This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

The Letters of Robert Burns is a complete revision of the earlier text established by J. De Lancey Ferguson. A number of new letters have been added and completed from manuscripts that have come to light since the Ferguson edition--there are letters to twenty-five new correspondents--and footnotes have been expanded to indicate the source of all Burns's quotations where these can be identified. The endnotes have been expanded to indicate letters to which Burns's are answers as well as answers received by Burns to the letters he sent. An appendix contains Currie's List of Letters to Burns, a document of major importance as it represents a selection of letters that were in the poet's possession at the time of his death.

During the Elizabethan era, writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and others frequently expounded on mercy, exploring the sources and outcomes of clemency. This fresh reading of such depictions shows that the concept of mercy was a contested one, directly shaped by tensions over the exercise of judgment by a woman on the throne.

A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture. Middleton's importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and 'Puritanism'. Swapan Chakravorty argues against the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts' disengagement from received ideological premisses and generic formulae. Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays' meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton's day.

Describing Jewish representation both by Jews and Gentiles in the British Romantic era, Scrivener integrates popular culture with belletristic writing to explore the wildly varying treatments of stereotypical figures: the pedlar, the moneylender, the Jew's daughter, "la belle juive," the convert, the prophet, the alchemist, and the criminal. This sweeping study finds that pervasive Judaeophobia, reflecting old religious conflicts and new anxieties over modernity, affects but does not wholly determine the discourses that reflect a mix of Jewish and English cultures.

Order and Disorder, the first epic poem by an Englishwoman, has never before been available in its entirety. The first five cantos were printed anonymously in 1679, but fifteen further cantos remained in manuscript, probably because they were so politically sensitive. David Norbrook, widely recognized as a leading authority on Renaissance literature and politics, has now attributed the work to the republican, Lucy Hutchison. In this prestigious scholarly volume, he provides a wealth of editorial matter, along with the first full version of Order and Disorder ever to be published. Order and Disorder shares much in common with 'Paradise Lost'. Both poems use the Christian myth of man's fall as an analogy for troubled times. Writing in similar circumstances to Milton, as a republican whose hopes were shattered by the return of the monarchy in 1660, Lucy Hutchinson also turned to the Book of Genesis as the ultimate creation story. Vivid passages portraying the fall of Babel, the Flood and the destruction of Sodom are edged with hostility towards the Restoration political regime. The stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel are interspersed with eloquent personal meditations on divine and human justice, the natural world, and women's role. Lucy Hutchinson is one of the most important women writers of the seventeenth century; her other works include a classic political biography, 'Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson', and the first English translation of Lucretius's materialist epic, The Nature of the Universe. Order and Disorder will be of particular interest to scholars, students and general readers of seventeenth-century poetry in general, of Milton in particular, of Early Modern women's writing, and of Biblical narrative.

Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 is the first modern study of the production and circulation of manuscripts during the English Renaissance. H. R. Woudhuysen examines the relationship between manuscript and print, looks at people who lived by their pens, and surveys authorial and scribal manuscripts, paying particular attention to the copying of verse, plays, and scholarly works by hand. He investigates the professional production of manuscripts for sale by scribes such as Ralph Crane and Richard Robinson. The second part of the book examines Sir Philip Sidney's works in the context of Woudhuysen's research, discussing all Sidney's important manuscripts, and seeks to assess his part in the circulation of his works and his role in the promotion of a scribal culture. A detailed examination of the manuscripts and early prints of his poems, of his Arcadias, and of Astrophil and Stella sheds new light on their composition, evolution, and dissemination, as well as on Sidney's friends and admirers. Based on the examination of hundreds of manuscripts, this book presents much new material describing manuscript production in the fields of literature, politics, the law, and historical, scientific, and antiquarian studies.

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.

Debate about the authorship of the manuscript known to us as De Doctrina Christiana has bedevilled Milton studies over recent years. In this book four leading scholars give an account of the research project that demonstrated its Miltonic provenance beyond reasonable doubt. But the authors do much more besides, locating Milton's systematic theology in its broader European context, picking open the stages and processes of its composition, and analysing its Latinity.

In Montaigne's age hardly anyone made a living through writing. This book examines the practical world in which he and his peers wrote in order to suggest that works like the Essays, for all the status they enjoy today as classics, neither originated in detached pursuits nor flourished as self-contained activities. From where did his wealth come? How did he spend his days at home on the family estate? How did he publish his book? Following Montaigne from his wine presses to the printing press reveals that he may have expended much more time and effort managing his family's property than has been thought, that publishing demanded he perform professional tasks such as financing, proofreading, and revising for his publisher, and finally that rather than an alternative to a political career, writing may have played an integral role in his political ambitions.

This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds - his 'theatrical republics' - and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially 'anti-theatrical'. The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.

What is the role of providence in Paradise Lost? In Looking into Providences, Raymond B. Waddington provides the first examination of this engaging subject. He explores the variety of implicit organizational structures or 'designs' that govern Paradise Lost, and looks in-depth at the 'trials, ' or testing situations, which require interpretation, choice, and action from its characters.

