Originally published in 1973, the history of French tragedy and tragicomedy from their origins in the sixteenth century to the last years of Louis XIV's reign is here surveyed in a single volume. Beginning with a brief account of the development of drama from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Dr Brereton examines the plays as types of drama, the circumstances in which they were produced and their reception by contemporaries. The traditionally great figures of Corneille and Racine are treated at some length, but their work is seen in perspective against the plays of their predecessors and of their own time. Garnier and Montchrestien are discussed, among others, as notable writers of Renaissance humanist tragedy. Sections are devoted to secondary but still important dramatists such as Mairet, Rotrou, Du Ryer, Tristan L'Hermite, Thomas Corneille and Quinault. A long chapter on Alexandre Hardy reviews the work of this neglected author and stresses his interest as a transitional link between the two centuries and as a vigorous pioneer of a type of drama which flourished for several decades after him concurrently with French 'classical' tragedy. The main currents of critical theory, social attitudes and stage history are described in their relation to the development of the drama. Well over a hundred plays are discussed or summarized; and the author has constantly referred back to the original material and has avoided an over-simplification of a vast subject which contains more exceptions and anomalies than has generally been recognized in the past. Chronological tables of the works of major dramatists, summaries of numerous plays and a bibliography containing modern editions of plays are included.

In the middle years of the sixteenth century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the 'tyrant by entrie' or the usurper, who supplanted earlier 'tyrant by the administration' as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own 'virtu' and through an act of 'lawmaking' violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. In contrast, the historical and tragic plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods teem with illegitimate monarchs. Almost all of Shakespeare's history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device. Why and how does usurpation emerge as a preoccupation in English theatre? What are the political, historical, legal, and dramaturgical transformations that influence and are influenced by this moment of emergence? As the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in sixteenth-century drama and politics, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.

In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language, and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.

This book features a collection of essays, shedding subversively new light on Romanticism and its canon of big-six, white, male Romantics by focusing on marginalised, forgotten and lost writers and their long-neglected works. Probing the realms of literary and cultural lostness, this book identifies different strata of oblivion and shows how densely the net of contacts and rivalries was woven around the ostensibly monolithic stars of the Romantic age. It reveals how the lost poets inspired the production of anthologised poetry, that they served as indispensable muses, sidekicks and interlocutors of the big six and that their relevance for the literary scene has been continuously underrated. This is also surprisingly true for some creators of famous one-hit wonders (Frankenstein, The Vampyre) who were suddenly rocketed to fame or notoriety, but could not help seeing their other works of fiction turning into abortive flops.

Shakespearean Echoes assembles a global cast of established and emerging scholars to explore new connections between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities and conflicts of Shakespeare's current international afterlife.

- Topical subject: there is a lot of interest in Ameilia and women authors in the early modern period, and they are being included in more university courses and studied in more depth my researchers. Shakespeare's co-authorship is another hot topic area in Shakespeare research. - Interest in Shakespeare is global, so healthy sale potential within both English and non-English speaking markets. - Author has a solid reputation in Shakespeare authorship research community, and previous works have had a positive impact.

This volume uses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment. Misers surveys this class of people-as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies-to explore how British attitudes about saving money shifted between 1700 and 1860. As opposed to the century before, the nineteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for misers, as economists credited them with adding to the nation's stock of capital and novelists newly imagined their capacity to empathize with fellow human beings. These characters shared the spotlight with real people who posthumously donned that label, populating into a cottage industry of miser biographies by the 1850s. By the time A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, many Victorians had come to embrace misers as links that connected one generation's extreme saving with the next generation's virtuous spending. With a broad chronological period, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in representation of misers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

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.

This is the first complete English translation of a lively travelogue written by Andronikos aka Nikandros Noukios, a Greek from Corfu, who accompanied a diplomatic mission from Venice to England in the middle of the sixteenth century. He describes some of the great northern Italian cities, gives vivid impressions of picturesque Germany, of sober but enthusiastic Lutheran church services, and of cities on the Rhine. In the Low Countries he visits the commercial centres and in England gives a real sense of the excitement of London and its sights. He rather liked the English (even giving a recipe for beer), and is clearly fascinated by Henry VIII, his attacks on the monasteries and his break with Rome. He then surprisingly joins up with a troop of Greek mercenaries, but finally leaves them and returns to Italy through France with glimpses of Fontainebleau and Francis I. We leave Andronikos after he has visited Rome on his way back to Venice. The book is an almost unknown source for the sixteenth century and will certainly be of interest to historians and students. It is also an important and little-known landmark in the development of Modern Greek literature, especially relevant to the burgeoning modern interest in travel writing. It is accessible and a good read.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama's most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy: Perspectives Across the Humanities is an interdisciplinary study of the abiding quarrel to which poet-philosopher Plato referred centuries ago in the Republic. The book presents eight chapters by four humanities scholars that historically contextualize and cross-interpret aspects of the quarrel in question. The authors share the view that although poets and philosophers continually quarrel, a harmonious union between the two groups is achievable in a manner promising application to a variety of contemporary cultural-political and aesthetic debates, all of which have implications for the current status of the humanities.

This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare's politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare's Histories and Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth's principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England's most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth's throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.

