Abstract This article explores a friendship between two major figures in the Bluestocking network: the courtier and diarist Mary Hamilton (1756–1816) and the artist Mary Delany (1700–1788). Drawing on the Mary Hamilton Papers and the Dickenson Family Papers, it sheds new light on the ways in which their relationship ensured continuity of female experience, solidarity, knowledge channelling, and skills transfer across generations. The article investigates these women’s collaborative activities and discusses Hamilton’s engagement with Delany’s famous paper flower collages. It also explores Hamilton’s volume of excerpts from Delany’s letters and transcriptions of poems penned by and dedicated to Delany. When read together, Hamilton’s various biographical materials related to Delany form the first contemporary collage–biography of her brilliant precursor.

Abstract This article explores a previously unknown manuscript of the anonymous academic drama Lingua. Housed in the Bridgeman family archives in Staffordshire Record Office, the manuscript is similar but by no means identical to the 1607 printed edition. I examine the manuscript’s possible provenance, its distinctive features and key variants (including its attention to act music), before focusing on two substantial original passages. Both of these episodes demonstrate a clear satirical interest in Wales, recycling as they do various Welsh stereotypes common in professional drama of the early seventeenth century. I argue that these sections—which also bear the mark of an engagement with Spenser and Rabelais—enrich our understanding not only of Lingua but of the links between university drama and wider literary and theatrical cultures. I conclude that these sections are likely authorial, and that Thomas Tomkis (to whom the play is usually attributed) may well have contributed to or overseen the production of the manuscript.

Abstract With a particular focus on an intensive close reading of the scenes between the lovers and their portrayal of desire and intimacy, this essay discusses how Shakespeare transforms lyric poetry, especially its formal features, not simply into dramatic poetry but into theatre, demonstrating how Shakespeare creates the lovers’ world and the passionate intimacy of their relationship through the embodiment of lyric forms, especially the sonnet, the epithalamium, and the aubade. Explicitly thinking about bodies (and bodies on stage) rather than ‘the body’, it draws on a number of Shakespeare’s sources, especially Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, as well as Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, exploring in precise detail how Shakespeare works with them, the particularity of his transformations, and their effects.1

Abstract Daniel Defoe’s pirate novel Captain Singleton (1720) was republished in 1757, during the political and military crises of the early stages of the Seven Years’ War. The fact that Singleton at this time was extensively rewritten has gone entirely unnoticed by scholars. The present article explains how this version of Defoe’s maritime picaresque fiction responded to national anxieties about naval performance, aristocratic leadership, and martial masculinity following the loss of Minorca, seeking to galvanize its readers during the privateering rush of this period and the more general appetite for a ‘blue-water’, colonial war strategy. In 1757, Bob Singleton is transformed from the stateless sea rover of Defoe’s original into a patriotic privateer who serves the British nation in an unofficial capacity, both as an African explorer in the first half and a maritime adventurer in the second. The 1757 novel shows the ways in which the rising taste for sentimental fiction, moving away from individualistic adventure stories, coalesced with imperialist and nationalist agendas in the mid-eighteenth century. This example of literary appropriation rewards the investigation of the afterlives of eighteenth-century fiction, aiding recognition of how novels endured and were revived, often in revised or remediated states, to reach different readerships and speak to new sociocultural contexts.

This essay re-examines the archival evidence for Katharine Metcalfe’s on-going involvement after 1912 in editing the novels of Jane Austen; in particular, what she may have contributed during the period 1912–1918 towards work for school editions of Mansfield Park and Emma, which, though abandoned in 1918, was later partially absorbed into R. W. Chapman’s edition of 1923. In doing so, it challenges recent estimations of Metcalfe’s importance as a textual pioneer, examines differences between the text of her edition of Pride and Prejudice of 1912 and Chapman’s of 1923, and affirms her role as research assistant taking her lead, as early as 1914, from him. In a shift of focus, it considers the intellectual atmosphere in which Metcalfe worked around 1912 and evidence for an alignment, at that time, of interest in Austen and her Georgian society with female-led shifts in British historiography and literary history. It argues that this (rather than textual acumen) is the appropriate context for an appreciation of Metcalfe’s contribution. On the evidence we have, the step change represented by her historically rich appendix to Pride and Prejudice 1912 (reissued in 1923 in her edition of Northanger Abbey) is the area in which Metcalfe most effectively intervened in the modern critical and popular engagement with Austen.

