Scholar Offers Literary Look at Virgin Queen

CHESTERTOWN—Eric Griffin, Associate Professor and Chair of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS, will lecture on “The Burden of Comedy: England, Spain, and Our Romance With Elizabeth Tudor,” on 4:30 p.m., Monday, October 18 in the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College. He will argue that our culture’s 400-year-old romance with the Virgin Queen internalizes the features of dramatic comedy as scripted by the Elizabethans themselves, making it impossible for us to consider her with historical objectivity. He also will discuss the Anglo-Spanish conflict of the late sixteenth century and its relevance for U.S. and U.K. relations with the Hispanic world today.

Griffin, who also directs Millsaps’ Program in Latin American Studies and teaches in the Living in Yucatan Program, has written in numerous journals, including Representations,English Literary Renaissance, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Invention of the North Atlantic World edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

His recent book, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), explores Anglo-Hispanic literary and cultural relations from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee.