Author: Morgan Shaw
Excess Emotion and Queer Subjectivity in Pericles
Pericles (1608), one of Shakespeare’s and co-author George Wilkins’s romances, dramatizes the tumultuous life of Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. Over five acts, it stages his acquisition of love, its tragic loss, and its ultimate rediscovery. Strikingly, the play opens with incest—Antiochus, the king of Antioch, instructs Pericles to solve a riddle whose answer reveals
Revelatory Liminality in the Metamorphoses’ Myrrha Episode
[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire, which she ultimately consummates . She does so
The Nurse’s Repertoire in Romeo and Juliet
What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate
Cannibalizing Mothers: Pre-Oedipal Horror in Hannibal and Titus Andronicus
[Trigger Warning: brief discussions of sexual assault.] It’s been nearly ten years since Bryan Fuller’s TV show Hannibal (2013-2015) debuted. Since then, it has garnered a cult viewership and a devoted online fanbase, often referred to as “fannibals.” However, to their (and my) chagrin, the show was preemptively cancelled after Season 3. As a late-comer