Many people today first encounter staged Shakespeare in an open-air setting. In Australia, picnic Shakespeares seem particularly suited to the predilections of contemporary audiences and the plays have been performed in a remarkably varied range of sites. Shakespeare has been transported to gardens, parks, caves, mountains and beaches all over the country, in a place that for Shakespeare and his contemporaries was completely unknown. Why does the anomaly of performing Shakespeare in Australian space exert such a strong appeal? This book traces the history of open-air Shakespeare production in Australia from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day and suggests that the industry reflects important changes in the ways contemporary Australians relate to both their environment and to Shakespeare. It provides striking evidence of the diversity of localised responses to Shakespeare that exist outside Britain, and contributes to our understanding of Shakespeare's changing global impact.

This book writes a performance history of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most ambiguous play, from 1606 to the present. It observes the choices that actors, directors, designers, musicians and adapters have made each time they have brought the play's thoughts on power, race, masculinity, regime change, exoticism, love, dotage and delinquency into alignment with a new present. Informed by close attention to theatre records - promptbooks, stage managers' reports, reviews - it offers in-depth analyses of fifteen international productions by (among others) the Royal Shakespeare Company, Citizens Theatre Glasgow, Northern Broadsides, Berliner Ensemble and Toneelgroep Amsterdam. It ends seeing Shakespeare's black Egyptian Queen Cleopatra - whited-out in performance for centuries - restored to the contemporary stage. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will be of interest to students, academics, actors, directors and general readers alike. -- .

The Scottish Invention of English Literature explores the origins of the teaching of English literature in the academy. It demonstrates how the subject began in eighteenth-century Scottish universities before being exported to America and other countries. The emergence of English as an institutionalised university subject was linked to the search for distinctive cultural identities throughout the English-speaking world. This book explores the role the discipline played in administering restraints on the expression of indigenous literary forms, and shows how the growing professionalisation of English as a subject offered a breeding ground for academics and writers with an interest in native identity and cultural nationalism. This book is a comprehensive account of the historical origins of the university subject of English literature and provides a wealth of new material on its particular Scottish provenance.

This book showcases cutting-edge research papers from the XIIth international Milton Symposium hosted by the University of Strasbourg, 17-21 June 2019. Strasbourg is home to Martin Bucer, the Protestant reformer from whom Milton drew support for his theory of divorce, and to Gustave Dore, the famous French illustrator of Paradise Lost. The 26 essays gathered in the present volume are by international scholars, including ones from countries outside the Anglosphere, young or experienced. Opening with a tribute to all Milton symposia organized since 1981, the book falls into eight parts, covering all aspects of Milton studies. "Milton and Materiality" starts with an essay by James G. Turner on personal bodily reference in Milton. In "Milton's Style and Language", the polemicist's use of satire is scrutinized and his relation to enthusiasm is examined, while a new light is shed on his sonnets. In "Milton's Prose", in a rare essay on Observations upon the Articles of Peace (1649), David H. Sacks compares Milton's view of Ireland with what he thought of Russia, delving into the notions of "civilization" and "tyranny". Then the reader will find six essays on Paradise Lost, including one by Hiroko Sano, followed by three essays on his minor poems by promising scholars. The debate on the authorship of De Doctrina Christiana is reopened, with many stylometric tables and charts. A new track leads us to Silesia. In "Reception Studies", two Brazilian contributors study Milton through the lens of French philosophers, and the next essay by Christophe Tournu focuses on the first French verse translation of Paradise Lost. The concluding part, "Milton and his Audience", considers Milton's relationship to his readers, music in Haydn's Creation, while Beverley Sherry analyses portraits of Milton and his works in stained glass.

This volume explores Shakespeare's interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience's most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning than it does in modern English, and was often associated with ideas such as mercy, compassion, charity, pardon, and clemency. This cluster of ideas provides Shakespeare's characters with a rich range of possibilities for engaging some of humanity's deepest emotional commitments, in which pity can be seen as a powerful stimulus for fostering social harmony, love, and forgiveness. However, Shakespeare also dramatizes pity's potential for deception, when the appeal to pity is not genuine, and conceals contrary motives of vengeance and cruelty. As Shakespeare's works remain relevant for modern audiences and readers, so too does his dramatization of the powerful ways in which emotions such as pity remain essential to our understanding of our shared humanity and of our awareness of compassion's role in our own private and civic lives.

