The Tonsons were the pre-eminent literary publishers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is difficult to estimate their contribution to the formation of English literature accurately. Nevertheless, it is clear that they carried Shakespeare into the eighteenth century and started the practice of modern editing of him. Without Rowe's life and without the Pope-Theobald controversy, the history of Shakespeare studies would have been different, perhaps much less illustrious. The same is true of Milton, a figure who through his political sympathies was in disrepute, but on whom Jacob Tonson the elder (and his nephew after him) decided to lavish the care, eventually including illustration and annotation, usually reserved for the classics. Later they issued an edition of Spenser by John Hughes, thus creating the triumvirate who for many years were to dominate the study of English renaissance literature. It is not unreasonable to claim that the house of Tonson invented English literature as matter for repeated reading and study. In addition, of course, the Tonsons were Dryden's main publisher, the first to publish Pope, and the consistent supporters of Addison and Steele and their early periodicals, while Jacob Tonson the elder had earlier shaped the miscellany, the translation of classical poetry into English, the pocket Elzevier series, and the luxury edition - practices carried on by the Tonson firm throughout the eighteenth century. They were at the forefront of the creation of a Whig literary culture and Jacob Tonson the elder was the founder of the famous Whig Kit-Cat Club which, it has been said, saved the nation. This edition brings together the correspondences of the Tonsons for the first time and represents a major intervention in the field of the history of the book and literary production. It includes 158 letters, with translations where necessary, from major authors, politicians, and men and women of letters of the period, discussing their work and the role that the Tonsons played in getting literature to the press and the reading nation. The letters are accompanied by generous and insightful annotation, as well as brief biographies of each of the Tonsons, and special sections on publishing, patronage, and retirement.

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. -- .

Winner of the 2022 SCSC Bainton Prize for Reference Works A Companion to Francois Rabelais offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the works of Francois Rabelais, one of the most influential writers of the Western literary tradition. A monk, medical doctor, translator and editor, Rabelais embodies the ideals of Renaissance humanism. His genre-bending fiction combines vast erudition, comic verve, and critical observations of all spheres of contemporary life that are relevant to this day. Two sections of this volume situate Rabelais's work in the larger social, political, and literary context of his time. A third section gives concise interpretations of each of the five books of the Pantagrueline Chronicles. The contributors are eminent scholars of early modern literature. They include: Tom Conley, Francois Cornilliat, Marie-Luce Demonet, Diane Desrosiers, Mireille Huchon, Elsa Kammerer, Jelle Koopmans, Claude La Charite, Nicolas Le Cadet, Frank Lestringant, Romain Menini, Gerard Milhe Poutingon, Marie-Claire Thomine, Jean-Charles Monferran, John Parkin, Jeff Persels, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Michael Randall, Paul J. Smith, and Walter Stephens.

Bad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference-that is, the notion of having Jewish or Muslim "blood"-and one concerned with Blackness and whiteness. Shakespeare's Othello tells us that he was "sold to slavery" in his youth, a phrase that evokes the Atlantic triangle trade for readers today. For many years, however, scholars have asserted that racialized slavery was not yet widely understood in early modern England, and that the kind of enslavement that Othello describes is related to Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean rather than the rise of the racialized enslavement of Afro-diasporic subjects. Bad Blood offers a new account of early modern race by tracing the development of European racial vocabularies from Spain to England. Dispelling assumptions, stemming from Spain's historical exclusion of Jews and Muslims, that premodern racial ideology focused on religious difference and purity of blood more than color, Emily Weissbourd argues that the context of the Atlantic slave trade is indispensable to understanding race in early modern Spanish and English literature alike. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, as well as Spanish picaresque fiction and its English translations, Weissbourd reveals how ideologies of racialized slavery as well as religious difference come to England via Spain, and how both notions of race operate in conjunction to shore up fantasies of Blackness, whiteness, and "pure blood." The enslavement of Black Africans, Weissbourd shows, is inextricable from the staging of race in early modern literature.

If the first phase of feminist criticism of English Renaissance studies unduly stressed women's victimization, the revisionist trend, this collection argues, is in denial about gender inequality altogether. This exciting volume represents the newest, post-revisionist phase of feminist criticism, which tries to integrate the vital insights of both earlier phases of scholarship and to establish a more accurate and nuanced picture of women's relation to early modern English culture. Features an Afterword by Gail Kern Paster and contributions from Jean Howard, Kate Chedgzoy and Grace Ioppolo, amongst others.

