The Environments of Frankenstein
Jerrold E. Hogle

This prolegomenon to a collection of eleven essays provides a setting for them all by explaining the ongoing significance of Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein two hundred years after it was first published; the theme of multiple “environments” that imbues Frankenstein and its offshoots and that is common to all these essays; the novel’s emergence from a generic environment of fiction (the Gothic) that established itself in the 1760s and continues to this day; the history of interpretations of Frankenstein generated by the various theoretical environments in which it has been analyzed; and how all of the following essays, including the particular environments of Frankenstein they treat, both advance that history and fit into the overall scheme of this special issue.

Frankenstein’s Origin-Stories
Susan J. Wolfson

Of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus—as the or (appositive or alternative?) may suggest—origins are in such oversupply, such over-determination, as to make a question of origin itself. Its complex multiples extend to a report from the decade in which Frankenstein is cast, the 1790s: J. M. Itard’s De l’éducation d’un homme sauvage (1801), about a feral boy of mysterious origin. Susan Wolfson investigates the several origin-stories for, in, from, and around Mary Shelley’s durably dynamic novel, including the question of “monstrous” assignments and the riddle for Enlightenment thought about whether primitive existence is ideal innocence, or savagery.

The Volcano That Spawned a Monster: Frankenstein and Climate Change
Gillen D’Arcy Wood

The volcanic period of 1816–18 is the most recent and vivid case study we have for worldwide climate catastrophe, evident from archival and geological records of sustained extreme weather, including drought, floods, storms, and crop-killing temperature decline. The signature literary expression of this historic climate crisis occurred in Switzerland, where teenage Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the midst of the disastrous “Year without a Summer,” 1816, a season of floods and food riots caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora thousands of miles away. This essay, combining climate science with historical and literary sources, reexamines the literary legend of that direful, stormy summer, which Mary Shelley spent on the shores of Lake Geneva with the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, with a new and original emphasis on its climatic context. The writers huddled indoors and wrote ghost stories, while the cataclysmic weather and humanitarian emergency unfolding around them weaved its way into Mary Shelley’s imagining of a tragic monster brought to life.

Moving Parts: Frankenstein, Biotechnology, and Mobility
Alan Bewell

The goal of this essay is to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a “bioethical” novel that draws upon several Romantic-era discourses that powerfully combined medical environmentalism, ecology, and political reform to criticize the “biotechnology” of her era. In her novel, Mary Shelley engages in a critique of the selective breeding that farmers of her era used to create new biological beings, as Victor Frankenstein does, by building on the role that new breeds of livestock played in the industrialization of late eighteenth-century British agriculture and the greater consumption of animal food in England. At the same time, Frankenstein also points up the problematic links between such breeding schemes and two other factors of the same period: the greater mobility of peoples and animals made viable by wide-ranging, seagoing trade, and the multiplicity of different-colored races made more apparent by how this mobility enabled the possibility of more human, as well as animal, crossbreeding.

Et Tu, Victor? Interrogating the Master’s Responsibility to—and Betrayal of—the Slave in Frankenstein
Maisha Wester

A white, wealthy, educated male, Victor Frankenstein spends a good portion of Mary Shelley’s novel complaining about being a slave to his Creature. Victor’s laments draw attention to Frankenstein’s engagement with debates about race, slavery, and abolition. The novel seems to ask what a slave is and thereby challenges notions about racial difference and the ideals of cultural/intellectual superiority that support enslaving populations. Foundational studies by H. L. Malchow and others on race in Frankenstein have defined the views of Shelley’s father, William Godwin, as well as the pervasive ideas of the era, to clarify the ways in which the Creature is racially coded to align with stereotypes about Blacks in particular. Using these studies as a starting point, Maisha Wester specifically examines the ways in which Shelley’s text engages the anxieties born out of slave insurrections and Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. To this end, she explores Shelley’s depiction of the turbulence in British society arising from these issues, showing how the Creature’s attacks metaphorize the insurrections that disturbed the era’s notions of racial difference. Ultimately, her essay explains how Victor is, indeed, a “slave”—as are many others like him.

