Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2012 volume opens with two essays on sexuality in Elizabethan narrative poetry: on homoeroticism in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and on Shakespeare’s swerve into Lucretian imagery in Venus and Adonis. The volume then turns to Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture: the commodification of spirit in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s evocation of the Acts of the Apostles in The Comedy of Errors, summoning in Hamlet and King Lear, discourses of procreation and generation in Antony and Cleopatra, trade and gender in John Webster’s Devil’s Law-Case, and an examination of street scenes in Romeo and Juliet in relation to Paul’s Cross Churchyard, the hub of the London bookselling market in the early modern period. The volume closes with essays on seventeenth-century literature and literary culture: on the puritan logic of the elder Andrew Marvell in his famous son’s poem To His Coy Mistress, on the sociable lexicography of a Royalist polymath attempting to reconcile with the English Commonwealth, and on the underestimated roles of Urania in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Contributors: David Ainsworth, Thomas W. Dabbs, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Russell Hugh McConnell, Robert L. Reid, Amrita Sen, Susan C. Staub, Emily Stockard, Nathan Stogdill, Christina A. Taormina, Emma Annette Wilson. Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes are Associate Professors of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.