Waddington situates the poem within the context of providentialism's centrality to seventeenth-century thought and life, arguing that Milton's own conception of providence was deeply influenced by the theology of Jacob Arminius. Using Milton's Arminian conception of free will, he then looks at the providential trials experienced by angels and humans. Finally, the work explores the ways in which providentialism infiltrates various kinds of discourse, ranging from military to medical, and from political to philosophical.

Joel Chandler Harris was internationally famous in his own time and has a surprisingly broad scholarly and popular following in ours. His portraits of slaves and former slaves, particularly Uncle Remus and Free Joe, poor whites, and Brer Rabbit, the archetypal trickster hero, have influenced many other writers, including Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and a wide array of children's authors from Beatrix Potter to A. A. Milne. Harris also left a lasting mark on popular culture, most clearly manifested through Disney's ^ISong of the South^R and at Disney World attractions featuring versions of Harris's characters. He singlehandedly preserved and made internationally famous the Brer Rabbit folktales, the largest body of African American oral folklore that the world has ever known. Additionally, Harris was a major New South journalist who accelerated the process of reconciliation between North and South and promoted racial tolerance after the Civil War. This reference book is a complete bibliographic guide to the scholarly response to Harris during the last two decades. The introduction explores such issues as Harris's renderings of black dialect, Southern character, and folklore, and his influence on popular culture. The first part is a supplement to Bickley's earlier bibliography of Harris, which covered the period 1862-1976. The second part provides more than 300 entries for books, articles, and dissertations about Harris published after 1976. Entries are grouped in sections according to year of publication, and then alphabetically within each section. Each entry is fully annotated, and a detailed index concludes the volume.

In Fleshly Tabernacles, Bryan Hampton examines John Milton's imaginative engagement with, and theological passion for, the Incarnation. As aesthetic symbol, theological event, and narrative picture of humanity's potential, the Incarnation profoundly governs the way Milton structures his 1645 Poems, ponders the holy office of the pulpit, reflects on the ends of speech and language, interprets sacred scripture or secular texts, and engages in the radical politics of the Civil War and Interregnum. Richly drawing upon the disciplines of historical and postmodern theology, philosophical hermeneutics, theological aesthetics, and literary theory, Fleshly Tabernacles pursues the wide-ranging implications of the heterodox, perfectionist strain in Milton's Christology. Hampton illustrates how vibrant Christologies generated and shaped particular brands of anticlericalism, theories of reading and language, and political commitments of English nonconformist sects during the turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. Ranters and Seekers, Diggers and Quakers, Fifth monarchists and some Anabaptists-many of those identified with these radical groups proclaim that the Incarnation is primarily understood, not as a singular event of antiquity, but as a present eruption and charged manifestation within the life of the individual believer, such that faithful believers become "fleshly tabernacles" housing the Divine. The perfectionist strain in Milton's theology resonated in the works of the Independent preacher John Everard, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, and the Quaker James Nayler. Fleshly Tabernacles intriguingly demonstrates how ideas of the incarnated Christ flourished in the world of revolutionary England, expressed in the notion that the regenerated human self could repair the ruins of church and state.

"Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama" explores the fruitful and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama, with analyses of "Othello," "Titus Andronicus," "King Henry IV Part 1," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "The Tempest."

This book examines the revival of antique philosophy in the Renaissance as a literary preoccupation informed by wit. Humanists were more inspired by the fictionalized characters of certain wise fools, including Diogenes the Cynic, Socrates, Aesop, Democritus, and Heraclitus, than by codified systems of thought. Rich in detail, this study offers a systematic treatment of wide-ranging Renaissance imagery and metaphors and presents a detailed iconography of certain classical philosophers. Ultimately, the problems of Renaissance humanism are revealed to reflect the concerns of humanists in the twenty-first century.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

"The categories of authenticity and sincerity have been treated with scepticism since at least the early twentieth century, but they remain indispensable for the study of Romantic literature and culture. This book, focusing on authors including Byron, Coleridge and Austen, aims to relocate the terms within the context of current critical debates"--

Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

Spectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations foreground a cluster of self-reflexive "themes" - from incorporation to reiteration, from migration to addiction, from silence to survival - that contribute to the redefinition of adaptation, and Shakespearean adaptation in particular, as an unfinished and interminable process. The "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary, mediatized, and heterogeneous presence, a spectral Shakespeare that leaves a mark on our contemporary mediascape.

Quantifiable citizenship in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for "population" in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred instead in the work of colonial writers who found in the act of counting the "vast numbers" of Indians who held her captive a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. Counting Bodies explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary pre-history of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine and even intimate interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds's The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley's unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds's work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius's Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson's influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley's is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

"Gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes. This book explicates the relationship between the rampant gambling in eighteenth-century England, the new forms of gambling-inspired capitalism that transformed British society, and novels that interrogate the new socio-economy of long odds and lucky breaks"--