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  • Introduction
  • Daniel Vitkus (bio)

This issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS) contains five ground-breaking articles dealing with five plays from (pre-1660) early modern England—four by William Shakespeare and one by John Fletcher. This exciting convergence of new scholarship on early modern drama was not planned as a special issue—rather, it was a happy case of serendipity. We happened to have received, reviewed, and then accepted all of these articles at about the same time—an unforeseen but welcome moment of convergence. As a result, this issue offers a rich package of scholarship for the field of English Renaissance theater, a concentration of critical and historical work that will be very useful and informative for those who are interested in the drama of early modern London and its cultural contexts.

These five exciting articles speak to each other in a number of salutary ways. Peter C. Herman's "Equity and the Problem of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream" explores the tension between equity and the letter of the law, as well as the potential for royal authority to overrule the law and perhaps become tyrannical. Articles by Lauren Garrett ("True Interest and the Affections: The Dangers of Lawful Lending in The Merchant of Venice") and Kelly Neil ("The Politics of Suicide in John Fletcher's Tragedie of Bonduca") also organize their analyses around an area of legal controversy: in Garrett's case the distinction between lawful and unlawful lending; and in Neil's argument a conflict between the claims to absolute, law-making authority on the part of James I, and the traditional claims, based on common law, of English subjects to make law, enforce law, and exercise legal decision-making with some autonomy from royal power. In her study of Fletcher's Tragedie of Bonduca, Neil demonstrates that the suicide of the title character serves as a kind of test case for the Foucauldian biopower that the monarch might exercise over subjects' bodies. Neil shows us how Bonduca herself becomes a sort of mouthpiece for an English national identity and a native, common law tradition that would [End Page 1] resist the efforts of the Scottish king to merge the kingdoms of Scotland and England. Garrett's examination of "true interest" in The Merchant of Venice reveals the controversial nature, not of outright usury, but of the lawful forms of lending that might also lead to abusive practices and excessive, damaging passions. All three of these articles help us to understand these plays more fully by investigating some of the key legal issues that informed and permeated Elizabethan and Jacobean social life, and then showing, through their insightful analyses, how those issues operate in the plays. These articles all demonstrate most convincingly that various legal principles (absolutism, commonwealth, the Ancient Constitution, true interest, suicide as felo de se, etc.) were connected to fundamental economic, juridical, and political practices—and therefore they were of great concern to early modern playwrights and playgoers who lived, wrote, and labored in an exceedingly litigious society.

The other two articles in this issue, Stuart Hampton-Reeves's "Kent's Best Man: Radical Chorographic Consciousness and the Identity Politics of Local History in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI" and Shannon Kelley's "The King's Coral Body: A Natural History of Coral and the Post-Tragic Ecology of The Tempest," add to our understanding of Shakespeare's drama, early and late, by giving these plays a local habitation and a name—in Kent and under the sea. Hampton-Reeves, by taking a careful look at Shakespeare's chronicle sources, side-by-side with other early modern texts and traditions that celebrated local Kentish identity, produces a strikingly new understanding of how Shakespeare represented Jack Cade and his rebellion—and what that representation means for the writing of history. Kelley, too, shows that dynastic histories and elite politics are undercut and infiltrated by other forces that are local and, in her study, tied to nature's power to metamorphose, heal, preserve, and protect. Through her fascinating account of coral and its slippery resistance to conventional taxonomic categorization, we come to understand, not only the full meaning of...

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