As an exceptionally long-lived author (1588-1679) whose protracted development, late appearance in print, subsequent muzzling, and profound notoriety raise fascinating questions about how, when, and to what effect his thinking exerted an impact as he sought to transform an entire culture, Hobbes supplies the ideal focus for a study of cultural transmission in early modern England. Ranging from Jonson to Rochester and including several critically neglected figures, select poetic contemporaries variously illuminate the scope of Hobbes's writing and the reach of his influence, in turn shedding diverse lights on the nature of their own work.

The essays in this volume challenge current 'givens' in medieval and early modern research around periodization and editorial practice. They showcase cutting-edge research practices and approaches in textual editing, and in manuscript and performance studies to produce new ways of reading and working for students and scholars.

By identifying a pervasive cultivation of attention as a perceptual and cognitive state in eighteenth-century poetry, this book explores overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention.

In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics. In this sequence of essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taken as a whole, this short but immensely wise book offers an illuminating and provocative insight into a great director's relationship with our greatest playwright. 'An invaluable gift from the greatest Shakespeare director of our time... Brook's genius, modesty, and brilliance shine through on every page' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Why did no one read Sonnet 18 for over one hundred years? What traumatic memories did Sonnet 111 conjure up for Charles Dickens? Which Sonnet did Wilfred Owen find particularly offensive on the WW1 battlefront? What kind of love does Sonnet 116 celebrate and why? Filling a surprising gap in Shakespeare studies, this book offers a challenging new reception history of the Sonnets and explores their belated entry into the Shakespeare canon. Jane Kingsley-Smith reveals the fascinating cultural history of individual Sonnets, identifying those which were particularly influential and exploring why they rose to prominence. This is a highly original study which argues that we should redirect our attention away from the story that the Sonnets tell as a sequence, to the fascinating afterlife of individual Shakespeare Sonnets.

This volume explores 'the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge' (Virginia Woolf): his poems and prose, their sources, interpretation and reception; his life, troubled marriage and fatherhood, conversation, changing intellectual contexts and legacy. Major entries cover such canonical works as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, 'Kubla Khan', the 'conversation poems' and Biographia Literaria. But a fuller understanding of Coleridge must embrace many lesser-known poems - lyrics, satire, comical squibs. The prose - critical, philosophical, political, religious - ranges from his early radical writings to the more conservative On the Constitution of the Church and State, his influential Shakespeare lectures, and the vast resource of the notebooks. Coleridge read widely throughout his life and engaged extensively with the work of, among many others, Milton, Fielding, Berkeley, Priestley, Kant, Schelling. One of his most important relationships was with William Wordsworth. Another was with Sara Hutchinson. Entries trace Coleridge's changing reputation, from brilliant young activist to the 'Sage of Highgate' to the later apostle of the theories of the imagination and of Practical Criticism. Other topics covered include opium, plagiarism, the French Revolution, Pantisocracy, Unitarianism, and the Salutation and Cat tavern.

The successful performance of a particular kind of masculinity was critical to political life during the eighteenth century, when men who claimed membership of the public sphere were expected to be men of honour as well as property. By the 1770s, however, the transformative effects of commerce and the claims of politeness complicated older certainties. Robert Jones examines how the parliamentary Opposition and their literary allies responded to political pressures and the emergencies of a disastrous war by fashioning a new mode of politics based on a more flexible range of masculinities. Basing his study on close readings of Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the trials of General Burgoyne and Admiral Keppel, and the Whig appropriation of Thomas Chatterton, Jones explores how Opposition discourse risked the charge of effeminacy in order to fuse the languages of honour and sensibility.

Shakespeare, Court Dramatist centres around the contention that the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated. Richard Dutton argues that many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare's plays have survived in versions adapted for court presentation, where length was no object (and indeed encouraged) and rhetorical virtuosity was appreciated. The first half of the study examines the court's patronage of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime and the crucial role of its Masters of the Revels, who supervised all performances there (as well as censoring plays for public performance). Dutton examines the emergence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, to whom Shakespeare was attached as their 'ordinary poet', and reviews what is known about the revision of plays in the early modern period. The second half of the study focuses in detail on six of Shakespeare's plays which exist in shorter, less polished texts as well as longer, more familiar ones: Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Dutton argues that they are not cut down from those familiar versions, but poorly reported originals which Shakespeare revised for court performance into what we know best today. More localized revisions in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Henry IV Part II can also best be explained in this context. The court, Richard Dutton argues, is what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

