This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet. The essays cover the whole of Spensers work, from early literary experiments such as The Shepeardes Calendar, to his unfinished crowning work,The Fairie Queene. The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their perspective contexts: new historicist, post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist. His study also covers the critical responses of leading British, Irish and American scholars.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The Sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex is an interdisciplinary study of a county at the forefront of religious, political and artistic developments in early-modern England. Ranging from the schism of Reformation to the outbreak of Civil War, the volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history, religious and intellectual history and English literature to offer new perspectives on early-modern Sussex. Essays discuss a wide variety of topics: the coherence of a county divided between East and West and Catholic and Protestant; the art and literary collections of Chichester cathedral; communities of Catholic gentry; Protestant martyrdom; aristocratic education; writing, preaching and exile; local funerary monuments; and the progresses of Elizabeth I. Contributors include Michael Questier; Nigel Llewellyn; Caroline Adams; Karen Coke; and Andrew Foster. The collection concludes with an Afterword by Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester). This volume extends work done in the 1960s and 70s on early-modern Sussex, drawing on new work on county and religious identities, and setting it into a broad national context. The result is a book that not only tells us much about Sussex, but which also has a great deal to offer all scholars working in the field of local and regional history, and religious change in England as a whole.

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England, including the political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses that governed the codes of lying and truth-telling from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The contributions to this collection draw on a wide range of early modern English literature from Shakespeare to Swift, and from travel writing to poetry, in order to explore the extent to which plays, poems, and narrative texts in this period were sites of negotiation, and, at times, of ideological warfare between the moral imperative of truth-telling and the expediency of telling lies. What were the cultural norms of truthfulness and lying, and on what basis were they constructed? What were the consequences when someone did not share the assumed common project of truth-telling? And which forms of communication were exempt from the pragmatic strictures on mendacious discourse? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex is an interdisciplinary study of a county at the forefront of religious, political and artistic developments in early-modern England. Ranging from the schism of Reformation to the outbreak of Civil War, the volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history, religious and intellectual history and English literature to offer new perspectives on early-modern Sussex. Essays discuss a wide variety of topics: the coherence of a county divided between East and West and Catholic and Protestant; the art and literary collections of Chichester cathedral; communities of Catholic gentry; Protestant martyrdom; aristocratic education; writing, preaching and exile; local funerary monuments; and the progresses of Elizabeth I. Contributors include Michael Questier; Nigel Llewellyn; Caroline Adams; Karen Coke; and Andrew Foster. The collection concludes with an Afterword by Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester). This volume extends work done in the 1960s and 70s on early-modern Sussex, drawing on new work on county and religious identities, and setting it into a broad national context. The result is a book that not only tells us much about Sussex, but which also has a great deal to offer all scholars working in the field of local and regional history, and religious change in England as a whole.

1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England, including the political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses that governed the codes of lying and truth-telling from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The contributions to this collection draw on a wide range of early modern English literature from Shakespeare to Swift, and from travel writing to poetry, in order to explore the extent to which plays, poems, and narrative texts in this period were sites of negotiation, and, at times, of ideological warfare between the moral imperative of truth-telling and the expediency of telling lies. What were the cultural norms of truthfulness and lying, and on what basis were they constructed? What were the consequences when someone did not share the assumed common project of truth-telling? And which forms of communication were exempt from the pragmatic strictures on mendacious discourse? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Should we assume that people who lived some time ago were quite similar to us or should we assume that they need to be thought of as alien beings with whom we have little in common? This specially commissioned collection explores this important issue through an analysis of the lives and work of a number of significant early modern writers. Shakespeare is analysed in a number of essays as authors ask whether we can learn anything about his life from reading the Sonnets and Hamlet. Other essays explore the first substantial autobiography in English, that of the musician and poet, Thomas Wythorne (1528-96); the representation of the self in Holbein's great painting, The Ambassadors; whether we have a window into men's and women's souls when we read their intimate personal correspondence; and whether modern studies that wish to recapture the intentions and inner thoughts of early modern people who left writings behind are valuable aids to interpreting the past. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

