Introduction

This issue includes a range of articles and reviews that engage with current debates about early modern culture and break new ground in their exploration of early modern writing. JEMCS has always been receptive to cultural studies scholarship that exceeds the limits of any one national or linguistic culture in order to examine how cultures overlap, blend, and interact. This issue is a case in point. Several of the articles published here are concerned with cross-cultural issues or with texts that represent cross-cultural transactions: they deal with the theatrical representation of colonization and commodity exchange; with the question of "uneven development" as an international process going back to the emergence of capitalism; with debates about how Italian models of pastoral tragicomedy were or were not taken up by English playwrights; and with the exilic sub-culture created by English nuns in early modern Belgium. Two of the essays here concentrate on intimate spaces and on verbal or archival details that reveal the cultural history of monastic or domestic life in Antwerp and Madrid.

The first two essays in this issue describe and analyze the island logic of an English culture experiencing a maritime turn and producing new imperialistic fantasies. Both articles look at the English representation of European voyagers who find themselves confined on a faraway, imaginary island—one dystopian, one utopian. Gitanjali Shahani, in her article "Of 'Barren Islands' and 'Cursèd Gold': Worth, Value, and Womanhood in The Sea Voyage," offers an exciting new interpretation of Fletcher and Massinger's play, a tragicomedy in which the European characters suffer deprivation in an inhospitable New World environment that denies the fulfillment of their desire for material and erotic possession, leading them to the brink of starvation and cannibalism. Her essay charts a shift from an older model of plunder and venturing to a new kind of venturing activity that involves more than simply the plunderer's quest for gold. Shahani skillfully reveals the play's emphasis, not only on male venturers seeking barren metal, but also on the management of potentially procreative bodies and erotic desires on a fictional New World island.

In the second island essay that appears here, "Of Islands and Bridges: Figures of Uneven Development in Bacon's New Atlantis," Sarah Hogan succeeds in deconstructing the imperialist fantasy that would combine a world-wide surveillance and commodification of knowledge with an insular control over the national homeland. Hogan's essay exhibits both an in-depth look at the current scholarship on The New Atlantis and a long historical trajectory: this boldly broad perspective allows her to expose the origins of capitalism and its basis in uneven development—a pattern of exploitation that still defines global capitalism today. By way of More's Utopia and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Hogan shows us how the dream of island-making persisted in a series of texts by English authors— from More's Latin Utopia to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe—and her insightful analyses of these literary texts demonstrate that English imperial fantasies about islands took on a particular structure. Drawing on the theories of David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others, the essay adeptly employs a literary-geographic mode of analysis that allows for a better understanding of a formative, aspirational period in the prehistory of the global capitalist system.

Both of these aforementioned island essays show us how a new sense of global exchange and its possibilities informed texts like Fletcher and Massinger's play or Bacon's utopian narrative—but they also do the work of cultural studies by connecting these literary works to the broader cultural and economic contexts that informed them. The third essay in this volume is an intervention in the current critical dialogue about early modern tragicomedy on the London stage, a topic that has been much discussed of late. In "Embracing the 'Mongrel': John Marston's The Malcontent, Antonio and Mellida, and the Development of English Early Modern Tragicomedy," Nathaniel C. Leonard revises and rewrites the history of the tragicomic genre in this period, bringing the crucial role of the experimental dramatist John Marston back into the history of this dramatic form. Leonard's careful...