This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays' authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies.

Dryden: Selected Poems is drawn from Paul Hammond and David Hopkins's remarkable five-volume The Poems of John Dryden, and includes a generous selection of his most important work. The great satires, MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, are included in full, as are his religious poemsReligio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, along with a number of Dryden's translations from Horace, Ovid, Homer, and Chaucer. Each poem is accompanied by a headnote, which gives details of composition, publication, and reception. The first-rate annotations provide information on matters of interpretation and give details of allusions that might prove baffling to contemporary readers. Some 300 years after his death, Dryden: Selected Poems will enable new generations of readers to discover the poet of whom Eliot wrote: 'we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden'.

From Robert Lovelace's uninvited hand-grasps in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa to to Basil Hallward's first encounter with Dorian Gray, literary depictions of touching hands in British literature from the 1740s to the 1890s communicate emotional dimensions of sexual experience that reflect shifting cultural norms associated with gender roles, sexuality , and sexual expression. But what is the relationship between hands, tactility, and sexuality in Victorian literature? And how do we best interpret what those touches communicate between characters? This volume addresses these questions by asserting a connection between the prevalence of violent, sexually charged touches in eighteenth-century novels such as those by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney and growing public concern over handshake etiquette in the nineteenth century evident in works by Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Flora Annie Steel. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary analysis with close analyses of paintings, musical compositions, and nonfictional texts , such as etiquette books and scientific treatises , to make a case for the significance of tactility to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of selfhood and sexuality. In doing so, it draws attention to the communicative nature of skin-to-skin contact as represented in literature and traces a trajectory of meaning from the forceful grips that violate female characters in eighteenth-century novels to the consensual embraces common in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature.

This book introduces a new perspective on Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), a work widely regarded as the 'first great opera', by exploring the influence of the Mantuan Accademia deglia Invaghiti, the group which hosted the opera's performance, and to which the libretto author, Alessandro Striggio the Younger, belonged. Arguing that the Invaghiti played a key role in shaping the development of Orfeo, the author explores the philosophical underpinnings of the Invaghiti and Italian academies of the era. Drawing on new primary sources, he shows how the Invaghiti's ideas about literature, dramaturgy, music, gender, and aesthetics were engaged and contested in the creation and staging of Orfeo. Relevant to researchers of music history, performance, and Renaissance and Baroque Italy, this study sheds new light on Monteverdi's opera as an intellectual and philosophical work.

An innovative exploration of fake news and alternative reality in late Stuart and early Hanoverian political and literary culture, from the Popish Plot and the South Sea Bubble to the Dunciad. James Francis Edward Stuart, the Prince of Wales born in 1688, was not a commoner's child smuggled into the queen's birthing chamber in a warming pan, but many people said he was. In 1708, the same prince did not quite land in Scotland with a force of 5,000 men in order to claim the Scottish crown, but writers busied themselves with exploring what would have happened if he had succeeded. These fictions had as potent an effect on the political culture of late Stuart and early Hanoverian Britain as many events that really did happen. From the alleged "Popish Plot" of Titus Oates to the South Sea Bubble, John McTague draws on a rich variety of sources - popular, archival and literary - to investigate the propagandic and literary exploitation of three kinds of things that did not occur at this time: failures which inspired "what if" narratives, speculative futures which failed to come to pass and "pure" fictions created and disseminated for political gain. Finally, a ground-breaking reading of the various versions of Pope's Dunciad reveals a work that in its exploration of historic causation and agency and its repurposing o fthe material of contemporary political and literary culture deploys many of the strategies explored in earlier chapters to present Hanoverian reality as if it were counterhistory. JOHN MCTAGUE is Lecturer in English Literature at Bristol University.

