The Elizabethan Theater II

An Elizabethan Enigma

The last thing William Shakespeare wants to be is predictable. Roughly halfway through his published collection of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, he frets that we may find it dull that he “write[s] . . . all one, ever the same,” producing one fourteen-line poem after another (76.5). He has reason to worry: he rarely allows himself to deviate from a strict iambic pentameter, and holds his v...

The Elizabethan Idea of Empire

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to est...

Elizabethan Dyetary of health

John Banister: an Elizabethan surgeon in Brazil.

In Brazil's sixteenth-century history, very few references are made to health professionals. On the expedition of Edward Fenton, dispatched by the English Crown in 1582 to set up a trading post in Asia, was the famous barber-surgeon and physician John Banister. The naval squadron, diverted from its original route to repeat the feats of Sir Francis Drake, stopped over in Africa, crossed the Atla...

Theater for the Emotions

During the course of this term, we explored how theater and science interact. It seemed to me that a challenge facing us at the beginning of the class was to find out how science, a stereotypically dry and factual area, could be turned into a show that would capture the attention and emotion of an audience. It was no surprise to me that we found ourselves gripped in the passions of the science ...