Gismond of Salerne (1566-68) was a dramatic adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio's Tancredi and Ghismunda novella produced at the Inner Temple. Positing that the legal background of the authors was ...reflected in their reception of Boccaccio, this essay investigates the representation and use of various significations of the law in the play. It argues that the Inns authors were receptive to the presence of the Natural Law concept in the background of Boccaccio's novella and that they intensified its role in the play, emphasizing its conflict with man-made law. The latter is also investigated in its own right, showing its impact on a thematic, rhetorical, and dramaturgical level. Further, the Inns writers' political interests as members of a community revolving around common law explain why the play idealizes and justifies specific legal notions and practices.
This essay poses a corrective to the longstanding critical tradition that reads John Donne’s elegy “To his Mistress going to bed” as a satirical attack on both Reformed doctrine and sexual love. I ...argue that Donne’s seriousness about the poetic task of describing reciprocal sexual desire stems from his earnest consideration of Reformed religion, at a time in his life when he was assessing the implications of relinquishing his Catholic faith and converting to the religion of the state church. Although critics have written much about Donne’s latent nostalgia for his Catholic past and about the mature Protestantism of his later years, considerably less attention has been given to how Donne’s experience of conversion shaped his view of both Reformed doctrine and sexual devotion in his early love poems. In its description of sexual love as an extension of religious experience, the elegy captures Donne’s imaginative movement among possible devotional models during a turbulent decade in his religious development. As the elegy details a particular moment of erotic foreplay, the poem explores the larger theological question of what emerging Reformed models of devotion might offer that their Catholic and classical counterparts could not.
This article explores John Donne's contribution to the relatively overlooked genre of early modern testamentary verse. I use Donne's work to show that poetic wills and testaments do not simply ...constitute poems that are structured as lengthy inventories of complaints and bequests. My study instead demonstrates that the formal features of his testamentary poems relate to and deviate from the egocentrically commemorative impulses of elegiac, epitaphic, and lyric verse. I argue that testamentary poems provide a unique textual site for self-display and self-commemoration because they function to communicate and fulfill the will of the (soon-to-be) dead. In sum, this article aims to advance our knowledge of the wider role that the composition of poetic legacies played in early modern English literary culture.
In 1656, clergyman Abraham Wright edited and printed Parnassus Biceps, an unabashedly royalist poetic miscellany. Though under the radar in both Wright's day and our own, Biceps performs crucial ...political work through a program of aesthetic education. This is accomplished in part by Biceps's repeated insistence on its university pedigree and by the inclusion of a number of "flawed beauty" poems, poems that locate, hyperfixate on, and praise a perceived flaw in an otherwise beautiful woman. Through these poems, Biceps attempts to reconfirm the normative gender hierarchy and emphasizes the masculine prerogative to create, circulate, and assign meaning to women. Further, centering and praising a perceived flaw render the flawed beauty poems of Wright's anthology analogous to the royalist cause itself. The coalition of ideological positions grouped under the rubric of royalism not only acknowledged but indeed embraced a flawed king and flawed church at its center. Poems celebrating flawed beauty can thus be assimilated to the defense of an imperfect (dead) king and an imperfect (disestablished) religion. As such, this seemingly trivial volume performs urgent political and aesthetic work by embarking upon the project of urging a scattered, defeated royalist cohort to continue to support their heroically flawed cause.
The early transition from Catholicism to Protestantism was a complicated journey for England, as individuals sorted out their spiritual beliefs, chose their political allegiances, and confronted an ...array of religious differences that had sprung forth in their society since the reign of Henry VIII. Inner anxieties often translated into outward violence. Amidst this turmoil the poet and Protestant preacher John Donne (1572–1631) emerged as a central figure, one who encouraged peace among Christians. Raised a Catholic but ordained in 1615 as an Anglican clergyman, Donne publicly identified himself with Protestantism, and yet scholars have long questioned his theological orientation. Drawing upon recent scholarship in church history, the authors of this collection reconsider Donne’s relationship to Protestantism and clearly demonstrate the political and theological impact of the Reformation on his life and writings.
The collection includes thirteen essays that together place Donne broadly in the context of English and European traditions and explore his divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and his sermons. It becomes clear that in adopting the values of the Reformation, Donne does not completely reject everything from his Catholic background. Rather, the clash of religion erupts in his work in both moving and disconcerting ways. This collection offers a fresh understanding of Donne’s hard-won irenicism, which he achieved at great personal and professional risk.