Frankenstein and the Sciences of Self-Regulation
Robert Mitchell

This essay argues that Romantic-era concepts of regulation help us to understand both how and why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provided a critical commentary on the sciences and political theories of its time and why the novel has continued to serve as a cultural touchpoint for understanding the implications of new technologies (for example, genetic engineering). Concepts of regulation appear at key points in Frankenstein, including in Robert Walton’s hopes that his trip to the North Pole will result in a scientific discovery about magnetism that can “regulate a thousand celestial observations” and in his and Victor Frankenstein’s reflections on the relationship between their education and their identities. Concepts of regulation were also central for many eighteenth-century and Romantic-era natural scientists, philosophers, political economists, and political theorists (including Antoine Lavoisier, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin), and they were paramount to the development of “liberal” economic theory, which aimed to use the science of political economy to limit the power of the state. Robert Mitchell argues that Frankenstein takes up these concepts of regulation in order to critique this linkage of liberalism and the sciences, with the end of encouraging its readers to reimagine the components of liberalism in more equitable forms.

Wild Minds: Frankenstein, Animality, and Romantic Brain Science
Alan Richardson

Only recently, with the rise of critical animal studies, have readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begun to do full justice to the hybrid nature of Frankenstein’s Creature, constructed (as Victor tells us) from materials found in the “slaughter-house” as well as the “dissecting room.” Yet even animal-studies scholars view the Creature’s brain as “human,” in the absence of any supporting evidence from Shelley’s text. Here, Alan Richardson traces the Creature’s horrific effect to dual anxieties that came to ferment during the early nineteenth century, both of them amply documented in the brain science of Shelley’s era and in published reactions to it. First, the line between human and animal was becoming notably porous, in natural history, in comparative anatomy and physiology, and even in such areas as the controversy over vaccination. Second, a new discourse of instinctive and innate mental tendencies had come to compete with both creationist and tabula rasa accounts of the human mind—a development that further eroded the border between human and animal. Frankenstein’s Creature, a literally monstrous hybrid, both embodies these anxieties and exaggerates them, as a fully material and yet rational humanoid entity with body parts, and perhaps neural organs and instincts, traceable to animals.

Adapting the Unthinkable: An Interview
Nick Dear, Anne K. Mellor

This segment consists primarily of a transcript of the question-and-answer exchange conducted at the Huntington on May 12, 2018, between Nick Dear, the author of the 2011 adaptation of Frankenstein first presented by the National Theatre of Great Britain, and Dr. Anne K. Mellor, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA. The interview was then and is here preceded by general remarks from Mr. Dear, for which he provides the following abstract: “I first remind our readers that I am a playwright, not a scholar, and that I identified a ‘gap in the market.’ Whilst there are many movie versions of the novel in existence, there has not been, to my knowledge, a stage version that was a good play. I wanted to do justice to Mary Shelley’s ‘handbook of radical philosophy’; at the same time, I stress that it’s a fairy tale, not a work of science. I then focus on the decision made with the director, Danny Boyle, to reframe the narrative from the Creature’s point of view. I go on to discuss some of the issues that this raised and the dramaturgical decisions that were subsequently made (for example, losing the framing narrative in the novel of Robert Walton on the ship). Finally, I talk about the difficulties of ending the story onstage—and my solution—given the ambivalent ending of Shelley’s novel.”

Frankenstein and Modern Bioscience: Which Story Should We Heed?
Henry T. Greely

Frankenstein presents us today with two different stories and two different lessons. The book, especially in the 1818 first edition, tells the story of Victor Frankenstein’s neglect of his parental duties and the harms that followed. The more lasting myth that succeeded the novel, however, became popular as early as the 1823 production of the first theatrical piece based on the book, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. This play’s different lesson is that Frankenstein dared too much, presumed to divine powers, and thus instigated the harms that followed. Modern bioscience affords us many unprecedented and disconcerting possibilities through, among other tools, genetics, neuroscience, stem-cell biology, and assisted reproduction. Which lessons should we apply to those possibilities, and from which of the two Frankenstein stories? Henry T. Greely argues that we should mainly fulfill the novel’s views of our duties of care. We should indeed, in Bruno Latour’s words, “Love our Monsters,” though we also need to heed the allure to the public of the myth of presumption.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering
Anne K. Mellor

Looking back over the essays in this collection, as well as the two-hundred-plus years since Frankenstein was conceived and published, this postscript asks us to recall that Mary Shelley’s own life experiences, especially childbirth, were sources for her story, even as it incorporated many other ingredients from her milieu. And today, the possibilities for creating artificial life that Frankenstein reflects on and prefigures so vividly are echoed directly in much bioscience. Shelley’s tale haunts our minds when we learn of the development of the Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnosis, which can genetically scan a pregnant woman’s blood to make detailed predictions about her fetus, and especially CRISPR technology, which could be used to edit the genes of a human embryo. More than Victor Frankenstein did with his creation, we must take responsibility for both the intended and the unintended consequences of human germline engineering.

