Throughout my orientation program and first few weeks at the University of Maryland as a freshman, I remember being showered with information about various health and safety issues I might encounter in college. This included a mandatory alcohol education course, details of the security measures in place on campus, and a very basic summary of the university’s drug policy.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. (Molloy 27)

‘I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.’ (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out)

Pericles has been viewed until recent critical history as a solid member of Shakespeare’s ‘romances’, plays which combined both tragic and comic elements. However, more informed recent discussion of the late plays has acknowledged the danger in attempting at all to apply a set genre to this group of plays.

What is in a name? In the realm of literature, its absence has the power to silence the voice, suppress the identity, and impose passivity upon the character. The anonymous character occupies a negative space, functioning as an “abstract ‘Other’ whose concrete and tangible distinction is unintelligible, unknowable, inarticulable, and inarticulate” (Frye 996). Historically, anonymity has been employed as a tool of oppression in the gender politics of the unnamed character.

I remember the moment exactly. I was sitting on my bed, listening to my iPod when the song “Unfaithful” by Rihanna began to play. Like hundreds of times before, I found myself singing along to the lyrics. However, for some indescribable reason, this time I realized what I was singing about. The lyrics describe a woman having an affair and, not only does she cheat on her boyfriend, she blatantly lies to his face about it. This song promotes infidelity and lying yet, to my surprise, I had never noticed its message before.

For characters that appear only briefly within Paradise Lost, Sin and Death have caused a surprisingly large amount of academic controversy. During the eighteenth century, critics considered them an ‘aesthetic flaw’ (White Jr, 337-341); even today, from whatever lens critics view the pair, they never seem to fit. Those who view Paradise Lost as non-allegorical nonetheless view them as an aberration; as Fallon asks: ‘What are these insubstantial beings, these abstractions, doing in a mimetic epic… why is this extended allegory in an otherwise non-allegorical epic?’ (168).