@article{crosbie_2023, title={Aristotelian Time, Ethics, and the Art of Persuasion in Shakespeare’s Henry V}, url={https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010007}, DOI={10.3390/literature3010007}, abstractNote={In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Henry’s invocation of an imagined future that understands the present as a theoretical past betrays a surprising indebtedness to Aristotle’s notion of time as “a measure of change with respect to the before and after.” Drawing on Aristotle’s theory that time depends upon a perceiving mind and that those unconscious of change mistakenly “join up the latter ‘now’ to the former and make it one,” this essay argues that Henry succeeds in altering his auditors’ behavior, and thus generating the history he desires, by merging their shared, lived present with his own fictive temporalities. A mode of persuasion famous in its ethical ambivalence, Henry’s rhetoric reveals how the very ontological assumptions governing perceptions of time may be manipulated, for good or ill, amid audiences who fail to critically envisage their own counterbalancing, imaginative histories.}, journal={Literature}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2023}, month={Jan} }
 @article{crosbie_2022, title={Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy}, volume={75}, ISSN={["1935-0236"]}, DOI={10.1017/rqx.2022.418}, abstractNote={leads to salvation.” Palamon, Arcite, Emelye, and Dorigen, however, “invite readers inside the devotional interiority of pagans, enabling an intimate encounter with religious difference . . . without stipulating where those experiences must lead” (82). Murton’s third chapter turns to the “religion of love” in Troilus and Criseyde and, therefore, to Troilus, love’s only true disciple: “both [Pandarus and Troilus] are fluent in the discourse of the religion of love, but only Troilus speaks it with true devotion” (103–04). Criseyde, Murton insists, is an atheist. Troilus, moreover, provides access to the deepest emotional levels of the story, and the “sharing” Chaucer offers his readers “goes beyond mere sympathy with Troilus’s beliefs, for readers are invited to re-voice those beliefs as they inhabit his songs and prayers to Love” (106). Chaucer himself becomes the focus of Murton’s fourth chapter on the dream visions as she examines how he “repeatedly turns to prayer to effect transitions in these texts, such as the transition into the liminal space of the dream, a crucial moment that marks the beginning of the process of poetic creation” (127). This is Murton’s most complex chapter as she traces how the poet challenges Dante’s vatic poetry and probes Chaucer’s anxieties concerning his readers’ response to “a vision that is his own, grounded in nothing outside himself that could provide a framework for, or a constraint upon, interpretation” (142). As her subsequent analysis of “The Retraction” and her conclusion make clear, her Chaucer is ultimately a poet of the earnest more than of game. Her argument about Chaucer’s use of prayer is also one with critics who overemphasize the critical detachment “this most apparently secular of Middle English poets” takes from his poetry (162). She claims that “Chaucer’s comedy gestures toward a deeper discomfort” (141) with the very phenomenon of reader response. Those arguments, and especially her readings of Chaucer’s prayers, deserve thoughtful consideration by Chaucerians. But I suspect most of Murton’s own readers will respond skeptically and perhaps coolly to this serious Chaucer. And while I, for one, welcome a scholar who takes Chaucer’s Christian faith seriously, I also think she too easily dismisses, or at least misses, the Christian humility that also inhabits his brilliant selfand reader-directed use of comic irony.}, number={4}, journal={RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2022}, pages={1437–1439} }
 @article{crosbie_2022, title={“'Strange Serious Wantoning:' Early Modern Chess Manuals and the Ethics of Virtuous Subterfuge"}, url={https://www.academia.edu/88245444/_Strange_Serious_Wantoning_Early_Modern_Chess_Manuals_and_the_Ethics_of_Virtuous_Subterfuge_Christopher_Crosbie_}, journal={Renaissance Papers}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2022} }
 @book{revenge tragedy and classical philosophy on the early modern stage_2021, year={2021} }
 @book{crosbie_2019, title={Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage}, ISBN={9781474440264 9781474459693}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440264.001.0001}, DOI={10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440264.001.0001}, abstractNote={This book discovers within early modern revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre. By recovering the pervasive influence of Aristotelian faculty psychology on The Spanish Tragedy, Aristotelian ethics on Titus Andronicus, Lucretian atomism on Hamlet, Galenic pneumatics on Antonio’s Revenge and Epictetian Stoicism on The Duchess of Malfi, this book reveals how the very atmospheres and ontological assumptions of revenge tragedy exert their own kind of conditioning dramaturgical force. The book also revitalises our understanding of how the Renaissance stage, even at its most lurid, functions as a unique space for the era’s practical, vernacular engagement with received philosophy.}, publisher={Edinburgh University Press}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2019}, month={Jan} }
