Whigham, Frank
Arthur J. Thaman and Wilhelmina Doré Thaman Professor of English

Education: Ph.D. UC San Diego 1976
Office Location: PAR 316
Office Hours: TTh 2:00-3:00 and by appointment
Phone: (512) 471-8794
ffw@mail.utexas.edu

Research Interests:

Frank Whigham's work focuses on early modern British literature and culture. He is one of the original group of California theorists who came to be known as the New Historicists, and his essays have appeared in many journals and collections, including PMLA, ELH, NLH, and Renaissance Drama. His work is known for combining anthropological and historical approaches to subjects as varied as Webster's Duchess of Malfi and the rhetoric of early modern English letters of recommendation. He has just completed a new scholarly edition of George Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy, co-edited with Wayne Rebhorn. He is also the founding supervisor of the Digital Archive Services database of images, which supports the teaching of British and American literature. In Austin he has worked actively to support secondary education, conducting seminars with local high-school teachers.

Recent Publications: 

George Puttenham. The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. Ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

First published in 1589, George Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy is a foundational work of criticism and English literary theory. Rich in detail about the nature, purpose, and function of poetry, as well as the character and goals of the poet, it reproduces numerous poems from the English Renaissance for which this book is our only source. In addition to serving as a valuable historical document, The Art of English Poesy provides generous insights into the court culture of Elizabethan England. That culture is on display in the attitudes and values of the writer, who presents himself as Elizabeth I's courtier and even addresses the queen directly at points. Many of his anecdotes are set at court, enabling us to watch courtiers in the act of negotiating their social and political relationships with one another as well as with rulers and social inferiors.

Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

In this book, Whigham combines an analysis of English Renaissance plays with an enriched sense of their social surroundings. Using anthropologically informed close reading, he traces the violent gestures of social self construction that animate many such plays — here focusing on The Spanish Tragedy, Arden of Faversham, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Duchess of Malfi — and the ways in which drama interacts with the conflict ridden discourses of social rank, gender, kinship and service relations.

"A major critical work of conceptual originality and importance, of rhetorical distinctiveness and power: one of the most intellectually stimulating and rhetorically compelling studies of English Renaissance drama I have ever read."

— Louis A. Montrose

Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Literature (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984).

"Elizabethan courtesy literature has often been used to invoke the sweet memory of a vanished culture, a refined world of gentility, noble breeding, and exquisite manners. Whigham offers a sober, skillful, and tough-minded analysis of the actual uses of this literature, its mingling of mystification and instruction, its half-concealed anxieties, its bad faith, its appropriation by a ruling elite for self-justification."

— Stephen Greenblatt