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Shakespeare's plays are stuffed with letters - 111 appear on stage in all but five of his dramas. But for modern actors, directors, and critics they are frequently an awkward embarrassment. Alan Stewart shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. By reconstructing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, and recapturing what it meant to write, send, receive, read, and archive a letter, it throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas. Early modern letters were not private missives sent through an anonymous postal system, but a vital - sometimes the only - means of maintaining contact and sending news between distant locations. Penning a letter was a serious business in a period when writers made their own pen and ink; letter-writing protocols were strict; letters were dispatched by personal messengers or carriers, often received and read in public - and Shakespeare exploited all these features to dramatic effect. Surveying the vast range of letters in Shakespeare's oeuvre, the book also features sustained new readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV Part One.

English drama between the late fifteenth century and the late sixteenth centuries is as diverse as it is engaging; this anthology brings together eighteen of the most interesting and important dramatic works from the period. The plays have been chosen to give a broad view of the drama produced in Tudor England. They testify to the eclectic tastes of sixteenth-century audiences, ranging from morality plays (Mankind, Everyman), to comedies inspired by the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus (Ralph Roister Doister), to tragedies inspired by the plays of Seneca (Gorboduc, Cambises). In later plays, morality plots rub shoulders with slapstick comic business (The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art, The Three Ladies of London), and classical gods intervene in the affairs of England's regions (Gallathea). While some of the plays offer pure entertainment, others have a clear political agenda. King Johan is presented as a prototype for English resistance to Rome's Catholicism; Gorboduc's decision to abdicate and divide his kingdom highlights the vexed question of the English succession under a childless queen. Other plays comment more obliquely on contemporary events. Play of the Four Elements reflects on England's nascent maritime expeditions to the New World, while The Three Ladies of London comments topically on immigrant overcrowding in England's port towns, and the dangers of England's trade in the Mediterranean. Some plays push the boundaries of what the theatre can do in staging violence (Cambises) and questioning gender roles (Gallathea). Designed for undergraduate use, the anthology includes extensive explanatory annotations and a substantial introduction to each play; spelling and punctuation have been partially modernized in the interests of making the texts more accessible to students. In all this, the anthology follows principles similar to those developed for Christina M. Fitzgerald's and John T. Sebastian's Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama; several of the plays from that anthology are also included here, while the rest have been newly edited for this volume, under the supervision of General Editor Alan Stewart.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

This volume belongs to the new critical edition of the complete works of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The edition presents the works in broadly chronological order and in accordance with the principles of modern textual scholarship. This volume contains Bacon's earliest known writings, dating from 1584 to 1596, comprising position papers, commentaries on printed works, legal readings and opinions, and discourses of advice, usually written in response to specific events or demands, and circulated in manuscript. Bacon's writings to 1596 generally reflect his professional occupations: legal, political, and parliamentary. They include substantial writings on the Martin Marprelate controversy of 1588-1589, Roman Catholic attacks on Elizabeth's government (1593); dramatic entertainments put on at Gray's Inn and the court; tracts on important legal cases of the period; notes from his extensive reading; and letters of advice written for and to Bacon's patron, Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex. Despite the 'occasional' nature of these writings, there is clearly visible across them the early signs - 'seeds' as their author would call them-of the philosophy Francis Bacon would later come to write. The writings are presented with substantial introductions, and full commentaries and glossaries

Humanism, in both its rhetoric and practice, attempted to transform the relationships between men that constituted the fabric of early modern society. So argues Alan Stewart in this ground-breaking investigation into the impact of humanism in sixteenth-century England. Here the author shows that by valorizing textual skills over martial prowess, humanism provided a new means of upward mobility for the lowborn but humanistically trained scholar: he could move into a highly intimate place in a nobleman's household that was previously not open to him. Because of its novelty and secrecy, the intimacy between master and scholar was vulnerable to accusations of another type of intimacy--sodomy. In comparing the ways both humanism and sodomy signaled a new economy of social relations capable of producing widespread anxiety, Stewart contributes to the foray of modern gay scholarship into Renais-sance art and literature. The author explores the intriguing relationship between humanism and sodomy in a series of case studies: the Medici court of the 1470s, the allegations against monks in the campaign to suppress the English monasteries, the institutionalized beating of young boys, the treacherous circle of the doomed Sir Thomas Seymour, and the closet secretaries of Elizabeth's final years. Stewart's documentation comes from a wide range of underused materials, from schoolboys' grammar books to political writings, enabling him to reconstruct frequently misunderstood events in their original contexts. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Humanism, in both its rhetoric and practice, attempted to transform the relationships between men that constituted the fabric of early modern society. So argues Alan Stewart in this ground-breaking investigation into the impact of humanism in sixteenth-century England. Here the author shows that by valorizing textual skills over martial prowess, humanism provided a new means of upward mobility for the lowborn but humanistically trained scholar: he could move into a highly intimate place in a nobleman's household that was previously not open to him. Because of its novelty and secrecy, the intimacy between master and scholar was vulnerable to accusations of another type of intimacy--sodomy. In comparing the ways both humanism and sodomy signaled a new economy of social relations capable of producing widespread anxiety, Stewart contributes to the foray of modern gay scholarship into Renais-sance art and literature.

The author explores the intriguing relationship between humanism and sodomy in a series of case studies: the Medici court of the 1470s, the allegations against monks in the campaign to suppress the English monasteries, the institutionalized beating of young boys, the treacherous circle of the doomed Sir Thomas Seymour, and the closet secretaries of Elizabeth's final years. Stewart's documentation comes from a wide range of underused materials, from schoolboys' grammar books to political writings, enabling him to reconstruct frequently misunderstood events in their original contexts.

Originally published in 1997.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.