Ithaca College

Dr. Dyani Johns Taff, Lecturer in the Department of English, has published an article in the current issue of the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Renaissance Drama.  The essay is titled "Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State in Jonson's The Staple of News."

Taff's article uses Ben Jonson's play The Staple of News (first performed prior to 1626, first published in 1640-1) as a lens through which to read early seventeenth-century preoccupations with the social, political, and intellectual status of gender.  "Gendered Circulation" argues that the complex cultural negotiations surrounding gender roles are figured, with surprising consistency, through maritime metaphors, both in Jonson's play and in a variety of other literary and historical sources.  Examining The Staple of News as well as early modern biblical commentary, marital advice tracts, and sermons, Taff shows that metaphors drawing on the vocabulary of sea travel expose the instability of dominant social hierarchies, including and especially hierarchies of gender.

"Gendered Circulation" is available in the Fall 2018 issue of Renaissance Drama, a link to which is provided below:

https://doi.org/10.1086/699623.