores and common courtesans, as Thomas Nashe does in Pierce Penniless. Others wrote plays that figured amorous Italian women as dangerous Circes, as Anthony Munday does in The Two Italian Gentlemen. When a play directly represents an Italian actress, the authors marginalize and silence her, as did Day, Wilkins, and Rowley with “Harlakin’s Wife” in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers. In Volpone, Ben Jonson turned his satire on Englishwomen like Fine Lady Would-Be, bent on imitating Italian courtesans and actresses. He excised all the resourcefulness from the virtuous Celia, who resembles the virgo as she falls victim to a violently venal husband and cynical lecher who strive to cast her as a flexible player-whore.

The Exuvial Book

In his posthumously published study Art and Agency, the anthropologist Alfred Gell sets out the idea of distributed personhood, according to which we are present, not just in our bodies, but also in the remnants we leave in the wider environment, our “exuviae” or sloughed skins. This chapter explores the implications of this notion of identity for our understanding of the codex. Taking up Genette’s concept of the paratext, it shifts our attention away from the “peritext,” the layers of framing attached to the book, and towards the “epitext,” the frames that exist beyond the book’s bounds. It goes on to show how Gell’s analysis, in licensing the idea that a text might be more powerfully present at its most distant verge than it can be in itself, can illuminate figurations of agency in texts by Thomas Nashe, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell.

A Second Way to Read McLuhan’s Footnotes to Innis

Background Marshall McLuhan claimed his work was a footnote to Harold A. Innis. His claims have been used to argue that McLuhan and Innis offer a coherent system of thought, with a systematic methodology and common set of basic assumptions and presuppositions. This article questions that species of argument and looks to deepen our understanding of the McLuhan-Innis relationship.Analysis McLuhan is read as an analogist, and his footnotes (plural) are interpreted as deliberate violations of normative patterns of academic use in the satiric tradition of Thomas Nashe and the Scriblerus Club.Conclusion and implications McLuhan is repositioned apropos of Innis, figures conventionally associated with the Toronto School of Communication Theory and historians who address themselves to the theme of orality and literacy. This article also invites a reconsideration of McLuhan in relation to the digital era, his contributions to epistemology and understanding media. Contexte Marshall McLuhan a dit que son œuvre n’était qu’une note en bas de page par rapport à celle de Harold A. Innis. Certains commentateurs ont utilisé ce propos pour soutenir que McLuhan et Innis ensemble présentent un système de pensée cohérent ayant une méthodologie systématique et des suppositions et présuppositions de base communes. L’article met cet argument en question tout en cherchant à approfondir notre compréhension du rapport McLuhan / Innis.Analyse On perçoit communément McLuhan comme étant un analogiste et on interprète ses notes en bas de page (au pluriel) comme étant des violations délibérées des normes académiques dans la tradition satirique d’un Thomas Nashe ou d’un Scriblerus Club.Conclusion et implications Cet article repositionne McLuhan par rapport à Innis, ces deux figures traditionnellement associées à l’École de communication de Toronto et aux historiens de l’oral et l’écrit. Cet article propose en outre une reconsidération de McLuhan par rapport à l’ère numérique et à ses contributions en épistémologie et en analyse des médias.

Thomas Nashe On and Off the Page

This chapter shifts attention from the literariness of Thomas Nashe’s style to its performability. It recalls the role performance played in his education, and his links to the theatre. It considers what was so meaningful about live performance that he tried to recreate its effect in printed prose. It explores the theatricality of his prose: his use of the rhetorical sentence to represent live thinking; his use of direct address in Summers last will and testament and The Unfortunate Traveller; and his imitation of the university play Pedantius in Have with you to Saffron Walden. Nashe’s attempt to bring the flat page to life with thought, wit, and emotion explains his criticism of Gabriel Harvey, whose pamphlets he represents as material objects that can be reduced to their constituent parts with no loss.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance

Two ideas lie at the heart of this study and its claim that we need a new history of reading: that voices in books can affect us deeply; that printed books can be brought to life with the voice. Voices and Books offers a new history of reading focused on the oral and voice-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader we have privileged in the last few decades, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tone—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others’ voices, as well as manage and exploit the voices of their readers. It offers fresh readings of the key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers: John Bale, Anne Askew, William Baldwin, Thomas Nashe. And it aims to rethink what a printed book can be, searching the printed page for vocal cues, and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process.

Harvey’s 1593 ‘To Be and Not To Be’

Ever since the discovery of the first quarto of Hamlet (Q1) in 1823, it has generated fierce debate among scholars about its origin. Recently, Terri Bourus has written a powerful book-length argument that Q1 was indeed by Shakespeare, as its title page states, and that he wrote it by 1589. The present article bolsters Bourus’s conclusion with a careful look at its title page claims as well as the literary satires of Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey and Ben Jonson. Specifically, Q1’s title page and apparent allusions to Hamlet in the early 1590s pamphlet war of Nashe and Harvey independently confirm an earlier chronology for the tragedy. Jonson also attributes a line exclusive to Q1 to his caricature of Shakespeare in Every Man Out of His Humor (1600). The evidence suggests Shakespeare had written Q1 much earlier than conventionally assumed and that there was no ‘lost Hamlet’.