Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2011 volume opens with three essays focused on Shakespeare: one on Pauline presences in 1 Henry 4, one on the play of letters in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and another on productive violence in Titus Andronicus. The volume then turns to links between Renaissance drama and the wider culture, with essays on Ramistic method in Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, overflowing emotion in generically experimental plays of the first decade of the seventeenth century, and the birdliming of characters in Bartholomew Fair and Othello. Next come essays devoted to a trio of lyric poets: Sir Philip Sidney, whose frustrated desire leads to the sacrificial sublime ; Fulke Greville, whose quest for certainty is complicated by his radical Calvinism; and George Herbert, whose spiritual transformations are inspired by the machinery of court masques. The volume closes with essays showcasing a range of interests in the history of ideas: Trinitarianism in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, social satire and the norms of Christian exemplarity, and the humane censorship of Cardinal Bellarmine.

Contributors: William A. Coulter, L. Grant Hamby, Bryan Herek, C. Bryan Love, Julia P. McLeod, Kara Northway, James Pearce, Paul J. Stapleton, Jessica Tooker, Lewis Walker, Kathryn Walls, Emma Annette Wilson.

Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes are Associate Professors of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.