JE Archer, H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley. 2011. The Autumn King: remembering the land in King Lear. Shakespeare Quarterly (in press)

Abstract:
This essay uses interdisciplinary research to argue that the botanical allusions in Cordelia's description of her father, 'Crowned with rank fumitor and furrow-weeds,/ With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,/ Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow,/ In our sustaining corn', register the nature of the political friction in King Lear. The resonance of pseudo-wheat in Cordelia's description, which depends on play-goers' recognition of a politics of food supply that was current in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, echoes recurring tropes of mimicry and subversion elsewhere in the play. Images of darnel contamination are deployed in this and other of Shakespeare's history plays to register and articulate enduring anxieties over relations between city, court and country, and legitimacy and bastardy. By restoring the arable setting of the play's climax, this essay develops a reading that is sensitive to the closely interwoven botanical, medical and political debates present in King Lear. The image of a mad and dispossessed King wearing a sprig of darnel for a crown is used to contextualize King James's fashioning, at the beginning of his reign, as a 'landlord', both in terms of contemporary concerns over sustenance and food distribution, and in the related light of Shakespeare's own activities as landowner and convicted grain hoarder.

H Thomas, H Ougham, LAJ Mur, S Jansson. 2011. Senescence and programmed cell death. In: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Plants. 2nd edition (eds B Buchanan, W Gruissem, R Jones). NY: Wiley (forthcoming)

RL Jones, H Ougham, H Thomas, SD Waaland. 2011. The Molecular Life of Plants. NJ, Chichester: Wiley (forthcoming)

R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas, JE Archer. 2010. Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester. Review of English Studies (under review). 

Abstract:
It is generally accepted that John Keats composed his ode ‘To Autumn’ following leisurely daily walks along the water-meadows south of the market city of Winchester. The present article brings together new archival evidence to suggest that the ‘eastern extremity’ of Winchester, St Giles's Hill – cornfields in 1819, we show, as well as the site of a major fair – in fact provides direct inspiration for the sights and sounds of the famous ode. The new topography enables us to see hitherto unsuspected dimensions to Keats's engagement with contemporary politics, in particular as they pertained to the management of food production and supply, wages and productivity. Furthermore, we suggest, this hill and its ancient market offered Keats a trenchant conceptual frame with which to reflect on his own poetic process. The article also examines the rise of what we might call the ‘new men’ of Winchester: financial figures – privatisers, landlords and bankers – who found their ideological counterpart in printer-publisher, James Robbins. Considering ‘To Autumn’ alongside land lease records, Robbins’s guidebooks to Winchester, as well as previously unidentified textual sources, this article shows that ‘To Autumn’ not only resists a concerted ‘capitalist’ reimagining of Winchester and its agricultural heritage, but takes its place in a wider contemporary debate around labour and ‘idleness’, surplus and profit.