Essays on aspects of early drama, including in this volume a focus on the Towneley plays. Editors: Sarah Carpenter, Pamela M. King, Meg Twycross, Greg Walker. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatreand pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modernsurvivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. This volume includes essays on spectatorship, audience reception and records of early drama, especially in Scotland, besides engaging with the current interest in the Towneley Plays and the history of its manuscript.

This large-scale anthology of early Scottish Literature, now revised, has been designed as a teaching text for use by school and university students. Longer works are either presented complete - e.g. James I, King is Quair; as long extracts with explanatory linking passages - e.g. Urquhart, The Jewel; or by sections which sum up the main themes and concerns of the text-e.g. Barbour's Bruce Book I. There are full critical and linguistic introductions; brief biographical and bibliographical introductions for each author or sub-section; the texts have all been re-edited; every difficult word is glossed, and full explanatory notes appear at the foot of each page. A substantial Appendix presents texts in Latin, Scots, English and Gaelic from the seventeenth century, demonstrating the vitality and interaction of these voices within the Scottish tradition. A noteworthy feature of the book is Professor Jack's Critical Introduction, 'Where Stands Scottish Literature Now?' This challenges many widely-held assumptions about Scottish literature. In particular it seeks to explore the reasons behind the strange neglect of the writers of the seventeenth century. Basing its argument on the texts of the Anthology as a whole, it seeks to re-define the accepted canon and suggests an alternative way of approaching Scottish literary history.

Along with his contemporary Robert Henryson, William Dunbar is the foremost figure of Scottish medieval literature. Writing as a court poet during the reign of James IV, Dunbar was at the intellectual heart of Scotland's Renaissance. His poetry is among the greatest in the Scots language: sophisticated, versatile and stylish, the work of a master of considerable literary genius. Ronald Jack's SCOTNOTE study guide examines a number of Dunbar's most important works - The Thrissil and the Rois, The Lament for the Makaris, The Golden Targe, The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and others - and explains the background, history, language and influences for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

Sir James Barrie's fall from critical grace has been spectacular. Ranked in his own day with Shaw and Hardy, he is now usually dismissed as superficial, sentimental and commercial to the point of artistic dishonesty. Professor Jack argues that the naturalistic, psychological and national criteria used to condemn him are at odds with his proclaimed purposes. Using Barrie's own literary theory as contained in Sentimental Tommy and elsewhere, he measures the playwright against the standards of a perspectival art founded on the perceived needs of its audience. Barrie's thought and theatrical skills are traced through the apprentice works of the Victorian period - Walker, London, The Professor's Love Story, The Little Minister, The Wedding Guest. Major debts to Shakespeare and to Ibsen are con-sidered in the light of Barrie's intention of becom-ing 'the heaviest writer of his time.' A compulsive reviser and perfectionist, he struggles to find a dramatic form capable of combining pleasing myth with harshest truth. The major plays of 1902-4 are radically reas-sessed and the older claim for Barrie's genius resurrected on new critical grounds. Quality Street is related to the metaphysical clash between Chris-tianity and Darwinism; The Admirable Crichton's many endings are seen - not as a sign of uncer-tainty - but as an anticipation of the deconstructionist's concern with form's defeat by meaning. Little Mary ('the too-too-obvious riddle') is re-vealed in all its allegorical complexity as a biting satire on the Irish problem and the English upper class. Peter Pan ends this stage of Barrie's pil-grimage, drawing his major concerns into the com-prehensive form of a Creation Myth, owing much to Nietzsche and Roget. First published in 1991 and now reprinted with corrections.