This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

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.

Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature. After Galen, the predominant medical paradigm of the period envisaged a self governed by humors, literally embodying inner emotion by locating and explaining human passion within a taxonomy of internal organs and fluids. It thus gave a profoundly material emphasis to behavioral phenomena, giving the poets of the period a vital and compelling vocabulary for describing the ways in which selves inhabit and experience bodies.

This book reflects on what medieval Latin authors don't say about the sex nobody had-or maybe some had-and about how they don't say it. Their silences are artfully constructed, according to a rhetorical tradition reaching back to classical practice and theory. The strategy of preterition calls attention to something scandalous precisely by claiming to pass over it. Because it gestures toward what's missing from the text itself, it epitomizes a destabilizing reliance on audience reaction that informs the whole of classical rhetoric's technology of persuasion. Medieval Latin preterition invites our growing awareness, when we attend to it closely, that silence is not single, but that silences are multiple. Their multiplicity consists not in what preterition is, but in what it does. Preterition's multiple silences enabled subversive interpretations by individuals and communities marginalized under dominant regimes of sexuality-as they still do today.

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.

In the early modern period, there have been a vigorous debate in the public arena on the nature of women and their place in society. For instance, most women had been excluded from inheritance. The author of this work is shedding light on how the notion of inheritance intrudes into the literature produced by women of the period. She analyses the tropes of inheritance and appropriation as they are evidenced in the works of women from the upper strata of society - women such as Mary (Sidney) Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wroth, both scions of the renowned Sidney family - and also those produced by those from lower down in the social spectrum, such as Aemilia Lanyer and Isabella Whitney.

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature interrogates the notion of a literary 'renaissance' in Dublin. Through detailed case studies of print and literature in Renaissance Dublin, the volume covers innovative new ground, including quantitative analysis of print production in Ireland, unique insight into the city's literary communities and considerations of literary genres that flourished in early modern Dublin. The volume's broad focus and extended timeline offer an unprecedented and comprehensive consideration of the features of renaissance that may be traced to the city from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. With contributions from leading scholars in the area of early modern Ireland, including Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, students and academics will find the book an invaluable resource for fully appreciating those elements that contributed to the complex literary character of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature. -- .

This book offers an original study of the debates which arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature. Paul Keen shows how these debates were situated at the intersection of the French Revolution and a more gradual revolution in information and literacy reflecting the aspirations of the professional classes in eighteenth-century England. He shows these movements converging in hostility to a new class of readers, whom critics saw as dangerously subject to the effects of seditious writings or the vagaries of literary fashion. The first part of the book concentrates on the dominant arguments about the role of literature and the status of the author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about working-class activists, radical women authors, and the Orientalists, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Through detailed readings of major authors, including Castiglione, Montaigne, Bacon and Corneille, David Posner examines the tensions between literary or imaginative representations of "nobility," and the increasingly problematic historical position of the nobility themselves. Situated at the intersection of rhetorical and historical theories of interpretation, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of how literature can both analyze and shape social identity.

This book explores the unedited material contained in the Hawthornden manuscripts of William Fowler, a Scottish poet attached to the court of Queen Anna of Denmark between 1590 and 1612. The material is representative of Fowler's ephemeral and occasional production, largely unknown to modern scholars. Through the lenses of the Hawthornden fragments, this book engages in the exploration of one of the "cultural places of the European Renaissance", represented by the extensive use of emblems and other literary devices, and by the use of manuscript copies to circulate them. The discourse mainly focuses on the Jacobean courtly establishment in the first decade of the seventeenth century, from the point of view of a Scottish insider. By focusing on the intellectual makeup of the court in the newly united Great Britain, this work aims at bridging manuscript scholarship and literary studies with a wider perspective on contemporary society, politics and culture.

This collection of essays by experts in Renaissance and Gothic studies tracks the lines of connection between Gothic sensibilities and the discursive network of the Renaissance. The texts covered encompass poetry, epic narratives, ghost stories, prose dialogues, political pamphlets and Shakespeare's texts, read alongside those of other playwrights. The authors show that the Gothic sensibility addresses subversive fantasies of transgression, be this in regard to gender (troubling stable notions of masculinity and femininity), social orders (challenging hegemonic, patriarchal or sovereign power), or disciplinary discourses (dictating what is deemed licit and what illicit or deviant). They relate these issues back to the early modern period as a moment of transition, in which categories of individual, gendered, racial and national identity began to emerge, and connect the religious and the pictorial turn within early modern textual production to a reassessment of Gothic culture. -- .

James Watt's historically grounded account of Gothic fiction, first published in 1999, takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterized at times by antagonistic relations between various writers or works. Central to his argument about these works' writing and reception is a nuanced understanding of their political import: Walpole's attempt to forge an aristocratic identity, the loyalist affiliations of many neglected works of the 1790s, a reconsideration of the subversive reputation of The Monk, and the ways in which Radcliffean romance proved congenial to conservative critics. Watt concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and examines the process by which the Gothic came to be defined as a monolithic tradition, in a way that continues to exert a powerful hold.

