Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2018 volume features essays presented at the conference at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with four essays on Shakespearean drama, offering readings ranging from the heteroglossia in Henry VIII to the limits of language in King Lear, social networks in Anthony and Cleopatra, and epiphanic excursions in the Shakespearean corpus. The next essays look at iconology, agency, and alterity on the early modern stage and colonial Peruvian art. The journal then returns us to the poetry of early modern England. The first of this group explores the perils of poor reading in The Countess of Montgomery’s Uriana and is followed by essays investigating the aesthetic connection between Spenser and Catullus and the sacred circularities in John Donne’s Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward. The volume concludes with an extended consideration of meritocracy and misogyny in the works of Ben Jonson.

Contributors: Nathan Dixon, Lisandra Estevez, Melissa J. Rack, Robert Lanier Reid, Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deneen Senasi, Jonathon Shelley, Kendall Spillman, John Wall, and Don E. Wayne.

The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of California, San Diego.