An investigation into how soldiers of this period considered and presented themselves. Within the large-scale historiography of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century warfare and the early modern military revolution there remain many unanswered questions about the individual soldier and their relationship to the profession of arms. What was it that distinguished a soldier from the rest of society? How was the military life perceived in this period by those with first-hand experience of soldiery, or who represented soldiers on the page and stage?How were nationality, class, and gender used to construct military identities? And how were such identities also shaped by classical and medieval models? This book examines how early modern fighting men and their peers viewed and represented themselves in military roles, and how they were viewed and fashioned by others. Focusing on English, Irish and Anglo-Irish soldiers active between the 1560s and 1630s, and using sources including poetry, petitions, sermons, military treatises and manuals, campaign records, and plays by Shakespeare, Middleton and their contemporaries, a combination of historians and literary scholars offer new investigations into the construction, representation and interpretation of military identity, and consider the personal and political implications of martial self-fashioning. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and methodologies, the essays here demonstrate how the study of military identity-and military identities-intersects with that of life-writing, digital humanities, gender, disability, the history of emotions, and the relationship between early modern literature and martial culture. MATTHEW WOODCOCK is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Literature, University of East Anglia; CIAN O'MAHONY is an Independent Scholar. Contributors: Angela Andreani, Benjamin Armintor, Ruth Canning, David Edwards, Andrew Hadfield, Andrew Hiscock, Adam McKeown, Philip Major, Cian O'Mahony, James O'Neill, Vimala Pasupathi, Clodagh Tait, David Trim, Matthew Woodcock.

This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet. The essays cover the whole of Spensers work, from early literary experiments such as The Shepeardes Calendar, to his unfinished crowning work,The Fairie Queene. The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their perspective contexts: new historicist, post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist. His study also covers the critical responses of leading British, Irish and American scholars.

First collection devoted to the Poly-Olbion, bringing out in particular its concerns with nature and the environment. Poly-Olbion (1612-1622), the collaborative work of the poet Michael Drayton, the legal scholar John Selden, and the engraver William Hole, ranks among the most remarkable literary productions of early modern England, and arguably among the most important. An ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of the history, topography, and ecology of England and Wales - ranging in its preoccupations from the supernatural conception of Merlin to the curious habits of beavers, and from celebrations of martial glory to laments over the diminishment of woodlands - the book seems determined to pack all of national and natural history between its covers. In the course of thirty songs, Drayton's Muse traverses a varying landscape in which personified rivers, hills, and forests sing of past glories and disasters, pursuing local and regional rivalries whilst propounding a heterogeneous vision of Britain. However, perhaps because of its very uniqueness, it has received relatively little critical attention. This is the first ever volume of essays on Poly-Olbion, and a reflection of the work's increasing prominence in scholarship on the literature and culture of early modern England: the poem has long been central to critical studies of early modern nationhood and nationalism, but in the last decade it has also assumed a central place in discussions of pre-modern approaches to ecological sustainability and environmental degradation. The contributors here address questions about the form and purpose of Poly-Olbion, as well as engaging with these dominant critical debates, reflecting the extent to which the preoccupations of Drayton and his collaborators have become our own.

This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of representation - aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual - and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary, combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics from the Reformation to the Restoration.

For many years C. S. Lewis's dismissal of the sixteenth century as a 'drab age' influenced literary scholars. Andrew Hadfield offers a challenging reinterpretation, through study of the work of some of the century's most important writers, including Skelton, Bale, Sidney, Spenser, Baldwin and the Earl of Surrey. He argues that all were involved in the establishment of a vernacular literary tradition as a crucial component of English identity, yet also wished to use the category of 'literature' to create a public space for critical political debate. Conventional assumptions - that pre-modern and modern history are neatly separated by the Renaissance, and that literary history is best studied as an autonomous narrative - are called into question: this book is a study of literary texts, but also a contribution to theories and histories of politics, national identity and culture.

This groundbreaking work, first published in 2005, reveals exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought that were critical of the English crown and constitution. Shakespeare has often been seen as a conservative political thinker characterised by an over-riding fear of the 'mob'. Hadfield argues instead that Shakespeare's writing emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility. Beginning with Shakespeare's apocalyptic representation of civil war in the Henry VI plays, Hadfield provides a series of powerful new readings of Shakespeare and his time. For anyone interested in Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, this book is required reading.

