First published in 1906, this edition of Magnyfycence aimed to highlight the true significance of the play within both the canon of John Skelton's work and English drama. Robert Lee Ramsay situates Magnyfycence as a morality play which functioned as a bridge between medieval miracle plays and the modern comedy. He demonstrates the text's significance as the first example of a play by an English man of letters and our first example of a secular and literary rather than theological morality play. This edition features an extensive scholarly introduction exploring areas such as the staging, versification, sources and characterisation, followed by the Middle-English text itself along with glosses.

First published in 1996, this volume asked the question: who - and what - was Christopher Marlowe? Dramatist, poet, atheist and possible spy, he was a man in contrast with his time. The authors here gather to explore Marlowe on the four hundredth anniversary of his death. They include significant interdisciplinary elements and focus on dramaturgy, textual criticism and biography. It is hoped that the diversity of approaches can further debates on both Marlowe and Renaissance culture.

Hate, malice, rage, and enmity: what would Shakespeare's plays be without these demonic, unruly passions? This book studies how the tirades and unrestrained villainy of Shakespeare's art explode the decorum and safety of our sanitized lives and challenge the limits of our selfhood. Everyone knows Shakespeare to be the exemplary poet of love, but how many celebrate his clarifying expressions of hatred? How many of us do not at some time feel that we have come away from his plays transformed by hate and washed clean by savage indignation? Saval fills the great gap in the interpretation of Shakespeare's unsocial feelings. The book asserts that emotions, as Aristotle claims in the Rhetoric, are connected to judgments. Under such a view, hatred and rage in Shakespeare cease to be a "blinding" of judgment or a loss of reason, but become claims upon the world that can be evaluated and interpreted. The literary criticism of anger and hate provides an alternative vision of the experience of Shakespeare's theater as an intensification of human experience that takes us far beyond criticism's traditional contexts of character, culture, and ethics. The volume, which is alive to the judgmental character of emotions, transforms the way we see the rancorous passions and the disorderly and disobedient demands of anger and hatred. Above all, it reminds us why Shakespeare is the exemplary creator of that rare yet pleasurable thing: a good hater.

This book traces the development of pastoral drama as it evolved over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy. It considers how writers of pastoral drama responded to social, cultural and intellectual pressures and innovations, regarding critical attitudes towards theatre and the arts.

Capturing the Picaro in Words discusses the framing of the transient marginals of early modern Madrid in the literary picaro. It compares the perceptions of constables, shopkeepers, and criminals, to those of mass-produced literary representations, and argues that the literary representations "displaced" the picaro, assigning the marginals different places in the literary texts in order to centralise the problem of urban vagrancy. The texts "spanished" the picaro, thus establishing the image of a culturally homogenous group; and lastly, "silenced" the picaro, under-representing the power marginals in the city derived from their knowledge of the information flows in the city.

From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women of power and agency found in these pages are indeed worth knowing, and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in early modern studies. Rather than using the conventional alphabetical format of the standard biographical encyclopedia, this volume is divided into categories of women. Since many women will fit in more than one category, each woman is placed in the category that best exemplifies her life, and is cross referenced in other appropriate sections. This structure makes the book an interesting read for seasoned scholars of early modern women, while students need not already be familiar with these subjects in order to benefit from the text. Another unusual feature of this reference work is that each entry begins with some incident from the woman's life that is particularly exciting or significant. Some entries are very brief while others are extensive. Each includes a source listing. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations of the time either by or about the women in the text.

Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.

This collection of fifteen essays by leading scholars examines the extraordinary diversity and richness of the writing produced in response to, and as part of, the upheaval in the religious, political and cultural life of the nation that constituted the English Revolution. Essays explore the course of events, intellectual trends and the publishing industry, the work of canonical figures such as Milton, Marvell, Bunyan and Clarendon, women's writing and fictional and non fictional prose. A full chronology, detailed guides to further reading and glossary of historical terms are included.

The focus of this volume is the intersection and the cross-fertilization between the travel narrative, literary discourse, and the New Philosophy in the early modern to early eighteenth-century historical periods. Contributors examine how, in an historical era which realized an emphasis on nation and during a time when exploration was laying the foundation for empire, science and the literary discourse of the travel narrative become intrinsically linked. Together, the essays in this collection point out the way in which travel narratives reflect the anxiety from changes brought about through the discoveries of the 'new knowledge' and the way this knowledge in turn provided a new and more complex understanding of the expanding world in which the writers lived. The worlds in this text are many (for no 'world' is monomial), from the antipodes to the New World, from the heavens to the seas, and from fictional worlds to the world which contains and/or constructs one's nation and empire. All of these essays demonstrate the manner in which the New Philosophy dramatically changed literary discourse.

The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.

In the 1780s and 90s, theater critics described the stage as a state in political tumult, while politicians invoked theater as a model for politics both good and bad. In this study, Betsy Bolton examines the ways Romantic women performers and playwrights used theatrical conventions to intervene in politics. This well illustrated study draws on canonical poetry and personal memoirs, popular drama and parliamentary debates, political caricatures and theatrical reviews to extend current understandings of Romantic theater, the public sphere, and Romantic gender relations.

Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation.

The commedia dell'arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell'arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell'arte.

Victoria Moul's groundbreaking study uncovers one of the most important features of early modern English poetry: its bilingualism. The first guide to a forgotten literary landscape, this book considers the vast quantities of poetry that were written and read in both Latin and English from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Introducing readers to a host of new authors and drawing on hundreds of manuscript as well as print sources, it also reinterprets a series of landmarks in English poetry within a bilingual literary context. Ranging from Tottel's miscellany to the hymns of Isaac Watts, via Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton and Cowley, this revelatory survey shows how the forms and fashions of contemporary Latin verse informed key developments in English poetry. As the complex, highly creative interactions between the two languages are revealed, the work reshapes our understanding of what 'English' literary history means.

