Shakespeare, Milton, and 17th-Century Literature
Bottom’s Wife [An article about gender and voice in the Kevin Kline film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Literature Film Quarterly 32 (2004), 126-33]
A Bogus Hero. [An article about the race in the Orson Welles film of Othello. Shakespeare Bulletin (Spring, 2005)]
Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night: Contemporary Film and Classic British Theatre. [An article about the 1996 film, with particular attention to the presence of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Ben Kingsley as Feste. Early Modern Literary Studies 8 (2002)]
Hamlet in Warsaw. [An article about the 1942 Ernst Lubitsch/Jack Benny comedy, To Be or Not To Be]
‘Stand’ and ‘Fall’ as Images of Posture in Paradise Lost [An essay about how Milton uses posture (standing) as a metaphor for faith. Milton Studies 8 (1975), 221-46]
The Education of the Faithful in Milton’s Piedmontese Sonnet [A close-reading of “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints.” Based on the very first college class I taught, at Kent State University. Milton Studies 10 (1977), 167-76]
Texts and Contexts: Two Languages in the Poetry of George Herbert [quotations from Biblical texts as reminders of plainness in a context of florid metaphor in Herbert’s lyric poems. Studies in Philology 79 (1982), 162-76]
Teaching Donne through Performance [In Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990)]
John Cotton [Biography and critical survey in American Writers Before 1800: A Biographical and Critical Dictionary, ed. James A Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 387-92]
Review of Wayward Macbeth (2011)
Review of Almost Shakespeare (2004)
19th-Century Literature
Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) [Biographical and critical entry in British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789-1832, First Series [Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 110] (Detroit, New York, London: Bruccoli Clark Layman — Gale Research, 1991), pp. 198-208]
Hannah More (1745-1833) [Biographical and critical entry in British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789-1832, First Series [Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 107] (Detroit, New York, London: Bruccoli Clark Layman — Gale Research, 1991), pp. 198-212
William Howitt (1792-1879) and Mary Howitt (1799-1888) [Biographical and critical entry in British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789-1832, Second Series [Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 110] (Detroit, New York, London: Bruccoli Clark Layman — Gale Research, 1991), pp. 139-151]
Felicia Hemans [Biographical and critical entry in British Romantic Poets, 1789-1832, Second Series, [Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 96] (Detroit, New York, London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1990), pp. 130-43]
Review of Andrew Motion, Keats
Other Essays and Talks
Speech to Oberlin Phi Beta Kappa, 2008
Medieval Plays for Modern Audiences [Article about a performance of the medieval York plays at the National Theatre, London. The Gamut, no. 4 (Fall, 1981), 47-58]
“Feminism and the Established Curriculum in British and American Literature,” Toward a Feminist Transformation of the Academy, ed. Beth Reed (Ann Arbor: GLCA, 1980)
Loren Eiseley and the Creative Imagination, [an article in the Oberlin Magazine (Sept./Oct., 1977)]
Review of Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in 17th-Century Music (2012)