Critical Survey

This article investigates the transformation of Spenser’s image of himself as poet in the interval between the first and second instalments of The Faerie Queene. The poet’s habits of gazing are informed by the lessons Britomart learns about seeing, but Spenser also explores the issue in two other poems written during this period, The Epithalamion (1595) and The Prothalamion (1596). Both works clearly place the poet next to pictures of occluded male gazers, Spenser’s bridegroom as marginal and as crucial as the Essex who emerges only briefly from Leicester House. Both of these male figures are ultimately sidelined by other gazers, their vision finally irrelevant to the nuptial proceedings unfolded in each poem. The 1596 cancellation of the reunion between Amoret and Scudamour is accompanied by a revised representation of Britomart, too. Taught to move beyond the magic mirror she encounters early in Book 3, Britomart is guided to put herself in the larger world and – like the poet – to look away from the image reflected in and by her gaze.

Thirty-two years after its first publication, Alternative Shakespeares stands as a landmark within Shakespeare studies. In 1985, at the height of the ‘theory wars’, the essays in the collection took a confrontational position, seeking to challenge the conventional ways of approaching England’s national playwright. One early reader was a scholar with a considerable investment in the old ways of doing things: we recently discovered a heavily annotated copy of the book in the library of Harold Jenkins, the former general editor of the Arden Shakespeare. Harold Jenkins’s copy of Alternative Shakespeares encourages us to reconstruct the historical contours of an intellectual confrontation, but our discovery also prompts thoughts for the present. Over the last few years, we have been in touch with the surviving contributors to the volume. Thirty years on, how do they feel about their essays? Do they stand by what they produced or would they now look to do things differently?

The Spanish bibliographer Pascual de Gayangos claimed in England that around 1835 he saw a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio in the Valladolid palace of Count Gondomar, erstwhile Spanish ambassador to the court of King James, but that the volume was later destroyed. However, accounts of the discovery are dubious and the relevant scholarship gives grounds for different interpretations. Eric Rasmussen suggests that Gayangos stole the Folio and then made up a story about its destruction. By reviewing the scholarship and offering new documentation, this article seeks to show that there is no verifiable evidence that Gondomar owned a First Folio; that both the uncertainties and contradictions involved in the discovery and the external evidence suggest that this copy never existed; that, therefore, Gayangos could not have seen or stolen it; and that, although it remains a mystery why he should have invented the story, there may be ascertainable reasons why he did so.

Starting from the sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century ars apodemica tradition, this article is based on Henry Oldenburg’s determination to include ‘inquiries’ on – and descriptions of – distant countries in Philosophical Transactions. Its four subsections all refer to the late Restoration period: they describe the tools of learned travel in the age of New Science, and focus on the Royal Society’s correspondence from the East and from early America. The short extracts taken from vols. 1–22 of Philosophical Transactions are also meant to show the Society’s imperialistic vision of the ‘Other’ and of the indigenous ‘know-how’ in most fields.

Prince Charles’s Stratford rendition of ‘To be or not to be’ on Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, together with his TV recital of Cranmer’s eulogy of Elizabeth I, as a 90th birthday present to his mother, crowned the old alliance between the Bard and British monarchy. For whereas critics read the plays as rehearsals for the execution of Charles I, the Prince’s theatre mania harks back to the royal restoration staged in comedies like All’s Well That Ends Well. And an entire genre of recent romances, such as Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, confirms how, so long as Will ‘is by performance served’, Shakespeare remains the therapy to cure the king’s speech. But the success of Mike Barlett’s King Charles III also presents the Prince with Marx’s interpretation: ‘Sovereignty of the monarch or of the people: that is the question’.