Arden Hegele. Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading. Pp. viii+223.
\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Hardback, £60.

An eminent and popular voice in fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, has also earned a prominent place in contemporary world literature as a translator—in fact, she says, ‘I was a translator before I was a writer’. Born to Indian Bengali parents in London in 1967, Lahiri has grappled with language since childhood. When she was three, her parents moved permanently to the US, and Lahiri grew up with a distinctive sense of shifting from one culture to another, from one language to another, her sense of self structured by the features and forms of different languages. Her entente with English and Bengali in childhood developed into a fascination with language learning, which ended in her enchantment with Italian. Lahiri’s love affair with Italian is beautifully illustrated in In Other Words (2016), a book that she wrote in Italian, which was translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Translating Myself and Others is to some extent an expansion of In Other Words, although the two books are different in style, form, and approach. The latest collection includes some powerful essays on the art of translation as well as on Lahiri’s personal investment in translating from Italian into English. She also offers deep and insightful discussion of relationships between originals and their translations, between a writer and a translator, on superiority and marginality, and also on the necessity of translation. In the first essay, ‘Why Italian’, Lahiri contemplates her growing love for Italian rather than English, her literary language, and Bengali, the language in which she communicated with her parents at home: ‘I am a writer without a true mother tongue’, she says, a writer ‘linguistically orphaned’ (10). She recalls the questions that were raised by her learning another language: ‘You’re of Indian origin, were born in London, raised in America. You write books in English. What does Italian have to do with any of that?’ (9). Even so, she persisted in gathering the details and subtleties that make for an Italian literary style. In the process, she thinks that her life ‘is a series of grafts, one after another’ (20).

Lumbering creatures who were unable to adapt, dinosaurs found themselves out of time in early twentieth-century literature, and on their way to becoming a metaphor. This socially moralized reading of dinosaurs is among those explored by Richard Fallon in his study of dinosaur-themed writing from the decades around 1900. The book listens to ‘what dinosaurs are made to say and how they are made to say it’ (p. 183) in texts ranging from nonfiction books and articles to short stories, adventure novels and journalism. In 1998, W. J. T. Mitchell claimed that modernity defined itself through the icon of the dinosaur (The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon). Fallon’s work draws on this grand idea, but he also unpicks it, tracing complexities through the late Victorian and Edwardian periods and approaching his sources in an inquisitive and flexible way. The book makes nice adjustments to scholarly history without attempting to rock the boat much, let alone overturn it. Despite the size of the creature in question, the arguments are modest, subtle and well-evidenced. Fallon leads us on an exploratory journey down the various interpretive paths taken by dinosaurs as they made their way into readers’ imaginations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Whether in print, on stage, or in the political arena, the subjects of war and military service preoccupied the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean audiences. In plays, histories, conduct manuals, pamphlets, reportage, personal letters, diplomatic exchanges, and military treatises—which proliferated in this period—the justifications for and practicalities of war-making were debated, combat was imagined as a rite of passage, and the battlefield was depicted as a space of opportunity. That the theatres of war offered both advancement and danger is evident in the rise and fall of Sir Walter Ralegh and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. These martial courtiers are the subject of two chapters in Hiscock’s Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe and loosely bookend his discussion of Shakespeare’s Henriad. Hiscock proposes that Shakespeare's history plays offer a sustained ‘examination of the motivations, desires, and performances surrounding misgovernment and the waging of war’ in England and on the continent (101). Throughout, Hiscock’s study is enrichingly contextualized by excerpts from primary sources (in their original languages and translated into English), such as reports from French envoys and Venetian diplomats, and correspondence from Elizabeth I, Henri IV, and European noblemen. A further strength lies in how the book’s arguments are not only underpinned by literary criticism and historical research but also informed by the judicious use of works by philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, St Augustine, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricœur, Seneca, and Slavoj Žižek.