In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics. In this sequence of essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taken as a whole, this short but immensely wise book offers an illuminating and provocative insight into a great director's relationship with our greatest playwright. 'An invaluable gift from the greatest Shakespeare director of our time... Brook's genius, modesty, and brilliance shine through on every page' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

This timely book traces ideas of pacifism through English literature, particularly poetry. Four wide-ranging chapters, drawing on both religious and secular texts, provide intellectual and historical contexts. There follows a chronological analysis of poetry which rejects war and celebrates peace, from the middle ages to the present day. The book provides inspiration for all readers who seriously believe that conflict and war do not solve problems, and for students it provides a new kind of thematic history of literature.

Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s discusses the work of three prominent women writers by focusing on the response to the French Revolution and the struggle for reform in Britain. Examining previously-neglected texts as well as more familiar ones, the book contributes to our understanding of a period of intense political and literary engagement.

Employing psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and materialist perspectives, this book examines Shakespeare's appropriations of Ovid's poetry in his Roman poems and plays. It argues that Shakespeare uses Ovid to explore violence, trauma, and virtus - the traumatic effects of aggression, sadomasochism, and the shifting notions of selfhood and masculinity.

"Oppositional Voices" is a study of women writers in the late Elizabethan period. Until the early 1980s it was generally assumed that women did not write any books during the Renaissance. Virginia Woolf wondered why no woman wrote a word of extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet'. The women discussed in this book "did" write some of that extraordinary literature'. Ignoring Renaissance society's injunction that women should confine themselves to religious compositions, they wrote poetry, drama and romantic fiction. They even voiced opposition to certain oppressive ideas and stereotypes. Yet, as this study suggests, what these authors finally say depended greatly on the fact that they were women writing in a culture inimical to female creative activity. "Oppositional Voices" powerfully shows how gender ideology intertwined with economics and social class, as well as with literary and linguistic conventions, to shape women's writing of the period. This book should be of interest to postgraduates, undergraduates and academics in Renaissance literature and women's studies.

New edition of a collection of songs and ballads from sixteenth-century Scotland, shedding important new light on the English and Scottish Reformation. The Gude and Godlie Ballatis is a collection of religious lyrics from the early years of the Scottish Reformation. It was a highly popular, if controversial, volume, was often reprinted, and is considered one of the most important literary works of vernacular Scots from the period. It contains translations of a number of Psalms, but most of the contents consist of shorter songs and ballads, many of which have been adapted from a secular to a spiritual use. The previous edition of the collection dates from 1897. The new edition not only revises the information given there, but presents the text of the earliest print (1565), which was unknown to the previous editor. The textual development of the collection through the various printings is studied, and is related to the changing historical, political, literary, cultural and theological contexts of Reformation Scotland. The editor addresses questions of authorship, transmission, source material, and the use and significance of these lyrics. Drawing on recent work in book history and English psalmody, as well as a deep knowledge of Older Scots lyric, he demonstrates the close connections between the collection and Continental hymnody, as well as interactions with English and Scots lyric, both sacred and profane. Alasdair A. MacDonald is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literatureof the Middle Ages, University of Groningen.

Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines the identity statements of the world's major imperialisms in multiple theatres of competition over the course of four centuries. Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines early identity statements and nuances of dominance of the world's major imperialisms in various theatres of competition. Developed in collaboration with leading scholars in the field, this book balances historical essays and case studies, and encourages investigations of conversant and competing imperialisms, their practices, and rhetoric of self-justification. Europe (west and east), India, the New World, Africa, and the Far East are among the sites of imperialism featured here, which are analyzed in relation to intersecting debates on politics, religion, literature, nationalism, commerce, conversion, and race. Valuable for preliminary or advanced studies, Imperialisms provides multiple points of entry into and guidelines for a conversation both current and vigorous.

The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature provides readers with a comprehensive reassessment of the value of humanism in an intellectual landscape. Offering contributions by leading international scholars, this volume seeks to define literature as a core expressive form and an essential constitutive element of newly reformulated understandings of humanism. While the value of humanism has recently been dominated by anti-humanist and post-humanist perspectives which focused on the flaws and exclusions of previous definitions of humanism, this volume examines the human problems, dilemmas, fears, and aspirations expressed in literature, as a fundamentally humanist art form and activity. Divided into three overarching categories, this companion will explore the histories, developments, debates, and contestations of humanism in literature, and deliver fresh definitions of "the new humanism" for the humanities. This focus aims to transcend the boundaries of a world in which human life is all too often defined in terms of restrictions-political, economic, theological, intellectual-and lived in terms of obedience, conformity, isolation, and fear. The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature will provide invaluable support to humanities students and scholars alike seeking to navigate the relevance and resilience of humanism across world cultures and literatures.

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau. -- .

Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include: Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them; the importance of his scholarly background; his consistent portrayal of family groups as fissured and troubled; the challenge that his works posed to contemporary orthodoxies about religion, sexuality, and government; and the long and sometimes spectacular afterlife of his works and of his literary reputation as a whole.

Daniel Defoe occupies a central place in the history of English literature. As the author of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders" he can claim, with some justification, to be the creator of the first novels in English. He was one of the earliest practitioners of the "desert island" myth which has had such a seminal influence on the human imagination. In "A Journal of the Plague Year" and "A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain" he forged a distinctive documentary style which deeply influenced later writers including Wells and Orwell.;In summarizing Defoe's life and achievements, this book offers a critical overview of his contribution to the development of the novel and re-establishes him as a central figure in the history of literature.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

The essays in this volume challenge current 'givens' in medieval and early modern research around periodization and editorial practice. They showcase cutting-edge research practices and approaches in textual editing, and in manuscript and performance studies to produce new ways of reading and working for students and scholars.

