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All Outputs (11)

Sine Dolore: Relative Painlessness in Shakespeare’s Laughter at War (2018)
Journal Article
Derrin, D. (2018). Sine Dolore: Relative Painlessness in Shakespeare’s Laughter at War. Critical Survey, 30(1), 81-97. https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2018.300106

How do we understand Shakespeare’s invitation to laugh in the context of war? Previous critical accounts have offered too simple a view: that laughter undercuts military ideals. Instead, this essay draws on the Aristotelian description of the laughab... Read More about Sine Dolore: Relative Painlessness in Shakespeare’s Laughter at War.

Crackinge Thraso: the Braggart Soldier Image in Sixteenth-Century Sermons and Religious Polemic (2017)
Journal Article
Derrin, D. (2017). Crackinge Thraso: the Braggart Soldier Image in Sixteenth-Century Sermons and Religious Polemic. English Studies, 98(7), 704-716. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2017.1339991

The article contributes to recent debates about the use of “profane learning” by humanist scholars in the sixteenth century in their sermons and religious polemic. It does this by surveying the use of references in such texts to the braggart soldier... Read More about Crackinge Thraso: the Braggart Soldier Image in Sixteenth-Century Sermons and Religious Polemic.

Self-referring Deformities: Humour in Early Modern Sermon Literature (2016)
Journal Article
Derrin, D. (2018). Self-referring Deformities: Humour in Early Modern Sermon Literature. Literature and Theology, 32(3), 255-269. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frw039

Few studies have addressed comprehensively the place of jesting in early modern pulpit rhetoric. This article documents some of the humour—jests and witty speech—in the period’s extant sermon literature. Specifically it identifies the analytical pote... Read More about Self-referring Deformities: Humour in Early Modern Sermon Literature.

Rethinking Iago’s Jests in Othello II.i: Honestas, Imports and Laughable Deformity (2016)
Journal Article
Derrin, D. (2016). Rethinking Iago’s Jests in Othello II.i: Honestas, Imports and Laughable Deformity. Renaissance Studies, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12219

An early scene in Act Two of Shakespeare's Othello is often cut or shortened. It is the one in which Iago jests with Desdemona while she waits and hopes for Othello to arrive safely in Cyprus (II.i.100–166). Critics and directors have found the scene... Read More about Rethinking Iago’s Jests in Othello II.i: Honestas, Imports and Laughable Deformity.