Renaissance ideas of honour had a profound influence on the English people who formed Shakespeare's audiences. In When Honour's at the Stake, first published in 1973, Norman Council describes the increasing importance of these ideas to the themes and structure of a number of Shakespeare's major plays. The validity of the most widely approved code of honour was being challenged on a variety of fronts, yet both personal standards of behaviour and public affairs were habitually understood in terms of honour. A series of tragedies are given their basic form by dramatizing the pernicious effects of man's disobedience to the various demands of honour; in Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear honour is among the principal motives of tragedy. In this way, the modern reader's comprehension of the plays can be greatly enhanced by reference to Elizabethan honour codes.

Mary Tudor's reign is regarded as a period where, within a short space of time, an early modern European state attempted to reverse the religious policy of preceding governments. This required the use of persuasion and coercion, of propaganda and censorship, as well as the controversial decision to revive an old statute against heresy. The efforts to renew Catholic worship and to revive Catholic education and spirituality were fiercely opposed by a small but determined group of Protestants, who sought ways of thwarting the return of Catholicism. The battle between those seeking to renew Catholicism and those determined to resist it raged for the full five years of Mary's reign. This volume brings together eleven authors from different disciplines (English Literature, History, Divinity, and the History of the Book), who explore the different policies undertaken to ensure that Catholicism could flourish once more in England. The safety of the clergy and of the public at the Mass was of paramount importance, since sporadic unrest took place early on. Steps were taken to ensure that reformist worship was stopped and that the country re-embraced Catholic practices. This involved a number of short- and long-term plans to be enacted by the regime. These included purging the universities of reformist ideas and ensuring the (re)education of both the laity and the clergy. On a wider scale this was undertaken via the pulpit and the printing press. Those who opposed the return to Catholicism did so by various means. Some retreated into exile, while others chose the press to voice their objections, as this volume details. The regime's responses to the actions of individuals and to the clandestine texts produced by their opposition come under scrutiny throughout this volume. The work presented here also offers new insight into the role of King Philip and his Spanish advisers. These essays therefore present a detailed assessment of the role of the Spanish who came with to England as a result of the marriage of Philip and Mary. They also move away from the ongoing discussions of 'persecution' seeking, rather, to present a more nuanced understanding of the regime's attempts to renew and revive a nation of worshippers, and to eradicate the disease of heresy. They also look at the ways those attempts were opposed by individuals at home and abroad, thereby providing a broad-ranging but detailed assessment of both Catholic renewal and Protestant resistance during the years 1553-1558.

The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language. It does this through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. Each book is written by an expert of the major writer concerned. In this study, the author sheds fresh light on two very different groups of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems: the early and controversial "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece", and the highly personal "Sonnets". He explains the genesis of the first two in the genre of Ovidian narrative poetry, in which a young Elizabethan man of letters was expected to excel, and which was extremely popular. In the "Sonnets" he traces the mental journey of a man going through an acute psychological crisis as he faces up to the truth about his own unconventional sexuality. It is a study which confronts these "disagreeables" in the "Sonnets" which most critics have ignored.

This book of original essays explores three important areas in comparative literature and history and in cultural studies: the boundaries between history and fiction;women as writers and subjects; and the connection between the early modern, modern and postmodern. New history and new literary studies look at innovative ways to see past cultures in a new light. Traditional methods are used to new ends and writers who are familiar within their cultures are translated to other cultures. This study promotes an expanded understanding of our cultural artifacts in a rapidly changing present. It discusses English-speaking culture in the early modern period in the context of other European cultures and relates Europe to other parts of the world, most notably America. After grounding the discussion of culture in history, identity, dialogue as a genre that crosses the boundaries between philosophy and fiction, the rhetoric of prefaces to historical collections, cosmographies and histories that share something with the techniques of literary and forensic rhetoric, the book proceeds to discuss two central issues in cultural studies today: gender and postmodernity. The final section of the book provides a general assessment through early modern texts of modernity and postmodernity.

