Shakespeare, Court Dramatist centres around the contention that the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated. Richard Dutton argues that many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare's plays have survived in versions adapted for court presentation, where length was no object (and indeed encouraged) and rhetorical virtuosity was appreciated. The first half of the study examines the court's patronage of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime and the crucial role of its Masters of the Revels, who supervised all performances there (as well as censoring plays for public performance). Dutton examines the emergence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, to whom Shakespeare was attached as their 'ordinary poet', and reviews what is known about the revision of plays in the early modern period. The second half of the study focuses in detail on six of Shakespeare's plays which exist in shorter, less polished texts as well as longer, more familiar ones: Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist argues that they are not cut down from those familiar versions, but poorly-reported originals which Shakespeare revised for court performance into what we know best today. More localised revisions in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Henry IV Part II can also best be explained in this context. The court, Richard Dutton argues, is what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Ben Jonson's Volpone is the most widely taught and commonly performed English Renaissance play outside of Shakespeare. However, the dramatic circumstances of its writing are little known. Jonson wrote the play very shortly after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, an event in which he was personally involved. This book argues that the play alludes to the plot as openly as censorship will allow, using the traditional form of the beast fable. As a Roman Catholic himself, Jonson shared in the repression suffered by his co-religionists in the wake of the Plot, and the play fiercely satirizes the man they chiefly blamed for this, Robert Cecil. The elaborate format which Jonson devised for the 1607 edition of Volpone, with a dedication, Epistle and numerous commendatory poems, is reproduced here photographically, allowing the reader to appreciate Jonson's covert meanings and to approach the text as those in 1607 might have done.

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own "Biographia Literaria" as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the "Biographia" was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

This book situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The first half considers the construction of the Regency peasant-poet and how Clare performed this role on stages such as the London Magazine. It also looks at the way in which it went out of fashion as Regency mentalities were replaced by early Victorian ones. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.

This book charts the major events of Stoker's life, which included friendships with many of the major figures of the age and a high public profile as manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum, and maps them onto the contours of his literary career. It offers sustained critical evaluation both of "Dracula" and also of Stoker's lesser-known works, which prove to yield much interest when reinserted into their original cultural contexts.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life. The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the growing sophistication of his poetry and poetics. For Shelley a poet was the 'combined product' of 'internal powers' and 'external influences' (Preface to Prometheus Unbound); this book explores how such a combination manifests itself in his own writings.

Explores the network of social, political and spiritual connections in north west England as a site for regional drama, introducing the reader to the non-metropolitan theatre spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. Uses the possibility that Shakespeare began his theatrical career to provide a range of new contexts for reading his plays. Examines the contexts in which the apprentice dramatist would have worked, providing new insight into regional performance, touring theatre & the patronage of the Earls of Derby. Examines the experiences of Catholic families and the way in which Lancashire's status as a Catholic stronghold led to conflict with central government's attempts to create a united state.. All this feeds into innovative readings of individual plays such as Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. -- .

New Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.

Epicene is now one of the most widely-studied of Johnson's plays. Brilliantly exploiting the Jacobean convention whereby boys played female roles, it satirises the newly fashionable and sexually ambiguous world of the West End of London, where courtly wit rubs shoulders with commercial values. This authoritative new edition, now in paperback, is based on a thorough re-examination of the earliest texts. The introduction analyses the play as originally written for the newly formed Children of the Queen's Revels, and performed at the little-known Whitefriars Theatre. Dutton discusses the composition of the play, which took place during a critical period in Jonson's life and career, when he was established as the principal writer of entertainments at the court. His relationships at this time, with ambitious wits such as John Donne, Sir Edward Herbert and the actor Nathan Field, are examined as models for the principal characters. This challengingly historicised text of Epicene will be essential reading for all serious students of early modern drama. -- .

This important collection of essays focuses on the place of Roman Catholicism in early modern England, bringing new perspectives to bear on whether Shakespeare himself was Catholic. In the Introduction, Richard Wilson reviews the history of the debate over Shakespeare's religion, while Arthur Marotti and Peter Milward offer current perspectives on the subject. Eamon Duffy offers a historian's view of the nature of Elizabethan Catholicism, complemented by Frank Brownlow's study of Elizabeth's most brutal enforcer of religious policy, Richard Topcliffe. Two key Catholic controversialists are addressed by Donna Hamilton (Richard Vestegan) and Jean-Christophe Mayer (Robert Parsons). Robert Miola opens up the neglected field of Jesuit drama in the period, whilst Sonia Fielitz specifically proposes a new, Jesuit source-text for Timon of Athens. Carol Enos (As You Like It), Margaret Jones-Davies (Cymbeline), Gerard Kilroy (Hamlet) and Randall Martin (Henry VI 3) read individual plays in the light of these questions, while Gary Taylor's essay fittingly investigates the possible influence of religious conflicts on the publication of the Shakespeare First Folio. Theatre and religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare as a whole represents a major intervention in this fiercely contested current debate. -- .

Interest in Ben Jonson is higher today than at any time since his death. This new collection offers detailed readings of all the major plays - Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair - and the poems. It also provides significant insights into the court masques and the later plays which have only recently been rediscovered as genuinely engaging stage pieces.

New Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.

