The purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem of literary influence in original ways and from a variety of perspectives. The emphasis throughout is on the sort of careful, exhaustive, evidence-based scholarship to which Forker dedicated his entire professional life. Although wide-ranging and various by design, the essays in this book never lose sight of three discrete yet overlapping areas of literary inquiry that create a unity of perspective amid the diversity of approaches: 1) the formation of play texts, textual analysis, and editorial practice; 2) performance history and the material playing conditions from Shakespeare's time to the present, including film as well as stage representations; and 3) the world, both cultural and literary, in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked and to which they bequeathed an artistic legacy that continues to be re-interpreted and re-defined by a whole new set of cultural and literary pressures. Eschewing any single, predetermined ideological perspective, the essays in this book call our attention to how the simplest questions or observations can open up provocative and unexpected scholarly vistas. In so doing, they invite us into a subtly re-configured world of literary influence that draws us into new, often unexpected, ways of seeing and understanding the familiar.

Anna of Denmark, Queen of England A Cultural Biography Leeds Barroll "The scholarship is impeccable, the argument new, and the case convincing. I am tempted to think that Barroll has here in effect invented a genre of 'cultural biography.'"--Catherine Belsey In the well-entrenched critical view of the Jacobean period, James I is credited with the flowering of culture in the early years of the seventeenth century. His queen, Anna of Denmark, is seen as a shadowy figure at best, a capricious and shallow one at worst. But Leeds Barroll makes a well-documented case that it was Anna who, for her own purposes, developed an alternative court and sponsored many of the other artistic ventures in one of the most productive and innovative periods of English cultural history. Married at seventeen, Anna soon became a shrewd and powerful player in the court politics of Scotland and, later, England. Her influence can be seen in James's choices for advisors and beneficiaries of royal attention. In fact, James's and Anna's longstanding dispute over the raising of the heir, Henry, caused a major scandal of the time and was suspected as a plot against the king's safety. In order to assert her own power, Anna actually forced a miscarriage upon herself, an extraordinary event that is referred to in much unnoticed contemporary diplomatic correspondence. An important feature of court entertainment and literary production at this time was the development of the extravagant drama known as the masque, which reached its literary peak in the works of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Barroll argues that it was in fact Anna and not James who encouraged and staged the masques, as a way of defining both a social and political identity for the royal consort, a role that had been nonexistent under Elizabeth. Barroll's work on Anna's patronage also sets Shakespeare's company in a broader context. By writing the cultural biography of Anna of Denmark, queen of England, Leeds Barroll reestablishes the influential and distinctive role of the queen consort in early modern Europe. Leeds Barroll is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. New Cultural Studies 2000 232 pages 6 x 9 15 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3574-6 Cloth $49.95s 32.50 World Rights Biography, History Short copy: This cultural biography rescues Queen Anna from the shadow of King James I, arguing that she sponsored many of the artistic endeavors at court in the innovative Jacobean period (e.g., the extravagant drama known as the masque) in her role as early modern queen consort. Leeds Barroll also delves into her relationship with Catholicism.