<I>John Clare, Politics and Poetry</I> challenges the traditional portrait of "poor John Clare", the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare's career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor market, and conservative patronage. Yet Clare was not a passive victim. This study explores the sources of the "poor Clare"' tradition, and recovers Clare's agency, revealing a writer fully engaged in his own professional life and in the social and political questions of the day.

Satirical verse on society and its hypocrisies A master of satire known for his ribald humor, self-deprecation, and invective verse (hija'), the poet Hmedan al-Shwe'ir was an acerbic critic of his society and its morals. Living in the Najd region of the Arabian Peninsula, Hmedan wrote in an idiom widely referred to as "Nabati," here a mix of Najdi vernacular and archaic vocabulary and images dating to the origins of Arabic poetry. In Arabian Satire, Hmedan is mostly concerned with worldly matters and addresses these in different guises: as the patriarch at the helm of the family boat and its unruly crew; as a picaresque anti-hero who revels in taking potshots at the established order, its hypocrisy, and its failings; as a peasant who labors over his palm trees, often to no avail and with no guarantee of success; and as a poet recording in verse how he thinks things ought to be. The poems in Arabian Satire reveal a plucky, headstrong, yet intensely socially committed figure-representative of the traditional Najdi ethos-who infuses his verse with proverbs, maxims, and words of wisdom expressed plainly and conversationally. Hmedan is widely quoted by historians of the Gulf region and in anthologies of popular sayings. This is the first full translation of this remarkable poet. An English-only edition.

New examinations of the figure of Charlemagne in Spanish literature and culture. The historical point of departure for this volume is Charlemagne's ill-fated incursion into Spain in 778. After an unsuccessful siege of Zaragoza, the king of the Franks directed his army north and on his passage through the Pyrenees, he turned his wrath on Pamplona, destroying the Basque city and its walls. The Basques subsequently ambushed the rearguard of Charlemagne's army on the heights of Pyrenees, killing numerous officers of the palace, plunderingthe baggage, and then vanishing into the forested hills, leaving the Franks to grieve without the satisfaction of revenge. In Spain, popular narratives eventually diverted their attention away from the Franks to the Spaniards responsible for their slaughter. This volume explores those legendary narratives of the Spaniards who defeated Charlemagne's army and the larger textual and cultural context of his presence in Spain, from before their careful elaboration in Latin and vernacular chronicles into the early modern period. It shares with previous studies a focus on the narration of historical and imaginary events across genres, but is unique in its emphasis on the reception and evolution of the legendary figure of Charlemagne in Spain. Overall, its purpose is to address the diversity and importance of the Carolingian legends in the literary, historical, and imaginative spheres during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into the seventeenth century. Matthew Bailey is Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia; Ryan D. Giles is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. Contributors: Frederick A. de Armas, Matthew Bailey, Anibal Biglieri, Ryan D. Giles, Lucy K. Pick, Mercedes Vaquero.

This book examines the Irish philosopher George Berkeley's contributions to debates concerning the role of virtue in society, which formed the foundation of his reputation as "the good bishop." Through a close analysis of key texts and the larger historical contexts within which they were composed, this study explores Berkeley's engagement with the social and economic threats facing Ireland and Britain, highlighting his belief that virtue and religion could help alleviate these problems. In doing so, Breuninger provides a more complete view of Berkeley's work outside the realm of philosophy and thus broadens our understanding of his place in the early Enlightenment.

Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of seventeenth-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold Van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. The approach differs from previous attempts to "explain" Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multi-media contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell's work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell's life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet's works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain. Thus, the in-between aspects of the poet and his poetry actually define his technique as well as his brilliance.

The poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) was one of the most influential authors of early modern England. Donne's Augustine examines his response to an iconic figure in the history of Western religious thought: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Katrin Ettenhuber argues that Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was equally indebted to the intellectual and literary legacy of the Church Fathers. The study recovers an Augustinian tradition of interpretation which permeated the religious world of the period, but which has until now been largely overlooked. She presents a comprehensive re-evaluation of Donne's writings, ranging from the poems to less familiar prose works, situates him carefully in the poetic, intellectual, and political contexts which frame his works, and engages with recent developments in both literary and historical studies.
Donne's Augustine is the first sustained study of Donne's reading practices, and of the theological sources which shaped his thought. It discovers a range of medieval and early modern texts which transformed the imagination of literary writers in the period but which have been neglected so far: devotional manuals, Scripture commentaries, and religious commonplace books (often in Latin). The study pays close attention to the intellectual and political conditions which informed the reception of Augustine's works, and offers detailed readings of Donne's texts which illuminate the literary aspects of his patristic heritage. Donne's Augustine makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the larger reading and writing culture of Renaissance England, and of the religious debates and controversies in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

This new Chronology allows for quick and easy retrieval of all the major dates pertaining to Christopher Marlowe's life and career. It also helpfully gives dates relevant to the real people and historical events dramatized in his plays and to those who acted in, produced them, the dates of publication of the works which he used as sources, the dates of principal revivals of his works, and the dates at which various key facts about his life and works were later rediscovered.

In distracted times like the present, Shakespeare too has been driven to distraction. Shakespeare | Cut considers contemporary practices of cutting up Shakespeare in stage productions, videogames, book sculptures, and YouTube postings, but it also takes the long view of how Shakespeare's texts have been cut apart in creative ways beginning in Shakespeare's own time. The book's five chapters consider cuts, cutting, and cutwork from a variety of angles: (1) as bodily experiences, (2) as essential parts of the process whereby Shakespeare and his contemporaries crafted scripts, (3) as units in perception, (4) as technologies situated at the interface between 'figure' and 'life,' and (5) as a fetish in western culture since 1900. Printed here for the first time are examples of the cut-ups that William S. Burroughs and Brion Guysin carried out with Shakespeare texts in the 1950s. Bruce R. Smith's original analysis is accompanied by twenty-four illustrations, which suggest the multiple media in which cutwork with Shakespeare has been carried out.

Volume 1 of the Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke presents Burke's early literary writings up to 1765, and before he became a key political figure. It is the first fully annotated and critical edition, with comprehensive notes and an authoritative introduction. The writings published here introduce readers to Burke's early attempts at a public voice. They demonstrate in a variety of ways how determined he was to become involved in the social and intellectual life of his times. The one work of Burke's early life which has long been recognized as having prime critical significance, the Sublime and the Beautiful, is naturally found here. In addition the volume includes the first fully edited version of other works which have been neglected, notably the Vindication of Natural Society, a substantial satire on current philosophical and religious thought, the Abridgement of English History and the Hints for an Essay on the Drama. The volume also prints reliable texts of his early poems and prose `characters' as well as the first complete text of The Reformer since it was first published in 1748. This was a weekly paper devoted principally to the Dublin cultural scene and was edited by Burke shortly after he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin.

This collection of essays examines Austen in relation to her business. Many of these essays, including those by Julia Prewitt Brown, Margaret Drabble, Jan Fergus, Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, and Elaine Showalter, were first delivered as papers at the Lake Louise conference on "Persuasion". The collection's culmination is a short story by Margaret Drabble that aims to bring Austen's "Elliots of Kellynch Hall" into the 20th century.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet to Burton's Anatomy to Hilliard's miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of the 'dis-ease' of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of devotion and salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, helping to humble believers' souls and bring them closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation - something this book calls 'emotive improvisation'. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts - including, but not limited to, moral treatises on the passions, medical text books, mortality records, doctors' case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional and elegiac poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays - Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding the experience of sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across source materials too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.

Thomas Wyatt (1504?-42) may have written the first sonnet in English. His translation from Plutarch's Moralia was the first publication of a classical moral essay in English. He introduced continental forms such as ottava rima to the language, and his paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms sparked a century of popular psalm translations. Yet while decades of criticism have centered on a handful of his best-known poems, many others are poorly understood, in part because we lack an authoritative edition. This volume-the first in a planned two-volume collection of Wyatt's complete works-comprises scholarly editions of 35 letters or memoranda, Wyatt's Declaration from the Tower and his Defence speech against treason charges. It also includes the first scholarly edition of The Quyete of Mynde. Each text is extensively annotated, each letter has a prefacing headnote, and each grouping of texts is separately introduced. The recipient of one letter is identified here for the first time from new archival discoveries. Two letters of instruction from Henry VIII are included along with four appendices containing related documents. Biographical entries (totalling 17,000 words) identify and introduce 64 persons related to Wyatt's diplomatic service, including every known member of Wyatt's diplomatic household.

