Taking into account the strict codes of both play-making and gender that abounded in Renaissance England, it may be surprising to consider how much cross-dressing and gender bending occurred in the theater. In John Lyly’s late sixteenth-century play, Galatea, we see two women, played by boy actors, disguise themselves as men and fall in love. Given Galatea’s plot, it is unsurprising that the gender issues of the period pervade it.

Imagining his own epitaph as written by a Chinese man of letters, eighteenth-century author Oliver Goldsmith once described himself as “justly styled the Sun of Literature and the Confucius of Europe” (Spence 73). As generous a designation as it is, why Goldsmith would liken himself to the figure of Confucius is somewhat unclear. Perhaps it had something to do with Goldsmith’s widespread celebrity or his advocacy of certain social and political mores.

William Faulkner’s literature can be seen to operate thematically around a close attention to names and naming, as a way of highlighting issues of memory, lineage, objectification, and identity in the antebellum and post-Civil War South. The war shredded all notions of permanence of objects and places by giving former property legal personhood, turning wealthy plantation-based communities into ghost towns, and renaming counties in honor of Southern nationalists.

“Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum / þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon, / hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon” translates to “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns” (ll. 1-3). Thus begins the Old English poem Beowulf, which offers one of the few remaining glimpses of Anglo-Saxon culture.

How does one articulate a slave’s continual pain? Which compositional medium best conveys a lifetime of misery? What last-minute omissions can a publishing company make to encapsulate the emotional onslaught felt by millions of voiceless sufferers? With all things considered, can the written word ever authentically illustrate a life enslaved?

Throughout much of Western literature, the shepherd has endured as a versatile and complex poetic figure. In his subsistent relationship with nature and distance from the urban, the shepherd has traditionally functioned as a lens and mouthpiece through which history’s poets have examined and voiced their social criticism. From the bucolic poems of Theocritus, to the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms, to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, shepherds have come to symbolize an unpolluted understanding of the world in which truth lies in simplicity.

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice confronts readers with the question of religious conversion, a complicated issue that runs throughout the play. When the Prince of Morocco comes to win Portia, he says, “I would not change this hue/ Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen” (2.1. 11-12). The word “except” suggests that, in the event that Portia were to require it, the Prince would in fact “change his hue” or convert his blackness into some fairer shade.

Among the most intricate of William Faulkner’s works, Light in August (1932) dramatizes not only the economic and racial conditions of the post-bellum South, but also the fraught search for meaning that was so central to the modernist project. In exploring these themes, critical discussions of the novel have often focused on the split psyche of Joe Christmas. The ambiguity of his race, lying purportedly between ‘black’ and ‘white,’ fosters in Christmas an internal struggle between two irreconcilable identities.