Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films' socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare's "words, words, words" into film's particular grammar and rhetoric

Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World explores the representation of political, economic, military, religious, and juridical power in texts and artifacts from early modern Spain and her American viceroyalties. In addition to analyzing the dynamics of power in written texts, chapters also examine pieces of material culture including coats of arms, coins, paintings and engravings. As the essays demonstrate, many of these objects work to transform the amorphous concept of power into a material reality with considerable symbolic dimensions subject to, and dependent on, interpretation. With its broad approach to the discourses of power, Signs of Power brings together studies of both canonical literary works as well as more obscure texts and objects. The position of the works studied with respect to the official center of power also varies. Whereas certain essays focus on the ways in which portrayals of power champion the aspirations of the Spanish Crown, other essays attend to voices of dissent that effectively call into question that authority.

Deux cent cinquante ans apres la mort de Montesquieu, de nouvelles questions se posent. Ce volume presente en trois volets les dernieres recherches sur Montesquieu, suscitees par la nouvelle edition des OEuvres completes (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation). Avec les Lettres persanes apparait la necessite d'analyser les modes de lecture induits par les dispositifs editoriaux (paratexte, nouvelle edition 'augmentee et diminuee' en 1721, table des matieres ou des sommaires, usages typographiques du dix-huitieme ou du dix-neuvieme siecle) voire par la censure romaine. On voit ainsi combien hier et aujourd'hui la lecture est tributaire de facteurs jusque-la meconnus: les Lettres persanes sont decidement un texte redoutable... L'Esprit des lois est scrute d'abord dans son ecriture meme, grace a la mise en relation du manuscrit conserve a la Bibliotheque nationale de France et d'un enorme corpus de manuscrits et d'archives desormais disponible, mais disperse dans toute l'Europe (oeuvres inachevees, correspondance, actes notaries, etc.): les strates de composition et de redaction sont reperables et datables de maniere tres precise grace a l'identification des 'mains' des secretaires de Montesquieu, ce qui permet de reconstituer une methode de travail et une chronologie de composition sensiblement differentes de celles qui etaient admises depuis les travaux fondateurs de Robert Shackleton. Cela conduit a evoquer differents aspects complementaires de l'activite de Montesquieu, qui necessitaient une mise au point (sur la pretendue cecite de Montesquieu, sur 'L'invocation aux Muses' ou la chronologie generale des secretaires). Enfin, ce sont les themes essentiels de Montesquieu, les idees-forces autour desquelles se constitue l'oeuvre majeure, qui sont examines. Le droit comme expression d'une rationalite mais aussi comme prolongement des premiers temps de la monarchie (avec la notion de constitution), l'economie comme champ nouveau offert a la reflexion politique, et un traitement de l'histoire qui offre de fructueux rapprochements avec Voltaire: tels sont les modes d'approche d'une pensee avec laquelle s'est ouvert un horizon radicalement nouveau.

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or "heritage" reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, "English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom" shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare's age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.

When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind-pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

Producing Women's Poetry is the first specialist study to consider English-language poetry by women across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Gillian Wright explores not only the forms and topics favoured by women, but also how their verse was enabled and shaped by their textual and biographical circumstances. She combines traditional literary and bibliographical approaches to address women's complex use of manuscript and print and their relationships with the male-generated genres of the traditional literary canon, as well as the role of agents such as scribes, publishers and editors in helping to determine how women's poetry was preserved, circulated and remembered. Wright focuses on key figures in the emerging canon of early modern women's writing, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, alongside the work of lesser-known poets Anne Southwell and Mary Monck, to create a new and compelling account of early modern women's literary history.

The name of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is inscribed in almost every flora and fauna published from the mid-eighteenth century onwards; in this respect he is virtually immortal. In this book a group of specialists argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean science and de-centre Linnaeus the man by exploring the ideas, practices and people connected to his taxonomic innovations. Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the 'Linnaean workshop': paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus's work in Paris, Koenigsberg, Edinburgh and beyond offer a window on the local contexts of knowledge transfer, including new perspectives on the history of anthropology and stadial theory. The global implications and negotiated nature of these intellectual, social and material developments are further investigated in chapters tracing the experiences and encounters of Linnaean travellers in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Through focusing on the circulation of Linnaean knowledge and placing it within the context of eighteenth-century globalization, authors provide innovative and important contributions to our understanding of the early modern history of science.

This book explores significant problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe. Maximillian E. Novak investigates a number of elements in Defoe's work by probing his interest in rendering of reality (what Defoe called "the Thing itself"). Novak examines Defoe's interest in the relationship between prose fiction and painting, as well as the various ways in which Defoe's woks were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. In this book, Novak attempts to consider the uniqueness and imaginativeness of various aspects of Defoe's writings including his way of evoking the seeming inability of language to describe a vivid scene or moments of overwhelming emotion, his attraction to the fiction of islands and utopias, his gradual development of the concepts surrounding Crusoe's cave, his fascination with the horrors of cannibalism, and some of the ways he attempted to defend his work and serious fiction in general. Most of all, Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives establishes the complexity and originality of Defoe as a writer of fiction.

