Spenser and the “Human”
Special Issue Of Spenser Studies
Guest Editors: Melissa E. Sanchez & Ayesha Ramachandran

This call for papers welcomes submissions for a special issue of Spenser Studies on the topic of Spenser and “The Human.” Over the past few decades, posthumanist studies have questioned the validity and ethics of understanding “the human” as a distinct ontological category, stressing the porousness of boundaries between human and other forms of life. While such studies have focused especially on the effects of modern science, technology, ecology, and animal rights discourse on definitions of humanity, their line of inquiry is hardly new: classical, medieval, and early modern philosophers and theologians had long pondered the question of what distinguishes human beings from the natural and supernatural worlds that surround them. Recognizing the centrality of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries to this problem, scholars of the early modern period have shown that an uncertainty about how to define the category of the human was in fact fundamental to the period’s literary and cultural debates. Animals, machines, corpses, ghosts, angels, subjects of conquest and colonization, and corporations (particularly in the form of the joint-stock company) could be both distinguished from and assimilated into the category of the human for polemical, economic, or experimental purposes, rendering the category productively ambiguous and malleable.
This volume aims to explore one important, neglected site for such engagement with early modern debates on the human and humanity: the writing of Edmund Spenser, whose life and work crosses a range of cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Spenser’s absence from the posthumanist archive is especially surprising given the wide variety of life forms that populate Spenser’s poetic and polemical worlds. We hope to bring together essays and conversations about Spenser’s oeuvre that will allow us to appreciate the complexity of early modern definitions of the human in the context of poetic representation, religious and political debate, humanist philosophy, colonial expansion, and emergent anatomical systems and scientific methods.

At the end of his Essais, Montaigne calls for new vision and appreciation of our humanity: “’Tis an absolute and, as it were, a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being. We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside.” Few writers took up this call more fully, provocatively, and bravely than Spenser, whose writing is filled with investigations of the nature of our “being” and the complexities of enjoying it rightly. This volume issues a call to think through these connections and boundaries, and to explore how such thinking might reinvigorate our own critical and theoretical practice.

Please submit proposed title, along with an abstract of no more than 500 words, to Ayesha Ramachandran (ayesha.ramachandran@yale.edu) and Melissa Sanchez (sanchezm@english.upenn.edu) by April 15, 2014. Authors will be notified of selection by April 30, 2014. If selected, final essays will be due February 1, 2015.

The critical pairing of Jonson and Shakespeare might not always be one of the most illuminating comparisons in literary history, but it is one of the most enduring. The distinctiveness of the Jonson-Shakespeare pairing lies in the often implicit assumption that these two somehow function as each other’s alternative; that between them they define a crucial axis of literary possibility – between learning and imagination, or inspiration and labour. The comparison has often served to elevate Shakespeare over Jonson, on grounds sometimes less aesthetic than crudely moral – Jonsonian envy or ethical failure used to highlight Shakespeare’s generosity or singular virtue. This, in turn, has generated responses which are sometimes guilty of partisanship or defensiveness.

These tendencies are still visible today in academic and popular evocations of “Shakespeare and Jonson”. Yet in other ways the pairing itself might seem archaic. The vastness of the Shakespeare industry has ensured that the Bard (when not assumed to be beyond compare) has benefited from a much less restrictive set of comparisons. For Jonson, the picture is more mixed. He has benefited from attention in areas with a less obviously Shakespearean relevance, such as the court masque, and unlike the Oxford Middleton the new Cambridge edition of Jonson is not modelled on a Shakespearean template. To that extent, he is no longer automatically fated to a disadvantageously comparative approach. In other ways, though, he is receding from view. The RSC has not staged a Jonson play for almost a decade, while the Globe has never mounted a full production of one of his works.

What value, then, is to be found in reviving the old double act? How, now, can they speak to each other? What can their conjunction reveal that might otherwise remain obscure? This, in a year that sees the quatercentenary of the publication of Jonson’s first folio and of Shakespeare’s death, is what we seek to find out with this special issue of Shakespeare on “Shakespeare and Jonson”. We would be happy to consider essays from any approach, although we would wish them to avoid merely retreading the old pas de deux. Essays might shed light on the early years of their comparison, or episodes in its history that illuminate it anew. We would be interested, too, in essays seeking to bring Shakespearean and Jonsonian thematic or methodological concerns together. What might happen if Shakespearean concerns are transferred to the Jonsonian corpus, and vice versa? Examples of possible approaches might include, though are not limited to:

• Staging and performance history, especially recent critical developments. Is there any value in considering “Jonson in parts”, for example?
• Page and stage: in recent years, Shakespeare studies has debated the relative merits of approaching the plays as the work of a man of theatre and/or a ‘literary’ dramatist – how might Jonson appear in the light of such debates?
• Religion, Catholicism and Judaism (why, for example, is Shakespeare’s entirely speculative “Catholicism” wrangled over while Jonson’s conversions receive comparably little interest?)
• Nationality and ‘Britishness’;
• The politics of monarchy, republicanism, or the monarchical republic;
• Genders and sexualities
• Historicism and presentism: do Shakespearean debates here illuminate the Jonsonian corpus or concerns?
• Literary heritage, including neoclassical, Greek and/or medieval influences. The influence of post-medieval, vernacular drama upon Shakespeare is well-documented, while Jonson is often considered a consciously neoclassical dramatist. Is it time to revisit this distinction?
  Literary celebrity. Shakespeare’s reputation as national bard is firmly cemented, but the recently-discovered account of Ben Jonson’s walk to Scotland suggests a kind of “royal progress” between London and Edinburgh. Might this breathe new life into old debates? What might we learn about early modern ideas of literary fame, its social and political significance, or the history of the author as celebrity?

Other ways of staging the conjunction are no doubt possible, and we would be delighted to consider them.

Please send expressions of interest or abstracts for papers of 6500-7000 words to james.loxley@ed.ac.uk and fionnuala.oneill@soton.ac.uk by Friday 16th May 2014.