Focusing on a burgeoning area of interest, this new study illustrates relations between legal and theatrical discourses in a range of plays. The essays focus on four general areas of interest to establish the vital connections between early modern drama and law during this seminal period in their professionalization: legal language and its construction of social norms and realities, positive law and the status of nature; the concept of property and its contractual guarantees; and the creation of power and authority under the law.

Responding to recent historical analyses of Post-Reformation English Catholicism, the essays in this collection by both literary scholars and historians focus on polemical, devotional, political, and literary texts that dramatize the conflicts between context-sensitive Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England. They foreground some major literary authors and canonical texts, but also examine non-canonical literature as well as other writings that embody ideological fantasies connecting the political and religious discourses of the time with their literary manifestations.

"Blake, Nation and Empire" challenges the orthodoxy of the politics of William Blake as exclusively radical, defined by his participation in the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s. It examines his work in the context of emergent discourses of nation and empire, and of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing particular emphasis on his output in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics. Blake's work is shown not only to be complexly embedded in the culture of his time but also to prefigure and contest the imperial century of pax Britannica.

"Don Quijote" and "Le Berger extravagant" criticize fiction but come in the shape of novels. Far from breaking with their respective traditions, they engage with the chivalric and the pastoral in a creative manner. Genre and imitation are key notions for situating these novels in literary history and in the uvres of Cervantes and Sorel. With emphasis on the continuity of each writer's approach, "Le Berger extravagant" is considered in the context of Sorel's aim to educate readers and avoid romance stereotypes, while the "Quijote" is read as an individual take on the chivalric novel, rejecting the Spanish tradition in favor of the ironic Italian "romanzo cavalleresco." Like Cervantes' "Galatea" and "Persiles," "Don Quijote" reflects a specific tradition which in turn serves to illuminate the famous book. This study offers interpretations of the two novels, but extends its scope toward the authors' other works and additional contemporary sources including Avellaneda's 1614 continuation of "Don Quijote."

This is the sixth volume of a detailed play-by-play catalogue of drama written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors during the 110 years between the English Reformation to the English Revolution, covering every known play, extant and lost, including some which have never before been identified. It is based on a complete, systematic survey of the whole of this body of work, presented in chronological order. Each entry contains comprehensive information about a single play: its various titles, authorship, and date; a summary of its plot, list of its roles, and details of the human and geographical world in which the fictional action takes place; a list of its sources, narrative and verbal, and a summary of its formal characteristics; details of its staging requirements; and an account of its early stage and textual history.

Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This edition includes her polemical foray into the Jacobean gender wars and her collected poems. Speght's tract, A Mouzzell for Melastomus (1617), is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnam's attack on women and a serious effort to stake women's claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis. In other words, she tried to yield a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speght's volume of poems, MoralitiesMemorandum with a Dream Prefixed (1621)--printed, in part, to counter charges that her prose was actually her father's-- includes a long memento mori meditation and an allegorical dream vision that recounts her own rapturous encounter with learning. Both texts vigorously defend women's education and encourage women's talents. This volume should find a ready audience among scholars and students of early seventeenth-century literature, history, and religion, as well as among those in women's studies.

This book explores the use of the Biblical text of the Song of Songs in seventeenth-century England. It charts the period's fascination with the idea of the mystical marriage, and shows how this image was implicated in the conflicts and political struggles of the time. It investigates the appeal of the Song of Songs to women authors and popular writers, and helps to explain some of the extraordinary developments in seventeenth-century English culture.

This chronology, like others in the series, presents the story of Dr Johnson's life in a readily accessible format to provide scholar and general reader alike with a quick guide to dates, people and places together with supplementary indexes.

With an introduction by Simon Callow Judgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius. Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, and charting how his legacy has grown over the centuries, this extraordinary book asks how Shakespeare has come to be such a powerful symbol of genius. Written with lively passion and wit, The Genius of Shakespeare is a fascinating biography of the life - and afterlife - of our greatest poet. Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has shown how the legend of Shakespeare's genius was created and sustained, and how the man himself became a truly global phenomenon. 'The best modern book on Shakespeare' Sir Peter Hall

With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period's most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold. This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play's performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play. -- .