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Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt, eds. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Othello. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2005. Pp. ix + 244. $37.50 casebound; $19.75 paperbound. This latest [...]

Carol Thomas Neely. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 244. $52.50 casebound; $21.95 paperbound. Virginia Mason Vaughan. [...]

Kenneth S. Rothwell. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century' of Film and Television. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii + 380 + illustrations. $28.99. Sarah [...]

James Hirsh. Shakespeare and the History o Soliloquies. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 200:3. Pp. 470 pages. $75.00 More than once while reading James Hirsh's new book I was [...]

'How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend' is the title of one of Plutarch's most famous Moralia, but the phrase could just as easily be the subtitle of Shakespeare's [...]

William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' can be seen as a play about friendship. Renaissance thinkers were particularly interested in this human relationship, feeling it was the basis for generating the good will that kept society together. The friendships of Bernardo and Fernando, and those of Hamlet with Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and especially with Horatio, portray the complex relationships humans can have.

'The Choise of Valentines,' an erotic poem by English Renaissance poet Thomas Nashe, exhibits many parallels of language and setting with Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Pardoner's Tale.' The two works open in similar fashion using similar phrases, for example. Other critics have made comparable connections between Nashe's poem and additional works by Chaucer. Nashe's apparent allusions to Chaucer suggest that the purpose of his poem transcended mere titillation. Nashe may have consciously intended to echo the comical Chaucerian irony he evidently admired., Although Thomas Nashe's poem 'The Cholse of Valentines' is often considered the most pornographic work to survive from a major author of the English Renaissance, the nature and Intent of [...]

The list of actual and possible literary influences on Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist is extremely long, owing in part to the specialized knowledge implied by the work's very title. [...]

Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson's works was deeply influenced by the emblematic art that was commonly available to the public in Renaissance England. These symbols were accompanied by short moral sayings and compiled to provide a visual guide to morality. Jonson's poems for a history book by Walter Raleigh were based on the engraving on the title page. Meanwhile, representations of alchemists, fools and animals were also based on the moralistic images taken from emblematic works such as Andrea Alciatus 'Opulenti haeretitas.'

Flannery O'Connor's story 'Everything That Rises Must Converge' is similar to Faulkner's story 'Barn Burning' in its treatment of the themes of painful initiation into maturity, family heritage, and the influence of the past on the present; it is different in its bleak ending. The similarities and differences between the two stories, as well as biographical data, suggest that O'Connor was influenced by Faulkner's work and that she attempted to distinguish her writing from his.

'The Devil Is an Ass' is a satirical play written by Ben Jonson in reference to current events in England during 1616. It refers to drainage proposals, Alderman Cockayne's speeches and commercial project, Spanish influences on the court of King James and the debate on judicial conduct. Jonson was also influenced by a contemporary play by George Ruggle, 'Ignoramus,' a university comedy.

Samuel Crowl. Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 254. $34.95. So many good films of Shakespeare's plays were released [...]

Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 255. $32.95. Edward Pechter's book may be one of the best places for any [...]

ON 6 November the latest round of talks between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders ended on a familiar note of disagreement. Set up under the auspices of the United [...]

Calvin Huckabay. John Milton: An Annotated Bibliography, 1968-1988. Ed. Paul J. Klemp. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996. xxiv + 535 pp. $100. ISBN: 0-8207-0272-2. John Milton has been more widely [...]

BISHOP BRIAN DUPPA's connection with Ben Jonson is well known, since Duppa collected and edited the important volume of poetic eulogies entitled Jonsonus Virbius (1638), published less than a year [...]

A COPY of Ben Jonson's 1616 Workes presently held at Yale University's Beinecke Library (shelf mark 1977 / +422) contains two poems on Jonson, both presumably written by Mildmay Fane, [...]

Anne Locke. A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Anne Locke's Sonnet Sequence with Locke's Epistle. Edited and with an Introduction by Kel Morin-Parsons. Waterloo, Ontario: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997. [...]

Anita Pacheco, ed. Early Women Writers: 1600-1720. Longman Critical Readers Series. London: Longman, 1998. x+282pp. ISBN 0 582 30462 8 Cloth: 0 582 30463 6 Paper. Robert C. Evans Auburn [...]

John Donne. The Holy Sonnets. Volume 7, Part 1 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. Ed. Gary A. Stringer, Paul A. Parrish et al. Bloomington: Indiana [...]

References to William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in a late 17th-century poem are used as an indication of the high esteem in which the writers were held; the tragic and comedic associations the writers held, respectively; and the subtlety of the poetic allusions.

These are boom times for biographies of Jonson; the past ten years have seen the appearance of a helpful survey by Rosalind Miles, a substantive reassessment by David Riggs, and [...]

Ben Jonson's detailed interest in the writings of Justus Lipsius, the great 'neo-stoic' intellectual, has recently been the subject of extensive attention.(1) Undeniable evidence of Jonson's interest appears in the [...]

Ben Jonson was exceptionally well versed in the writings of classical Greece and Rome, and the Roman philosopher Seneca was of particular interest to him. In fact, Jonson's marked copy [...]

BEN JONSON'S consuming interest in Latin literature is obvious not only from the works he wrote but also from the books he read and marked. Many of the surviving books [...]

Ben Jonson's literary debt to Sir Thomas Wyatt is explored, comparing the sentiment in Wyatt's poem, 'They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek' with Jonson's poem 'The Vision of Ben Ionson, on the muses of his friend M. Drayton.'

Edmund Bolton's regard for Ben Jonson was perhaps most memorably expressed by his inclusion of the poet in a list of potential members of a proposed royal academy in 1617.(1) [...]