Abstracts

"Powdered with Golden Rain": The Myth of Danae in Early Modern Drama
Julie Sanders, Keele University

Orlando and the Golden World: The Old World and the New in As You Like It
Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University

"In his gold I shine": Jacobean Comedy and the art of the mediating trickster.
Alizon Brunning, University of Central Lancashire

"O unquenchable thirst of gold": Lyly's Midas and the English quest for Empire
Annaliese Connolly, Sheffield Hallam University

"Powdered with Golden Rain": The Myth of Danae in Early Modern Drama
Julie Sanders, Keele University

This essay explores the appropriation and reworking of the mythological story of Danae, who was impregnated while imprisoned in a tower by Jove in the form of a golden shower. Many early modern poets and dramatists were drawn to this particular myth but their individual deployments of it can be read in a historicized manner: their revisions alter in emphasis according to the contingencies of history, politics, and artistic context. In the Jacobean period, when city comedy is a predominant public theatre genre, the 'golden shower' is read in a highly pragmatic and reductionist manner as a literal bribing of the tower guards. Examples of this in plays by Jonson and Heywood amongst others are examined. In the Caroline period, an important shift in focus can be registered, that enables a recycling of the myth in the context of debates about female agency, in particular theatrical female agency. The specific case of James Shirley's 1633 The Bird in a Cage, where the inset play performed by Eugenia and her incarcerated women is that of Jupiter and Danae, provides the concluding discussion of the essay.

Orlando and the Golden World: The Old World and the New in As You Like It
Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University

This essay argues that As You Like It not only shows a considerable interest in the classical past, but does so, paradoxical though this may seem, specifically in the context of the New World. In Shakespeare's play, a setting which hovers with suggestive indeterminacy between England and France holds up a mirror in which the audience can see itself facing both a newly discovered continent in relation to which early modern Europe is the old world, and a classical past in relation to which it is itself new. In this confusing slippage of newness and oldness, Shakespeare seems to introduce a comforting absolute by his repeated references to the concept of a golden age. However, disturbing ironies and instabilities accrue to the word "gold" as the quest for the ideological 'gold standard' proves to be fissured by a conflict between the classical definition of the golden age as a time of spiritual excellence, and the far more materialistic lust for the literal gold of the new world. At the same time as it shows how European attempts to establish dominance in the New World of the Americas are underpinned by pride in a classical heritage, As You Like It thus also charts a growing gulf between the values and attitudes of early modern Europeans and that authorising classical culture.

"In his gold I shine": Jacobean Comedy and the art of the mediating trickster.
Alizon Brunning, University of Central Lancashire

This essay argues that the Ovid's description of the Golden Age is both appropriated and transformed in Jacobean City comedy. In Golding's translation of Ovid material abundance is achieved without the need for labour. In comedy, particularly romance comedy, the imaginative re construction of such bountiful states might be seen to form a sort of wish fulfilment fantasy. City comedy though is predicated not on a nostalgic yearning for past ideal states but on the 'reality' of urban life. This 'Iron Age' corresponds with the postlapsarian state where God's injunction that man should labour is keenly felt. However, from a positive perspective, the productive relationship between man and matter might be seen to provide a carnivalesque pleasure, while the mining, trade and venture which are denigrated in Ovid are celebrated in the light of early modern expansion. Labour here can be seen to provide a way of re-creating a new Golden Age. However, while City comedy contains elements of carnivalesque excess and mercantile success, the 'golden hope' of many of its citizens is that they can avoid the curse of Adam. Gold, in the form of money becomes the means by which the material cycle of production and consumption can be bypassed. This essay examines the ways in which the trickster figures of such City Comedies as Volpone, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Devil is an Ass harness the creative possibilities of money to create wealth without work.

"O unquenchable thirst of gold": Lyly's Midas and the English quest for Empire
Annaliese Connolly, Sheffield Hallam University

This paper argues that despite being written to celebrate England's defeat of the Armada, Midas actually offers a critique of England's own imperial claims. Lyly uses Lesbos and Phrygia, the play's two opposed locations, which figure as England and Spain, to underline the similarities between them. Firstly, the paper examines how the analogy between Elizabeth as the ruler of Lesbos and Sappho, far from flattering the queen underlines the negative aspects of her position as a female ruler. Next, it goes on to explore the significance of Phrygia, in the light of the translatio myth, to suggest that the play uses it to collapse any sense of difference between English and Spanish in their quest for empire. Finally, I consider the ways in which the play places its emphasis not upon the conflict between England and Spain as the play's allegory suggests, but upon the influence of gold upon those who go in search of it. Here Midas draws upon modern myths of gold such as El Dorado to suggest that the thirst for gold affects English and Spanish alike.

"The City Cannot Hold You": Social Conversion in the Goldsmith's Shop.
Janelle Day Jenstad, University of Windsor.

The goldsmith's imbrication in the business of literal conversion offers a powerful context for an examination of social conversion. In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Middleton invokes the rich language of this trade ("chased," "base," "drossy," "light," "changed") to discipline the socially ambitious Yellowhammers and frustrate the "mutual conversion" that William Harrison ascribed to merchants and gentlemen. Socially adjacent, Yellowhammer and Sir Walter Whorehound respectively maximize and minimize their differences; their ambitions and loyalties are enacted and betrayed by their hypersensitivity to the implications of diction. Turning the goldsmith's conventionally duplicitous practices against the goldsmith himself, Sir Walter passes his former mistress as a "chaste maid" much as a light coin might be tendered as a heavy one. Because both the "chaste maid" and the prostitute are represented as coins, Yellowhammer's failure to distinguish their respective worth becomes a professional failure; his conservative retreat to Goldsmiths' Hall suggests the city's ability to retain its citizens and absorb the new denizens arriving every year.

Meet the Peters.
Richard Abrams, University of Southern Maine.

Recent internal evidence makes clear that John Ford had a principal hand in the "Funeral Elegy" for William Peter (1612), signed WS and formerly attributed to Shakespeare. However, no plausible explanation has been offered of how the initials "W.S." got attached to the poem; nor is Shakespeare eliminated as the WS referred to on the title page, in the dedication, and in the poem's "authorial" digressions. This essay contends that the Peter elegy may be a poem about Shakespeare, if not by him. It surveys the social orbit of the Bowhay Peters, which extended to their prominent recusant kinsmen, the Petres of Essex and London. New information is offered concerning the Bowhay Peters, including evidence for their Catholic rather than merely high-church leanings. Central to discussion is William, 2nd Lord Petre, who in 1606 repaid a debt to Will Peter's brother John. Lord Petre belonged to a social circle that touched variously on Shakespeare's. He knew Southampton and frequented the Mermaid Tavern. Months after the Elegy's composition, his eldest daughter married the scion of the Sheldon family of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, later becoming a patient of Shakespeare's son-in-law Dr. John Hall. A month after the marriage, he patronized the stationer Edward Blount, close associate of the Elegy's publisher, Thomas Thorpe (Blount's trail is shown to cross "WS's" in other ways as well around the time of the Elegy). Beyond these detailed explorations, the essay mentions in passing many other reasons why Shakespeare remains pertinent to study of the Elegy.

© 2002-, Lisa Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).