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This article argues that the editorial history of Elizabeth Cary's letters has powerfully influenced how the letters are read and understood today. In particular, it suggests that an editorial organisation that cleaves to Cary's conversion has had a narrowing effect, straightjacketing the letters as "conversion writing" and underplaying the significances of texts actually enmeshed in a more expansive range of epistolary activity. The article forwards an alternative editorial strategy – a site-based method which allows for the consideration of Cary not only as a Catholic convert (an exceptional figure) but also as an early modern woman with companionate connections to other early modern writers deploying the epistolary form to address quotidian matters such as penury, precarity, homelessness and family breakdown. Dealing with the neglected issue of "extant-ness" throughout, the article argues that editors of early modern women's letters can be more explicit about the ways in which chance, contingency and curation influence that which survives. It makes a case for embracing "extant-ness" as a concept which might usefully undergird all epistolary enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holloway and Wray consider the perspectives offered by two very different seventeenth-century women: Mary Bonaventure Browne, or Mother Browne (b. 1615) and Lady Ann Fanshawe (b. 1625) both of whom exchanged Ireland for Spain, and both of whom record journeys both ‘real’ and imagined in their writings. Browne's deployment of hagiographical tropes in herHistory of the Poor Claresmay reveal the potential impact of Iberian conventual culture; her allusions to the markers of sanctity insistent on the immutability of the body, whilst accepting and anticipating spectral presence in the form of bilocation. Fanshawe’sMemoirsare considered alongside the material legacy of her ‘Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery’. Her impressions both in transit and within thedomusare similarly marked by receptivity and sensitivity to the host culture. Amidst a backdrop of religious persecution and political uncertainty, in both cases Spain emerges as a potentially enabling context for creativity and self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented exploring the film "Mickey B," adapted from the play "Macbeth," by William Shakespeare and produced at the Maghaberry maximum security prison in Northern Ireland. The film, which features prisoners serving lengthy sentences, earned criticism and caused controversy in Great Britain. Charitable group Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC) oversaw the film production undertaken by inmates. The use of a Shakespeare drama to bring change in an incarcerated environment is noted.

This article argues that, when a printed page is initially orally generated and then transcribed, either at the time or on a subsequent occasion by a listener or an interlocutor, there are important critical implications for the “I” of the account. It takes as a case study Anna Trapnel's first published works. Appearing within a few weeks of each other in 1654, The Cry of a Stone and Strange and Wonderful News are both mediated texts, large parts of which depend on the agency of a relater. The article begins by examining the textual traces of the relater, arguing for the centrality of his role and other agencies in the shaping of the works which bear Trapnel's name. Situating itself in relation to a current orientation in feminist autobiographical theory that places emphasis on the external requirement to narrate one's life, rather than on the spontaneous production of autobiography by an inner self, the article emphasizes notions of coaxing, witnessing and intersubjectivity to point up an appreciation of women's life writing as a species of cultural production in which various historical actors—male and female—participate. This dialogic process, which persists into the afterlife of transcription, owes part of its genesis to the political vagaries of 1654 and precipitates two contrasting—but equally “authentic”—versions of Trapnel's life and self. Mapping this movement, discussion concentrates on the ways in which a critical confrontation with women's oral narrative is as much an activity of disentangling as it is of reconstructing, an activity which is revealing of the extent to which a spectrum of social and cultural networks participates in and facilitates the female writing act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the musical film 'Love's Labour's Lost,' directed by Kenneth Branagh. Overview of the film; Views on the performance of actress Alicia Silverstone in the film; Information on the final narrative resolution in the film.