 @article{crosbie_2018, title={Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation}, volume={115}, ISSN={["1545-6951"]}, DOI={10.1086/694829}, abstractNote={Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRenaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation. Leah Whittington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii+239.Christopher CrosbieChristopher CrosbieNorth Carolina State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLeah Whittington’s Renaissance Suppliants, impressive in scope, provides a lively and engaging reading of literary expressions of supplication across historical periods. Advertised as a study of Renaissance authors, the book opens with two nuanced and informative chapters centered on the “supplicatory dynamics” found in classical texts themselves, as the author establishes the terms by which this “ancient form of ritualized interaction” (vi) would come to be understood by later generations. Noting that studies on Renaissance supplication have tended to either “assimilate synchronically related phenomena” (10) or, if inclined toward diachronic analysis, narrowly focus on epic convention alone, Whittington argues that such latter studies “bleach the story of reception into an ahistorical encounter between the Renaissance poet and his classical forbears, without sufficient attention to intervening mediations” (12). In order to get at the “grammar” (13) of supplication rituals, Whittington examines in her first chapter the “fundamental paradox that gives supplication its flexibility and fascination” across periods, namely, the ways in which “the suppliant’s lowliness can sometimes be a source of extraordinary power” (16). Alert to the “radical contingency of supplication” (29), however, Whittington also unfolds how vulnerability can not only produce compassion but also intensify cruelty. An illuminative survey of Homer, Pliny, Thucydides, and Greek tragedy examines the various supplicatory strategies—dependent as much upon ritualized physical performance as upon verbal appeal—at work in classical texts across genres.The second chapter centers on supplication in Vergil’s Aeneid, and if some may be wary of Whittington’s initial description of Vergil as a kind of “ambient presence” for Renaissance authors, the readings that follow sustain the claim that he remains “imaginatively operative via the type of deep acculturation that pertains to texts received and recollected through multiple channels” (47). In his understanding of supplication’s rituals as multivalent and eminently adaptable depending upon context, Vergil serves as the “authorizing predecessor” for Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton, “the model par excellence for bringing the literary past to bear on the localized concerns of the historical present” (48). Here, Whittington situates the Aeneid within the era’s conflicted sensibilities toward supplication: as something acceptable for foreigners, since it provided occasion for Roman magnanimity; as suspect for Romans themselves, given its connotations of cowardice or dishonor; and, within political discourse, as deeply disturbing to republicans, yet “effectively normalized” by Caesar nonetheless when he “accepted the senate’s request for pardon” (56). Such tensions find expression in key moments of the Aeneid, and Whittington’s ensuing analysis convincingly figures the “emotional partiality of the narrator” (62) as integral to the poem’s larger strategy of “invit[ing] consideration of the characters in terms of their alignment or non-alignment with the narrator’s ethically motivated poetic mode” (68). In particular, Whittington deftly handles the tensions that arise when Aeneas is given the role of respondent to a supplication, yet reacts in a way at odds with the “the narrator’s pro-suppliant rhetoric” (72), a feature that helps reveal Vergil’s investment “in creating a readership that experiences the interaction of supplication from the perspective of both suppliant and supplicated” (80).Turning to the Renaissance, the third chapter takes up the matter of Petrarch’s use of “the supplicatory discourse of fin amor as a crucial poetic resource for telling the story of the multiple, isolated self” (85). Whittington surveys Dantean poetics to recall that “one of the key aspects of Petrarch’s search for a new poetic path beyond Dante … is his staging of a reintroduction of supplicatory interactions into erotic poetry” (95). Reading Petrarch’s Africa as indebted to supplicant imagery drawn variously from classical epic and troubadour lyric, Whittington argues “Petrarch casts the lovers [Sophonisba and Massinissa] in two simultaneous supplicatory dramas, one military, epic, and classical, the other erotic, lyric, and contemporary” (103). Such an “enterprise of affective archaeology,” Whittington