Critical Survey

Roger Ascham has been credited with rehabilitating Elizabeth Tudor's image after a near-disastrous seduction at the hands of her stepmother's husband Thomas Seymour. But in many ways Ascham's tutelage merely continues a process the Lord Admiral had already begun, educating a young girl about what to wear, how to comport herself, and how to regard her male teacher, all necessary steps in the programme Vives details as removing 'the residue of her infancy'. This essay examines Ascham's seductions and Seymour's pedagogy with the larger aim of exploring the Tudor classroom, at once an official site of humanist learning and kind of rival space where women were taught to read and to write and to counteract the designs of male teachers. If images of Lucretia and Griselda resurface in accounts of Elizabeth's prodigious learning, there were other female figures - like Katherine Parr and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth's governess Kat Ashley and the Duchess of Suffolk - who shaped a humanism of the household just as crucial as the humanism of the university.

This paper explores the controversy as to whether The Merry Wives of Windsor is a celebration of royal and aristocratic power and of an imagined national community, or a suburban comedy whose viewpoint is that of the contemporary English middle-class. Drawing on recent work on female authority in household and community, it is suggested that Shakespeare's Windsor is not only discontinuous with the culture of nobility, but is presented as a parallel world or alternative universe where things are done quite differently. The play thus engages in a critique of the aristocratic values embodied in the Order of the Garter, and offers an alternative source of power in the domestic lives of ordinary women.

Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability in Titus Andronicus

The present essay attempts to shed light on the gender politics of Tobias Smollett's novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker in relation to its spatial politics, and argues that geographic space functions as a framework within which gender contextualises both urban and rural culture. Drawing primarily on Henri Lefebvre's seminal post-modernist study of space, the paper argues that space is a social production that gives rise to representational effects. Chief among them is gender, and the essay analyses the way Smollett invokes and then subverts the traditional literary and cultural binary between country/femininity and city/masculinity. It thus advances a deconstruction of a familiar binary opposition between geographic and sexual stereotypes. Thus, the ultimate 'traveller' of Smollett's picaresque novel is none other than the reader who is invited to explore his/her identity by analysing Smollett's presentation of the formation of subjectivity through the intersections of space and gender as well as his ambiguous stance towards his contemporary status quo.

Marilyn Hacker has published eleven collections of poetry including Essays on Departure (Carcanet, 2006) and Deseperanto (W.W. Norton, 2003). She is also an internationally renowned translator, former Editor- in-Chief of the Kenyon Review, and now serves on the editorial board of Siecle 21 in France and co-edits the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series.

Upon Reflection PAUL MCLOUGHLIN

Sensational Seasonal Offer! Berlin to Jerusalem The Four Hundred Saplings Complete Our Late Cat Kilroy Was There Too The Chilcot Enquiry ALEXIS LYKIARD

Included in the Sale Keyhole JOHN LEVETT

Bits of Kindliness RICHARD KELL

After The Goldrush by Peter Carpenter (Warwick: Nine Arches Press, 2009), 67 pp. ISBN 978-0-9560559-4-1, £8.00

book of days by Linda France (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2009), 79 pp. ISBN 978-0-9560341-3-7, £7.95

Beans in Snow by Jennifer Copley (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2009), 66 pp. ISBN 978-0-9560341-2-0, £7.95

Turning the Key by Lotte Kramer (Rockingham Press, 2009), 978-1-904851-30-1, £7.99

Reader, help me by Andrew Boobier (Graft Poetry, 2008), 978-0- 9558400-1-2, £5.85

The Matter of Britain by Keith Howden (Post Romantic Empire), £20.00

Granny Albyn’s Complaint by David Betteridge (Smokestack Books, 2008), 978-0-955402-83-8, £7.95 It Wouldn’t Do by John Kay (Cow Shed Press), £6.99

Notes on contributors