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six 'versions' of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children's bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries. Examines a broad range of texts, including well-known canonical texts, such as Gulliver's Travels, neglected fiction, such as Stephen Cullen's The Haunted Priory, and little studied genres, such as catechisms and children's bibles

This is the first comprehensive study of the revival and appropriation of the Roman triumph from the 1580s to the 1650s. English versions of the triumph included ceremonial reenactments, poetic or pictorial representations, and stage performances. As well as many non-canonical writers, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton all produced versions. The book includes an original survey of ancient literary models and the work of humanist antiquarians, and shows how all its texts are implicated in contemporary political conflicts and discourses.

By identifying a pervasive cultivation of attention as a perceptual and cognitive state in eighteenth-century poetry, this book explores overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention.

Presenting a fresh perspective on one of the most celebrated print canons in literary history, Valerie Rumbold explores the expressive force of print context, format, typography, ornament and paratext encountered by early readers of Jonathan Swift. By focusing on the books, pamphlets and single sheets in which the Dublin and London book trades published his work, this revealing whole-career analysis, based on a chronology of publication that often lagged years behind dates of composition, examines first editions and significant reprints throughout Swift's lifetime, and posthumous first editions and collections in the twenty years after his death. Drawing on this material evidence, Rumbold reframes Swift's publishing career as a late expression of an early modern formation in which publishing was primarily an adjunct to public service. In an age of digital reading, this timely study invites a new engagement with the printed texts of Swift.

As an exceptionally long-lived author (1588-1679) whose protracted development, late appearance in print, subsequent muzzling, and profound notoriety raise fascinating questions about how, when, and to what effect his thinking exerted an impact as he sought to transform an entire culture, Hobbes supplies the ideal focus for a study of cultural transmission in early modern England. Ranging from Jonson to Rochester and including several critically neglected figures, select poetic contemporaries variously illuminate the scope of Hobbes's writing and the reach of his influence, in turn shedding diverse lights on the nature of their own work.

How should we read a text that does not exist, or present a play the manuscript of which is lost and the identity of whose author cannot be established for certain?

Such is the enigma posed by "Cardenio" - a play performed in England for the first time in 1612 or 1613 and attributed forty years later to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Its plot is that of a 'novella' inserted into Don Quixote, a work that circulated throughout the major countries of Europe, where it was translated and adapted for the theatre. In England, Cervantes' novel was known and cited even before it was translated in 1612 and had inspired "Cardenio."

But there is more at stake in this enigma. This was a time when, thanks mainly to the invention of the printing press, there was a proliferation of discourses. There was often a reaction when it was feared that this proliferation would become excessive, and many writings were weeded out. Not all were destined to survive, in particular plays for the theatre, which, in many cases, were never published. This genre, situated at the bottom of the literary hierarchy, was well suited to the existence of ephemeral works. However, if an author became famous, the desire for an archive of his works prompted the invention of textual relics, the restoration of remainders ruined by the passing of time or, in order to fill in the gaps, in some cases, even the fabrication of forgeries. Such was the fate of "Cardenio" in the eighteenth century.

Retracing the history of this play therefore leads one to wonder about the status, in the past, of works today judged to be canonical. In this book the reader will rediscover the malleability of texts, transformed as they were by translations and adaptations, their migrations from one genre to another, and their changing meanings constructed by their various publics. Thanks to Roger Chartier's forensic skills, fresh light is cast upon the mystery of a play lacking a text but not an author.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In this selection of research articles Butterworth focuses on investigation of the practical and technical means by which early English theatre, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, was performed. Matters of staging for both 'pageant vehicle' and 'theatre-in-the-round' are described and analysed to consider their impact on playing by players, expositors, narrators and prompters. All these operators also functioned to promote the closely aligned disciplines of pyrotechnics and magic (legerdemain or sleight of hand) which also influence the nature of the presented theatre. The sixteen chapters form four clearly identified parts-staging, playing, pyrotechnics and magic-and drawing on a wealth of primary source material, Butterworth encourages the reader to rediscover and reappreciate the actors, magicians, wainwrights and wheelwrights, pyrotechnists, and (in modern terms) the special effects people and event managers who brought these early texts to theatrical life on busy city streets and across open arenas. The chapters variously explore and analyse the important backwaters of material culture that enabled, facilitated and shaped performance yet have received scant scholarly attention. It is here, among the itemised payments to carpenters and chemists, the noted requirements of mechanics and wheelwrights, or tucked away among the marginalia of suppliers of staging and ingenious devices that Butterworth has made his stamping ground. This is a fascinating introduction to the very 'nuts and bolts' of early theatre. Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre is a closely argued celebration of stagecraft that will appeal to academics and students of performance, theatre history and medieval studies as well as history and literature more broadly. It constitutes the eighth volume in the Routledge series Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies and continues the valuable work of that series (of which Butterworth is a general editor) in bringing significant and expert research articles to a wider audience.

Challenges the notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with) nature. By focusing on various forms of 'dialogue, ' these essays shift our interest away from speaking and toward listening, to illuminate ways that early modern Englishwomen interacted with their natural surroundings

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers' legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.