asserts, allows for a “contemporary investigation of the permeable relationship between pity and desire” (106), a notion extended in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as well. Such texts, Whittington avers in the chapter’s boldest claim, reveal how the “multi-faceted interiority of the speaker depends not, as we often think, on the total unavailability of the lady, but on the patterns of suspense and uncertainty afforded by the structure of lyric supplication” (107).In the fourth chapter, Whittington focuses on Shakespeare’s Richard II and Coriolanus, paradigmatic texts that exhibit the ways “supplication exercises unexpected constraint because its formal structures are not, in the end, so easily manipulated to suit the individual desires and aims of the present actors who participate in its norms” (121). Bringing the deep history of ritualized supplication to bear on Bolingbroke and Coriolanus, Whittington persuasively argues that “supplication is able to exert extreme pressure on agents who otherwise think themselves capable of controlling and mastering its scripts and semantics” (121). Given this particular critical interest, one wishes for even passing consideration of other Shakespearean plays—King Lear comes most readily to mind—and the analysis on Richard II curiously omits the deposition scene, which certainly would have benefitted from Whittington’s nuanced conceptual frame. But the tight focus serves the argument well, and the chapter’s analysis of the supplications on behalf of the rebellious Aumerle, in particular, stands out as a crucial critical intervention. Here, Whittington examines how although, before Flint Castle, “Bolingbroke could treat supplication simply as political theater, an outdated convention that he was able to mime and surpass,” in the Aumerle scene, the Duchess “makes clear that the semantics of ritual forms are not so easily fixed and unfixed” (135), a moment indicative of how the “past exerts claims on us, even when it no longer fits” (136). The chapter concludes by considering Volumnia’s famous final supplication to her son, and, while akin to more familiar readings, Whittington’s analysis deepens our understanding of this “moment of tragic disintegration” (152) by reverse engineering with great care the “technologies of reconciliation” (156) animating the scene.Situating Paradise Lost within both seventeenth-century republican sentiment and the era’s prominent debates over kneeling in religious ceremonies, the final chapter examines how Milton “tease[s] out distinctions between different types of humiliation, separating the self-lowering that amounts to subjection from self-abasing gestures that bestow dignity on the suppliant and have the power to transform relationships” (162). For Whittington, Milton’s Satan brings together “two registers of resistance to supplication,” embodying both “the classical republican ideology of patrician pride” and, more surprisingly, “a Puritan theological motivation” in his resistance to kneeling, lest he elevate “the object of supplication to the status of divinity” (172–73). After examining how this “aversion to the ‘suppliant knee’” (173) erroneously confuses sign and “the thing itself” (175), Whittington uncovers how Eve’s postlapsarian supplication, which imports “the sacrosanct inviolability of the Homeric suppliant into the biblical world of Paradise Lost” (177), initiates a process of inventing new ritualized actions designed for effecting reconciliation. Different in kind from Satan’s misunderstanding of the dynamics of self-abasement, Eve’s regenerative supplication aligns in this way with the Son’s own kenosis, a leveling that makes the Son “the poem’s consummate republican,” as Milton marshals “classical supplication” as a “poetic mechanism for dramatizing the unwinding of hierarchical forms” (192).Traversing the worlds of Homer, Vergil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton, among others, Renaissance Suppliants is a lucid, capacious study. Throughout, it remains deeply attentive to the particular historical exigencies that gave rise to the continual reinvention of supplicatory rituals within literature from antiquity to the Renaissance. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 3February 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/694829HistoryPublished online September 22, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.}, number={3}, journal={MODERN PHILOLOGY}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2018}, month={Feb}, pages={E219–E222} }
 @inbook{flothow_coelsch-foisner_oppolzer_2017, place={Heidelberg}, title={"Refashioning Fable through the Baconian Essay: De sapientia veterum and Mythologies of the Early Modern Natural Philosopher"}, url={https://www.academia.edu/35826710/_Refashioning_Fable_through_the_Baconian_Essay_De_sapientia_veterum_and_Mythologies_of_the_Early_Modern_Natural_Philosopher_Christopher_Crosbie_}, booktitle={The Essay: Forms and Transformations}, publisher={Universitatsverlag Winter}, year={2017} }
