From the Editors

This issue opens our first full year with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Readers of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS) will have seen the new cover art in our last issue; this issue sees a new look inside the journal, the result of a cover-to-cover redesign. We at JEMCS are very happy to be publishing with Penn, and we anticipate many good things for the journal moving forward: more special issues and review essays, treating original and innovative topics that will open up new fields of inquiry in early modern studies; more issues per year, as we move from a semi-annual to a quarterly publication at the start of 2012; and more experimental formats for articles, debates, responses, and collaborations.

While many things are changing at JEMCS, others will remain constant. This issue features a group of articles that take up many of our core intellectual concerns within the field of early modern cultural studies. Including new topics on race and gender studies, focusing on both major authors and less well-known figures, crossing geographical and cultural boundaries, these essays reflect the vibrant energy that defines the best work in early modern cultural studies.

Frances E. Dolan's "Re-reading Rape in The Changeling" takes up the persistent critical question of whether or not Middleton and Rowley's Beatrice-Joanna should be understood as a victim or villain. Dolan suggests that attempts to characterize Beatrice-Joanna as the victim of rape, in particular, may shut down important critical opportunities. Drawing on historical scholarship that shows how The Changeling's depiction of Beatrice-Joanna's situation departs from contemporary standards for criminal rape, Dolan argues that the play nonetheless makes questions about Beatrice-Joanna's agency and intent central to the play. From this perspective, the play is not merely a static representation of the historic legal status of rape/ravishment; instead it participates in an unfinished debate over "the interplay of coercion and consent, of victimization and strategy." Because a similar dynamic between consent and coercion is fundamental to modern feminism, these issues inflect not just the play itself but also shape our ability to read it.

Vanita Neelakanta's "Theatrum Mundi and Milton's Theater of the Blind in Samson Agonistes" focuses on issues of human agency but locates them on a quite different kind of stage, the divine stage of the theatrum mundi. Beginning with the seeming indeterminacy of Samson's final moments, Neelakanta suggests that the questions that these moments raise about Samson's relationship to God can best be understood through Milton's powerful and innovative use of the classical trope of theatrum mundi. This trope describes man as an actor playing out his life under the eye of a god who is both the author and audience for the performance of that life. Within this tradition, a chosen hero such as Samson may be understood to be the special recipient of God's favor insofar as God is there to watch him. However, Samson's career enacts the contrary possibility that the divine spectator might avert his gaze, or worse yet, that the human actor might simply be unable to tell whether he remains within the heavenly field of vision. The poem's refusal to provide the reader with an assured ending parallels the uncertain and anxious experience of the human actor on the divine stage and thus, as Neelakanta concludes, "theatrum mundi is exposed as the theater of the blind."

Turning from the forms of agency that might be understood to define the single individual to forms of collective identity, our two final essays take up questions of race and the boundaries of identity in early modern culture. In "Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early Modern England," Kimberly Poitevin expands upon recent critical arguments that have identified black-face performances by male actors as central to the rise of phenotype racism in early modern culture. For Poitevin, though, equally important in making skin color and physical complexion markers of identity was the wider use of and new attention to the cosmetics that women used. While male actors used...