Volume 26, numéro 1, 2023

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This editorial launches our open call for book reviews editor(s), announces our 2023 essay prize winners, and commemorates the life of our late colleague and editorial board member Dr JoAnna Dutka.

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This essay reads Pericles (1608) through the lens of early modern critical whiteness studies. Tracing how the play reworks the colour-coding of its medieval source text along new racial lines, this essay sees Pericles’s melancholia as an allegory of the always incomplete condition of whiteness. It then shows how Pericles uses the erotic mechanics of romance to pursue his quest for whiteness. Ultimately, the essay underlines the relevance of Pericles’s quest to Shakespeare’s cultural moment before discussing the voices of resistance to the project of whiteness embedded within the play, and the uses of that play for our own times.

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In the aftermath of the storm in The Tempest, as Miranda suffers vicariously with the shipwrecked passengers, Prospero imposes meaning onto the environmental catastrophe. Imbricating maritime salvage, physical saving, and theological salvation, Prospero insists on a temporality of supersession in which catastrophe allows one political order to displace an older, corrupt paradigm. But the act of salvaging deepens Miranda’s erotic attachment to Ferdinand and complicates the social affiliations of the island. Alternately, Caliban, inverting the erotics of salvage, dramatizes how racialized perception saturates experiential encounters with the storm.

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Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1621) clearly sits in the tradition of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Italianate tragedy and is resonant of stories, ideas, theories, and characters from Italian history and its literary tradition. This essay discusses the play as one of the earliest examples of Massinger’s interest in Italy and its culture. It investigates the play’s Italian setting and examines the influence of the Italian cultural and political legacy to offer new insights into the development of Anglo-Italian relations and England’s home and religious politics in the early 1620s.

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With its glorified ghost, godly avenger, and idolatrous Tyrant, Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy appears to offer a thinly veiled allegory of Protestant triumphalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to how its characters do — or do not — respond to the play’s many crises of conscience. This essay sets Middleton’s tragedy against English Protestant understandings of the trembling body and vexed conscience. It demonstrates that while the play’s multiple instances of trembling seem to unsettle its Protestant triumphalism, its special effects, intended to provoke audience trembling, might nevertheless deepen playgoers’ attachment to the Protestant cause.

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This article discusses a recently rediscovered copy of Ben Jonson's 1640 Workes that contains seventeenth-century annotations to Epicene that suggest preparations for performance. We trace the folio copy’s provenance with the Powell family in Nanteos, Wales, and consider the possibility that it may have been annotated when in the possession of Sir Thomas Powell, a lawyer and judge who spent much of his life in London. We argue that the annotated play-text can be connected to four other playbooks by William Shakespeare and James Shirley that have been previously associated with seventeenth-century amateur theatricals, and that the new evidence provided by the Jonson text points plausibly to a practice of amateur performance at and around Gray's Inn in the middle of the century.