Michael Baird Saenger

Southwestern University · Department of English

It may certainly be said that nothing can be assumed about Shakespeare: on the one hand, the Elizabethan poet seems to be thriving, with more editions, productions, studies, and translations appearing every year; on the other hand, in a time of global crisis and decolonization, the question of why Shakespeare is relevant at all is now more pertinen...

This essay assesses two dominant modes of understanding William Shakespeare’s effect on world cultures. Those two modes are anchored on the ideas of tradition and commerce. Each offers valuable insight but also carries with it inherent limitations. This essay borrows from recent interdisciplinary work on ecosystems to offer a third way of approachi...

This study emerges from an interdisciplinary conversation about the theory of translation and the role of foreign language in fiction and society. By analyzing Shakespeare’s treatment of France, Saenger interrogates the cognitive borders of England - a border that was more dependent on languages and ideas than it was on governments and shorelines.

Ben Jonson animates The Alchemist with an intersection of languages. In this moral satire, he captures the layered dialects, specialized vocabularies, and social desires of London and holds them up for view. This essay examines the play’s negotiation of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ modes of translation, also with reference to Shakespeare’s treatment...

John Rastell’s An Exposition Of Certaine difficult and obscure words, and termes of the Lawes of this Realme, newly set forth & augmented, both in French & English, for the help of such yong Students, as are desirous to attaine to the knowledge of the same (1595) illustrates a different kind of textual project from either the plays or primers exami...

In Shakespeare’s London, it was increasingly apparent that the circulation of abstract capital and its transformative powers could create stark disparities of wealth and poverty. Meanwhile, the theater of tragedy emerged as a place where people could go to pay to watch other people in pain. The theater was a little globe, and one way to understand...

All identity formation is narcissistic, if we follow Lacan, so the plot device of identical twins makes evident and open for examination this basic phenomenon by splitting the self instead of reflecting it; how does one distinguish oneself from a nearly identical double? The plays that use this device, The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, embed...

One of the more unusual methods of this book is to use the graphic typography of non-literary books, particularly French primers, to provide insight into Shakespeare’s staging of England and France. Such an effort requires some methodological groundwork. By now, there is nothing particularly shocking about the idea of working across the anachronist...

The goal of the previous chapter was to lay out a broad conceptual framework for an intertextual discussion of drama and language instruction books. This chapter advances the methodology of this study by focusing on more local issues involved in translation and the printed page. Here, I argue that a distinction drawn from translation theorists can...

All’s Well That Ends Well is set almost entirely in France, and it pivots around the personal and social transformations that Helen and Parolles experience at the margin of that French world, in Florence. Both attempt to become someone they are not yet; Parolles strives to become a military hero by recapturing the drum and instead becomes a prodiga...

When Gloucester is being interrogated in King Lear, he at one point says, “I am tied to the stake and I must stand the course” (3.7.54–55). This line, alluding to bear-baiting, must make the audience uncomfortable. They may or may not attend bear-baitings, but here, they must recognize the parallel structure of tragedies and those spectacles of ani...

5. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London 1977). 6. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (Harmondsworth 1978). 7. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (New York 1998) 3d. 8. A. C. Hamilton, et al., The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto 1997).

"Oral literature" is an uncomfortable pair of words; Walter Ong goes so far as to suggest that the phrase is "self-contradictory" (1982:13). Orality has gained legitimacy as an object of critical inquiry, but as long as critics are located in universities, they must, like archeologists, rely (however suspiciously) on transcriptions and try to piece...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2000. Includes bibliographical references.