Volume 28, Number 2, 2025 Access to current issues of this journal requires a subscription.

EN:

This paper examines the significance of Aaron’s melancholy toward the production of whiteness in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. While the word ‘melancholy’ only appears once, Aaron’s self-confessed temperament becomes a key tool in the play’s efforts to define race along moral and physical lines. This paper explores how Aaron becomes a resource in securing the play’s representation of a white, Roman legacy, and how the commodification of Black bodies resonates with early modern constructions of race and the formation of a racially delineated hierarchical system.

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This article examines early modern English dramatic representations of Carthaginian noblewoman Sophonisba as a model of idealized, white femininity. Through an analysis of John Marston’s The Wonder of Women, Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio, and Nathaniel Lee’s Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow, I argue that Sophonisba’s chaste, fair body functions as the embodiment of idealized femininity while paradoxically exerting destabilizing power over men such as Masinissa, Syphax, and Scipio. These plays illuminate the irony of glorifying white, virginal femininity, which ultimately disrupts military and political pursuits.

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Acousmatic warfare, the use of sound without a visible source as a means of force, is presented in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as sonic play akin to that of an innocuous, ephemeral play, game, or dream, prompting audiences to engage carefully with the play’s uncanny sonic effects. The staging of acousmatic sound makes possible the coexisting presence of both racialization and resistance. The inset play, Pyramus and Thisbe, presents a competitive and interactive play that both racializes and protects the artisan players by allowing them to use their authorial skills to stage sonic resistance against aristocratic powers.

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This article analyzes overlooked evidence concerning the conscription of boys by early modern English choirs and theatre companies, arguing that legal and cultural representations depicted these abductions as benevolent while violating consent. It further speculates that points of contact between the theatrical economy and the Virginia Company may have prompted authorities to use a parallel mode of impressment to take Powhatan children to populate Henrico College. I argue that the practices of coercion and abduction on the English stage can provide a useful framework for understanding the rhetoric of benign subservience that the English authorities cultivated in an Atlantic context.

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This review essay considers whiteness in Shakespeare and early modern studies through five books: David Sterling Brown’s Shakespeare’s White Others; Miles Grier’s Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery; Farah Karim-Cooper’s The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race; White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite, edited by Arthur L. Little, Jr; and Ian Smith’s Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race.

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This introduction presents a new collection of essays examining the role of conversion in early modern English drama. Together, the contributions demonstrate how the theatre served as a space for dramatizing the political, theological, and psychological complexities of identity transformation. With case studies ranging from city comedy to colonial propaganda, the volume emphasizes conversion’s entanglement with race, gender, and performance. Drawing on recent scholarship, the authors highlight drama’s unique capacity to stage conversional doubt, sincerity, and dissimulation — establishing theatre as both a site of ideological reinforcement and a medium for interrogating the limits of belief and belonging.

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This article explores the stakes of discerning criminal conversion on the early modern stage, particularly when city comedies and domestic tragedies mediate contemporaneous London events. These plots offered an intersection between contemporaneous pamphlets that framed criminality as a distinct social identity and early English dramatic practices representing spiritual conversion. The Roaring Girl defended Moll Cutpurse’s criminal adjacency by framing her urban mediation as a hagiography akin to the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene. In contrast, domestic tragedies used hybrid personification to offer ambiguity about the spiritual or forensic state of mediators or go-betweens in criminal conspiracies. These paradigms offer diverging responses to antitheatrical warnings about the associative risks of playgoing.

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In her theory of moral exemplarity, philosopher Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski observes how every era and culture has recognized supremely good individuals, models who inspire admiration and imitation. On the early modern stage, Bess Bridges — heroine of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West — emerges as one such magnanimous figure. Her virtuous exemplarity enkindles deep admiration in other characters, their mimetic responses leading to metanoia. This essay explores the moral psychology of admiration in Heywood’s play, the complex relationship between the passions and conversion, and early modern theatre as a school and fruitful site for the realization of virtue.

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Scholars often contextualize the faithful wife archetype as an iteration of the exhaustingly obedient ‘Patient Griselda’ trope. However, this essay demonstrates the significance of these characters to conversion narratives, showing the agency and power wives were granted to return their wayward husbands to family values, economic and sexual restraint, and the spread of Christianity through reproduction. The London Prodigal responds to topical discourses regarding women’s moral responsibility toward men, staging scenarios in which a wife tames her husband without threatening patriarchal structures and is celebrated for it. The play thus offers an important contribution for studying gendered patterns of conversion.

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Attuned to the early modern period’s contested conversion culture, the essay traces how Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet overlays its romantic plot with the language and logic of religious confession, skepticism, persecution, and martyrdom. Romeo’s shifting affections and Juliet’s performative repentance stage anxieties about the sincerity of professed faith or love, and the tragic resolution questions the culture’s over-reliance on martyrdom as proof of devotion. The play ultimately rejects the logic that constrains characters to a binary choice between renegade or martyr and affirms instead the inevitability of uncertainty in all professions of devotion, whether spiritual or romantic.

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Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta presents religion and religious conversion as a tool of state power, rather than as a religious process. This play’s representation of false conversions lays bare the central paradox that plagued Reformation conversion narratives: how do you know someone has truly been converted? Marlowe’s play radically transforms acts of conversion into nonperformative speech. By staging coerced, dissembling, and honest conversions in a single play, with little ritualized action to distinguish one conversion from another, Marlowe challenges the religious work of conversion, exposing it as an early modern political tool that could be manipulated by both the state and individuals.