"Shakespearean Neuroplay" provides a methodology for applying cognitive science to the study of drama and performance. With Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" as a test subject and the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending as a tool, Cook unravels the “mirror held up to nature” at the center of Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet’s mirror becomes a conceptual structure that invisibly scaffolds our understanding of the play. A lucid explanation of both contemporary science and "Hamlet," "Shakespearean Neuroplay" unveils Shakespeare’s textual theatrics and sheds light on blind spots in theatre and performance theory.

This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

The first comprehensive study of Calderon in English Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is one of the most important dramatists - many would say the single most important dramatist - of the Spanish Golden Age. Spain's dominant and most prestigious playwright for much of the seventeenth century, his work is still regularly staged and translated, influential in more recent times on writers as diverse as Schiller, Shelley and Lorca. The author of around 120 plays (not counting his numerous Corpus Christi autos) in a variety of styles, Calderon is most famous for his stirring dramas, characterized by rhetorically powerful poetry, dramatic structures carefully calibrated to produce poignant echoes, and the fizzing intellectual energy they apply to the age's ontological, eschatological and political preoccupations. His plays succeed in combining these perennial concerns with compelling plots subtle enough to defy definitive interpretation. As this volume seeks to show, however, Calderon's comedies deserve equal recognition. Too long stereotyped as a dour, cerebral conservative, this playwright's comic works are as amusing as they are clever. This Companion is the first comprehensive study of Calderon in English. It provides a rigorous but readable introduction to the man, his work and its legacy. Its chapters - written by leading international comedia specialists - provide an overview of his life, explain his intellectual, social, moral, and literary contexts, and examine his stagecraft, his corpus, and his reception both within and without the Hispanic world up to the twenty-first century. Specific chapters are devoted to La vida es sueno, his most famous work, which appears on many a university syllabus, and to his infamous wife-murder plays.

This book defines the previously unaddressed, early evolution of the American frontier hero in literature and popular culture. Denise MacNeil resituates the literary origins of this hero from the nineteenth century to the seventeenth century by tracing its roots to Mary Rowlandson's narration of her experiences as a prisoner. This study follows the subsequent evolution through works by Unca Eliza Winkfield, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and the film-maker John Ford and actor John Wayne. This book exposes complex gender and racial roots and clarifies a cultural stereotype that has become one of those most highly coded as white and masculine within American literature and culture.

'Anthony Munday and civic culture' is a full-scale study of a fascinating but hitherto neglected author set in the context of the city where he was born, and where he lived and worked. A re-appraisal of Munday has long been overdue. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Dekker, amongst others; as a playwright, prose writer, translator, poet, pageant-maker and pamphleteer he was active in all the major literary genres of his day. This study of his diverse works throws fresh light on our understanding of this significant period, which thus far has largely been interpreted through canonical texts and authors. Recent early modern studies have been characterised by a return to history and an increasing interest in the material dimensions of culture. This book also builds in a timely fashion upon the on-going scholarly interest in London and its culture to put forward new ways of re-thinking existing debates, such as the relationship between the City of London, the court and the theatres. A wide range of Munday's texts are explored in depth, including plays, original prose works, translations, Lord Mayors' Shows, and his editions of John Stow's Survey of London. The book employs an interdisciplinary methodology drawing on history, biography, literary criticism and topography, offering a broad and contextualised account of this important writer in his various milieux. 'Anthony Munday and civic culture' explores historical sources as well as literary texts and will appeal to students and scholars of both early modern literature and history as well as to cultural geographers.

