From the Editors

The four essays published in this issue of JEMCS reflect the journal's continuing interest in English Renaissance drama, and the texts that their authors analyze range from canonical works like Shakespeare's Richard III to lesser known texts such as Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque and the anonymous Life and Death of Jack Straw. These essays all deal, in one way or another, with the staging of royal power. Each of these four scholars offers a fresh and exciting argument about how, through rhetoric and spectacle, these dramatic texts represent the efforts of the monarch (and his lords) to dominate or negotiate with their subjects. The two review essays that follow, by Gerald MacLean and Trish Thomas Henley, indicate the journal's abiding commitment to other genres beyond the drama, to theories of the body, and to other cultures beyond the shores of Britain.

The first article published in this issue provides a new understanding of one of Shakespeare's best known royal characters, the amoral and unhandsome Richard III. In this essay, titled "Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeare's Richard III," Joel Elliot Slotkin accounts for the seductive appeal of Richard's evil by placing it in the context of a particular early modern aesthetic theory, one that has not always been recognized by scholars of early modern drama. Slotkin demonstrates that the characters' responses to Richard's dastardly deeds and shocking words function as a model for the audience's response to the play. The article probes the tensions in Elizabethan culture between aesthetic pleasure and those early modern aesthetic theories (like Sir Philip Sydney's in The Defence of Poesy) that claim a positive moral function for poetry and drama. According to Slotkin, Shakespeare's play is not "aversion therapy"; rather, it makes the horrible delightful and provides its audience with a pleasurable appreciation for "the power and beauty of monstrous evil." Whereas most critics of Richard III have argued that the representation of evil in the play is intended to produce repulsion in the audience, Slotkin convincingly shows us how it offers a distinctive variety of pleasure that comes from watching evil at work or from admiring deformity.

In "An Attack of the Clowns: Comedy, Vagrancy and the Elizabethan History Play," Maya Mathur looks at three plays that stage popular revolt: The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 2 Henry VI, and George a' Greene. She argues that in these plays the representation of lower-class rebellion uses the appeal of comedy to raise serious questions about social inequality and economic injustice. In other words, the leveling power of laughter produces a situation that allows for low-born English subjects to speak truth to power. While earlier critics of these plays have claimed that the comic representation of revolt tends to degrade and diminish the force of the plays' political critique of tyranny and injustice (i.e., the rebels become ridiculous and their threats are laughed away), Mathur makes apparent the political efficaciousness of the comic mode. She shows how these plays refer to a native tradition of lower-class insurrection that staged genuine social protest through ludic inversion and other strategies that were sometimes quite effective in conveying messages of protest to those in power. Mathur argues that the laughter directed at comic rebels was not necessarily scornful or dismissive; instead, that laughter could sound a challenge against unjust or uncaring overlords and monarchs.

Kevin Curran's article, "Erotic Policy: King James, Thomas Campion, and the Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage," focuses on another political process: the efforts of King James I to encourage Anglo-Scottish marriage at court, as a way to materialize and encourage the political unification of Scotland and England. Using as his key text, The Lord Hay's Masque, written by Thomas Campion and performed at court in 1607, Curran focuses his argument on the symbolic significance of that performance in the context of contemporaneous Parliamentary debates on naturalization and the Union of England and Scotland. Curran's essay corrects and supplements the existing scholarship on this masque by showing that...