Taking eroticism on the English Renaissance Stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, these essays explore the nature of sexual definition and desire in early modern culture. Identifying the stage as a primary site for the display of eroticism, the authors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour.
This volume also addresses a crucial theoretical problem in postmodern cultural criticism: how can subjective phenomena, such as Renaissance erotic experience, be placed in its historical, public context? And can this experience be examined without recourse to psychoanalytical theory? Contributors argue that theatrical erotic dynamics served to deconstruct gender itself, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up a new and distinctive perspective in the cultural debate.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual volume containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from around the world. This issue features a Forum on "Early Modern Animal/Human Interfaces." In addition, there are articles on Simile, Paternity and Identity in Henry V, Shakespeare's Sleeping Workers, and Comedy and the Erotics of the Grave in The Widow's Tears, a review article, and reviews of seventeen books of current interest.

Within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology, "The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre" explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the "dead" in early modern English culture.

Susan Zimmerman argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate - in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of "dead" idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting 'dead' bodies. Zimmerman contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant - as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency.

Features

*Original in its conjunction of critical theory (Bataille, Kristeva, Lacan, Benjamin) with an historical account of the shifting status of the corpse in late medieval and early modern England

*The first study to demonstrate connections between the meanings attached to the material body in early modern Protestantism, the practice of anatomical dissection, and the English public theatre.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual volume containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from around the world. This issue features a Forum on "Early Modern Animal/Human Interfaces." In addition, there are articles on Simile, Paternity and Identity in Henry V, Shakespeare's Sleeping Workers, and Comedy and the Erotics of the Grave in The Widow's Tears, a review article, and reviews of seventeen books of current interest.

Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its sociopolitical history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. In addition to articles, the journal includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modern culture. Volume XXXIV continues the journal's series of Forums, in which a group of scholars address an issue of importance to early modern studies. The Forum in this issue is entitled ""Is There Character After Theory?"" Organized and introduced by Raphael Falco, it features Tom Bishop, Dympna Callaghan, Jonathan Crewe, Christy Desmet, Elizabeth Fowler, and Alan Sinfield. Volume XXXIV also includes three essays: Roger Chartier on ""Jack Cade, the Skin of a Dead Lamb, and the Hatred for Writing""; Julian Yates on ""Stealing Shakespeare's Oranges""; and Anston Bosman on ""'Best Play with Mardian': Eunuch and Blackamoor and Imperial Culturegram."" Susan Zimmerman is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Garrett Sullivan is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual volume containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from around the world. This issue features a Forum on "Shakespeare and Moral Agency". In addition, there is an article on Sovereign Sleep in Hamlet and Macbeth, three review articles, and reviews of seventeen books of current interest.

This year's volume begins an annual series of articles discussing the state of scholarship on drama being performed in other parts of the world during Shakespeare's time, here in Ming China and Golden-Age Spain. Four other articles explore black Hamlet, sleepy minds in Shakespeare's last plays, and

Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing more than three hundred pages of essays and studies by critics from both hemispheres.