The stigmatisation of parody as "the worst enemy" of creativity has been pervasive in our literary culture. Although recent theoretical approaches have compelled critics to rethink many received notions regarding the significance of contemporary parodic activity, the perception remains that parody existed only on the disreputable margins of earlier literary cultures. This study places parody firmly (if paradoxically) where it belongs: at the centre of the literary-creative process in much of the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much praise and critical disdain simultaneously. This Guide returns to the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, to explore and analyse the full range of contradictory responses that the Gothic evoked. Angela Wright appraises the key criticism surrounding the Gothic fiction of this period, from eighteenth-century accounts to present-day commentaries. Adopting an easy-to-follow thematic approach, the Guide examines: - contemporary criticism of the Gothic - the aesthetics of terror and horror - the influence of the French Revolution - religion, nationalism and the Gothic - the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic - the relationship between gender and the Gothic. Concise and authoritative, this indispensable Guide provides an overview of Gothic criticism and covers the work of a variety of well-known Gothic writers, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and many others.

This interdisciplinary study examines the literary, artistic and biographical afterlives in England of the great sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, from before his death to the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the lasting impact of his once famous poem Gerusalemme liberata across a spectrum of arts, it aims to stimulate a revival of interest in a neglected poetic masterpiece and its author, some fifty years after the last account of the poet in English. The influence of Tasso's poem is traced and analysed in the literary works of Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare and Daniel, and consideration is also given to its impact on the visual and musical arts in England, in works by Van Dyck, Poussin and Handel. A second strand focuses on English responses to Tasso's troubled life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exemplified in Byron's memorable impersonation of the poet's voice in The Lament of Tasso. -- .

Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender. This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas. Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Othello," and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. "Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality" shows how revisions and criticism of Renaissance drama contributed to the emergence of heterosexuality. It also shows how changing ideas about status, adultery, friendship, and race were factors in that emergence.

Contextualizing Michelangelo's poetry and spirituality within the framework of the religious Zeitgeist of his era, this study investigates his poetic production to shed new light on the artist's religious beliefs and unique language of art. Author Ambra Moroncini looks first and foremost at Michelangelo the poet and proposes a thought-provoking reading of Michelangelo's most controversial artistic production between 1536 and c.1550: The Last Judgment, his devotional drawings made for Vittoria Colonna, and his last frescoes for the Pauline Chapel. Using theological and literary analyses which draw upon reformist and Protestant scriptural writings, as well as on Michelangelo's own rime spirituali and Vittoria Colonna's spiritual lyrics, Moroncini proposes a compelling argument for the impact that the Reformation had on one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance. It brings to light how, in the second quarter of the sixteenth century in Italy, Michelangelo's poetry and aesthetic conception were strongly inspired by the revived theologia crucis of evangelical spirituality, rather than by the theologia gloriae of Catholic teaching.

Sir Walter Ralegh created a powerful public identity by means of the prose texts he wrote from prison. This new study not only offers a much-needed analysis of these neglected political writings, but also demonstrates the ways in which his readers modified Ralegh's public identity in a series of fascinating posthumous reinterpretations. By focusing on both Ralegh and his interpreters, this book contributes to the growing body of work on the politics and practice of writing and reading in early-modern England.

This title concerns itself with dress in the novels of Samuel Richardson, and how attire confirms, contributes to, or challenges the characters' fashioning of self, and the self as others (characters or readers) perceive it.

This work offers a peer reviewed account of Defoe's birth and upbringing from 1644 and how he kept the first 36 years of his life a secret and discusses the effects of a vastly different life on all critical understandings of his writing. It is fundamental to any study of Daniel Defoe.

Overturning the common characterization of seventeenth-century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative genre with little bearing on the evolution of the novel, this book argues for the centrality of seventeenth-century romance in key political and moral philosophical debates of its time. Concentrating especially on the intersection between romance and the late humanist problem of self-interest, the book discerns the deeply moral philosophical aspect of prose romances from Sidney's "Arcadia," through Wroth's "Urania" and Barclay's "Argenis," to the dozen or so now little-known Royalist romances from the mid-seventeenth century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of the history of prose fiction and the novel, early modern women's writing, and those concerned with the political valences of genre and the intersections between literature and moral philosophy.

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. -- .

The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As Pohl's primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate Paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon's Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality and offers their own utopian judgment.

