The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage

Michelle M. Dowd is Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her previous publications include Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (co-edited with Thomas Festa, 2012), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (co-edited with Natasha Korda, 2011), and Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England (co-edited with Julie A. Eckerle, 2007). She has also published on early modern drama and women's writing in journals including Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Studies.

• Introduction: staging inheritance in early modern England; 1. Crooked titles and inconstant estates; 2. Revision and inaccessibility in The Duchess of Malfi; 3. Travel, displacement, and the prodigal son; 4. Dislocation and the loss of issue in Pericles; 5. Claustrophobia and urban affiliation in Volpone and Epicene; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

'… pays particularly close attention to spatial discourse as a theatrical mode of expressing the historical pressures and exigencies shaping sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English patriarchal and patrilineal economies. … Dowd's study also reminds us that spatial discourse offers an underappreciated archive for rethinking the kinds of cultural work accomplished by the dynamics of early modern drama.' Mark Albert Johnston, Renaissance and Reformation