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The famous crux at Henry V, 2.3.15-16 has long taxed editors of the play, but no more convincing solution has been found than Lewis Theobald's conjecture of 1724. This article contends, firstly, that Theobald's conjecture is not only misguided but has also propitiated sentimental, mythographic readings of 1 and 2 Henry IV, which pastoralize the Boar's Head tavern and idealise Falstaff, its most famous patron; secondly, that in view of the dirty realism of the Boar's Head scenes and in light of recent research into the table-book, William Smith's conjecture as reported by Zachary Grey in 1754 should be rescued, with slight modification, to replace Theobald's. If accepted, the modified Grey-Smith solution will permit the Boar's Head, Falstaff and the plays themselves to be regarded in a truer, if more rebarbative, light. Yet the erasure of deep-seated but wish-fulfilling misconceptions might be a price few readers and audiences are willing to pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with recent claims regarding the impossibility of the transcultural narrative. After demonstrating the possibility of such narrative, a metaphorical model is proposed as a useful means of approaching the transcultural narrative. It is shown how an intellectual process of analogy and an affective process of empathy enable the transcultural narrative's initial alterity to be assimilated to form part of the reader's culturally specific conceptual system. This assimilation does not mean that the transcultural narrative ceases to be transcultural because, as is the case with all narratives, total comprehension and therefore total assimilation is impossible. (Contains 10 notes.)

This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the use of intercultural allusion in narratives of transcultural identity. Identity is taken to be narrative in performance, one element of which, intercultural allusion, serves pragmatically to broker the transcultured subject's insertion into the host culture. The paper then shows how Othello's narratives of identity in Shakespeare's tragedy are mimetic of both identity as performance and of the strategic deployment of intercultural allusion. The article concludes with a consideration of Caryl Phillips's reaction to the Othello icon of exotic ethnicity in his meditative novel "The Nature of Blood". This reaction forms part of Phillips's own identity narrative and is illustrative of how a real person's identity is also reliant upon allusion--often in spite of itself. (Contains 7 notes.)

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This paper explores the involvement of metaphor and allusion in the discursive construction of cross-cultural identity. Cross-cultural identity is regarded as a narrative; as such it is liable to rhetorical analysis and dependent on rhetorical processes for its construction and assimilation. Metaphor is claimed to serve both as an analogy for the act of cross-cultural communication and cognition and as a fundamental enabling means of that communication and cognition. Allusion is, likewise, claimed to serve as another analogy on the semiotic and mimetic levels, this time for the experiential condition of the cross-cultural subject, while more pragmatically, it acts as a means for negotiating a palatable identity in a given host community. In conclusion, it is suggested that rhetorical analysis may provide a fruitful tool for affirming the possibility of cross-cultural communication and for understanding how it may actually work.

This paper subjects the function of allusion first to a stylistic and then to a more pragmatic analysis. It is argued that allusion is interactive and enables the construction of a community or culture in which the sender invites the receiver to share. In the case of Heaney’s short lyric, it is shown how allusions to Keats at first sight persuade readers of the existence of a shared community with the poet that is founded on shared cultural experiences. However, this sense of community is problematised by the experiential disjunction between the allusively competent “you” to whom the poem is addressed and the “you” inscribed into the poem itself. This disjunction entails the alienation of the explicit addressee from the recollected experiences of the poetic persona as narrated within the poem, an alienation which mirrors that persona’s forlorn incapacity to map onto the Ulster of his childhood the allusive pre-texts of English culture. Thus allusion throws into relief both what sender and receiver may have in common and what keeps them apart, while also offering the poet refuge in the ambiguity inherent in the twin possibilities of referential or associative readings.