Ruben Espinosa

Fluellen’s Foreign Identity and the Ill Neighborhood of King Henry V

Ruben Espinosa — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:29:27 PDT

This chapter is forthcoming in 2012. This essay considers Shakespeare’s attention to Fluellen’s foreignness in King Henry V amid the play’s exploration of a nebulous cultural/national English identity, and it argues that the play’s emphasis on cultural and religious difference serves to underscore Elizabethan England’s tenuous sense of self. The imagined English fellowship under God that Henry evokes is at odds with the divided community at the margins of his play and the fractured identity of Shakespeare’s own England. Through Fluellen, then, difference is marked as concurrently strange and surprisingly stable.

Performing the Immigration Debate: Mexican Identities in YouTube Shakespeare

Ruben Espinosa — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:22:58 PDT

This book chapter is forthcoming in 2012. The collection is under contract at Palgrave. In this essay, I examine how YouTube dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare often reveal the weight of Shakespeare’s cultural capital, in both overbearing and empowering ways, when engaging in representations of Mexican identities. In the process, this essay interrogates how the venue of YouTube allows for the open exploration of the fluidity of Mexican identities – insecurity, apprehension, celebration, xenophobia, racism and all – within adaptations of Shakespeare’s work.

Shakespeare and Immigration

Ruben Espinosa et al. — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:08:10 PDT

This collection is forthcoming in 2012 from Ashgate Publishing. This book examines the role of, and reaction to, the issue of immigration in Shakespeare’s drama and culture. The essays in this edited collection not only seek to interrogate how the massive influx of immigrants during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I influenced perceptions of English identity, and gave rise to anxieties about homeland security in early modern England, but they also aim to understand how our current concerns surrounding immigration shape our perception of the role of the alien in Shakespeare’s work and expand the texts in new and relevant directions to a contemporary audience.

"Can no prayers pierce thee?": Re-imagining Marian Intercession in The Merchant of Venice

Ruben Espinosa — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:39:39 PDT

In post-Reformation England, anti-Catholic polemics delineated Marian devotion as dangerous, if not idolatrous, and attacked the Virgin Mary’s influence by contending that belief in her intercessory power posed a threat to God’s authority. But the very existence of these polemics indicates that prayer to, and desire for, the Virgin Mary’s intercession endured the Reformation. This article addresses Shakespeare’s attention to this Marian strength in The Merchant of Venice to demonstrate how he draws on Mary’s “lost” intercessory power in his development of Portia as a character reminiscent of the compassionate Virgin Mary of Catholic tradition. By casting Marian intercession in a significant light, Shakespeare not only addresses the cultural anxiety surrounding narrowed avenues of salvation in post-Reformation thought, but he also draws attention to the promise behind feminine influence. In this way, then, female intercession allows us to reconsider gendered identity, and the gendered power structure at work in both The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s England.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England

Ruben Espinosa — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:18:18 PDT

This book offers a new approach to evaluating the psychological "loss" of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England by illustrating how, in the wake of Mary's demotion, re-inscriptions of her roles and meanings only proliferated, seizing hold of national imagination and resulting in new configurations of masculinity. I survey the early modern cultural and literary response to Mary's marginalization, and argue that Shakespeare employs both Roman Catholic and post-Reformation views of Marian strength not only to scrutinize cultural perceptions of masculinity, but also to offer his audience new avenues of exploring both religious and gendered subjectivity. By deploying Mary's symbolic valence to infuse certain characters and dramatic situations with feminine potency, I argue, Shakespeare draws attention to the Virgin mary as an alternative to an otherwise unilaterally masculine outlook on salvation and gendered identity formation.