 @inbook{walsh_2016, title={"State of the Art: Current Critical Approaches to The Revenger's Tragedy"}, url={https://www.academia.edu/35843837/_State_of_the_Art_Current_Critical_Approaches_to_The_Revengers_Tragedy_Christopher_Crosbie_}, booktitle={The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader}, year={2016} }
 @inbook{the state of the art: current critical approaches to the revenger's tragedy_2016, year={2016} }
 @article{crosbie_2015, title={PUBLICIZING THE SCIENCE OF GOD: MILTON'S RAPHAEL AND THE BOUNDARIES OF KNOWLEDGE}, volume={67}, ISSN={["0034-4346"]}, DOI={10.5840/renascence201567419}, abstractNote={This essay reads Raphael, the principal expositor of scientific knowledge in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as embodying divergent, virtually antithetical, dispositions towards the prospect of free engagement with natural philosophy within the public sphere. At once stimulating Adam’s curiosity about the natural world while also overzealously curtailing the range of human inquiry, Raphael inadvertently primes Adam and Eve to fall for Satan’s sophistry by advancing undue restrictions in excess of his divine mandate. In doing so, Raphael’s pedagogy conveys the uncertainty experienced by Milton and many of his more anxious contemporaries regarding the precise manner by which one should best navigate scientific discussion within a burgeoning public sphere. Raphael’s dual functions create a dialectic of restrained scientific inquiry that, in the absence of a definitive model for a religiously-informed science predicated on free inquiry, thus constitutes that most Miltonic of paradoxes: the advocacy of investigative liberty superintended by an elite few.}, number={4}, journal={RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2015}, pages={239–260} }
 @article{publicizing the science of god: milton's raphael and the boundaries of knowledge_2015, url={https://www.academia.edu/35827066/_Publicizing_the_Science_of_God_Miltons_Raphael_and_the_Boundaries_of_Knowledge_Christopher_Crosbie_}, DOI={https://doi.org/10.5840/renascence201567419}, abstractNote={This essay reads Raphael, the principal expositor of scientific knowledge in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as embodying divergent, virtually antithetical, dispositions towards the prospect of free engagement with natural philosophy within the public sphere. At once stimulating Adam’s curiosity about the natural world while also overzealously curtailing the range of human inquiry, Raphael inadvertently primes Adam and Eve to fall for Satan’s sophistry by advancing undue restrictions in excess of his divine mandate. In doing so, Raphael’s pedagogy conveys the uncertainty experienced by Milton and many of his more anxious contemporaries regarding the precise manner by which one should best navigate scientific discussion within a burgeoning public sphere. Raphael’s dual functions create a dialectic of restrained scientific inquiry that, in the absence of a definitive model for a religiously-informed science predicated on free inquiry, thus constitutes that most Miltonic of paradoxes: the advocacy of investigative liberty superintended by an elite few.}, journal={Renascence}, year={2015} }
 @article{publicizing the science of god: milton's raphael and the boundaries of knowledge_2015, year={2015} }
 @inbook{ed. robert demaria jr._2014, place={Oxford}, title={Francis Bacon and Aristotelian Afterlives}, volume={2}, url={https://www.academia.edu/9047584/_Francis_Bacon_and_Aristotelian_Afterlives_Christopher_Crosbie_}, publisher={Wiley-Blackwell}, year={2014}, pages={231–248} }
 @article{crosbie_2014, title={The Longleat Manuscript Reconsidered: Shakespeare and the Sword of Lath}, volume={44}, ISSN={["1475-6757"]}, DOI={10.1111/1475-6757.12027}, abstractNote={The principal challenge posed by the Longleat manuscript, or Peacham drawing, has been to account for the few marked discontinuities that exist between an image and its accompanying patchwork of texts, components that otherwise might seem to correspond rather well. Widely considered the only illustration of a Shakespearean play from the author’s lifetime, this single folio sheet (Figure 1) apparently depicts a scene, or perhaps scenes, from Titus Andronicus. Across the top of the leaf appears a drawing of seven figures, consisting from left to right of two Roman soldiers (perhaps Titus’ sons), a victorious Titus returned from war, a kneeling Tamora, Queen of the Goths, two men (presumably her sons) bound as prisoners, and Aaron the Moor, holding in his left hand what seems to be a sword while appearing to point with his right hand at the sword, the two kneeling men, Tamora, or perhaps some combination of them. Beneath the drawing follows approximately forty lines of text, beginning with a stage direction not found in the play itself reading, “Enter Tamora pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution.” The remaining text consists of three main components: Tamora’s plea for her son, drawn from the first act of Shakespeare’s play; a short response by Titus, comprised of one line from the play and two apparently invented}, number={2}, journal={ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2014}, pages={221–240} }