Shakespeare, Theatre, Performance, History, adaptation, politics, postcolonial United Kingdom, race, gender, television, movie

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama-one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as "Shakespeare's late plays," "tragicomedy," or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

The tumultuous relations between Britain and the United Provinces in the seventeenth century provide the backdrop to this book, striking new ground as its transnational framework permits an overview of their intertwined culture, politics, trade, intellectual exchange, and religious debate. How the English and Dutch understood each other is coloured by these factors, and revealed through an imagological method, charting the myriad uses of stereotypes in different genres and contexts. The discussion is anchored in a specific context through the lives and works of John Milton and Andrew Marvell, whose complex connections with Dutch people and society are investigated. As well as turning overdue attention to neglected Dutch writers of the period, the book creates new possibilities for reading Milton and Marvell as not merely English, but European poets.

This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mobilised their linguistic resources in pursuit of vital pragmatic goals, drawing on three corpora of letters written by the poor. The main question addressed by the book is, 'How were the poor, often armed only with low levels of education and literacy, able to meet the challenge of writing letters vital to their interests, even to their survival?' Timmis argues that the answer lies in the highly strategic approach adopted by the writers, particularly evident in the way formulaic language is used in the pauper and prisoner letters. Formulaic language supports the writers in producing intelligible letters in what they consider an appropriate tone but also allows them to exploit popular cultural motifs of the time. Data is drawn from three sources: pauper letters by the poor applying for parish relief, from around 1795 to 1834; prisoner letters by women awaiting deportation to Australia for defrauding the Bank of England in the early nineteenth century; and anonymous letters by the poor demanding money with menaces. Comparison with the Mayhew Corpus of interviews with the London poor in the 1850s reinforces the idea that part of the writers' approach was to orient away from the vernacular towards a style they perceived to be more elevated. Showing how resourceful people can be in communicating their needs in crises and in turn surfacing new insights into literacy and demotic language awareness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics and social history.

Staging Favorites explores theatrical representations of royal favorites in Spanish, French, and English dramatic production during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time, the courts of Spain, France, and England were dominated by all-powerful ministers who enjoyed royal favor. The politics of royal favoritism gave rise to a significant group of plays which constitutes the subject of this book. While scholars have studied this group partially and separately in national context, Staging Favorites approaches these "dramas about favorites" from a wider European point of view, and performs comparative analyses of a number of plays - including La paciencia en la fortuna; Le Favori, ou la Coquette; and Sejanus His Fall - and adds new detail and differentiation to the early modern perception and representation of the royal favorite. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in early modern literature, history of theater, and cultural history.

The first volume to offer a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to this period of Spanish history Applies a range of cutting-edge approaches within a number of key areas including history, politics, literature, science, the visual arts, music, race, faith and gender A wide theoretical range of chapters written by influential scholars from across the globe

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers' responses to Shakespeare's sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets' first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare's Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers' interests in Shakespeare's classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Four hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, his works continue to not only fill playhouses around the world, but also be adapted in various forms for consumption in popular culture, including in film, television, comics and graphic novels, and digital media. Drawing on theories of play and adaptation, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations demonstrates how the practices of Shakespearean adaptations are frequently products of playful, and sometimes irreverent, engagements that allow new 'Shakespeares' to emerge, revealing Shakespeare's ongoing impact in popular culture. Significantly, this collection explores the role of play in the construction of meaning in Shakespearean adaptations-adaptations of both the works of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare the man-and contributes to the growing scholarly interest in playfulness both past and present. The chapters in Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations engage with the diverse ways that play is used in Shakespearean adaptations on stage, screen, and page, examining how these adaptations draw out existing humour in Shakespeare's works, the ways that play is used as a pedagogical aid to help explain complex language, themes, and emotions found in Shakespeare's works, and more generally how play and playfulness can make Shakespeare 'relatable,' 'relevant,' and entertaining for successive generations of audiences and readers.

These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public 'performances' of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. (CS1090)

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction explores how the figure of the orphan was shaped by changing social and historical circumstances. Analysing sixteen major novels from Defoe to Austen, this original study explains the undiminished popularity of literary orphans and reveals their key role in the construction of gendered subjectivity.

Based on Ilan Stavans' new translation which accurately captures the verve of the original, this Norton Critical Edition includes: an introduction and explanatory annotations; contextual materials highlighting the novella's strong anticlerical views and its affinities with Don Quixote in depictions of social hierarchy in Renaissance Spain; as well as excerpts from Juan de Luna's Lazarillo sequel; and eleven critical studies.

Sarah Fielding was one of the most respected women authors of her generation and a key figure in the development of the novel. She was admired especially by Samuel Richardson, who famously commented that her 'knowledge of the human heart' was greater than that of her brother, the novelist Henry Fielding. This edition revives The Countess of Dellwyn, the only one of Sarah Fielding's major works not previously available in a modern scholarly edition. The novel is satirical and didactic, taking as its targets fashionable life and modern marriage (and scandalous divorce) and narrated with acerbic wit by its anonymous third-person narrator. This edition benefits greatly from Gillian Skinner's editorial work and it is a book that will be of great interest to researchers into the eighteenth-century novel and women's writing of the period worldwide.

This study offers a timely and necessary reassessment of the careers of Ann Yearsley and Hannah More. Making use of newly-discovered letters and poems, Andrews provides a full analysis of the breakdown of the two writers' affiliation and compares it to other labouring-class relationships based on patronage.