Spenser's Monstrous Regiment is a stimulating and scholarly account of how the experience of living and writing in Ireland qualified Spenser's attitude towards female regiment and challenged his notions of English nationhood. Including a trenchant discussion of the influence of colonialism upon the structure, themes, imagery, and language of Spenser's poetry, this is the first major study of Spenser's canon to engage with primary Gaelic materials in its assessment of his relationship with native Irish and Old English culture. It also provides the first detailed analysis of his association with Lord Grey through examination of the secretarial letters currently held in the PRO.

The last twenty years have witnessed the rediscovery of a large number of women writers of the early modern period. This process of recovery has had a major impact on early modern studies for, by beginning to restore women to the history of the period, it provides new insight into the formative years of the modern era. This collection amply demonstrates the diversity as well as the literary and historical significance of early women's writing. It brings together studies by an impressive range of critics, including Elaine Hobby, Catherine Gallagher, Jane Spencer and Laura Brown, and examines the major works of five of the most important women writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn and Anne Finch. The range of authors it covers, and the challenging critical work it presents, make Early Women Writers: 1600-1720 essential reading for students of feminist theory, Women's Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as for all those interested in the history and literature of the early modern period.

"The Gothic and the Rule of Law" is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power. It represents a highly significant contribution to Gothic criticism and to law and literature scholarship.

The first book-length biography of John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), a second-generation migrant poet, translator and military author, that explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period. John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), the eldest son of Flemish migrants, was a man of many parts: Dutch and English poet, translator, military author, virtuoso networker, successful merchant and hosier, Dutch church elder and militia captain. This first book-length biography, making extensive use of archival and literary sources, reconstructs the life and work of this multi-talented, self-made man, whose literary oeuvre is marked by its polyvocality. Cruso's poetry includes a Dutch amplificatio on Psalm 8, some 221 Dutch epigrams, and elegies (one of which frames the most important Anglo-Dutch literary moment in the seventeenth century, a collection of Dutch and Latin elegies which marked the death of the London Dutch church minister, Simeon Ruytinck, and included verses by Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso's life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.

Reissuing 15 works originally published between 1934 and 1991, this diverse set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship devoted to Renaissance Drama. Routledge Library Editions: Renaissance Drama provides an extensive study of performance history and criticism of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, as well as volumes dedicated to the playwrights Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. These volumes present together a lively picture of the development of British theatre and will be of interest to students of literature, drama and performance.

This is a collection of previously published essays on late medieval and early modern literature, designed to act as a companion to "Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375 -1575," edited by Derek Pearsall (1999).

The object of the accompanying anthology is to provide representation of a variety of kinds of prose and verse, including some not traditionally regarded as canonically "literary," and also to trespass beyond the boundaries of the conventional medieval/early modern divide. This new volume provides some of the critical backing for those decisions about the canon and about periodization, and also give evidence of the vigor of opinion and debate in the field in general.

Most of the essays are from the last 20 years, and some are very recent, though space is also found for some earlier classics. The collection pays particular attention to those critics who have had the most powerful recent impact on our reading of the texts of the period: they are selected for their excellence and importance, whether in themselves or as representatives of an influential critical approach, and not for their adherence to any one school of interpretation. They will provide a companion to the texts in the anthology, a commentary and counterpoint to the views expressed in the editor's headnotes and explanatory notes, and a perspective on the best that has been thought and said about the writing of these two extraordinary centuries of creativity, consolidation and seed-sowing.

Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.

This anthology of 18th-century English poetry is extensively annotated for a new generation of readers. It combines the scope of a period anthology with the detailed annotations of an authoritative single-author edition. Selected poets include John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and William Cowper. The guiding principle of the annotation is one of thoroughness: the editors concentrate on works where the meanings have changed, on primary allusions and on relevant details of social and political history.

This is the first book-length study of early modern English approaches to Medea, the classical witch and infanticide who exercised a powerful sway over literary and cultural imagination in the period 1558-1688. It encompasses poetry, prose and drama, and translation, tragedy, comedy and political writing.