Of all the poets Francis Meres names in his famous Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), just two rate a mention as being both 'our best for tragedy' and 'the best poets for comedy': William Shakespeare and George Chapman. All Fools, written in 1599, is the only Elizabethan comedy based directly on the plays of Terence. By taking episodes and characters from two brilliant works, The Self-Tormenter and The Brothers, Chapman creates something that is distinctly Elizabethan while remaining faithful to the spirit of the great Roman master. In this edition, an extensive introduction and commentary show how Chapman combines the literary and theatrical traditions of ancient Rome with everyday life in his own time to fashion a sparkling and innovative comedy that will delight audiences today as much as it did those of 1599. -- .

Coleridge and Contemplation is a multi-disciplinary volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, founding poet of British Romanticism, critic, and author of philosophical, political, and theological works. In his philosophical writings, Coleridge developed his thinking about the symbolizing imagination, a precursor to contemplation, into a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of 'Reason'. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the 'dark fluxion' pursued but ultimately 'unfixable by thought', and his extensive range of interests make a philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary approach to Coleridge essential. This book is the first collection to feature philosophers and intellectual historians writing on Coleridge's philosophy. This volume opens up a neglected aspect of the work of Britain's greatest philosopher-poet - his analysis of contemplation, which he considered the highest of human mental powers. Philosophers including Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Cheyne contribute original essays on the philosophical, literary, and political implications of Coleridge's views. The volume is edited and introduced by Peter Cheyne, and Baroness Mary Warnock contributes a foreword. The chapters by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from leading Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other chapters, from intellectual historians and theologians, including Douglas Hedley clarify the historical background, and 'religious musings', of Coleridge's thought regarding contemplation.

This collation from Samuel T. Coleridge's contributions to the theory of language presents an imposing revision of the enlightenment approach to language. Selections from his verse, notebooks, journalism and ephemera are arranged under headings including the language of politics; language and culture; the language of poetry; theory of language; words and things; organ of language; and the language of religion. The editor's introduction situates Coleridge's thinking in its period, and with modern theory in mind.

Challenges the notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with) nature. By focusing on various forms of 'dialogue, ' these essays shift our interest away from speaking and toward listening, to illuminate ways that early modern Englishwomen interacted with their natural surroundings

The sentiment which affects survivors in the disposition of their dead, and which is, in one regard, a superstition, is, in another, a creditable outcome of our common humanity: namely, the desire to honour the memory of departed worth, and to guard the "hallowed reliques" by the erection of a shrine, both as a visible mark of respect for the dead, and as a place of resort for those pilgrims who may come to pay him tribute. It is this sentiment which dots our graveyards with memorial tablets and more ambitious sculptures, and which still preserves so many of our closed churchyards from desecration, and our {1a} ancient tombs from the molestation of careless, curious, or mercenary persons. But there is another sentiment, not inconsistent with this, which prompts us, on suitable occasions, to disinter the remains of great men, and remove them to a more fitting and more honourable resting-place. The Hotel des Invalides at Paris, and the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura at Rome, {1b} are indebted to this sentiment for the possession of relics which make those edifices the natural resort of pilgrims as of sight-seers.

Early Modern Metaphysical Literature illuminates now-obscured aspects of cultural negotiation and denaturalization germane to numerous Metaphysical texts. Examining poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Edward Herbert, this book challenges readers to recognize the provocative strangeness of these writings both in their original contexts and today.

This collection is the first book-length study of the writings and influence of Elizabeth Cary, author of the first original play by a woman to be printed in English, "The Tragedy of Mariam" (1613). While previous criticism has focused most exclusively on "The Tragedie of Mariam" and "The History of Edward II," the essays in this volume broaden our understanding of Cary as a writer by incorporating critical and historical analyses of her forays into other genres as well. Always mindful of the literary, political, and religious backdrop of early Stuart England, the essays explore the extent of her engagement in both the print and manuscript worlds of early modern England. The essays address crucial questions about authorship, form, and reception and avoid generalizations about gender that would smooth over her consistently ambiguous portrayals of male and female figures and her complicated appropriations of typically "male" genres.