James Joyce's Ulysses is a famously obscene novel. What is the purpose and emotional effect of the novel's obscenity? In court, Morris Ernst defended Ulysses as an emotionally static work of high art ...that was only to be accessed intellectually. After the legal battle had been won, critics became more forthright about the novel's broader emotional appeal. Martha Nussbaum ends Upheavals of Thought (2001) celebrating Ulysses as the apotheosis of an aesthetic tradition progressing toward the frank acknowledgment of all our everyday emotions--all except for disgust. A central tenet of Nussbaum's theory of the emotions is that disgust is per se morally suspect. Joyce, however, admitted that he had disgusted himself writing Ulysses, a novel that demonstrates the hidden value of our most irrational emotion.
Donald davie, a serious man, had serious doubts, but his friend Thom Gunn kept assuring him that contemporary poetry could be at once really gay and really traditional. Gunn thought so partly because ...several major poets who helped forge the tradition as he and Davie knew it, poets such as Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, were themselves gay.1 He also thought so, as his recently published letters confirm, because of his counterintuitive conviction that historical poetic techniques can enhance "improvisatory and up-to-date subject matter."2 Free verse caught the sensation of modern freedom but sometimes fell short in reflecting on it or thinking through it. Gunn, who moved from Cambridge to California in 1954, maintained that poets seeking to represent a queer experience or unconventional setting might be better off relying on the time-tested shaping power of established meters and rhymes. Formal control could then serve as both a defining part of the exploration—an order within freedom—and a device for assessing it, as though from the outside. This inside-and-out defense of traditional form is one he adopted from his Stanford teacher Yvor Winters, for whom poetry's formal discipline (as Gunn puts it) "does not reject experience" but offers "a means of simultaneously conveying it, in all its variety, and evaluating it."3 Experience was the rub for Donald Davie, who in 1982 claimed that his friend's poetry had cut itself off from the literary past by embracing queer content.4 Gunn had good reason to disagree. The very sequence in which he came out in his verse, far from marking a clean break with Winters and traditional form, attests to his ongoing involvement with them. That coming-out sequence takes place in couplets that deserve to be called Popean. But they're Popean in a specific sense, defined not just by regular meter and rhyme but especially by line-ending punctuation that allows enjambment to make room for intimacy.
The Black Mediterranean Di Maio, Alessandra
Transition (Kampala, Uganda),
04/2022
132
Journal Article
The first time, over twenty years ago, I was on board a local ferry that connects the small port town of Trapani to Favignana, a little island belonging to the Egadi Archipelago only eleven miles off ...the coast, when I was startled by the unexpected vision of three dinghies. While physical and psychological abuse of all sorts happen on each leg of the journey, casualties multiply and remain undercounted. ...since the 2011 Arab Spring ignited by the Tunisian Revolution, traffic has been incessant, with imaginable consequences. Mainstream representations oscillate between two narratives: either African migrants are represented as victims to be rescued by an incongruous Nobel Peace-prized European Union trapped in its "white savior complex"; or they are described as invaders contaminating the alleged purity of the "white continent," which they enter "illegally," stealingjobs from the locals and harassing their women (the most striking example is the coverage of the 2015 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany). In whichever mass-mediated representation we may choose to indulge, the world still seems to be looking on at these young Africans striving to gain access to Europe, heroes of an epic that repeats itself in space and time, "in amused contempt and pity" (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903), as if the harg was not a global business-literally-for which the Western capitalistic system is accountable.
Dipasquale analyzes John Donne's "Spring" in light of Shakespeare's 115, rather than vice versa. In taking this course, and in adding Sonnet 116 to the mix, she is guided by her own preferences. ..."Spring" (under its more well-known title "Love's Growth") has delighted her for over thirty years; at the tender age of twenty-five, she wrote, and presented to a person she loved, an earnest and self-consciously intertextual love poem inspired by Donne's lyric. In contrast, she only recently became familiar with Sonnet 115, and it interests her precisely because it resembles "Spring" while contrasting strongly with its famous next-door neighbor, 116, a sonnet she have long disliked. In both poems, a speaker realizes that his love has grown and that his earlier use of superlatives to describe that love has thus been proven invalid.
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