Introduction

Three of the four core articles in this issue of JEMCS focus on notions of sexual desire and their relation to variables of race, social rank, and geographical situation. Rebecca Olson’s “‘Too Gentle’: Jealousy and Class in Othello” opens this line of inquiry by arguing that the theme of sexual jealousy in Shakespeare’s tragedy deserves to be examined alongside a parallel concern with how social privilege functions in the play as a catalyst for erotic desires and anxieties. According to this logic, Desdemona exemplifies that group of Shakespeare’s female characters who elicit the profoundest jealousy from their husbands and suitors (one might think also of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale or Imogen in Cymbeline), a group distinguished by their status as the only children of powerful men. In this respect Othello stages the convergence of sexual and social misgivings about the display of aristocratic bodies—misgivings that grew increasingly pronounced in the seventeenth- century English cultural imaginary.

Nick Jones’s “Cosmetic Ontologies, Cosmetic Subversions: Articulating Black Beauty and Humanity in Luis de Góngora’s ‘En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento’” concentrates in turn on issues of race as these affect conventions of feminine attractiveness in the literary culture of early seventeenth-century Spain. According to Jones, Góngora’s letrilla on the feast of Corpus Christi responds to the African presence in early modern Spain by invoking a tradition of paradoxical praise for the allurements of dark-skinned women, a tradition that originates with the Song of Songs. This tradition, enhanced via references to clothing and cosmetics, eventuates in a celebration of African racial identity that is achieved through the reclamation and subversion of European beauty practices.

Rather than concentrating on the dynamics of sexuality, Anita Gilman Sherman’s “Poland in the Cultural Imaginary of Early Modern England” explores the cultural semiotics associated with place. For Sherman’s essay, the place in question is Poland, and Sherman undertakes a reexamination of that country’s cultural reputation in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In the process, she argues for Poland’s preeminent association with various kinds of social innovation, most particularly religious toleration, federated political structures, and electoral monarchy. These attributes, she maintains, become visible and available for debate in early modern England largely thanks to Poland’s reputation for fostering and exemplifying them.

In “‘Sexy in a “Tunbridge Wells” Sort of Way’: A Study in the Literary Iconography of Place,” Ronald W. Cooley continues this focus on space by studying what we might call the geographical indices of desire. Focusing on the Kentish spa town of Tunbridge Wells, Cooley traces that town’s emergence in seventeenth-century English popular culture as a proverbial site of sexual adventure and a setting for the exercise of feminine sexual agency. Following this bit of popular symbology further, into the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Cooley then notes the subsequent transformation of Tunbridge Wells into a retirement town and an emblem of conventionality and stability, its erotic coding thus translated into the register of the comically aged and impotent.

Following these essays, our current lineup of book reviews focuses on similar variables of sexuality and geography as these are addressed in books on Spain in Shakespeare and Cervantes, on encounters between early modern Europe and the Islamic world, and on the character of the sexual act as it is figured in early modern England. Taken as a whole, this collection of essays and reviews thus offers readers a unified yet varied exploration of certain key concepts—desire, sexuality, place, race, and social rank—as these figure in the literature and culture of early modern Europe.