This groundbreaking work, first published in 2005, reveals exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought that were critical of the English crown and constitution. Shakespeare has often been seen as a conservative political thinker characterised by an over-riding fear of the 'mob'. Hadfield argues instead that Shakespeare's writing emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility. Beginning with Shakespeare's apocalyptic representation of civil war in the Henry VI plays, Hadfield provides a series of powerful new readings of Shakespeare and his time. For anyone interested in Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, this book is required reading.

In this accessible and rigorous introduction to Spenser, fourteen specially-commissioned essays provide all the essential information required to appreciate and understand Spenser's rewarding and challenging work. The Companion guides the reader through Spenser's poetry and prose, and provides extensive commentary on his life, the historical and religious context in which he wrote, his wide reading in Classical, European and English poetry, his sexual politics and use of language. A chronology and further reading lists make this volume indispensable for any student of Spenser.

Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Renaissance historians and literary critics. They are divided over a number of questions: Was there once a concerted plan to censor all material hostile to the status quo; or did authorities only intervene in periods of acute crisis? Did authorities actually read the material referred to them? This is the first collection to bring together the key figures in the field, with essays by Richard Burt, Janet Clare, Cyndia Clegg, Richard Dutton, Richard McCabe, and Annabel Patterson.

Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Renaissance historians and literary critics. Commentators are divided on a number of questions. Was there once a concerted plan to censor all material hostile to the status quo? Or did authorities only intervene in periods of acute crisis? Did they actually read the material referred to them? This is the first collection that brings together the key figures in the field and includes essays by Richard Burt, Janet Clare, Cyndia Clegg, Richard Dutton, Richard McCabe and Annabel Patterson.

The question of ethics has dominated recent developments within the humanities. This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts. Ethical and literary issues explored by the contributors include biography, sensibility, national identity, feminism, postcolonialism, religion, subjectivity and stylistics. Literary authors and philosophers/theorists discussed range from Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to Michele Roberts and Salman Rushdie, and from Kant and Coleridge to Derrida and Levinas.

This revised and enlarged Fourth Edition expands and improves on the strengths of the previous three editions. All selections are based on early and established texts, fully glossed, and carefully annotated. An Editor's Note follows each section. This new edition addresses the shifts in scholarly and critical interests in Spenser studies since 1993 as well as access provided by new technology. Notes reflect the information that Spenser's best readers would have at their fingertips without spoiling the pleasure of reading Spenser for the first time. Mother Hubberds Tale from the 1591 Complaints is newly included. The Ruines of Rome, Spenser's translation of Joachim Du Bellay's Antiquitez, is also added to give readers the chance to see Spenser at work as a translator and to give the English perspective on Rome. Sixteen critical essays have been added to supplement fourteen earlier commentaries. Among the perspectives new to the Fourth Edition are those of C. S Lewis, Martha Craig, Gordon Teskey, Jeff Dolven, David Wilson-Okamura, and Jennifer Summit. In keeping with the last edition, critical pieces on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped together to facilitate classroom discussion. New selections from Jane Grogan, Andrew D. Hadfield, Colin Burrow, Lynn Staley, Lauren Silberman, and A. E. B. Coldiron join the readings on House of Busyrane, and "Amoretti" grows with selections by A. Leigh DeNeef and Helena Mennie Shire. A Chronology of Spenser's life and an extensive Bibliography are also included.

Now available in paperback, The intellectual culture of the English country house is a ground-breaking collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars, which uncovers the vibrant intellectual life of early modern provincial England. The essays explore architectural planning; libraries and book collecting; landscape gardening; interior design; the history of science and scientific experimentation; and the collection of portraits and paintings. The volume demonstrate the significance of the English country house (e.g. Knole House, Castle Howard, Penshurst Place) and its place within larger local cultures that it helped to create and shape. It provides a substantial overview of the country house culture of early modern England and the complicated relationship between the provinces and the national, the country and the city, in a period of rapid social, intellectual and economic transformation. -- .