Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Identifying mermaids: economies of representation in Dekker and Middleton's The roaring girl
  • "We shall discover our selves": practicing the mermaid's law in Margaret Cavendish's The convent of pleasure
  • Perfect pictures: the mermaid's half-theater and the anti-theatrical debates in Book III of Spenser's The faerie queene
  • Reading like a mermaid: Antony and Cleopatra's (un)mysterious history and the case of the disappearing snake
  • Afterword: "drown'd O, where?": the mermaid and the map in Shakespeare's Hamlet.