Papers by Heather Hirschfeld
English Studies, 2009
Thomas Rist's book title signals his purpose. By referring to early modern England as R... more Thomas Rist's book title signals his purpose. By referring to early modern England as Reforming England rather than Reformed England, he commits himself to what he (quoting Allison Shell) calls the reclamation of English Renaissance literature. ...
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Cornell University Press eBooks, Apr 10, 2014
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Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2012
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Shakespeare Quarterly, 2012
265 nineteenth century and during second-wave feminism. Findlay herself is firmly feminist in her... more 265 nineteenth century and during second-wave feminism. Findlay herself is firmly feminist in her readings and glosses, for example, complaining that to give birth is only meaning 41 of bear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and providing long entries on commodity and gift as terms applied to women, as well as the more predictable tongue, while a perhaps unexpected entry on despair notes that this is personified as female in The Comedy of Errors. The tone is typified by her unequivocal conclusion that “it is men who make whores, as Shakespeare’s texts amply show” (440). She is suitably informed by recent scholarship, noting the spelling and probable derivation of the alternative form Innogen, rather than the traditional Imogen, and that Shakespeare’s authorship of the Hecate scenes is doubtful. I have one or two caveats. I’m not sure that it’s helpful to gloss and crossreference bracelet as “an ornamental ring or band worn around the arm” (54). Also, although the volume as a whole uses the name formats of the Riverside Shakespeare, there are one or two inconsistencies, most notably in the spelling of Aemilia: on pages 97–98, students might struggle to notice that the first A of Aemelia Lanyer is not in boldface and that the cross-reference is actually to the (differently spelled) Emilia. For such a long book, there are very few typos; I did note taudry (18) followed by tawdry (19); caul is consistently spelled with an -e, although the OED acknowledges only caul; and Jean Addison Roberts (121, 184, 451) should be Jeanne Addison Roberts. Nevertheless, this is an impressive achievement and a very rewarding read.
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Shakespeare Quarterly, 2003
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Renaissance Drama, 2003
Moll The Frith, Roaring the roaring Girl (London, irl of Thomas 1611), Middleton wears men's ... more Moll The Frith, Roaring the roaring Girl (London, irl of Thomas 1611), Middleton wears men's and Thomas clothes, Dekker's and this flagrant sartorial indiscretion renders her, ironically, overexposed. Moll's adversaries as well as her champions recognize that Moll's fashion statement and the potentially radical social inversions it entails make her a public figure, make her known. Sebastian Wengrave, who uses Moll to help him secure the woman he desires, celebrates the fact that he can rely on "a wench / Called Moll, Mad Moll, or Merry Moll, a creature / So strange in quality, a whole city takes / Note of her name and person" ;his father, on the other hand, laments the fact that even his servant knows Moll "as well as I know 'twill rain upon Simon and Jude 's day next."1 Whether they accept or condemn her, the play's central characters various members of the gentry, merchant, and servant classes that populate the city comedy all assert Moll's notoriety. Such a consensus on a woman's celebrity would have been, in a historical period that prized female chastity and privacy, a mode of condemnation.2 But the consensus may also have been a mode of negation: a strong assertion that masks a darker, unconscious commitment o the assertion's exact opposite. The opposite here would be that in her man's clothing Moll, rather than widely known, is simultaneously unknowable and in the know. Insistence on Moll's notoriety, that is, covers for her London compatriots the contradictory, or negated, fact that she is the bearer and
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The End of Satisfaction
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Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England, 2021
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Modern Philology, 2018
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Shakespeare Quarterly, 2010
the other, quotes well-known, apposite passages from Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Hooker, and othe... more the other, quotes well-known, apposite passages from Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Hooker, and others but does not adequately address such relevant notions as adiaphora or custom. Sometimes the treatment of classical ideas and sources is misleading. The ancient (ultimately Pythagorean) notion that “one” is not a number is not equivalent to the claim that Shakespeare playfully derives from it in sonnet 136 that “one” is “nothing” (50–51, 143–44); the one or the monad, central to so much ancient metaphysical speculation, is not nothing or “another denomination of zero” (143), but rather the primordial, nonnumerical unity that is the source of all numbers (as Blank’s citation at 144n55 makes clear). Blank twice cites Seneca’s attack on mathematical knowledge in Moral Epistle 88 to argue that Seneca “questioned the value of human ‘numbering’ altogether” (148) and suggested that the human “mind,” despite all its knowledge, “cannot measure itself ” (197). Yet Seneca is no skeptic, and the Senecan epistle does not argue for the impossibility of measuring human affairs but rather advocates turning from measuring distracting, external things like property to measuring ethically relevant matters such as “‘what is enough for a man’” (Moral Epistle 88.10, quoted at page 148). Elsewhere in his epistles, Seneca urges human beings to “weigh” [perpendere] their worth accurately (Moral Epistle 80.9–10). A conceptual weakness of the study is that Blank often deploys the notion of measurement loosely to refer to any judgment of relative value, whether or not it involves quantitative measures, literal or figurative. The chapter on “race relations” in Shakespeare’s Venice plays explores fascinating similarities among Shylock, Iago, and Othello as racialized outsiders. Yet when Blank glosses Shakespearean puns on human “kind” and human “kindness” or reads Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech in terms of Renaissance arguments about human equality (82–84) and therefore in terms of tropes of quantity, she obscures the fact that Shakespeare’s treatments of human sameness and likeness here do not depend in any direct way upon quantitative metaphors. In sum, not everything quite adds up in this engaging book, but the subtle readings in Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man offer extremely useful additions to our understanding of Shakespeare the skeptic.
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The Review of English Studies, 2016
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Shakespeare and Textual Studies
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The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists
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Shakespeare Quarterly, 2012
265 nineteenth century and during second-wave feminism. Findlay herself is firmly feminist in her... more 265 nineteenth century and during second-wave feminism. Findlay herself is firmly feminist in her readings and glosses, for example, complaining that to give birth is only meaning 41 of bear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and providing long entries on commodity and gift as terms applied to women, as well as the more predictable tongue, while a perhaps unexpected entry on despair notes that this is personified as female in The Comedy of Errors. The tone is typified by her unequivocal conclusion that “it is men who make whores, as Shakespeare’s texts amply show” (440). She is suitably informed by recent scholarship, noting the spelling and probable derivation of the alternative form Innogen, rather than the traditional Imogen, and that Shakespeare’s authorship of the Hecate scenes is doubtful. I have one or two caveats. I’m not sure that it’s helpful to gloss and crossreference bracelet as “an ornamental ring or band worn around the arm” (54). Also, although the volume as a whole uses the name formats of the Riverside Shakespeare, there are one or two inconsistencies, most notably in the spelling of Aemilia: on pages 97–98, students might struggle to notice that the first A of Aemelia Lanyer is not in boldface and that the cross-reference is actually to the (differently spelled) Emilia. For such a long book, there are very few typos; I did note taudry (18) followed by tawdry (19); caul is consistently spelled with an -e, although the OED acknowledges only caul; and Jean Addison Roberts (121, 184, 451) should be Jeanne Addison Roberts. Nevertheless, this is an impressive achievement and a very rewarding read.
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2011
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2012
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2015
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Papers by Heather Hirschfeld