[Editor's Introduction]

The editors are grateful for the assistance of Jerome Bump, Tom Cable, Jack Farrell, Neville Hoad, Ben Lindfors, James Loehlin, Carol MacKay, Joseph Malof, Michael Stapleton, and Frank Whigham.

The first half of this issue comprises three essays on Renaissance drama; the second half three on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and culture.

We begin with "Shakespearean Prosody Unbound," which challenges the conventional claim that poetic form is an auxiliary to meaning. Author Mark Womack argues instead that meter operates independently of the meaning of the line in which it inheres. Shakespearean prosody nevertheless actively and pleasurably engages audiencesmore than it would were it semantically obsequious merelyand Womack marks ways it does so. Next, Eric C. Brown maintains that Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost responds to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: not only through its treatment of the theme of frustrated love and display of antique pageantry, but also in its proto-Baconian challenge to scholastic authority. We wrap up the first half of this issue with Ian McAdam, whose previous contribution to this journal ("The Spanish Tragedy and the Politico-Religious Unconscious," TSLL 42.1 [2000]) plumbed the religious psychology informing Kyd's seminal revenge tragedy. His new essay, which addresses the Protestant "failure of manliness" implicit in the action of Arden of Faversham, further advances his groundbreaking investigation of the Reformation theological-psychological complex.

Keeping to the theater and its expression of the times, our fourth essay examines memoirs of Victorian actresses who attempted to present themselves as respectable women, per "domestic ideology's paradigm of British womanhood," as author Deborah Pye writes. In so doing, these self-apologists implicitly advocated expanding that paradigm to include a new category, that of the respectable working professional. Our next essay moves from the negotiation of domestic ideology to a critical inspection of what is arguably its philosophical basis. In "John Henry Newman, Knowingness, and Victorian Perfectionism," Andrew H. Miller analyzes Newman's moral psychology, especially as it pivots on his resistance to facile conceptions of conviction. Newman's stance is then placed in telling relation to the perfectionist tendencies of his contemporaries. Concluding this issue, Dennis Sobolev reviews the debate over Hopkins's homosexualityas evinced by his poetry, devotional prose, and notebooksand concludes that denial of Hopkins's homoeroticism, his "unequivocal attraction to men and his awareness of this attraction," is no longer possible. Hopkins's quite conscious attraction to men nevertheless registers as consciousness of sin. Hence both his strong attraction to men and his devoted resistance to that attraction shape its expression in his poetry.