Perry Curtis - Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

EDITED BY
Curtis Perry and John Watkins

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Curtis Perry and John Watkins 2009

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First edition published 2009

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages/
edited by Curtis Perry and John Watkins.1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 9780199558179 (alk. paper)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shakespeare, William,
1564-1616KnowledgeMiddle Ages. 3. English literatureMedieval influences.
I. Perry, Curtis. II. Watkins, John, 1960
PR3069. M47S53 2009
822.33dc22
2009001824

Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
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ISBN 978 0 19 9558179

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

The editors would like to thank Andrew McNeillie, of Oxford University Press, for his enthusiastic support of our project. We are also very grateful to the staff at Oxford University Press who oversaw its production, and especially to Jacqueline Baker and Claire Thompson. Two anonymous peer reviewers solicited by the press offered useful queries for the authors of many of the essays as well as smart advice about the book as a whole. The Bibliothque National de France granted us permission to reproduce an illustration of Richard IIs abdication from a fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript of Froissarts Chronicles (BNF, FR 2646) for our cover. Generous research support from the University of Minnesota allowed John Watkins to hire expert research assistants at crucial stages of the project. Dana Schumacher helped us enormously with final preparation of the manuscript, and Anne Carter assisted us with the index. We are also very grateful to Andrew Elfenbein for his patient assistance with final proofreading. Finally we would like to thank the Shakespeare Association of America for hosting a seminar on Shakespeare and the Middle Ages at their 2004 annual meeting in New Orleans. Several of the papers were first presented at that lively session.

Curtis Perry and John Watkins

1. Shakespeares Fickle Fee-Simple: A Lovers Complaint, Nostalgia,
and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism

Christopher Warley

Sarah Beckwith

3. Towards a History of Performativity: Sacrament, Social Contract,
and The Merchant of Venice

Elizabeth Fowler

4. Losing France and Becoming England: Shakespeares King John
and the Emergence of State-Based Diplomacy

John Watkins

5. The Voice of the Author in The Phoenix and Turtle:
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser

Patrick Cheney

William Kuskin

Brian Walsh

8. For They Are Englishmen: National Identities and the Early
Modern Drama of Medieval Conquest

Curtis Perry

Michael OConnell

10. Marvels and Counterfeits: False Resurrections in the Chester
Antichrist and 1 Henry IV

Karen Sawyer Marsalek

11. Shakespeares Medieval Morality: The Merchant of Venice
and the Gesta Romanorum

Rebecca Krug

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The following standard abbreviations occur throughout the book without further explanation:

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Shakespeare refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

Sarah Beckwith is the author of Christs Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993); Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001); and numerous other essays on medieval and Renaissance dramatic and religious culture. She is Professor of English and Theater at Duke University, and is currently working on a book called Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness.

Patrick Cheney is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on early modern literature, including Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) and Shakespeares Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeares Poetry.

Elizabeth Fowlers work in medieval and Renaissance literature ranges mainly from Chaucer to Milton and concerns the ethics and politics of notions of the person, the nature of political and jurisprudential thought as it occurs in the arts, and the bodily and social effects of poetry. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia and lives on the side of the Blue Ridge.