Using a framework based on J. L. Austin's understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer's work on how things are done with words in Milton's and Blake's poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake's epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard's Song, Blake's Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake's brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called 'one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry'.

Analyses a wide range of early modern literary works and their references to Islam Includes analyses of some iconic works. Draws attention to the significance of some less well-known known works. Examines interface between literature, politics, and culture. Uses a range of theoretical tools to identify trends against their sociopolitical background. Critiques assumptions of racial and religious superiority. Draws out contemporary implications for today's world.

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature>/cite> tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans' embedment in the world. A confluence of cultural factors produced the relevant changes. Of paramount significance was the rapid spread of literacy in England and across Europe: reading transformed the relationship between self and world, retooled moral reasoning, and even altered human anatomy. This book pursues the salutary possibilities, including the ecological benefits, of this redesigned self by advancing fresh readings of texts by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, and Margaret Cavendish. The eco-self offers certain refinements to ecological theory by renewing appreciation for the rational, deliberative functions that distinguish humans from other species.

In 1816, the British government did something no one had ever done before: it introduced the first official gold standard in history. Through a close analysis of the pamphlets, reviews, lectures, journalism, editorials, poems, and novels surrounding the gold standard, this book examines its significance to the culture and literature of Romantic-era Britain. The gold standard was not a material object or universal concept, but a self-reflexive discourse that raised fundamental questions about knowledge, value, and social life. While politicians and financial experts believed that gold was the key to the nation's economic confidence, writers such as Ricardo, Malthus, Coleridge, Shelley, Austen, and Scott transformed the debates on the standard into a new disposition reflecting the difficulties and ambivalence of modern commerce: embarrassment. In this comprehensive and authoritative study, the author demonstrates the importance of monetary controversies to the story of Romanticism and of literary analysis to our understanding of money.

The Martin Marprelate tracts are the most famous pamphlets of the English Renaissance; to their contemporaries they were the most notorious. Printed in 1588 and 1589 on a secret press carted across the English countryside from one sympathetic household to another, the seven tracts attack the Church of England, particularly its bishops (hence the pseudonym, Mar-prelate), and advocate a Presbyterian system of church government. Scandalously witty, racy, and irreverent, the Marprelate tracts are the finest prose satires of their era. Their colloquial style and playfully self-dramatizing manner influenced the fiction and theatre of the Elizabethan Golden Age. This text was the first fully annotated edition of the tracts to appear in almost a century. A lightly modernized text makes Martin Marprelate's famous voice easily accessible, and a full introduction details the background, sources, production, authorship, and seventeenth-century afterlife of the tracts.

Originally published in 1990 by Routledge, Dictionary of Riddles is a collection of nearly 1500 of the most cryptic and entertaining riddles from history. Drawn from sources throughout the world, the collection ranges from earthy medieval jokes about fleas, worms and vegetables to the sophisticated puzzles composed by literary figures from Schiller, Swift, Voltaire, Rousseau and Cervantes to Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book traces the history of riddles from their origins in antiquity through the golden age of the Renaissance, to their decline into the nursery and the first few signs of their modern revival, and draws together all the strands of the riddling art. Dictionary of Riddles received a Special Commendation in Reference Review's Best Specialist Reference Books of 1990 Awards.

The book centres around an historical figure that has received little critical attention in the past, broaching a relatively new field of masculinity studies. It traverses both unstudied material and recognisable works by constating the artefacts of Robert against those of more famous contemporaries (Philip Sidney, Robert Devereaux, Prince Henry Frederick). As part of its contribution to the emerging discourse on Renaissance masculinity, this book provides a point of view of manly reputation that goes beyond a binary comparison to femininity, or a contrast between the behaviours of men of different social classes. By keeping the focus narrow (only titled peerage), masculinity is understood in terms of historical influence, monarchical power and progressions of philosophy, morality and self-reflection. Such a text is ideal for students of Early Modern literature or history because it provides them necessary context of the period as well as specific information which will help them in the interpretive analysis of literary and visual texts. This is not just a work of literary analysis - it is an interdisciplinary study which includes forays into miniature portraits, masques, clothing as well as works of literature.

