William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a commonwealth founded on labor and…[Read more]

This article examines The Tempest in light of artists’ renderings of the play in New Orleans, reflecting on anti-Black racism in Shakespeare’s play and in the Deep South.

This essay argues that Thomas Tusser’s popular book of georgic verse, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, offered a counter to developments in courtly poetry under Elizabeth I. Critics have long disparaged Tusser’s poetry as naïvely rustic, but Tusser was not an uneducated peasant who happened to pick up enough literacy to pen a book of poem…[Read more]

This article argues that there is an implicit colonial rhetoric in images of headlessness associated with early travel narratives, especially Ralegh’s Discovery of Giuana, but also early maps, etc. The earliest draft included a bit about the same headless image coming up in one of Freud’s analyses, but the editors thought it detracted from the…[Read more]

Overview of the field soft peddling my own take on the area of study.

This article questions the orthodox reading of early English city comedies that such plays
exhibit intense national or proto-national fervor, especially articulated in terms of anti-alien
sentiment. A close examination of The Dutch Courtesan and Englishmen for My Money
shows that English playgoers were keen to see their cosmopolitan city…[Read more]