The first applied research volume in Scottish Romanticism, this collection foregrounds the concept of progress as 'improvement' as a constitutive theme of Scottish writing during the long eighteenth century. It explores improvement as the animating principle behind Scotland's post-1707 project of modernization, a narrative both shaped and reflected in the literary sphere. It represents a vital moment in Romantic studies, as a 'four-nations' interrogation of the British context reaches maturity. Equally, the volume contributes to a central concern in the study of Scottish culture, amplifying a critical synthesis of Romanticism and Enlightenment. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781351056427_oachapter9.pdf

Shakespearean Temporalities addresses a critical neglect in Early Modern Performance and Shakespeare Studies, revising widely prevailing and long-standing assumptions about the performance and reception of history on the early modern stage. Demonstrating that theatre, at the turn of the seventeenth century, thrived on an intense fascination with perceived tensions between (medieval) past and (early modern) present, this volume uncovers a dimension of historical drama that has been largely neglected due to a strong focus on nationhood and a predilection for 'topical' readings. It moreover reassesses genre conventions by venturing beyond the threshold of the supposed "death of the history play," in 1603. Closely analysing a broad range of Shakespeare's historical drama, it explores the dramatic techniques that allow the theatre to perform historical distance. An experience of historical contingency through an immersion in a world ontologically related yet temporally removed is thus revealed as a major appeal of historical drama and a striking aspect of Shakespeare's history plays. With a focus on performance, the experience of playgoers, and the dynamics that resulted from the collective production of dramatic historiography by competing companies, the book offers the first analysis of what can be referred to as Shakespeare's dramaturgy of historical temporality.

Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights gained as a result of a major, ongoing Digital Humanities project, this study posits a historical continuum of casual quotation which informs Shakespeare's own works as well as their afterlives. In this groudbreaking, rigorous analysis, Dr. Regula Trillini offers readers a new approach and understanding of the use and impact quotes like the infamous, 'To be or not to be,' have had througout literary history.

King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across the late medieval and early modern periods, their cultural influence extending from Robin Hood ballads to Shakespearean national histories. This study represents the first detailed exploration of this rich and fascinating literary tradition, tracing its development across deeply politicized fifteenth-century comic tales and early modern ballads. The medieval King and Commoner tales depict an incognito king becoming lost in the forest and encountering a disgruntled commoner who complains of class oppression and poaches the king's deer. This is an upside-down world of tricksters, violence, and politicized feasting that critiques and deconstructs medieval hierarchy. The commoners of these tales utilize the inversion of the medieval carnival, crowning themselves as liminal mock kings in the forest while threatening to rend and devour a body politic that would oppress them. These tales are complex and ambiguous, reimagining the socio-political upheaval of the late medieval period in sophisticated ruminations on class relations. By contrast, the early modern ballads and chapbooks see the tradition undergo a conservative metamorphosis. Suppressing its more radical elements amid a celebration of proto-panoptical kings, the tradition remerges as royalist propaganda in which the king watches his thankful subjects through the keyhole.

Contains fourteen of Thomas Birrell's articles published between 1950 and 2006 / Chapters examine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English catholic history / Will appeal to all those interested in early modern history and the history of religion

Shakespeare's plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find-without having to do extensive research-that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare's World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.

This innovative study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand discusses plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood and Massinger, pairing them with writings about the finances of royalty and aristocrats, privateers, theatrical entrepreneurs and debtors.

In early modern England, boys and girls learned to be masculine or feminine as they learned to read and write. This 1999 book explores how gender differences, instilled through specific methods of instruction in literacy, were scrutinised in the English public theatre. Close readings of plays from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to Thomas Dekker's Whore of Babylon, and of poems, didactic treatises and autobiographical writings from the same period, offer a richly textured analysis of the interaction between didactic precepts, literary models, and historical men and women. At the cross-roads between literary studies and social and cultural history, Eve Sanders' research offers insights into poems, plays, and first-person narratives (including works by women writers, such as Mary Sidney and Anne Clifford) and into the social conflicts that shaped individuals as the writers and readers of such texts.

This book studies the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period when the values of a redefined patriarchy converged with the motives of an expansionist economy. Joan Pong Linton argues that the emergent romance figure of the husband (subsuming the roles of soldier and merchant) embodies the ideal of productive masculinity with which Englishmen defined their identity in America, justifying their activities of piracy, trade and settlement. At the same time, colonial narratives, in putting this masculinity to the test, often contradict and raise doubts about the ideal, and these doubts prompt individual romances to a self-conscious reflection on English cultural assumptions and colonial motives. Hence colonial experience reveals not just the 'romance of empire' but also the impact of the New World on English identity.

The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.