 @article{the longleat manuscript reconsidered: shakespeare and the sword of lath_2014, url={https://www.academia.edu/9047639/_The_Longleat_Manuscript_Reconsidered_Shakespeare_and_the_Sword_of_Lath_Christopher_Crosbie_}, journal={English Literary Renaissance}, year={2014} }
 @article{the longleat manuscript reconsidered: shakespeare and the sword of lath_2014, year={2014} }
 @article{the comedy of errors, haecceity, and the metaphysics of individuation_2013, url={https://www.academia.edu/9047718/_The_Comedy_of_Errors_Haecceity_and_the_Metaphysics_of_Individuation_Christopher_Crosbie_}, journal={Renaissance Papers}, year={2013} }
 @article{the comedy of errors, haecceity, and the metaphysics of individuation_2013, year={2013} }
 @article{crosbie_2012, title={Deathly experiments: A study of icons and emblems of mortality in Christopher Marlowe's plays.}, volume={43}, number={2}, journal={Sixteenth Century Journal}, author={Crosbie, C.}, year={2012}, pages={458–459} }
 @article{crosbie_2012, title={Women and revenge in Shakespeare: Gender; genre, and ethics}, volume={63}, DOI={10.1353/shq.2012.0027}, abstractNote={Linda Woodbridge. English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality. Marguerite A. Tassi. Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics. Get access English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality. By Linda Woodbridge. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Illus. Pp. Xvi + 332. $95.00 cloth.Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics. Edited By Marguerite A. Tassi. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2011. Pp. 344. $69.50hardback. Christopher Crosbie Christopher Crosbie Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 2, Summer 2012, Pages 253–256, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2012.0027 Published: 01 July 2012}, number={2}, journal={Shakespeare Quarterly}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2012}, pages={253–256} }
 @article{philosophies of retribution: kyd, shakespeare, webster and the revenge tragedy genre_2009, year={2009} }
 @article{oeconomia and the vegetative soul: rethinking revenge in the spanish tragedy_2008, url={https://www.academia.edu/9047467/_Oeconomia_and_the_Vegetative_Soul_Rethinking_Revenge_in_The_Spanish_Tragedy_Christopher_Crosbie_}, DOI={https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2008.00115.x}, abstractNote={Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy creates a subtle apologia for the “middling sort” by challenging the socially constructed predicates of aristocratic privilege. A scrivener's son, Kyd undertsood oeconomia, or household management, as both the means for material advancement among the “middling sort” and a potential threat to aristocratic insularity. His translation of Torquato Tasso's The Householder's Philosophy, a work rarely studied by literary scholars, reveals an abiding interest in the political import of natural philosophy on class structure. More particularly, through his sophisticated revision of Aristotelian faculty psychology, Kyd appropriates early modern understandings of the vegetative soul—the source of all reproduction, nutrition, and growth inherent in all living things —to reveal middling ambition as a natural phenomenon. By representing the latent desire for growth and development as the consequence of an innate psychology, Kyd's play transforms revenge into an understandable outgrowth of thwarted ambition, a type of reproduction by absense, when all lawful means of material advancement become foreclosed. Rather than simply irrational and brutish, or, conversely, highly calculative, revenge appears throughout Kyd's play as instinctively reproductive as well.}, journal={English Literary Renaissance}, year={2008} }
 @article{oeconomia and the vegetative soul: rethinking revenge in the spanish tragedy_2008, year={2008} }
 @article{crosbie_2008, title={Rhetorical readings, dark comedies, and Shakespeare's problem plays}, volume={42}, DOI={10.1353/cdr.0.0006}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays Christopher Crosbie Ira Clark. Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem PlaysGainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. 160. $59.95. Ira Clark’s Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays examines the function of specific rhetorical structures within Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. Reacting against the “predisposition [in prevailing criticism] to preferred sociopolitical and ideological results” present in readings where there is a “predetermination of confirming conclusions by the method of approach” (2), Clark proffers rhetorical analysis as [End Page 246] a corrective methodology—not simply as a replacement for more theoretically informed readings but rather as a more neutral (and, consequently, for Clark, a more reliable) grounding for readings of all stripes. Clark intends to “embed history within the forms whereas most tend to embed the formal discussions within their histories” (3). This desire to “embed history within the forms” leads to a useful, if brief, overview of rhetorical education in early