This unique book examines the psychanalysis of madness and trauma through an extended discussion of Tristram Shandy. Crossover between literary studies and psychoanalysis. Francoise Davoine explores the entire novel, taking a psychoanalytic lens to the monologue by Tristram's embryo in the opening chapter, the war traumas of Captain Toby and Corporal Trim, and several key themes including confinement, love and history. The book presents Shandean wit as a valuable tool in therapeutic work.

This fasincating new book seeks to explain an important and unanswered question: how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. It argues that literary works (cultural media) are not secondary in our perceptions of disease, but are among the primary determinants of physical experience. In order to explain the apparent disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, Lawlor examines literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, and covers a wide range of authors and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie).

The letters of the great eighteenth-century historian of music and man of letters, Dr Charles Burney (1726-1814), friend of Samuel Johnson and Joseph Haydn, are here collected and published in chronological order for the first time. This initial instalment of a projected four-volume edition of the Letters, edited from manuscript and other sources, opens with the earliest surviving letter, written in 1751 when Burney was an obscure country organist. It concludes in December 1784 with the death of Samuel Johnson. These are the letters of the active years which saw Burney's remarkable rise to the head of his chosen profession, music. They chronicle his musical travels in Europe, and his literary activities as a scholar and author of the Continental Tours, the first two volumes of his famous History of Music, and the Commemoration of Handel, written at the behest of George III. They also document Burney's membership in the celebrated literary coterie at Streatham, and the emergence as a novelist of his daughter Fanny, whose Evelina and Cecilia appeared in these years.

In this, the first full-length study of Vico's highly original autobiography, Verene discusses its place in the history of autobiography generally, and shows it to be the first work of modern intellectual autobiography which uses a genetic method. The author views the autobiography as a work in which Vico applies the principles of human history discussed in New Science, making the telling of his own life an application and verification of his own philosophy. He places Vico's autobiography within the general development of the genre, considering it in relation to Augustine's Confessions, Descartes's Discourse, and Rousseau's Confessions. The author shows Vico to be not only the founder of the philosophy of history, but also the originator of a philosophical art of self-narrative which is the response by a modern thinker to the ancient problem of self-knowledge.

This is the fifth volume in a ten-volume series of the critical old-spelling texts of the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, in which the texts are established on modern bibliographical principles. Each play is introduced by a discussion of the text, has variant readings in footnotes, and is followed by full textual notes and lists of press-variants, emendations of accidentals and historical collations.

This is the ninth volume in the definitive series of critical, old-spelling texts of the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, in which the texts are established on modern bibliographical principles. This volume contains six plays written by Fletcher and his collaborators, Philip Massinger and William Rowley. Each play is introduced by a discussion of the text and authorship, and is accompanied by detailed textual notes, a list of press-variants, emendations of accidentals and a historical collation. The plays are The Sea Voyage, The Double Marriage, The Prophetess, The Little French Lawyer, The Elder Brother and The Maid in the Mill.

Critics since the eighteenth century have puzzled over the form of James Thomson's composite long poem, The Seasons (1730, 1744, 1746), its generically hybrid make-up, and its relationship to established genres both Classical and modern. The textual condition of the work is complicated by the fact that it started as a stand-alone poem, Winter (1726), but was subsequently expanded-as part of a revision process that lasted almost two decades-through the addition of three further seasons poems. Transforming from primarily devotional poem to georgic account of the role of man's laboring role in the creation, the meaning of The Seasons shifted with each addition of new material. Each revision introduced diverse subject matter while existing material was reorganized and occasionally moved from one season installment to another. The Genres of Thomson's The Seasons is the first collection of essays exclusively devoted to the study of the work's formal heterogeneity, polyvocality, and polygeneric character. All contributions examine the different modes (descriptive, reflective, pastoral, hymnal, amatory, epic, georgic, dramatic), discourses (political, sentimental, scientific), and kinds that cooperate to make up the different installments and variants of The Seasons. They probe the multifarious interactions between different genres and modes and how a renewed focus on the form of Thomson's long poem will result in an understanding of the processual character of The Seasons as a synthesizing simulacrum of various discourses and theories of composition. The volume's essays map the generic anatomy of the poem in its different incarnations. They shed light on the poet's conception of the descriptive long poem and his engaging with formal traditions that would have enabled contemporaneous readers to conceive of The Seasons as an assimilating and learned work to be read through both the works of the Classics and moderns. Contributions revisit models explaining the structural complexity of The Seasons, proposing others in their stead, and consider Thomson as the author of a long poem in relation to other poets both English and (in a transnational study) Swedish. The poem is furthermore contextualized in terms of sexuality and animal studies.