The great Slavic medieval epic, The Igor Tale, recounts the story of a Russian prince who leads his men into battle against the Mongols. In 1935, Soviet scholar P.N. Berkov began to compile a bibliography of Western European translations of the poem, later followed by several Soviet Union biographies compiling the works on the epic that had appeared in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Here, Cooper attempts to remedy the shortcomings of previous scholar work: to seriously survey the large body of non-Soviet scholarship on the poem particularly Western contributions to Igor scholarship. Originally published in 1978, Cooper traces foreign scholarship and translations from 1900-1976 from a wide variety of Western and some Eastern nations including the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Japan and many other countries. This title is a valuable resource for students of Literature and Slavic Studies.

This masterly edition contains all of Milton's English poems, with the exception of Paradise Lost, together with translations and texts of all his Latin, Italian and Greek poems. First published in 1968 - and substantially updated in 1996 - John Carey's edition has, with Alastair Fowler's Paradise Lost, established itself as the pre-eminent edition of Milton's poetry, both for the student and the general reader. Hailed as 'a very Bible of a Milton', the extensive notes and headnotes serve to illuminate the wealth of Milton's allusions and to synthesize the judgements and disagreements of a bewildering array of modern critics. Each headnote sets out details of composition and context which will deepen any reader's appreciation of the poetry, while also providing a concise overview of the critical and scholarly debates that continue to flame around the work of one of the greatest poets in the English language. Steeped in learning though it undoubtedly is, it is also an unfailing light to those who wish to plot their own path through the dazzling riches of Milton's imagination.

Contemporary criticism of Donne has tended to ignore the historical culture and ideology that conditioned his writings, reinforcing the traditionally accepted model of the poet as a humanist of ethical, cultural and political individualism. In this title, first published in 1986, Thomas Docherty challenges this with a more rigorously theoretical reading of Donne, particularly in relation to the specific culture of the late Renaissance in Europe. Docherty locates Donne's poetry at the crux of the various scientific, legal, domestic and rhetorical discourses that surrounded and informed it. With a broadly post-structuralist approach, this reissue will benefit literature students with an interest in the wider study and context of John Donne's work.

First published in 1990, this title provides a compendium of useful information for any reader of Donne to have at hand: crucial biographical material, historical contextualisation, and details about his life's work. The intention throughout is to enhance understanding and appreciation, without being exhaustive. The major portion of the volume, in both importance and size, is 'A Donne Dictionary'. Its entries are arranged alphabetically: they identify, describe and explain the most influential persons in Donne's life and works, as well as places, characters, allusions, ideas, concepts, individual words, phrases and literary terms that are relevant to a rounded appreciation of his poetry and prose. A Jonne Donne Companion will prove invaluable for all students of English poetry and Anglican theology.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

"Macbeth" is one of Shakespeare's most performed and studied tragedies. This major new Arden edition offers students detailed on-page commentary notes highlighting meaning and theatrical ideas and themes, as well as an illustrated, lengthy introduction setting the play in its historical, theatrical and critical context and outlining the recent debates about Middleton's possible co-authorship of some scenes.A comprehensive and informative edition ideal for students and teachers seeking to explore the play in depth, whether in the classroom or on the stage.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1979, this title presents the basic facts and the background information needed by a modern reader of Robinson Crusoe, as well as a careful exploration of the structure and style of the work itself. Pat Rogers pays particular attention to the book's composition and publishing history, the critical history surrounding it from 1719 onwards, and the contemporary context of geographical discovery, colonialism and piracy, as well as more controversial areas of interpretation. A wide-ranging and practical reissue, this study will be of value to literature students with a particular interest in the critical interpretation of Robinsons Crusoe, as well as the novel's place in the context of Defoe's career.

First published in 1926, this title presents the great artistic and literary innovations of the Romantic movement according to an often overlooked and unacknowledged definition of 'Romanticism', which is of particular relevance in the consideration of the English Romantic spirit: pertaining to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages.

Max Byrd's lucidly written and compelling volume aims to provide a scholarly introduction to one of the most puzzling pieces of eighteenth-century literature, and a stimulus to critical thought and discussion. Laurence Sterne - an eccentric and largely unsuccessful clergyman - was forty-six when he sat down in January of 1759 to being his literary masterpiece. Aside from his sermons, only two of which had ever been published, Sterne had little more to do with the literary life than any other respectable provincial clergyman. His explosion into the history of English literature occurred not only without preparation, but also without apparent aptitude. Tristram Shandy, first published in 1985, sketches Sterne's life and literary antecedents, closely analysing key passages of his great satire and concluding with the critical history and bibliography. It will thus be of use to all students of eighteenth-century English literature.

