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This book considers Richard III and the four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad—Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. This book combines close reading with cultural analysis to show how the language characters speak always says more than the speakers mean to say. Shakespeare's speakers try to say one thing. Their language says other things that often question the speakers' motives or intentions. The book explores the effect of this linguistic mischief on the representation of all the Henriad's major figures. It centers attention on the portrayal of Falstaff and on the bad faith that darkens the language and performance of Harry, the Prince of Wales who becomes King Henry V.

Through readings of Shakespeare and Paul, Members of His Body protests the Christian defense of marital monogamy. If the Paul who authors 1 Corinthians would prefer that unmarried believers remain single, the pseudonymous Paul of the epistle to the Ephesians argues that marriage affords the couple membership in the body of Christ. For neither Paul is plural marriage the antithesis of Christian marriage. For the Paul of Ephesians, plural marriage is rather the telos of Christian community. Building on scholarship regarding early modern sexualities, as well as on political-theological conversations about Pauline universalism, Members of His Body argues that marriage functions in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale as a contested vehicle of Christian embodiment. Shakespeare’s plays query the extent to which man and wife become “one flesh” through marriage, and the extent to which they share that fleshly identity with other Christians. These plays explore the racial, religious, and gender criteria for marital membership in the body of Christ. Finally, they suggest that marital jealousy and paranoia about adultery result in part from a Christian theology of shared embodiment. In the wake of recent arguments that expanding marriage rights to gay people will open the door to the cultural acceptance and legalization of plural marriage, Shakespeare’s plays remind us that much Christian theology already looks forward to this end.

Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage explores the stage’s unprecedented local turn in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century London. By taking the city as its subject, this book argues that the stage made possible a radical reorienting of theatrical practice, opening up a reflexive space within which an increasingly diverse population might begin to “practice” the city. In this, the stage began to operate as a medium as well as a model for urban experience. The story this book tells, through the close reading of plays in relation to networks of urban activity, is about the theater’s place within a shifting matrix of local practices that actively mediates the unsettling milieu of rapid urbanization. It is a story about the complex processes of urban plurality and the possibilities for interpretation and invention in the daily lives of ordinary Londoners. Following an introduction that lays out the main claims, the book contains individual chapters that focus on a group of five London plays, including histories (1 and 2Henry IV and Sir Thomas More) and city comedies (Englishmen for My Money and The Roaring Girl).

Shakespeare and Donne are themselves hybrids who crossed generic and social boundaries and also shared a contemporary urban space and roots in the old religion. Centering on cross-fertilization between these authors’ writings, the chapters in this volume examine relationships that are broadly cultural, theoretical, and imaginative. They emphasize the intersection of physical or material dimensions of experience with nonphysical and transcendent ones, whether these are moral, intellectual, or religious. They also juxtapose lyric and sermons interactively with narrative and plays. Performance and audience are among their concerns, as are the themes of skepticism and imagination and various philosophies of thought, sensation, and meaning: those of Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Kripke, Agamben, Massumi, and Serres, for example. Language and rhetoric constitute a conspicuous emphasis in the volume and include naming and punning, public and private discourse, figures, tropes, and styles. Besides philosophies of mind and language, theoretical orientations encompass intertextuality, feminism and sexuality, reception and performance, and historicism. The chapters are grouped under four headings: “Time, Love, Sex, and Death” (Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Jennifer Pacenza), “Moral, Public, and Spatial Imaginaries” (Mary Blackstone and Jeanne Shami, Douglas Trevor), “Names, Puns, and More” (Marshall Grossman, David Lee Miller, Julian Lamb), and “Realms of Privacy and Imagination” (Anita Gilman Sherman, Judith H. Anderson).

This book shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In readings of Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, I show how his works offer a means for coming to terms with basic uncertainties: about how we can be free, about whether the world is abundant, about whether we have met the demands of love and social life. Though there exist many accounts of Shakespeare’s skepticism, none approach it as does this book. Some accounts portray that skepticism as enabling—whether by fostering Keats’ heroic, ultimately positive “Negativity Capability” or by serving as a subjective foundation for the tolerant, liberal state—while others portray it as a corrosive disease, in need of cure. While not denying these possibilities, my project presents an alternative, attending to varieties of skepticism that keep negative capability negative but that make skepticism livable—that ask for a lasting disorientation, for practicing the impractical, for a drastic reshaping of the frames by which readers view and negotiate the world.