Critical Survey

This article explores some of the sports and leisure activities of Lewis Carroll. He is well known for his playfulness in his writings but relatively few works have explored what he was doing in his holiday time. Away from the ivory towers of Oxford University, he would travel to the south coast to explore the seaside towns such as Brighton and Eastbourne. He was well aware of the games and sports of the Victorian age and acquired an interest in aquatics. He was interested in young girls and watched then playing on the beach, recording them in his diary. As a spectator it is impossible to know what his motives were but they suggest that play has a negative side – i.e., the player being played with.

This article brings ecofeminist critical thinking to William Shakespeare's female characters: Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Desdemona in Othello, and Cordelia in King Lear. Beginning with the principal that women and nature are similar in many ways (reproductive function, discrimination, subordination, possession, violence), ecofeminism focuses on the interaction between the two. Ecofeminism grounds its beliefs in the fact that patriarchal domination gets imposed through different binary oppositions including man-woman and culture-nature categories. By applying ecofeminism's positions, the authors will provide a critical thinking of the production of socially imposed inequalities seen through Juliet, Desdemona, and Cordelia. Since out of many different publications on the topic of ecofeminism none has provided such an approach, the authors believe that the article presents an important addition to the literature on both Shakespeare and ecofeminism.

This article explores how Shakespeare transforms his early picture of female virtue embodied by Bianca Minola – safely stowed in her chambers in The Taming of the Shrew – into the freedom we find in Othello's Bianca, who is an emblem of the larger world; her movements aligned with integrity, the ability to reason, and mastery of her body. I investigate how Bianca's 'nomadic' status guarantees her safety and speech, and also locate her agency and mobility alongside the movements of female characters like Moll Cutpurse, Isabella Whitney's dejected maidservant, and Spenser's Britomart – all guardians of a world to which they only peripherally belong.

This article explores examples of emotion and perception in a number of Shakespearean dramas. It discusses compassionate perception as a process of synaesthesia, referring to recent theoretical strands from fields such as the cultural history of emotions and historical phenomenology, and consults early modern sources, such as Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (first published in 1601). Focusing especially on the relation between compassion – here literally defined as shared emotion – and tactility, it discusses what the familiar notion of being emotionally 'touched' (or 'moved') implies in an early modern context. Locating 'touching experiences', potentially produced by performances of plays such as Titus Andronicus, the article, at the same time, places such experiences in the context of contemporaneous contesting cultural discourses on whether such experiences might be considered beneficial and instructive to the minds and bodies in the auditorium or whether they might have the reverse effect as both morally and physically corruptive.

In his study of psychology in the 1930s, Samuel Beckett registered a number of ideas regarding the face. He took note of the Gestalt idea that the baby is born with the innate ability to distinguish the figure of a face from a blurry buzzing background. His interest was also piqued by the finding that one's perception of a facial expression might change depending on how much of the face is made visible. These ideas would influence his later work. Focusing on the short play That Time, this article looks at Beckett's dramatic presentation of a face alone in the dark. It compares Beckett's approach to face-reading with the study of the face that developed in twentieth-century experimental psychology. Beckett, I suggest, is working with the idea, common in experimental psychology, that facial expressions can be produced involuntarily and perceived effortlessly. However, he also draws attention to a more effortful mode of producing and perceiving faces. Finally, the article situates Beckett's portrayal of the face in relation to a modern culture that increasingly recognises – and celebrates – the face's unmanageability, but has not stopped attempting to manage the face.