The period between the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment has long been regarded as the zenith of the 'republic of letters', a pan-European community of like-minded scholars and intellectuals who fostered critical approaches to the study of the Bible and other ancient texts, while renouncing the brutal religio-political disputes that were tearing their continent apart at the same time. Criticism and Confession offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive challenge to this account. Throughout this period, all forms of biblical scholarship were intended to contribute to theological debates, rather than defusing or transcending them, and meaningful collaboration between scholars of different confessions was an exception, rather than the norm. 'Neutrality' was a fiction that obscured the ways in which scholarship served the interests of ecclesiastical and political institutions. Scholarly practices varied from one confessional context to another, and the progress of 'criticism' was never straightforward. The study demonstrates this by placing scholarly works in dialogue with works of dogmatic theology, and comparing examples from multiple confessional and national contexts. It offers major revisionist treatments of canonical figures in the history of scholarship, such as Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, and Louis Cappel, based on unstudied archival as well as printed sources; and it places those figures alongside their more marginal, overlooked counterparts. It also contextualizes scholarly correspondence and other forms of intellectual exchange by considering them alongside the records of political and ecclesiastical bodies. Throughout, the study combines the methods of the history of scholarship with techniques drawn from other fields, including literary, political, and religious history. As well as presenting a new history of seventeenth-century biblical criticism, it also critiques modern scholarly assumptions about the relationships between erudition, humanistic culture, political activism, and religious identity.

The Double Voice reassesses the notions of gender which have been used to analyze Renaissance literature. Rather than assuming that men and women write differently because of background, education, and culture, it tries to unsettle the connections between the sex of the author and the constructions of gender in texts, and to reconsider the prevalent determinist model of reading which tends to consign women writers to the private, domestic sphere and to render male negotiations of gender invisible and transparent.

This investigation of literary history writing between 1770 and 1820 identifies the mode's distinction from canon formation as central to its cultural vitality. Using secret history, memoir and the novel, amongst other sources, it invites a re-thinking of literary history's place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print culture.

The Family of Love charts a successful love intrigue between the cash-strapped Gerardine, and Maria, the sequestered niece of the mercenary Doctor Glister. Their romance unfolds against the dissection of two citizen marriages, the Glisters' and the Purges'. Mistress Purge attends Familist meetings independently, arousing her husband's suspicions about her marital fidelity. Two libertines, Lipsalve and Gudgeon, go in search of sex and solubility (freedom from constipation), receiving more than they bargain for in respect of the latter. This scholarly edition of Family of Love marks the first occasion on which the comedy is attributed to Lording Barry in print. It brings together literary and historical discussion with a thorough analysis of the play's disputed authorship. Tomlinson highlights Barry's rich vein of burlesque humour in a comedy that combines magic, a trunk, and a mock-court session with vigorous colloquial language. -- .

Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy's conception is interrupted by a question about a clock and he has his nose damaged at birth by a man-midwife's forceps; Ann Radcliffe's gothic heroines play musical instruments to soothe their troubled minds. In Novel Machines, however, Joseph Drury argues that the most important machine in any eighteenth-century novel is the narrative itself. Like other kinds of machine, a narrative is an artificial construction composed of different parts that combine to produce a sequence of causally linked actions. Like other machines, a narrative is designed to produce predictable effects and can therefore be put to certain uses. Such affinities had been apparent to critics since Aristotle, but they began to assume a particular urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Reading works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe, Novel Machines tracks the consequences of the effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel's narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern 'invention' that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period's moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel's narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period's most characteristic and influential formal innovations.

In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical etiologies and cures. Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. She explores the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and greensickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. Finally, she examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy and considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness.
With reference to the works of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Ford, and Davenant, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature investigates how early modern representations of lovesickness expose contemporary cultural constructions of love, revealing the relation of sexuality to spirituality and the creation and shattering of the impassioned subject. It offers an important contribution to the history of romantic love and will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, gender, and medical history.

The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910 draws on previously unseen archival material to explore the innovative and scholarly ways in which English literature was taught to extramural students in England during the fin de siecle. It begins by tracing the development of the subject from 1650 onwards, before looking at the impassioned debates surrounding the introduction of English as an honours degree at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1880s and '90s. The book then examines exactly how the subject was taught in various non-university settings such as novel-reading unions, the University Extension Movement, and informal literary advice columns written by Arnold Bennett for a popular Edwardian newspaper. At a time when the future of the humanities feels increasingly uncertain, this book sheds new light on the modern roots of tertiary-level English teaching.