Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. Organized and sponsored in the early 1950s by Duke University and the universities of South Carolina and North Carolina, the annual meeting is now hosted by various colleges and universities across the southeastern United States. The conference accepts papers on all subjects relating to the Renaissance -- music, art, history, literature, etc. -- from scholars all over North America and Europe. This is the forty-seventh volume of Renaissance Papers. It includes articles on 15th-c. Florentine wedding chests, called cassoni, on Isabella Whitney, on Spenser's 'April' woodcut, on Cervantes' El Trato del Argel, on Thomas Nashe's Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, on the crone as type in English Renaissance drama, on female speech and disempowerment in Marlowe's Tamberlane I, on Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II, on Chaucer's contribution to The Tempest, and on echoes of Ovid in Donne's elegies. T. H. HOWARD-HILL and PHILIP ROLLINSON are professors of English at the University of South Carolina.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays on all aspects of the Renaissance submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, organized originally in the early 1950s by scholars at Duke University and the universities of North and South Carolina. This year's annual volume, the forty-sixth to be published by the Conference and the fourth by Camden House, is the most substantial ever, containing twelve articles. Five articles on Shakespeare range from alchemy and hermaphroditism in Sonnet 20 to Leontes and skepticism in The Winter's Tale. There are two pieces on Milton, one involving his feminine representation of himself as author, the other attempting a breakthrough in interpretation of Samson Agonistes. There are also literary studies of Mucedorus, the most popular play in the English Renaissance, and of Spenser's two female protagonists, Britomart and Amoret. There are also an examination of the power struggles in an Italian convent, a new assessment of Stephen Gardiner's role in the Counter-Reformation in England, and a study of the early characteristics of Cromwell in the press of the English Civil War.

For many years Middleton's "A Game at Chess" was more notorious than read, considered rather a phenomenon of theatrical history than a pre-eminent piece of dramatic writing. "A Game at Chess" was a nine days' wonder, an exceptional play of King James' reign on account of its unprecedented representation of matters of state usually forbidden on the stage. The King's Men performed the play uninterruptedly between 5th and 14th August, 1624 at their Globe Theatre, attracting large audiences, before the Privy Council closed the theatre by the King's command. More recently, growing interest in the connections of economics and politics with authorship have promoted readings that locate the play so firmly within its historical context as propaganda that, again, its worthwhile literary and theatrical qualities are neglected. In writing "A Game at Chess", Middleton employed the devices of the neoclassical comedy of intrigue within the matrix of the traditional oral play. What might have seemed old-fashioned allegory was rejuvenated by his adoption of the fashionable game of chess as the fiction within which the play was set. The product of Middleton's experienced craftsmanship is at once deceptively simple and surprisingly complex. -- .

Articles on works of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Marston, Webster, Jonson, Mary Wroth, and Milton; and two historical articles on aspects of the court of King James I. Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year for presentation at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. Organized and sponsored in the early 1950s by Duke University and the universities of South Carolina and North Carolina, the annual meeting is now hosted by various colleges and universities across the southeastern United States. It accepts papers on all subjects relating to the Renaissance -- music, art, history, literature, etc. -- from scholars all over North America and Europe. Camden House has published Renaissance Papers for the Southeastern Renaissance Conference since 1996. Renaissance Papers1998 contains fourteen articles. Twelve are literary studies, reflecting different critical perspectives, on the works of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Marston, Webster, Jonson, Mary Wroth, and Milton. Two are historical/sociological studies of the court of King James I; one on the implications of Pocahontas's conversion and marriage to an Englishman and the other on the shifting expression of royal authority from public spectacle to the realmof learning in the medium of print.

Scholarly interest in The Book of Sir Thomas More has concentrated on the issue of Shakespeare's contribution to its revision. The play, which concerns the life of Sir Thomas More, was written in 1593 4, subjected to censorship by the Master of the Revels and revised by a group of playwrights which probably included Shakespeare. 148 lines have been claimed as Shakespeare's, and these were the focus of a collection of essays edited by A. W. Pollard in 1923. The range of topics in this volume is much wider than that of the 1923 collection, taking in the problems presented by the play as a whole, its authorship and revision, structure, occasion and staging. The terms of controversy are realigned, and the stature of the play re-established, making it appear more than ever likely that Shakespeare contributed to its revision.