Important Recent Scholarship on Frankenstein: A Bibliography of the Last Decade
Jerrold E. Hogle

Introduction: Ancient Rome in English Political Culture, ca. 1570–1660
Paulina Kewes

Ancient Histories of Rome in Sixteenth-Century England: A Reconsideration of Their Printing and Circulation

Freyja Cox Jensen

This essay addresses the printing and circulation of ancient histories in England before 1600. A detailed case study in the context of wider European printing trends, it focuses on the significance of historians of Rome in particular, drawing on a new statistical analysis of the printing of ancient historians across Europe derived from the Universal Short Title Catalogue. Demonstrating new patterns of print popularity, the essay provides a nuanced understanding of the role histories of Rome played in early modern political culture and aims to facilitate more precise studies of the importance and popularity of individual historians, such as Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus—both in England and in Europe.

Translations of State: Ancient Rome and Late Elizabethan Political Thought
Paulina Kewes

This essay reconsiders late Elizabethan political thought by scrutinizing the significance of the Roman state in the passionate controversy about the royal succession. It explains the varied and often contradictory polemical utility of Roman history in contemporary discussions in England and Europe of monarchy and imperial expansion, and then analyzes its deployment in the most daring contemporary succession tract: the Jesuit Robert Persons’s A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1595). While A Conference has been traditionally under-stood to advocate limited elective kingship, this essay demonstrates that its theoretical first part, in which the Roman example underpins a case for popular sovereignty, was open to far more radical readings. Persons’s treatise attracted widespread charges of antimonarchism and, in the following century, served republican and Whig enemies of the Stuarts

Roman Law and Roman Ideology in Alberico Gentili
Annabel Brett

Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) is associated with two different aspects of the political heritage of Rome in early modern England: first, with the English reception of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, and thus with republican-ism in a Roman idiom; second, with the absolutist revival of Roman civil law under James VI and I. This essay argues that we cannot understand this apparent contradiction within a purely English context. We need to broaden our lens to the international arena, which is where Gentili situated both his jurisprudence and his politics. It is the confrontation between these that is Gentili’s ultimate concern, and this essay suggests how he negotiated the divide in a new style of legal writing.

Ben Jonson, the Earl of Clarendon, and the Conspiracy of Catiline
Blair Worden

This essay illustrates the subterranean presence of classical writing in seventeenth-century English political thinking. It shows how Ben Jonson’s Catiline his Conspiracy (1611), a dramatization of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, penetrated the mind of one of Jonson’s disciples, the eminent statesman and royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Over the decades after Jonson’s death, the play helped Clarendon, as well as other followers of Charles I, to make sense of the nation’s descent into civil war and revolution.

Introduction: Ancient Rome in English Political Culture, ca. 1570–1660
Paulina Kewes

Ancient Histories of Rome in Sixteenth-Century England: A Reconsideration of Their Printing and Circulation

Freyja Cox Jensen

This essay addresses the printing and circulation of ancient histories in England before 1600. A detailed case study in the context of wider European printing trends, it focuses on the significance of historians of Rome in particular, drawing on a new statistical analysis of the printing of ancient historians across Europe derived from the Universal Short Title Catalogue. Demonstrating new patterns of print popularity, the essay provides a nuanced understanding of the role histories of Rome played in early modern political culture and aims to facilitate more precise studies of the importance and popularity of individual historians, such as Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus—both in England and in Europe.

