Table Of ContentRenaissance Personhood
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Renaissance Personhood
Materiality, Taxonomy, Process
Edited by Kevin Curran
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
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© editorial matter and organization Kevin Curran, 2020
© the chapters their several authors, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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The right of Kevin Curran to be identifi ed as the editor of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors viii
1. What Was Personhood? 1
Kevin Curran
I. Materialities of Personhood: Chairs, Machines, Doors
2. Daughters, Chairs, and Liberty in Margaret
Cavendish’s The Religious 21
Stephanie Elsky
3. The Inner Lives of Renaissance Machines 44
Wendy Beth Hyman
4. Two Doors: Personhood and Housebreaking
in Semayne’s Case and The Comedy of Errors 62
Colby Gordon
II. Taxonomies of Personhood: Status, Species, Race
5. Should (Bleeding) Trees Have Standing? 87
Joseph Campana
6. Aping Personhood 117
Holly Dugan
7. Race, Personhood, and the Human in The Tempest 138
Amanda Bailey
III. Processes of Personhood: Eating, Lusting, Mapping
8. Liquid Macbeth 163
David B. Goldstein
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vi Contents
9. Things in Action: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, Macbeth,
and Levinas on Shame 186
John Michael Archer
10. Edward Herbert’s Cosmopolitan State 210
Gregory Kneidel
Index 232
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Acknowledgments
This volume began its life as two collaborative events: a roundtable I
organized for the 2017 meeting of the Modern Language Association
in Philadelphia called “Object Lessons in Personhood” and a semi-
nar I directed at the 2018 meeting of the Shakespeare Association
of America in Los Angeles called “Object Lessons in Renaissance
Personhood.” I want to thank all who participated in these events
for their daring ideas. Our discussions changed how I thought about
personhood in ways I could never have predicted. Moving this proj-
ect from the interactive environments of the conference and semi-
nar room to the more formal and atomized landscape of cooperative
book creation was an absolute pleasure thanks to the truly stellar
team of contributors who joined me. I am very fortunate to be in the
company of such a rigorous, inventive, and intellectually generous
group of scholars in these pages. Finally, Edinburgh University Press
has been a delight to work with. Thank you to Michelle Houston,
Ersev Ersoy, Rebecca Mackenzie, and Carla Hepburn for ushering
Renaissance Personhood through review and production with pro-
fessionalism and care.
Kevin Curran
Lausanne, Switzerland
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Contributors
John Michael Archer is Professor of English at New York Uni-
versity. His fi rst book, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and
Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford University
Press, 1993), discusses the portrayal of political surveillance in the
works of Montaigne, Marlowe, Bacon, and other authors. Old
Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2001), extends his interest in
knowledge-gathering to the later seventeenth century by analyzing
European travel writings along with literary works by Shakespeare,
Milton, and Dryden. His third book, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen
and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (Palgrave, 2005), shows
how the London citizen and the immigrant city-dweller fi gure in the
action and verbal texture of Shakespeare’s drama. Technically Alive:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Palgrave, 2012) traces the correspondence
between Heidegger’s thinking about technology and Shakespeare’s
poetics of natural productivity. Chapters take up agriculture, ani-
mals, memory, print culture, and ecological waste, as well as tech-
nology as a form of thought.
Amanda Bailey is Professor of English at the University of Maryland.
She is the author of Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood
in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
and Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance
England (University of Toronto Press, 2007). She has edited Mascu-
linity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, with Roze Hentschell
(Palgrave, 2010), and, more recently, Affect Theory and Early Mod-
ern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form (Palgrave, 2017), with Mario
DiGangi. She has published numerous essays and book chapters and
is currently completing Shakespeare on Consent, under contract with
Routledge. This book broadens and deepens the notion of consent
underwriting the #MeToo movement by tracing its legacy to earlier
understandings of erotic agency in relation to gender, embodiment,
and collective politics. She is also working on a book-length study of
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Contributors ix
racial economies of knowledge and the formation of the Humanities
as an academic discipline.
Joseph Campana is a poet, arts writer, and scholar who serves as
Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English at Rice University where
he is also an editor of Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. He
is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability,
and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham University Press, 2012), co-
editor with Scott Maisano of Renaissance Posthumanism (Fordham
University Press, 2016), and the author of three collections of poetry,
The Book of Faces (2005), Natural Selections (2012), which received
the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Book of Life (Tupelo Press, 2019).
Current projects include a study of children and sovereignty in the
works of Shakespeare, The Child’s Two Bodies, a study of bees,
trees, crocodile tears, and other forms of creaturely life called Living
Figures, and a two-volume co-edited collection with Keith Botelho
on insect life in the Renaissance, Lesser Living Creatures.
Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the Uni-
versity of Lausanne in Switzerland and editor of the book series
“Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy.” He is
the author of Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed
Selfhood (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Marriage, Per-
formance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Ashgate, 2009). He is
the editor of Shakespeare and Judgment (Edinburgh University Press,
2016) and co-editor, with James Kearney, of a special issue of the
journal Criticism on “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” (2012). In
2017, Curran was named Distinguished International Visiting Fellow
at the Center for the History of Emotions in Australia. He is also the
founder and Director of the Lausanne Shakespeare Festival.
Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at the George Wash-
ington University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of
Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2013), co-editor, with Lara Farina, of Intimate
Senses, a special issue of Postmedieval (2012), and co-editor, with
Karl Steel, of Fabulous Animals, a special issue of EMC (2016).
She is currently working on The Famous Ape, a book project that
explores the prehistory of primatology through the lens of Shake-
speare’s plays.
Stephanie Elsky is Assistant Professor of English at Rhodes College.
She is the author of Custom, Law, and the Constitution of English
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