The notion of 'selfhood' conjures up images of self-sufficiency, integrity, introspectiveness, and autonomy - characteristics typically associated with 'modernity.' The seventeenth century marks the crucial transition to a new form of 'bourgeois' selfhood, although the concept goes back to the pre-modern and early modern period. A richly interdisciplinary collection, Space and Self integrates perspectives from history, history of literature, and history of art to link the issue of selfhood to the new and vital literature on space.

As Space and Self shows, there have at all times been multiple paths and alternative possibilities for forming identities, marking personhood, and experiencing life as a concrete, singular individual. Positioning self and space as specific and evolving constructs, a diverse group of contributors explore how persons become embodied in particular places or inscribed in concrete space. Space and Self thus sets the terms for current discussion of these topics and provides new approaches to studying their cultural specificity.

Breaking new ground in the study of tragedy, early modern theatre, and literary London, Metropolitan Tragedy demonstrates that early modern tragedy emerged from the juncture of radical changes in London's urban fabric and the city's judicial procedures. Marissa Greenberg argues that plays by Shakespeare, Milton, Massinger, and others rework classical conventions to represent the city as a locus of suffering and loss while they reflect on actual sources of injustice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: structural upheaval, imperial ambition, and political tyranny. Drawing on a rich archive of printed and manuscript sources, including numerous images of England's capital, Greenberg reveals the competing ideas about the metropolis that mediated responses to theatrical tragedy. The first study of early modern tragedy as an urban genre, Metropolitan Tragedy advances our understanding of the intersections between genre and history.

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

Beginning around 1559 and continuing through 1642, writers in England, Scotland, and France found themselves pre-occupied with an unusual sort of crime, a crime without a name which today we call 'terrorism'. These crimes were especially dangerous because they were aimed at violating not just the law but the fabric of law itself; and yet they were also, from an opposite point of view, especially hopeful, for they seemed to have the power of unmaking a systematic injustice and restoring a nation to its 'ancient liberty'. The Bible and the annals of classical history were full of examples: Ehud assassinating King Eglon of Moab; Samson bringing down the temple in Gaza; Catiline arousing a conspiracy of terror in republican Rome; Marcus Brutus leading a conspiracy against the life of Julius Caesar. More recent history provided examples too: legends about Mehmed II and his concubine Irene; the assassination in Florence of Duke Alessandro de 'Medici, by his cousin Lorenzino. Terrorism Before the Letter recounts how these stories came together in the imaginations of writers to provide a system of 'enabling fictions', in other words a 'mythography', that made it possible for people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to think (with and about) terrorism, to engage in it or react against it, to compose stories and devise theories in response to it, even before the word and the concept were born. Terrorist violence could be condoned or condemned, glorified or demonised. But it was a legacy of political history and for a while an especially menacing form of aggression, breaking out in assassinations, abductions, riots, and massacres, and becoming a spectacle of horror and hope on the French and British stage, as well as the main theme of numerous narratives and lyrical poems. This study brings to life the controversies over 'terrorism before the letter' in the early modern period, and it explicates the discourse that arose around it from a rhetorical as well as a structural point of view. Kenneth Burke's 'pentad of motives' helps organise the material, and show how complex the concept of terrorist action could be. Terrorism is usually thought to be a modern phenomenon. But it is actually a foundational figure of the European imagination, at once a reality and a myth, and it has had an impact on political life since the beginnings of Europe itself. Terrorism is a violence that communicates, and the dynamics of communication itself reveal it special powers and inevitable failures.

This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters' interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another's expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters' discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and early modern portrayals of the body and mind and explicate the role they play in forging an intimate rapport.

Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon.

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 Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. Volume 2 examines the period from1750-1820, which was a crucial period in the development of the novel in English. Not only was it the time of Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and Scott, but it also saw the establishment and definition of the novel as we know it, as well as the emergence of a number of subgenres, several of which remain to this day. Conventionally however, it has been one of the least studied areas-seen as a falling off from the heyday of Richardson and Fielding, or merely a prelude to the great Victorian novelists. This volume takes full advantage of recent major advances in scholarly bibliography, new critical assessments, and the fresh availability of long-neglected fictional works, to offer a new mapping and appraisal. The opening section, as well as some remarkable later chapters, consider historical conditions underlying the production, circulation, and reception of fiction during these seventy years, a period itself marked by a rapid growth in output and expansion in readership. Other chapters cover the principal forms, movements, and literary themes of the period, with individual contributions on the four major novelists (named above), seen in historical context, as well as others on adjacent fields such as the shorter tale, magazine fiction, children's literature, and drama. The volume also views the novel in the light of other major institutions of modern literary culture, including book reviewing and the reprint trade, all of which played a part in advancing a sense of the novel as a defining feature of the British cultural landscape. A focus on 'global' literature and imported fiction in two concluding chapters in turn reflects a broader concern for transnat onal literary studies in general.

