ABSTRACT
The level of current interest in interpreting texts as registers of cultural change in early modern England bespeaks an increasingly shared perspective in literary studies that again seeks to take history seriously. As we literary-historical types now go about our usual business of intertextuality-analyzing texts and putting them into relation with other texts-we avoid dealing solely in textual formulations of our concerns. Unless they are tethered to extralinguistic referents of context, relations among texts seemingly cannot be freed from the specter of an indefinite regress of signifiers in play. Many of us have accordingly turned to an almost hallowed triad-the factors of race (or ethnicity), class, and gender-as anchors for our work on historical texts in historical contexts. Taken over from our social-science colleagues in the current vogue of interdisciplinary method swapping, these factors look so promising because race, class, and gender are both powerfully material in their bases and even more potently ideological in their social encodings and decodings.