The Russian reception of the greatest Roman poet, Vergil, provided Russian thinkers with a way in which to define Russian-European features. This volume looks to uncover the nature of Russian reception of Vergil, and argues that the best way to analyse his presence in Russian letters is to view it in the context of the formation and development of Russian national and literary identity.
Russian reception of Vergil began to play an integral role in the eighteenth century -- starting with the reforms of Peter the Great -- and continued to be an important point of reference for Russian writers well into the last part of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it took on a spiritual, almost messianic mission, while towards the end of the millennium the post-modernist Vergil of Joseph Brodsky contemplated the fate of a poet in the world. However, Russian reception of Vergil offers significantly more than mere foreign importation or imitation of the beliefs and attitudes towards Vergil developed in Europe. It provides a gateway to understanding Russian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about national identity and values, and uncovers important sources of later thinking about the character and destiny of Russia. Vergil in Russia reveals that at the centre of Russian reception of Vergil is Russia's challenge to define the character and validity of their own civilization. Vergil's poems, especially the Aeneid, gave Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in both political and cultural terms.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

Early modern drama is steeped in biblical language, imagery and stories. This collection examines the pervasive presence of scripture on the early modern stage. Exploring plays by writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster, the contributors show how theatre offers a site of public and communal engagement with the Bible.

"Historicizing Blake" puts Blake back into the cultural context of his times. These essays by both established and younger scholars re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost subcultural historian, lain McCalman, "Historicizing Blake" represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing of Romanticism.

Whenever Shakespeare wrote a 'shrew' into one of his plays he created a character who challenged ideas about acceptable behaviour for a woman. This is as true today as when the plays were first performed. A shrew is a woman who refuses to be quiet when she is told to be, who says things that people do not want to hear. She is constructed to alleviate male anxieties through ridicule, but like so many objects of comedy or derision, she is full of power because of her very ability to generate these anxieties. 'Shrew' is supposed to be an insult, but has often been used to describe women enacting behaviour that can be brave, clever, noble or just. This book marries an examination of Shakespeare's shrews in his plays with their history in recent performance, to investigate our own attitudes to hearing women with defiant voices.

Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World explores a range of images and texts that shed light on the complexity of the European reception and interpretation of the New World. Jonathan Hart examines Columbus's first representation of the natives and the New World, the representation of him in subsequent ages, the portrayal of America in sexual terms, the cultural intricacies brought into play by a variety of translators and mediators, the tensions between the aesthetic and colonial in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and a discussion of cultural and voice appropriation that examines the colonial in the postcolonial. This book brings the comparative study of the cultural past of the Americas and the Atlantic world into focus as it relates to the present.

Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies. Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.

"Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture" explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. Through examination of the practices and texts of literary families, the book traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print; that reflects a struggle in Romantic self-identity between communities of feeling and individual genius; and that grapples with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth centuryits science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne.

Editors of Shakespeare's Complete Works must decide what to include. Although not in the First Folio collection of 1623, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III have now entered the canon as plays co-authored by Shakespeare. Determining the Shakespeare Canon makes the case for lifting Arden of Faversham, first published in 1592, over the same threshold. A wealth of evidence indicates that Shakespeare was wholly or largely responsible for several of its central scenes (constituting Act III in editions divided into acts), and that the domestic tragedy can thus be added to the mounting list of his dramatic collaborations. Shakespeare's beginnings as a playwright are due for reconsideration. The second half of this volume provides solid grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe's inclusion of A Lover's Complaint within the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. While A Lover's Complaint has long been part of the Shakespeare canon, according to most editors, the poem's authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto's ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.

This book describes the emergence of ecological understanding among the English Romantic poets, arguing that this new holistic paradigm offered a conceptual and ideological basis for American environmentalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, John Clare, and Mary Shelley all contributed to the fundamental ideas and core values of the modern environmental movement; their vital influence was openly acknowledged by Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin. By revealing hitherto unsuspected links between English and American nature writers, this book elucidates the Romantic origins of American environmentalism.

This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and non-fiction, individual essays provide insights on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of drug effects of opium, alcohol and many other plant-based substances. Contributors consider both contemporary and recent medical knowledge in order to contextualise and illuminate understandings of how drugs were utilised as stimulants, as relaxants, for pleasure, as pain relievers and for other purposes. Chapters also examine the novelty of experimentations of drugs in conversation with the way literary texts incorporate them, highlighting the importance of literary and cultural texts for addressing ethical questions.