This book examines a pivotal moment in the history of science and women's place in it. Meredith Ray offers the first in-depth study and complete English translation of the fascinating correspondence between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617), a natural philosopher and author of the epic poem, Scanderbeide (1623), and famed astronomer, Galileo Galilei. Their correspondence, undertaken soon after the publication of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, reveals how Sarrocchi approached Galileo for his help revising her epic poem, offering, in return, her endorsement of his recent telescopic discoveries. Situated against the vibrant and often contentious backdrop of early modern intellectual and academic culture, their letters illustrate, in miniature, that the Scientific Revolution was, in fact, the product of a long evolution with roots in the deep connections between literary and scientific exchanges.

"The Duchess of Malfi" is one of the major tragedies of the early modern period and remains popular in the theatre as well as in the classroom. The story of the Duchess's secret marriage and the cruel revenge of her brothers has fascinated and appalled audiences for centuries.

This new Arden edition offers readers a comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, critical and performance history. The text is modernized and edited to the highest scholarly standards, with textual notes and commentary notes on the same page for ease of reference. Leah Marcus is the Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. "The Duchess of Malfi" is one of the major tragedies of the early modern period and remains popular in the theatre as well as in the classroom. The story of the Duchess's secret marriage and the cruel revenge of her brothers has fascinated and appalled audiences for centuries.

This new Arden edition offers readers a comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, critical and performance history. The text is modernized and edited to the highest scholarly standards, with textual notes and commentary notes on the same page for ease of reference. "The Duchess of Malfi" is one of the major tragedies of the early modern period and remains popular in the theatre as well as in the classroom. The story of the Duchess's secret marriage and the cruel revenge of her brothers has fascinated and appalled audiences for centuries.

This new Arden edition offers readers a comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, critical and performance history. The text is modernized and edited to the highest scholarly standards, with textual notes and commentary notes on the same page for ease of reference. "Here's a good idea, "The Arden Shakespeare," purveyor of handsome editions of individual plays, now expands the brand with "Arden Early Modern Drama." Scholars increasingly explore Jacobethan plays, and a series that takes them just as seriously as the Shakespeare canon is very welcome. You'll find the same small design, ample font size, enthusiastic historical/cultural context, full performance history and munificent annotation. For students, actors and less specialized lovers of Renaissance doings, these editions may become the luxe choice. Leah S. Marcus' lively introduction situates it in Jacobean London...Wonderful illustrations...I hope the series will lure directors to stage these alluring plays."--"Plays International"

Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.

Bradford Mudge's book looks at the origins of literary pornography in English, presenting a comprehensive overview of the complex issues surrounding pornography in the eighteenth century, as it appears in fiction, poetry, criticism, medical manuals, and illustrations. Mudge frames these battles in the context of contemporary feminine argument, while closely reading the moment in which the lines of battle were first drawn.

Aphra Behn??'s novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the most widely studied works of seventeenth-century literature, because of its powerful representation of slavery and complex portrayal of ways in which differing races and cultures - European, Black African, and Native American - observe and misinterpret each other. This edition presents a new edition of Oroonoko, with unprecedentedly full and informative commentary, along with complete texts of three major British seventeenth-century works concerned with race and colonialism: Henry Neville??'s The Isle of Pines (1668), Behn??'s Abdelazer (1676), and Thomas Southerne??'s tragedy Oroonoko (1696). It combines these with a rich anthology of European discussions of slavery, racial difference, and colonial conquest from the mid-sixteenth century to the time of Behn??'s death. Many are taken from important works that have not hitherto been easily available, and the collection offers an unrivaled resource for studying the culture that produced Britain??'s first major fictions of slavery.

Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a collection of lyric poems on sacred and profane love and other subjects, has traditionally been viewed as reflecting the conflicted nature of its author. However, award winning author Thomas E. Peterson argues that Petrarch's Fragmenta is an ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures. By concentrating on the poem's reliance on Christian tenets and distinguishing between author, narrator and character, Peterson exposes the underlying narrative and theological unity of the work. Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity, and biblical intertextuality, Peterson conducts a rigorous examination of the Fragmenta's poetic language. This combination of stylistic and philological analysis recasts Petrarch's poetry in a new light revealing its radically innovative and liberating character.