Christopher Highley's book explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic "other" was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.

This book is the first comprehensive account of homoeroticism in Renaissance drama. Mario DiGangi analyzes the relation between homoeroticism and social power in a wide range of literary and historical texts from the 1580s to the 1620s, drawing on the insights of materialist, feminist and queer theory. Each chapter focuses on the homoerotics of a major dramatic genre (Ovidian comedy, satiric comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy) and studies the ideologies and institutions it characteristically explores.

This book is the first comprehensive account of homoeroticism in Renaissance drama. Mario DiGangi analyzes the relation between homoeroticism and social power in a wide range of literary and historical texts from the 1580s to the 1620s, drawing on the insights of materialist, feminist and queer theory. Each chapter focuses on the homoerotics of a major dramatic genre (Ovidian comedy, satiric comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy) and studies the ideologies and institutions it characteristically explores.

Recent explanations of changes in early modern European thought speak much of a move from orality and emphasis on language to print culture and a "spatial" way of thinking. Timothy J. Reiss offers a more complex explanation for the massive changes in thought that occurred. He describes how, while teaching and public debate continued to be based in the language arts, scientific and artistic areas came to depend on mathematical disciplines, including music, for new means and methods of discovery, and as a basis for wider sociocultural renewal.

Textual Intercourse brings together literary criticism, theater history, the study of printed books, and gender studies, to show how the writing of Renaissance drama was conceptualized in the languages of sex, gender, and eroticism. Jeffrey Masten argues that the plays of Shakespeare and others, and the way in which those plays were first printed, illustrates a shift from a model of collaboration to one of singular authorship. Using methods attuned to sexuality and gender, Masten illuminates questions of authorship and intellectual property.

This revisionary study of the origins of courtly literature reveals the culture of spectatorship and voyeurism that shaped early Tudor English literary life. Through new research into the reception of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, it demonstrates how Pandarus became the model of the early modern courtier. In close readings of early Tudor poetry, court drama, letters, manuscript anthologies and printed books, Seth Lerer illuminates a "Pandaric" world of displayed bodies, surreptitious letters, and transgressive performances.

Heather James argues that Shakespeare's use of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources demonstrates the appropriation of classical authority in the interests of developing a national myth. She goes on to distinguish Shakespeare's deployment of the myth--notably in Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Tempest--from "official" Tudor and Stuart ideology, and to show how Shakespeare participates in the larger cultural project of finding historical legitimacy for Britain as a realm asserting its status as an empire.

The period from the Reformation to the English Civil War saw an evolving understanding of social identity in England. This book uses four illuminating case studies to chart a shift from mid-sixteenth-century notions of an individually generated, spiritually motivated self, to civil war perceptions of the self as a site of civil control. Each centers on the work of an early modern woman writer in the act of self-definition and authorization, illustrating the evolving relationships between public and private selves and the increasing role of gender in determining different identities for men...

Celia Daileader explores the paradoxes of eroticism in early modern English drama, where women and their bodies (represented by boy actors) were materially absent and yet symbolically central. Accounting for the significance of the space offstage, where most sexual acts take place, Daileader looks to the suppression of religious drama in England and the resulting secularization of the stage. She draws together questions about sexuality and the sacred, in the bodies--of Christ and of woman--banished from the early modern English stage.

Slander constitutes a central social, legal and literary concern of early modern England. M. Lindsay Kaplan reveals it to be an effective, if unstable, means of repudiating one's opposition, and shows how it was deployed by rulers and poets including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare. Her study challenges recent claims that the state controlled poets' criticisms by means of censorship, arguing instead that power relations between poets and the state are more accurately described in terms of the reversible charge of slander.