Katherine Philips (1632-1664) is widely regarded as a pioneering figure within English-language women's literary history. Best known as a poet, she was also a skilled translator, letter writer and literary critic whose subjects ranged from friendship and retirement to politics and public life. Her poetry achieved a high reputation among coterie networks in London, Wales and Ireland during her lifetime, and was published to great acclaim after her death. The present volume, drawing on important recent research into her early manuscripts and printed texts, represents a new and innovative phase in Philips's scholarship. Emphasizing her literary responses to other writers as well as the ambition and sophistication of her work, it includes groundbreaking studies of her use of form and genre, her practices as a translator, her engagement with philosophy and political theory, and her experiences in Restoration Dublin. It also examines the posthumous reception of Philips's poetry and model theoretical and digital humanities approaches to her work. This book was originally published as two special issues of Women's Writing.

This text proposes a reinterpretation of the history behind the canon of the Tre Corone (Three Crowns), which consists of the three great Italian authors of the 14th century - Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Examining the first commentaries on Dante's Commedia, the book argues that the elaboration of the canon of the Tre Corone does not date back to the 15th century but instead to the last quarter of the 14th century. The investigation moves from Guglielmo Maramauro's commentary - circa 1373, and the first exegetical text in which we can find explicit quotations from Petrarch and Boccaccio - to the major commentators of the second half of the 14th century: Benvenuto da Imola, Francesco da Buti and the Anonimo Fiorentino. The work focuses on the conceptual and poetic continuity between Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as identified by the first interpreters of the Commedia, demonstrating that contemporary readers and intellectuals immediately recognized a strong affinity between these three authors based on criteria not merely linguistic or rhetorical. The findings and conclusions of this work are of great interest to scholars of Dante, as well as those studying medieval poetry and Italian literature.

In British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, Miranda Burgess examines what Romantic-period writers called "romance." Reading a broad range of fictional and nonfictional works published between 1740 and 1830, Burgess places authors such as Richardson, Scott, Austen and Wollstonecraft in a new economic, social, and cultural context. She argues that the romance held a key role in remaking the national order of a Britain dependent on ideologies of human nature for justification of its social, economic, and political systems.

Molière's long-lost trunk of letters and manuscripts has yet to be found amidst the dust of some Parisian attic, but in spite of that, a story of his life can be told from documentary evidence, reminiscence, gossip and innuendo, and inferences from his plays. He was very much a man of his time and place, and this new biography, the first to be written in English since 1930, places the great actor/playwright in his historical context as the son of well-to-do bourgeois and student at the Jesuit College de Clermont in the 1630's, as one of a group of stage-struck hopefuls and as a vagabond actor in the provinces in the 1640's and 50's, and--from 1658 to his death in 1673--as a clever courtier, a faithful friend, a not-so-faithful lover, a successful and controversial playwright striking out against hypocrisy in religion and medicine, and a cynical survivor of the literary, cultural, and marital wars. Virginia Scott is Professor of Theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has published numerous articles in Theater Survey, Theater Journal, and Theater Research International as well as writing the book The Commedia dellÀrte in Paris, which won the George Freedley Award for the best book in theater studies in 1991.

This study explores the complex role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature. Focusing on the relationship between England and one of its "Celtic colonies," Scotland, Janet Sorensen examines how the expansion of the British empire influenced the formation of a national standard English. The book demonstrates the ambivalence at the heart of British linguistic identity, moving from a close analysis of Scottish writers Alexander MacDonald, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Tobias Smollett to a revised understanding of the language use of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen.

This book traces the progress of Renaissance romance from a genre addressed to women as readers to a genre written by women. Exploring this crucial transitional period, Helen Hackett examines the work of a diverse range of writers from Lyly, Rich and Greene to Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Her book culminates in an analysis of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), the first romance written by a woman, and considers the developing representation of female heroism and selfhood, especially the adaptation of saintly roles to secular and even erotic purposes.

Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular print images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the 1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. Drawing on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artifacts, Laura Knoppers shows how Cromwellian print transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture and panegyric. Her study also finds a new cultural context for authors such as Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Waller.

Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 is unique in providing an authoritative, up-to-date overview of eighteenth-century women's writing and its contexts. The contributors are well-known feminist literary critics, cultural historians and historians of publishing. They discuss the construction of women, and women's writing across a wide range of genres, including essays on ideas of femininity, women and race, changing family structures, women and the law, and women as publishers and as readers. This book will be an invaluable resource both for students and experts in the field.

This book explores the vital and interactive relationship between city and court in the drama of Shakespeare's time. Janette Dillon looks at relations between drama and city through the wider lens of fashion and commercialism, examining in particular the developing "West End" area along the Strand. She argues that during this period the drama of Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood and others, is oriented toward both the city of London and the court, rather than to one or the other, as previous studies have assumed.

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.

Between 1580 and 1745, a period that saw Edmund Spenser's journey to an unconquered Ireland and the Jacobite Rebellion, the first British Empire was established. The intervening years saw the cultural and material forces of colonialism pursue a fitful, often fanciful endeavour to secure space for this expansion. With the defeat of the Highland clans, what England in 1580 could only dream about had materialised: a coherent, socio-spatial system known as an empire. Taking the Atlantic world as its context, this ambitious 1999 book argues that England's culture during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was saturated with a geographic imagination fed by the experiences and experiments of colonialism. Using theories of space and its production to ground his readings, Bruce McLeod skilfully explores how works by Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift imagine, interrogate and narrate the adventure and geography of empire.