There was no single 'Elizabethan stage'. Early modern actors exploited various opportunities for patronage and profit between the 1570s and 1642, whether touring, or performing at inns, in country houses, in purpose-built theatres, at court, at the universities or at the inns of court. This authoritative and comprehensive collection of new essays explores the social, political, and economic pressures under which the playing companies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries operated. It shows how they evolved over time to meet new challenges such as the opposition of City of London authorities, the possibility of permanent location in London, the re-emergence of boy companies c. 1600, and the great increase in court performance which began under James I. Essays also explore the practical everyday business of playing: acquiring scripts and playhouses, dramatic authorship, the contribution of financiers and entrepreneurs, rehearsing, lighting, music, props, styles of acting, boy actors, and the role of women in an 'all-male' world. A number of contributors address the methodologies of theatre history itself, questioning its philosophical premises and evaluating the nature of the evidence we have, such as that from stage directions in play-books or from the visual records. The collection as a whole offers a challenging account of the world of the players in Tudor-Stuart England, revising old assumptions and so inviting us to explore anew the plays which were written for them and which are their greatest living legacy.

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own "Biographia Literaria" as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the "Biographia" was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

This work situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The first half considers the construction of the Regency peasant poet and how Clare performed this role on stages such as the London Magazine. It also looks at the way in which it went out of fashion as Regency mentalities were replaced by early Victorian ones. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.

William Shakespeare is the best-known writer in the English-speaking world. Contrary to popular myth, we actually know more about him and his career than we do about most dramatists of his era - the fruits of three hundred years of fascinated research. Whilst we know less than we would like about Shakespeare's private life, we do have a far clearer picture of his professional career, and of the theatres and social structures with which he was involved. And yet the significance of what we know is fiercely contested and we are challenged by a host of contradictions. Elizabethan actors were often classed as vagabonds yet some were also servants to royalty who performed at court. All the roles in Shakespeare's plays were acted by men, yet he wrote strong roles for women from Lady Macbeth to Rosalind. So was Shakespeare a feminist before his time? Richard Dutton tackles these and other issues which keep Shakespeare, the most influential literary life in literary history, at the centre of our cultural life today.

In 'Percy Bysshe Shelly: A Literary Life' , Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life . The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the growing sophistication of his poetry and poetics. For Shelley, a poet was the 'combined product' of 'internal powers' and 'external influences' (Preface to Prometheus Unbound ); this book explores how such a combination manifests itself in his own writings.

Ben Jonson's Volpone is the most widely taught and commonly performed English Renaissance play outside of Shakespeare. However, the dramatic circumstances of its writing are little known. Jonson wrote the play very shortly after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, an event in which he was personally involved. This book argues that the play alludes to the plot as openly as censorship will allow, using the traditional form of the beast fable. As a Roman Catholic himself, Jonson shared in the repression suffered by his co-religionists in the wake of the Plot, and the play fiercely satirizes the man they chiefly blamed for this, Robert Cecil. The elaborate format which Jonson devised for the 1607 edition of Volpone, with a dedication, Epistle and numerous commendatory poems, is reproduced here photographically, allowing the reader to appreciate Jonson's covert meanings and to approach the text as those in 1607 might have done.

This book offers a critical assessment of the career of one of the most formidable figures of English literature, the most influential poet and dramatist of the early seventeenth century. Richard Dutton focuses on the greatest landmark of Jonson's career, the 1616 folio collection of his works with which he crowned his growing reputation as a man of letters, collecting together the majority of his most enduring works - including Every Man in his Humour, Volpone, The Alchemist; the tragedies Sejanus and Catiline; and the major masques and poems. The book relates these works (and another masterpiece, Bartholomew Fair, which belongs to the same period) to Jonson's tempestuous life and times, touching on such issues as his involvement with the Gunpowder Plot, his frequent confrontations with the political authorities, his emergence as Poet Laureate at Court and his often touchy relations with fellow authors like Shakespeare and Donne. But the principal aim throughout is to offer detailed critical analyses of Jonson's major works showing how, for all that they are rooted in the concerns of his own age, they are far more accessible and relevant to modern readers than is often assumed.

Shakespeare, Court Dramatist centres around the contention that the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated. Richard Dutton argues that many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare's plays have survived in versions adapted for court presentation, where length was no object (and indeed encouraged) and rhetorical virtuosity was appreciated. The first half of the study examines the court's patronage of the theatre during Shakespeare's lifetime and the crucial role of its Masters of the Revels, who supervised all performances there (as well as censoring plays for public performance). Dutton examines the emergence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, to whom Shakespeare was attached as their 'ordinary poet', and reviews what is known about the revision of plays in the early modern period. The second half of the study focuses in detail on six of Shakespeare's plays which exist in shorter, less polished texts as well as longer, more familiar ones: Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Dutton argues that they are not cut down from those familiar versions, but poorly reported originals which Shakespeare revised for court performance into what we know best today. More localized revisions in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Henry IV Part II can also best be explained in this context. The court, Richard Dutton argues, is what made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

This book charts the major events of Stoker's life, including friendships with many of the major figures of the age and as manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum, with his literary career. It offers critical evaluation of Dracula and of Stoker's lesser-known works, yielding much interest when reinserted into their original cultural contexts.

This volume contains Thomas Middletons four greatest plays, "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside," "Women Beware Women," "The Changeling," and "A Game at Chess." "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" is the most complex and effective of the city comedies. "Women Beware Women" and "The Changeling" (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies aside from Shakespeare, studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology. "A Game at Chess" was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical expose of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played to packed houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. With the most up-to-date introduction available, this volume offers all the play texts newly edited with richly informative annotation.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A collection of poems exploring the run up to Christmas, its excitement, its pitfalls, its love, and its culmination in the activities of the legendary red cloaked gentleman. This is a reproduction in its entirety of a tiny handwritten book written twenty five years ago and originally entitled Advent 88, and given to the authors wife on Christmas Day.