By the time King James I took the throne, the actors in London’s children’s theatre companies were rapidly approaching adulthood. This essay uses Ben Jonson’s Epicoene to suggest that the liminal status of these young performers was key to the way the plays explored and represented the vexed status of the Jacobean political subject. At a time when James was countering parliamentary unrest by adopting and expanding the rhetoric of the firm but benevolent father-king, works like Jonson’s asked whether it was possible, or even desirable, to leave childish things behind.

This article argues that John Donne's engagement with and privileging of the body lies at the creative core of his work. Donne's poetry and prose courts heresy and generates drama as he elevates the body to a status equal with or even superior to the soul, a crucial component of selfhood that is ultimately key not only to earthly but heavenly life. It is in the bodily self, with its sexuality, its illness, and its promise of resurrection, that this consummate "metaphysical" poet locates the soul and the treasures of its existence.

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In a pitched battle over the state's basic terminology, thousands of pamphlets poured from the English press after censorship ended in 1640-41—the meanings of the words "king," "people," and "tyrant" were just a few thrown into question. John Milton quickly entered the fray, and his works have recently been read for their destabilizing tendencies in that struggle, the way their iconoclastic metaphors challenge the language of reified power. This paper examines tells another side of the story, exploring Milton's use of mathematical language to correct metaphor and bring law into harmony with both man's reason and God's will.

Previous criticism of Marvell’s “Mourning” has not only ignored the narrator’s invocation of “Indian slaves,” but has in most cases actually erased it. This essay explores the consequences of that erasure for our understanding of the poem and its place in the history of colonialism and race-making.