modern England at the end of the first chapter and to a second chapter that “sets a historical critical context for the formal ones to come” (1). While the historical and critical contextualization signaled in these early chapters rarely reappears in succeeding ones (each essay almost exclusively focuses on one play and its rhetorical devices), Clark’s lucid and accessible review of the criticism would prove useful for the classroom or one seeking an entry point into the problem plays. Beginning his critical review with Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Clark revisits Harbage’s claim that the “public theater” wielded greater influence than the “private theater” in the development of English nationalism (11). Clark rereads Harbage through more recent criticism that situates problem plays within a variegated network of influences (including the rise of satiric city comedy, interest in Continental skepticism, and intensified competition among rival companies during the Poetmachia), and he does so in order to nuance our understanding of the stage’s role in the development of national identity. While this critical survey adds little by way of new insight, it sets up Clark’s reminder that, in some respects, “problem plays succeed history plays in helping determine what constituted England” (19). The complex role of the theaters in the development of English nationalism, however, remains a subtext in Clark’s study, not a principal focus of investigation, since he wishes to “return to a more formal questioning of the predicaments and tensions, resolutions and irresolutions of these dark comedies that were modulating into tragicomedy’s resolving formulae of miraculous grace and forgiveness” (23). This project, Clark signals, is particularly pertinent since “no comprehensive stylistic study of the problem plays yet exists” (23). As part of his effort to provide just such a study, Clark proposes a taxonomy of five particular rhetorical modes characteristic of problem plays. Such plays, Clark avers, remain preoccupied with “a neologistic and polysyllabic diction that collides with a vulgar … punning diction”; “a showy rhetorical high style … generally in verse juxtaposed against an abrupt, jarringly irregular, suggestive colloquial low style customarily in prose”; “a density of figurative language that is involved, mixed, elliptical”; “a frequency of brief satiric characterizations”; and “a high incidence of sententious, analytic, and self-serving proverbs” (23). Although one may reasonably wonder how other plays (perhaps Love’s Labor’s Lost, for instance) might complicate these devices as markers of problem plays, [End Page 247] the schema remains useful for this study and accords well with the satiric, urbane turn of early Jacobean theater outlined by Clark in the first part of his work. In his third chapter, Clark exclusively focuses on chiasmus as a rhetorical device crucial (as it were) to Measure for Measure’s presentation of “social, political, sexual, theological, and legal relationships” (32), a device particularly suited for encouraging yet frustrating engagement with social matters. “Chiasmus,” Clark argues, “lends itself to the expression of problems” yet concomitantly “compels us to measure the intractability of problems” (33). Less concerned with where exactly that leaves us in rethinking the broader cultural implications of Measure for Measure, Clark, after a...}, number={2}, journal={Comparative Drama}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2008}, pages={246–249} }
 @article{crosbie_2008, title={Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England}, volume={61}, ISSN={["0034-4338"]}, DOI={10.1353/ren.0.0256}, abstractNote={Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, eds. Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. x + 234 pp. index. illus. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–5781–1. - Volume 61 Issue 4}, number={4}, journal={RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY}, author={Crosbie, Christopher}, year={2008}, pages={1406–1407} }
 @article{fixing moderation: titus andronicus and the aristotelian determination of value_2007, url={https://www.academia.edu/9047434/_Fixing_Moderation_Titus_Andronicus_and_the_Aristotelian_Determination_of_Value_Christopher_Crosbie_}, DOI={https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2007.0021}, abstractNote={Journal Article Fixing Moderation: Titus Andronicus and the Aristotelian Determination of Value Get access Christopher Crosbie Christopher Crosbie Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 58, Issue 2, Summer 2007, Pages 147–173, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2007.0021 Published: 01 July 2007}, journal={Shakespeare Quarterly}, year={2007} }
 @article{fixing moderation: titus andronicus and the aristotelian determination of value_2007, year={2007} }
 @article{goodly physic: disease, purgation, and anatomical display in shakespeare's troilus and cressida_1999, year={1999} }
 @article{sexuality, corruption, and the body politic: the paradoxical tribute of the misfortunes of arthur to elizabeth i_1999, year={1999} }