This volume introduces 'civic Shakespeare' as a new and complex category entailing the dynamic relation between the individual and the community on issues of authority, liberty, and cultural production. It investigates civic Shakespeare through Romeo and Juliet as a case study for an interrogation of the limits and possibilities of theatre and the idea of the civic. The play's focus on civil strife, political challenge, and the rise of a new conception of the individual within society makes it an ideal site to examine how early modern civic topics were received and reconfigured on stage, and how the play has triggered ever new interpretations and civic performances over time. The essays focus on the way the play reflects civic life through the dramatization of issues of crisis and reconciliation when private and public spaces are brought to conflict, but also concentrate on the way the play has subsequently entered the public space of civic life. Set within the fertile context of performance studies and inspired by philosophical and sociological approaches, this book helps clarify the role of theatre within civic space while questioning the relation between citizens as spectators and the community. The wide-ranging chapters cover problems of civil interaction and their onstage representation, dealing with urban and household spaces; the boundaries of social relations and legal, economic, political, and religious regulation; and the public dimension of memory and celebration. This volume articulates civic Romeo and Juliet from the sources of genre to contemporary multicultural performances in political contact-zones and civic 'Shakespaces,' exploring the Bard and this play within the context of communal practices and their relations with institutions and civic interests.

This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne's Essays, Spenser's allegorical poetry, Donne's metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton's epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.

First published in 1995, this title provides the reader with a compendium of useful information for any reader of George Herbert to have at hand. It includes key biographical information, situates the poetry in its historical and cultural context, and, where appropriate, explains theological concepts and traditions which have a direct bearing on the verse. The aim throughout is to enhance understanding and appreciation, without being exhaustive. A George Herbert Companion will be of most use to general readers and undergraduate students coming to this poetry for the first time, and will interest students of Anglican Caroline theology and hymnology.

First published in 1998, this title provides for the reader of the renowned metaphysical poet and politician a valuable reference and resource volume. It is a compendium of useful information for any reader of Andrew Marvell, including crucial biographical material, historical contextualisation, and details about his life's work. The intention throughout is to enhance understanding and appreciation, without being exhaustive. The major portion of the volume, in both importance and size, is 'A Marvell Dictionary'. Its entries are arranged alphabetically: they identify, describe and explain the most influential persons in Marvell's life and works, as well as places, characters, allusions, ideas, concepts, individual words, phrases and literary terms that are relevant to a rounded appreciation of his poetry and prose. An Andrew Marvell Companion will prove invaluable for all students of English poetry and seventeenth-century political history.

The Art of John Webster, first published in 1972, is a study of the three extant plays of Webster known to be solely his work. These plays are seen as attempts to achieve in literature the effects of the baroque, a term which related Webster to the larger developments of European art. Their content is analysed in terms of a consistent opposition between evil and the law. The book seeks to re-establish a base for the claims that must be made for Webster as a serious artist. This title will be of interest to students of literature and drama.

First published in 1972, this is the first detailed study of the milieu of the eighteenth-century literary hack and its significance in Augustan literature. Although the modern term 'Grub Street' has declined into vague metaphor, for the Augustan satirists it embodied not only an actual place but an emphatic lifestyle. Pat Rogers shows that the major satirists - Pope, Swift and Fielding - built a potent fiction surrounding the real circumstances in which the scribblers lived, and the importance of this aspect of their writing. The author first locates the original Grub Street, in what is now the Barbican, and then presents a detailed topographical tour of the surrounding area. With detailed studies of a number of key authors, as well as the modern and metaphorical development of the term 'Grub Street', this book offers comprehensive insight into the nature of Augustan literature and the social conditions and concerns that inspired it.