Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The nine articles in this volume reflect a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. The first four essays seek reasons for the success of various Renaissance plays: Christopher Cobb examines how Thomas Heywood casts heroic action in a positive light in his romantic dramas, whereas Lucas Erne urges that Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy owes its success to its Christian portrait of Heironimo's unsuccessful attempt to recognize a benevolent deity. Robert Reeder looks at Renaissance educational manuals in order to clarify views on precocity in Richard III, Bartholomew Fair, and Twelfth Night; and Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta investigate and refute postmodern claims about a "transvestite stage." Scott Lucas shows how several sonnets of Fulke Greville's Caelica disorient the reader, underscoring the poet's doubts about human reason and perception; and Pamela Macfie illustrates how Marlowe's ghostly allusions to Ovid's Heroides in Hero and Leander darken the portrayal of the tragic lovers' frustration. The final three essays concern the 17th-century literary giants Donne and Milton: Jay Stubblefield shows Donne's 1619 sermon to the Virginia Company to be a uniquely Thomistic commentary on the conflicting motives behind England's exploits in the New World; and John Wall and John T. Shawcross explore the effects of John Milton's poems on Renaissance and modern readers.
M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University.