Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus critically engages and enacts teachings and patterns of emulation, including those of Quintilian, Roger Ascham, and other contemporary humanists and playwrights, pressing emulation's uses to extremes that suggest that imitative self-fashioning potentially results in monstrous or fragmented characters, decisions, and texts. The professed aim of the grammar-school education, the ability to judge well, is conflicted by Titus's exposure of judgment as itself a contested concept, locked within a circularity of intertextual precedents. Titus's excessive, even parodic, repetition of emulative strategies acts as a rebuttal of seemingly straightforward humanist models of character, judgment, self, and decorum.

This essay argues that John Milton's A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634) is influenced by early modern concepts of childhood in a way that critics have not recognized. Childhood was a problematic concept in contemporary religious, pedagogical, and legal discourses. Children were depicted as models of submission, but prone to impetuous indiscretion, and their path to adult agency was strewn with pitfalls, especially in the liminal period of youth. A Mask engages with and transforms these discourses. It rejects the political quietism routinely associated with childhood and shows that the child's unique sensitivity may offer a route to a particularly powerful kind of voice.

Prior to the late fifteenth century in Florence, the losers of political conflicts routinely faced exile as punishment for their perceived crimes. Following the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, however, such political criminals increasingly received death sentences rather than banishment. This article explores how the changing nature of punishment for political crimes in Renaissance Florence from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries can be read as a barometer of political change in the city. It examines the relationship between the growing number of political executions and the long transformation of Florence from a republic to a principality, with reference to the broader context of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy.