Drawing from medieval chivalric culture, the prose romance was a popular early modern genre featuring stories of courtship, combat, and travel. Flourishing at the same moment as the growing English trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, prose romances adopted both Eastern settings and new conceptions of masculinity - commercial rather than chivalric, erotic rather than militant. Knights in Arms moves beyond the best-known examples of the genre, such as Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to consider the broad range of texts which featured the Eastern Mediterranean in this era. Goran Stanivukovic highlights how eroticism within prose romances, particularly homoerotic desire, facilitated commercial, cross-ethnic, and cross-cultural interactions, shaping European knowledge and conceptions of the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire. Through his careful examination of these lesser known works, Stanivukovic sheds important light on early modern trade, Mediterranean politics, and the changing meaning of masculinity in an age of commercial expansion.

Explores popular Renaissance tragedies through a chronological commentary of political, social, cultural and aesthetic factorsThis book covers the development of tragedy as a dramatic genre from its earliest examples in the 1560's until the closure of the theatres in 1642. It traces the astonishingly diverse range of tragedies as they were influenced by the growth of public and private theatre venues in London. Tragedy was the most popular and the most diverse of theatrical genres during the English Renaissance; it was also the most disruptive and subversive. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, tragedy reaches kings and queens and everyday person alike. Tragedy has rules, but these were rules that playwrights were ready to trouble and transform to meet changes in society and politics, in theatre venue, and in audience demand.Key FeaturesPlays and their authors are discussed alongside each other against the background of the socio-cultural and political conditions of their timesShows the degree to which theatre history can be connected with other significant contextual factors and critical ideas in analysis of the tragedies of the English RenaissanceReflects the latest scholarship of early modern theatre history (especially London theatres), the history of performance and acting and the print history of stage playsInspects the sub-genres associated with the form, such as revenge tragedy, historical tragedy, domestic tragedy, tragicomedy and closet drama

Now available in paperback, Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies. Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature. The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism. Works from Shakespeare's entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.

Explores popular Renaissance tragedies through a chronological commentary of political, social, cultural and aesthetic factorsThis book covers the development of tragedy as a dramatic genre from its earliest examples in the 1560's until the closure of the theatres in 1642. It traces the astonishingly diverse range of tragedies as they were influenced by the growth of public and private theatre venues in London. Tragedy was the most popular and the most diverse of theatrical genres during the English Renaissance; it was also the most disruptive and subversive. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, tragedy reaches kings and queens and everyday person alike. Tragedy has rules, but these were rules that playwrights were ready to trouble and transform to meet changes in society and politics, in theatre venue, and in audience demand.Key FeaturesPlays and their authors are discussed alongside each other against the background of the socio-cultural and political conditions of their timesShows the degree to which theatre history can be connected with other significant contextual factors and critical ideas in analysis of the tragedies of the English RenaissanceReflects the latest scholarship of early modern theatre history (especially London theatres), the history of performance and acting and the print history of stage playsInspects the sub-genres associated with the form, such as revenge tragedy, historical tragedy, domestic tragedy, tragicomedy and closet drama

Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies. Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature. The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism. Works from Shakespeare's entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

Body has been one of the main preoccupations of current Renaissance historiography and current critical theory. Both the literary representation of the body and the construction of the material body in Renaissance anatomical and medical discourses have been used to explore the dynamics of early modern sexuality, gender, and society. Yet the influence of Ovid's texts on the construction of the Renaissance discourses of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity has not been fully explored. This collection of original essays uses contemporary theory to examine Renaissance writers' reworking of Ovid's texts in order to analyze the strategies in the construction of the early modern discourses of gender, sexuality, and writing. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I explores literary and dramatic allusions to Ovid in relation to early modern ideologies of subjectivity and anxieties about identification and desire. Part II illustrates the appropriation of Ovidian myths by poets and dramatists interested in the articulation of agency. Part III demonstrates how various points of intertextuality between Ovid and English Renaissance writers ranging from Marlowe to Milton contributed to early modern epistemologies and discourse of embodiment, spectatorship, and print culture.