Heather James

University of Southern California, English, Faculty Member

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Address: Los Angeles, United States

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University of Edinburgh

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Kwantlen Polytechnic University

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University of Cologne

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Brooklyn College of CUNY

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UNL - New University of Lisbon

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University of Michigan

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Papers by Heather James

Shakespeare's Italian Loves: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto in Much Ado About Nothing

Early Modern Improvisations, 2024

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The Traumas of Troy and the Elizabethan Schoolboy in Marlowe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage

Anglia, 2024

Dido, Queene of Carthage is calibrated to disrupt the smooth passage of the translation of empire... more Dido, Queene of Carthage is calibrated to disrupt the smooth passage of the translation of empire and studies embraced by humanist pedagogy. Taking full ad- vantage of the theatrical affordances offered by the boy actors of the Children of her Majesty’s Chapel, the play aims to whisk its target audience, the sophisticated wits of the Inns of Court, back to their early encounters with the matter of Troy in their studies of Vergil and Ovid in grammar school. This essay focuses on the play’s first two acts to show how Marlowe deploys the materials of classical letters and rhetoric in ways that test and contest their ideological functions.

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Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England

The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the ... more The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the lyric eroticism of the late sixteenth century to the rise of libertinism in the late seventeenth century. Heather James argues that Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of literary innovation and free speech, was the galvanizing force behind this extraordinary level of poetic creativity. Moving beyond mere topicality, she identifies the ingenuity, novelty and audacity of the period's poetry as the political inverse of censorship culture. Considering Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and Wharton among many others, the book explains how free speech was extended into the growing domain of English letters, and thereby presents a new model of the relationship between early modern poetry and political philosophy.

The Graveyard and the Frontier: Hamlet Among the Buffaloes

Representations , 2022

The image of Hamlet holding and beholding the skull in the graveyard scene of Hamlet is an icon o... more The image of Hamlet holding and beholding the skull in the graveyard scene of Hamlet is an icon of tragic endings that exceeds the moralizing dimensions of the standard memento mori or remembrance of death. This essay explores the significance of the image in the history of Shakespearean adaptation in the context of the art, science, and ethical philosophy of the American frontier. The focus of the essay is Herd on the Move, the most ambitious painting by artist and naturalist William Jacob Hays (1830–75). The large canvas presents the exodus of bison on the frontier to points further west and features a bison in the posture of Hamlet gazing in tragic shock and recognition at a bison skull to the side of the herd. The essay analyzes this painting to trace the theme of the extinction of species as it is embedded in the ‘‘translation of empire’’ and Manifest Destiny. I account for the combined resources of several histories—art, theater, nineteenth-century history and philosophy—to elucidate the ways in which Hays, as an artist and scientist, aimed to retrain the eyes of East Coast clientele so that they might see the ecological and ethical consequences of the White man’s perspective on the push west to native species, especially the bison and the Indigenous peoples with whom their existence was intimately entwined. Representations 159. © 2022 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734- 6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 58–89.

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An Aethiopian Sodomite, Aesop, and Ovid: The Undoing of Dynastic Epic in Ariosto's Orlando furioso

Modern Philology, 2019

Ludovico Ariosto devoted over twenty-five years to composing his Orlando furioso, which he revise... more Ludovico Ariosto devoted over twenty-five years to composing his Orlando furioso, which he revised and expanded in three editions of 1516, 1521, and 1532. While these editions involve changes great and small in the poem's narrative sequence and patterns of imitation, just one matter of form dominates modern criticism: the sense of the ending. No one disputes that all versions conclude in a dynastic compliment to the Estes of Ferrara, Ariosto's patrons. The finale reaches its full statement in 1532, when Ariosto added elaborate set pieces in praise of the Este court. Yet this edition also heightens the tension between the Furioso's dynastic goals and the formal liberties Ariosto takes earlier in the poem. Prior to the end, anything goes: an indefinite range of narrative possibilities may be spun from ancient, medieval, and contemporary forms of genre, aesthetics, moral philosophy, geography, history, depictions of warfare, and visions of sex and gender. Poetic traditions invite improvisation and change, while ideological rules seem there for the breaking. In the end, the principle of dynasty brings the plotlines to order but does little to justify the scope of the poem's materials or the liberties Ariosto takes with them. Criticism has long focused on Ariosto's use of classical, imperial epic to fuel his poem's drive, however delayed, toward a dynastic conclusion that neatly converges with plots focused on the triumph of Europe over Africa and Christianity over Islam. 1 In this view of the ending, Vergil's Aeneid, as Rome's epic about empire building, oversees the Furioso's ultimate duties to military triumph, hierarchical order, and dynastic succession. By contrast, the romance genre, spurred by its classical precedents in Homer's

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Blazoning Injustice: Mutilating Titus, Vergil, and Rome

Shakespeare's Troy, 1997

Book chapter on historical trauma and the arts of humanist education in Titus Andronicus, as a pl... more

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"Tricks we play on the dead": making history in Troilus and Cressida

from Shakespeare's Troy, 1997

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The Problem of Poetry in The Faerie Queene, Book 5

The Spenser Review 45.1.1, 2015

This essay is a preliminary attempt to come to grips with a subtle but deep problem in the poetry... more This essay is a preliminary attempt to come to grips with a subtle but deep problem in the poetry of The Faerie Queene, Book V that is both linked to and overshadowed by the concerns of history, ideology, and politics that permeate Spenser's Legend of Justice as a narrative uneasily situated between Faerylond and the contemporary environs of France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. In Book V, Spenser hones in on a feature of poetry that pervades The Faerie Queene and generally works to illuminate and expand the imaginative prospects of the poem: this is the art of comparison, which comprehends matters great and small in Spenser's book and in Elizabethan culture. It affects the practice of analogy, which extends across disciplines of knowledge (including mathematics, grammar, and law) to consider matters of proportion, correspondence, resemblance, and reasoning based on parallel cases; the humanist project of imitation based on classical as well as biblical models; and the epic simile, in which comparisons between one thing and another are drawn out in ways that make their prospects of success or failure seem to be co-extensive with the possibilities of poetic interpretation itself. The project of Book V depends heavily on the arts of analogy, imitation, and comparison, but the specific uses of these arts are less successful and persuasive than they are in earlier books of The Faerie Queene.

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The Ovidian Girlhood of Shakespeare's Boy Actors: Q2 Juliet

Shakespeare Survey 69 (2016)

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Shakespeare's Troy : drama, politics, and the translation of empire

Heather James examines the ways in which Shakespeare handles the inheritance and transmission of ... more

Ben Jonson's Light Reading

A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, eds. John Miller and Carole E. Newlands, ads. John Miller and Carole E. Newlands, 2014

Ben Jonson’s formidable classical learning was skewed towards the Stoic philosophers, but in his ... more Ben Jonson’s formidable classical learning was skewed towards the Stoic philosophers, but in his poetic tastes he favored the light genres over tragedy and epic. The relationship between Jonson’s weighty classicism and his delight in comedy, elegy, epigram, and satire has not always made sense to modern critics, who rightly note the tension between Jonson’s love of forceful moral judgment and his equal if not greater love of the bold liberties that the slender genres take with social, political, and moral proprieties. This chapter aims to explain how and why Jonson defended the slender genres and, in particular, the Roman love poet most often said to be Jonson’s polar opposite: Ovid. Ben Jonson accepted and even insisted on his difference from the Elizabethan Ovidians but he defended them, himself, and poetic liberties per se through his fierce embrace of Ovid, the politically bold poet of exile.
I will be happy to send a copy of the essay to interested scholars on an individual basis.

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