The first volume of William Godwin's letters reflected the origins and impact of his great philosophical work, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and showed him at the height of his influence and reputation. This second volume (1798-1805) reveals a less familiar person in different surroundings: a man still well-connected, attracting new friends and disciples, but increasingly embattled as a public intellectual, as a political radical, and as a professional author. The volume includes scores of texts newly transcribed from the original manuscripts and given scholarly annotation for the first time. Godwin was not only a speculative philosopher but also a risk-taking entrepreneur. The letters show him responding to changes in public mood, seeking compromise in his philosophical commitments, and remaking himself as the author of novels, plays, biographies, and children's books. They trace the fragmentation of his intellectual circle of the 1790s and the building of new alliances. They include an eye-witness account of the condition of Ireland on the eve of the 1800 Act of Union. They follow his quest, in the wake of the death of his first wife Mary Wollstonecraft, to find a new life-companion and mother for his two young children. Godwin's letters reflect the cultural history of his times, and throw light on many other literary, political, and artistic figures. They record irreplaceable losses, both public and private, and trace new beginnings in his intellectual and literary development, in his commercial ventures, and in his social and domestic life.

This anthology is the sister volume to The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama. It contains sixteen of the most important, innovative, and dramatically exciting plays from the long Tudor century (1485-1603) newly edited in accessible modern spelling from original manuscripts or printed texts. Unlike previous anthologies, which have tended to divide the period by selecting examples of only 'medieval' or 'Renaissance' drama, and so eliding the continuities between the two, this volume gives readers an overview of the whole period. For in reality 'medieval' plays such as the magnificent York mystery cycle and the interludes of John Heywood were being performed through much of the sixteenth century, alongside 'Renaissance' works such as the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle and Jasper Heywood's English re-imagining of Seneca's tragedy of blood, Thyestes. Tudor audiences clearly did not share the assumptions of modern editors, who have seen the plays produced before the 1590s as 'primitive', didactic stuff, soon swept away by the genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare. They enjoyed all of the works printed here, some anthologised in a readily available collection for the first time, seeing in each of them elements of dramatic action, character, and emotional engagement that moved and entertained them. This anthology will allow modern readers to see why, offering a chronological arrangement of the best Tudor plays that allows them to see for themselves the ways in which the traditions and tropes that would characterise the Shakespearean stage were tried and tested through a century of innovation and experiment. With the riches of a century of Tudor drama before them in a single volume, readers and performers will be able to judge both what was gained in the long century from the 1480s to the 1600s and also what was lost as drama moved from the streets and halls of the early Tudor period to the professional playhouses of the Elizabethan age.

In early eighteenth-century texts, the gypsy is frequently figured as an amusing rogue; by the Victorian period, it has begun to take on a nostalgic, romanticized form, abandoning sublimity in favour of the bucolic fantasy propagated by George Borrow and the founding members of the Gypsy Lore Society. Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period argues that, in the gap between these two situations, the figure of the gypsy is exploited by Romantic-period writers and artists, often in unexpected ways. Drawing attention to prominent writers (including Wordsworth, Austen, Clare, Cowper and Bronte) as well as those less well-known, Sarah Houghton-Walker examines representations of gypsies in literature and art from 1780-1830, alongside the contemporary socio-historical events and cultural processes which put pressure on those representations. She argues that, raising troubling questions by its repeated escape from the categories of enlightenment discourses which might seek to 'know' or 'understand' in empirical ways, the gypsy exists both within and outside of conventional English society. The figure of the gypsy is thus available to writers and artists to facilitate the articulation of dilemmas and anxieties taking various forms, and especially as a lens through which questions of knowledge and identity (which is often mutable, and troubling) might be focussed. .

This book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgment which propose fresh insights into Austen's narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major components of selfhood theory-memory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflection-and investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austen's narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austen's rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.

William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of William Cobbett (1763-1835), situating his journalism and rural radicalism in relation to contemporary political debates.

The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture explores the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in early modern english studies. Essays by leading international scholars reflect on the legacy of historicist approaches and on calls for a renewal of formalist analysis as both a tool and as a defence of our object of study as literary critics. This collection addresses the possibilities as well as the challenges of combining these critical traditions; it tests and reflects on these through practice. It also establishes new lines of enquiry by expanding definitions of form to include the material as well as theoretical implications of the term and explores the early modern roots of these connections. The period's most famous poets such as Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Jonson appear alongside Anne Southwell, Thomas Campion, and many anonymous poets and songwriters. The Work of Form brings together contributors from literary history, historicism, manuscript study, prosodic theory, the history of music, history of the book, as well as print and manuscript culture. It represents avowedly political historical work, alongside aesthetic and theoretical frameworks, work bridging literature and music, and cognitive poetics. In bringing together these diverse commitments, it addresses urgent questions about how we can understand and analyse literary form in a historically-rooted way, and demands rigorous discussion about the status of formal and aesthetic considerations in editing, in literary criticism, and in teaching.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.