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Hutchinson examines the character Insulso Sogliardo in Ben Jonson' 1599 play Every Man Out of His Humour which has long been seen by many Shakespeare scholars as being a lampoon of William Shakespere. Richard Malim writes that Every Man \"contains the most direct and complete refutation of the pretensions of William Shakespeare as author\" (Malim 200). Less recognized is Jonson's association of Sogliardo with a member of the corvid (crow) family.

[...]wisdom eludes the Scottish king, who remains the 'foreign' embodiment of a 'slippery state', in a way which gives the lie to his father-in-law's paroxysms of familial amity. [...]at an early stage, the King of England hands down a thread of English monarchical political insight, which it is to become incumbent on his daughter to bring to Scotland. [...]Ford draws on a tradition in which 'the English had projected onto Scotland the intemperate characteristics associated with extremely northern complexions - slow wits, ferocity, and barbarism':50 Are all our braving enemies shrunk back, Hid in the fogs of their distempered climate, Not daring to behold our colours wave In spite of this infected air? (4.1.14) This is but a cold phlegmatic country, not stirring enough for men of spirit; give me the heart of England for my money. [...]Perkin Warbeck owes considerably more to Shakespeare than simply constituting a late homage to his history plays; Ford employs the same outward appearance of ideological conservatism whilst simultaneously exposing the cracks - in this case, the divisions and differences -within a united Great Britain and between conflicting monarchical ideals. Greene envisages a royal union with Scotland, whilst Ford considers the limitations of merely royal union in a Great Britain divided politically, militarily, religiously and culturally. [...]we can trace a gradual move from a perception of the potential benefits and necessary political weighting of a monarchical Great Britain (which, Greene's play suggests, must be largely Anglocentric and Europhobic) to dubiety in Ford's play about Great Britain's stability, and a recognition of the endurance and hierarchy of separate national identities within that union. 1 Steven G. Ellis and Christopher Maginn, The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660 (Abingdon: Routledge 2013), p. 290.

Wagner and Miles, the primary servants in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, derive their function and identity from their masters. Since both Faustus and Bacon are magicians, their servants are influenced by contact with magic. Although they are less significant figures than the protagonists, the servants help to determine the outcome of their respective plays. By examining Wagner and Miles as servants of both their masters and of magic itself, we can see how Faustus and Bacon fail as magicians, as masters of magic. In comparing the “good” servant, Wagner, whose master is overcome by magic, to the “bad” servant, Miles, whose master renounces magic, we can arrive at an understanding of true service and its relationship to magic.

[...]this story demonstrates the way in which hospitality towards guests and hostility towards strangers often go hand-in-hand in the early modern period. The manuscript of John of Bordeaux or the Second Part of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay at Alnwick Castle appears to be a sequel to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.7 McMillin and MacLean have concluded that while Friar Bacon was performed by the Queen's Men, John of Bordeaux was performed by Lord Strange's Men.8 Although the manuscript's provenance is unknown, John of Bordeaux is now bound with the anonymous seventeenth-century play, The Wasp. The manuscript is in a fragmentary state; the play is missing two scenes, includes two substantial lacunae (one filled in by Chettle, the other left blank) and the final page of the manuscript is so badly mutilated that the play's finale is virtually unreadable.9 Laurie Maguire has convincingly argued that the manuscript of John of Bordeaux may have been the result of a collaborative effort between Thomas Nashe and Greene, which was subsequently altered and added to by Henry Chettle after Greene's death.10 Greene may have worked alongside a number of collaborators (perhaps in an attempt to speed up the process of composition and capitalise on the success of Friar Bacon before interest waned), or perhaps after Greene's death Chettle came across a draft of John of Bordeaux and, after some substantial additions and corrections, sold the manuscript on (a moneymaking strategy that we suspect Chettle also deployed in regard to Greene's Groatsworth of Wit).11 But even if this is the work of someone other than Greene, the playwright/s clearly were familiar with Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. According to Derrida's theory, diplomatic exchange needs to be guided by the somewhat utopian concept of unconditional hospitality in order not to be reduced to the demands of the moment.

Since Stephen Greenblatt's reference to source study as 'the elephant's graveyard of literary history',1 scholars have been reimagining their methodologies for constructing the networks in which texts are connected. [...]Polixenes banishing Perdita mirrors Gwalter's casting out of Grissil: Mar. Shakespeare's choices regarding Leontes and Florizel are too specific and well-developed to have come from an echo of 'The Clerk's Tale' in Pandosto. Because I argue that Shakespeare's most immediate source is Dekker, the most striking difference between Gwalter and Leontes is the reasoning (or lack thereof) behind ostracizing Hermione and Grissil. There is, in fact, a single instance of the word 'patient' in the entirety of The Winter's Tale; Hermione uses the word self-reflexively.51 After Leontes has cut off her access to Mamilius and sends her to prison, Hermione muses, 'There's some ill planet reigns; / I must be patient, till the heavens look / With an aspect more favorable' (2.1.105-7). Because Leontes is more concerned about Hermione's chastity and constancy than her ability to weather hardship, this particular use of 'patient' links Hermione with Griselda in general.

According to Foster, Greene 'show[ed] considerable tact in balancing the different kinds of dramatic experience', so that 'whenever a potentially tragic action threatened to become too grim the audience's spirits' were 'raised with by something comic'. Theatrical tradition dictates that a dumb show 'import[...] the argument of the play' (Ham. [...]in Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc (1563) and George Gascoigne's Jocasta (1572), the dumb shows foreshadow events which will later be represented through dialogue. [...]it is a sensory experience which justifies belief; '[t]ouch' confirms faith (JIV. According to Bohan, and as the dumb shows demonstrate, history is one long series of tragedies, which humanity is doomed to repeat. 27.

In this paper I focus on Greene's Elizabethan comedy, which David Bevington has referred to as containing 'bogus history'. I argue that Greene embraced the history he inherited. The play contains three strands of history that parallel and intertwine: the pursuit of marriage for Prince Edward; the story of Margaret of Fressingfield; anda depiction of Friar Bacon, the magician. We can think of several categories of history, but 'bogus' raises different issues. 'Bogus' seems to presuppose the superiority of accuracy as a function of historical writing, an alien concept to most Tudor-Stuart writers of history. Using the examples of Spenser, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hey wood, I delineate concepts of history in Shakespeare's time. From this delineation I examine the play, ending with Bacon's speech at the play's end in which prophecy and history coalesce, reinforcing the play's link to thirteenth-century England.

Davis traces how the interplay between visual and tactile knowledge both stimulates and constitutes masculine desire in \"The Winter's Tale\" and its more important sources and analogues, Book 10 of Ovid's \"Metamorphoses\" and Robert Greene's \"Pandosto.\" The female bodies these three works portray and the sensuosness with which they portray them argue that sexuality is the basis on which to understand beauty and power.