Translations of State: Ancient Rome and Late Elizabethan Political Thought
Paulina Kewes

This essay reconsiders late Elizabethan political thought by scrutinizing the significance of the Roman state in the passionate controversy about the royal succession. It explains the varied and often contradictory polemical utility of Roman history in contemporary discussions in England and Europe of monarchy and imperial expansion, and then analyzes its deployment in the most daring contemporary succession tract: the Jesuit Robert Persons’s A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1595). While A Conference has been traditionally under-stood to advocate limited elective kingship, this essay demonstrates that its theoretical first part, in which the Roman example underpins a case for popular sovereignty, was open to far more radical readings. Persons’s treatise attracted widespread charges of antimonarchism and, in the following century, served republican and Whig enemies of the Stuarts

Roman Law and Roman Ideology in Alberico Gentili
Annabel Brett

Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) is associated with two different aspects of the political heritage of Rome in early modern England: first, with the English reception of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, and thus with republican-ism in a Roman idiom; second, with the absolutist revival of Roman civil law under James VI and I. This essay argues that we cannot understand this apparent contradiction within a purely English context. We need to broaden our lens to the international arena, which is where Gentili situated both his jurisprudence and his politics. It is the confrontation between these that is Gentili’s ultimate concern, and this essay suggests how he negotiated the divide in a new style of legal writing.

Ben Jonson, the Earl of Clarendon, and the Conspiracy of Catiline
Blair Worden

This essay illustrates the subterranean presence of classical writing in seventeenth-century English political thinking. It shows how Ben Jonson’s Catiline his Conspiracy (1611), a dramatization of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, penetrated the mind of one of Jonson’s disciples, the eminent statesman and royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Over the decades after Jonson’s death, the play helped Clarendon, as well as other followers of Charles I, to make sense of the nation’s descent into civil war and revolution.

The Last Early Modern Epyllion: William Sampson’s Love’s Metamorphosis, Or: Apollo and Daphne 
Emanuel Stelzer

William Sampson’s Ovidian epyllion Love’s Metamorphosis, Or: Apollo and Daphne, written after 1645, has remained in manuscript only (Harley MS 6947, no. 41, fols. 318–36, British Library) and has received virtually no scholarly attention. It is a willful archaism modeled on Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The poem was dedicated to Margaret Cavendish, perhaps on the occasion of her return from her exile on the Continent in 1651. This essay considers why Sampson chose this genre, what his relationship with the Cavendishes was, how he expected the poem to be received in the context of the Civil War and Interregnum, and what the dedication to Cavendish tells us about female readership.

Did Shakespeare Use a Manuscript of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars to Write Richard II ? 
David S. Weiss

Evidence indicates that Shakespeare may have used a scribal version of Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars, rather than the first printed edition, while writing Richard II. There are two extant manuscripts of portions of Daniel’s epic poem. A never-printed stanza in one manuscript employs imagery similar to Shakespeare’s to describe the same invented episode. To investigate possible influence, this essay assesses the dates of the manuscripts, analyzes variants from the printed edition, evaluates the shared imagery, and considers how Shakespeare’s possible use of a manuscript impacts the dating of Richard II. It also identifies social connections between the authors that explain how the playwright could have obtained access to an early version of the poet’s work. 

“Be as a Planetary Plague”: Pestilence and Cure in Timon of Athens
Jodie Austin 

In William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s problem play, Timon of Athens, the fate of the city hangs in the balance as the eponymous character threatens it with literal and figurative diseases from outside its walls. Strikingly, the plague itself is evoked thirteen times throughout the play, rendering the drama itself exceptional in boldly referring to the disease that ravaged London in 1603, the approximate year in which the play was first performed. Jodie Austin examines the theme of plague in Timon of Athens to argue that Shakespeare and Middleton produced a radical representation of the plague as a force for good—more specifically, as a force designed to scourge the ailing body politic of disorder. Ultimately, her aim is to promote discursive alignment between early modern literary studies and disciplines related to the history of medicine through a close examination of a relatively rare dramatic treatment of plague from the seventeenth century. 

