OU - Faculty and Staff Publications

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Browsing OU - Faculty and Staff Publications by College/Department "College of Arts and Sciences::Department of English"

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    The Case of Eleazar Edgar: Leicester’s Commonwealth and the Book Trade in 1604
    (2021-06) Mansky, Joseph
    Scholars have long observed that the Catholic libel known as Leicester’s Commonwealth circulated extensively in manuscript. After its first printing in 1584, the tract was not printed again until 1641. Yet over ninety full or partial manuscript copies survive, suggesting that it was, as H. R. Woudhuysen writes, “one of the most widely circulated prose tracts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Despite the considerable number of extant manuscripts, however, scholars have found few explicit reports of the book’s scribal dissemination.
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    Jane Shore, Edward IV, and the Politics of Publicity
    (2018) Mansky, Joseph
    This essay sketches the publics imagined and instantiated by Thomas Heywood's two-part history play Edward IV. Heywood’s play locates the middle-class woman Jane Shore at the center of public politics, turning the cautionary tale of “Mistress Shore” (King Edward’s favorite mistress) into the populist story of “Jane Shore,” champion of the commons and innocent victim of Richard III’s tyranny. As a commoner and a woman, Jane Shore models an emergent politics of publicity through which ordinary people, no less than princes and politicians, could fashion public identities and participate in political life. Richard’s propaganda proves to be no match for Jane’s enduring popularity. Even as the tyrant reduces her to abject poverty, he completely fails to dislodge her from the people’s hearts. Her fall instead catalyzes a community of resistance: the affective attachments of ordinary people generate a counterpublic of commiserating citizens in the play—and in Heywood’s theater.
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    “Look No More”: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia
    (2019-03) Mansky, Joseph
    In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero’s fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero’s rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience’s eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson’s Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson’s time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism. (JM)