It was not only in his histories that Voltaire thought, worried and wrote about history. In fact, many of Voltaire's most provocative and tantalising remarks on history lie outside the province of the so-called OEuvres historiques, in the vast expanses of his complete works, and historical events and historical figures elicit some of his most imaginative writing. Voltaire's propensity to write about history in works that are not histories sheds new light on his historiographical thought and temper. The historian that emerges from these pages is, by turns, a feverish, bed-ridden man haunted by the St Bartholomew massacre (an overwhelming preoccupation of Voltaire's, although it receives only cursory attention in the prose histories) an inspired poet mythologising Henri IV's epic adventures, a bawdy satirist amused by Joan of Arc, a raconteur nourished by historical anecdotes, even a doting uncle winking at his niece as he elaborates a philosophy of history. In all these forms and at all these times, an interest in history is integral and abiding. Far from being marginal or oblique, these works yield important insights into a pervasive Voltairean sense of history which finds in these different forms both the freedoms and the traditions - and indeed often the readers - denied to the OEuvres historiques. Moreover, innovative works like the Henriade and Candide, which fall into this category, prove as influential to historians as Voltaire's recognised histories. Voltaire's prodigious energy and versatility in fields other than history have probably harmed his reputation as a historian when, already in the eighteenth century, historians were increasingly expected to be specialists. This study shows that Voltaire's historiographical thought ranges across areas and texts artificially sundered by subsequent editorial compartmentalisations, and it reveals a restlessly complex, inventive writer confronting history in numerous different guises.

This book frames British Romanticism as the artistic counterpart to a revolution in subjectivity occasioned by the rise of "The Rule of Law" and as a traumatic response to the challenges mounted against that ideal after the French Revolution. The bulk of this study focuses on Romantic literary replies to these events (primarily in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake), but its latter stages also explore how Romantic poetry's construction of the autonomous reading subject continues to influence legal and literary critical reactions to two modern crises in the rule of law: European Fascism and the continuing instability of legal interpretive strategy.

Jonathan Swift's influence on the writings and politics of England and Ireland was reinforced by a combination of contradictory forces: an authoritarian attachment to tradition and rule, and a vivid responsiveness to the disorders of a modernity he resisted and yet helped to create. He was, perhaps even more than Pope, a dominant voice of his times. The rich variety of the literary culture to which he belonged shows the penetration of his ideas, personality and style. This is true of writers who were his friends and admirers (Pope), of adversaries (Mandeville, Johnson), of several who became great ironists in his shadow (Gibbon, Austen), and of some surprising examples of Swiftian afterlife (Chatterton). Claude Rawson, leading scholar of the works of Swift, brings together recent essays, as well as classic earlier work extensively revised, to offer fresh insights into an era when Swift's voice was a pervasive presence.

Severed heads emblemise the vexed relationship between the aesthetic and the atrocious. During the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, colonisers such as Edmund Spenser, Sir John Harington and Sir George Carew wrote or translated epic romances replete with beheadings even as they countenanced - or conducted - similar deeds on the battlefield. This study juxtaposes the archival record of actual violence with literary depictions of decapitation to explore how violence gets transcribed into art. Patricia Palmer brings the colonial world of Renaissance England face to face with Irish literary culture. She surveys a broad linguistic and geographical range of texts, from translations of Virgil's Aeneid to the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Ercilla and makes Irish-language responses to conquest and colonisation available in readable translations. In doing so, she offers literary and political historians access not only to colonial brutality but also to its ethical reservations, while providing access to the all-too-rarely heard voices of the dispossessed.

Winner of the Roma Gill Prize 2015, Marlowe's Literary Scepticism re-evaluates the representation of religion in Christopher Marlowe's plays and poems, demonstrating the extent to which his literary engagement with questions of belief was shaped by the virulent polemical debates that raged in post-Reformation Europe. Offering new readings of under-studied works such as the poetic translations and a fresh perspective on well-known plays such as Doctor Faustus, this book focuses on Marlowe's depiction of the religious frauds denounced by his contemporaries. It identifies Marlowe as one of the earliest writers to acknowledge the practical value of religious hypocrisy, and a pivotal figure in the history of scepticism.

In his Essais, Montaigne stresses that his theoretical interest in philosophy goes hand in hand with its practicality. In fact, he makes it clear that there is little reason to live our lives according to doctrine without proof that others have successfully done so. Understanding Montaigne's philosophical thought, therefore, means not only studying the philosophies of the great thinkers, but also the characters and ways of life of the philosophers themselves. The focus of Montaigne and the Lives of the Philosophers: Life Writing and Transversality in the Essais is how Montaigne assembled the lives of the philosophers on the pages of his Essais in order to grapple with two fundamental aims of his project: first, to transform the teaching of moral philosophy, and next, to experiment with a transverse construction of his self. Both of these objectives grew out of a dialogue with the structure and content in the life writing of Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, authors whose books were bestsellers during the essayist's lifetime.