Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2015 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with a trio of reconsiderations of the impact of patronage on theater under the Stuarts, the role of the audience in Hamlet, and the role of King Arthur in The Faerie Queene. The heart of this year’s journal is English drama, featuring essays on anxieties about nationhood in The Spanish Tragedy, generic anomalies and Chaucerian echoes in All’s Well That Ends Well, the inversion of the hagiographical tradition in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the complexities coalescing around authorial identity under the Stuarts. In the penultimate essay, the focus shifts to the non-dramatic with a reconsideration of Milton’s Paradise Regained and its relationship to the court masque. The last offering is a historical essay on the intersection of the personal and the political in John Wray’s The Pilgrim'sJournal. The volume concludes with four book reviews.

Contributors: David M. Bergeron, William A. Coulter, Timothy D. Crowley, Melissa Geil, Lainie Pomerleau, Robert Lanier Reid, Emily Stockard, Lewis Walker, John N. Wall.

The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of Georgia.