Writing about an Arden footnote in my previous post, I was reminded of my very favourite Arden footnote. The Arden Shakespeare editions are well known and loved for their lavish annotations. The one I like best, and which I have to admit in my memory grew to be much longer than it actually is, is [...]

Last night, in the Shakespeare reading group I teach in Haarlem, we wondered about a line in the first scene of 3 Henry 6, where Clifford states that he mourns in steel. King Henry VI has just reminded Lord Clifford and the Earl of Northumberland that they have vowed to be revenged on the Duke [...]

Discussions of early modern revenge often trace a teleological line in which traditions of revenge are gradually replaced by a national system of justice. What this teleological view of the development of a strong legal system obscures, however, are the similarities between justice and revenge. Looking back from our modern period, we tend to think [...]

Starting from Hamlet, Sharon Howard’s Early Modern Notes yesterday discussed ghosts, crime detection and providence. As a researcher of revenge on the early modern stage, I cannot resist adding some reflections here.

Interestingly in the context of Sharon’s discussion of ghosts and their relation to the detection of crimes, proponents of the public theatre used [...]

The French CNRS has launched a wonderful site: Representing France and the French, on images of the French, France (and the French language) in English early modern plays. In an easily searchable database, a team of researchers has gathered over 4000 allusions to France in a corpus of plays from canonical playwrights. They are [...]

In the context of an international project on child care, the Dutch family council recently published a report in which they expressed their concern over the fact that in Dutch families, the emancipation process seems to stagger to a halt as soon as a family has children. Child care is still mainly considered the mother’s [...]

Studies of the early modern passions often seek to interrelate their research with the experience of selfhood. If the early modern phenomenology of the passions, of the relation between emotions and reason, of body and mind, is very much different from our own post-Cartesian conception of those concepts, then how did this difference affect the [...]