The Context for the Text: The Masque Entertainments of the Egerton-Hastings Family 
Vanessa Wilkie

Vanessa Wilkie argues that the Egerton-Hastings family had a long-established practice of literary patronage that involved commissioning and hosting masque entertainments in their homes to signal major legal victories and familial career advancements. John Marston’s Entertainment at Ashby marked the 1607 Act of Parliament that ended a major inheritance lawsuit, John Milton’s 1631 Arcades celebrated the family’s victory in the Castlehaven trials, and Milton’s Comus served as the entertainment at the Earl of Bridgewater’s installation as president of the Marches of Wales. This essay introduces Marston’s 1607 masque as part of what should be considered a trio of masques, not just a duo of Miltonic masques, and thus more accurately frames all three occasions and texts. The essay also narrows the possible date range of the performance of Milton’s Arcades. This reading expands our understanding of the genre and function of elite household entertainments and masques.

Writing Time: Charting the History of Clock Time in Seventeenth-Century Diaries 
Daniel Patterson

In this essay, Daniel Patterson explores the representation of time in early modern diaries. In particular, he examines the presence and significance of clock time in a previously unknown seventeenth-century diary—that of an unassuming schoolmaster and customs official named George Lloyd (1642–1718). This source is examined alongside well-known diaries by Ralph Josselin, Samuel Pepys, and Constantijn Huygens. Taking the view that all diaries are innately temporal texts, the essay demonstrates that different temporal regimes can be discerned in each of these examples, from the mysterious, providential conception of time presented by Josselin to the quasi-realist narrative mimesis of Pepys. Lloyd, ultimately, was the first diarist to incorporate the new reality of accurate, widely available mechanical time as a fundamental feature of quotidian existence and self-narrative. 

“The Cursed Jew Priest That Ordered the Woman and Her Child to Be Burnt”: Rumors of Jewish Infanticide in Early Modern London 
Emily Vine

In this essay, Emily Vine traces the emergence, re-emergence, and impact of a distinct anti-Semitic narrative of Jewish infanticide and sacrifice by fire that appeared in print in London several times between 1674 and 1732. She identifies and links the versions of this specific narrative and directly connects the re-emergence of the narrative to outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence against the London Jewish community. This essay considers the published accounts themselves alongside evidence of their reception, situating this narrative within the context of the Jewish readmission to England (after 1656) and a wider proliferation of anti-Semitic literature. It analyzes the origins of this rumor, suggests ways in which the accusation was fueled by the misinterpretation of Jewish rituals, and demonstrates the direct effect that it had on Judeo-Christian relations in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London. It argues that the repeated resonance of this particular narrative, unlike other anti-Semitic literature, lay in the geographical immediacy of the events described, events purported to take place within the streets and alleyways of London, in domestic spaces that ostensibly coexisted with the homes of Christian readers.

Alexander Pope and a Carracci Venus at the Court of James II and Mary of Modena 
Timothy Erwin

When Alexander Pope published the 1714 Rape of the Lock, he included a frontispiece that recalls a seated Venus associated with the Carracci Accademia degli incamminati during the seventeenth century. The same iconography informs the author’s description of Belinda at her dressing table and appears in the headpiece for the poem in Pope’s Works (1717). Dating to antiquity, the Venus-adorned theme represents the Carracci academy’s aim to reconcile diverse artistic practice to a theory of formal design. Carracci-school images of the goddess often feature a braid of hair, symbolizing the creation of the beautiful. Via an engraving by Etienne Baudet, Francesco Albani’s Venus at Her Toilet, or The Air (1621–33), served Pope as a prime source of poetic imagery. Timothy Erwin argues that the iconography reaches Pope mediated by figures with ties to James II and Mary of Modena—above all, Anne Finch. Sharing a symbolic order with the braid of Venus, Belinda’s lost lock comes to represent the cultural disappearance of an ideal composite beauty celebrated by the Stuart court of James and Mary. 

New Life Records for John Skelton as Rector of Diss, Norfolk (1514 and 1516) 
Sebastian Sobecki

This note introduces three new life records for the poet John Skelton. These documents shed light on his life between 1512 and 1516, and they show that Skelton remained in Diss in Norfolk into 1514, and left Norfolk at or shortly before the beginning of 1516. All three documents are plea entries from the Court of Common Pleas. In the first record, Skelton submits a plea of debt against the goldsmith John Page of Bury St. Edmunds in Hilary Term of 1514, and in the second two, the poet appears as a defendant in two suits of debt dating from Hilary Term 1516, filed by the executors of Sir William Danvers. Sebastian Sobecki reproduces, transcribes, and translates all three documents in this note.