Renaissance Papers 2008

"Renaissance Papers" collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2008 volume, in keeping with the Conference's meeting at the new Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, has a special emphasis on the performance history of Renaissance drama. It includes essays on the use of trap doors in London theaters, on the staging of dismemberment in Renaissance plays, on the economics of the boys' companies, and on Jonson's engagement with changing patterns of theatrical patronage in Volpone. An essay on Troilus and Cressida and the history play rounds out the volume's studies in drama. Three essays treat epic from a variety of perspectives, considering in turn Spenser's techniques for leading readers to doubt his narrator in Book Three of the "Faerie Queene", Marlowe's allusions to Lucan in "Hero and Leander", and Milton's treatment of names and materialism in "Paradise Lost". Two essays examine decidedly different incidents of sixteenth-century religious controversy: Wolsey's use of Italian models to display his magnificence through his building program, and Thomas Stapleton's translation of Bede during the Great Controversy to refute Protestant claims about the origins of the English Church. Contributors of this title are Jane Blanchard, Kevin M. Carr, Nicholas Crawford, Sara Nair James, Claire Kimball, C. Bryan Love, Pamela Royston Macfie, James J. Mainard O'Connell, Paul J. Stapleton and Lewis Walker. Christopher Cobb is assistant professor of English at Saint Mary's College.