This is a wide-ranging, closely-researched collection, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, on the cultural placement and transmission of texts between 1520 and 1750. Material and historical conditions of texts are analysed, and the range of works is wide, including plays and the Lucrece of Shakespeare (with adaptations, and a discussion of 'reading' playtexts), Sidney's Arcadia, Greene's popular Pandosto (both discussed in the contexts of changing readerships and forms of fiction), Hakluyt's travel books, funerary verse, and the writings of Katherine Parr and Elizabethan...

What have we learned from the first experiments performed at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? What light have recent productions shed on the way Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen? Written by the Leverhulme Fellow appointed to study and record actor use of this new-old playhouse, here is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years, in workshops, rehearsals and performances. It shows how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of 'historical' constraints (and unexpected freedoms) to provide valuable new...

Sir Walter Ralegh created a powerful public identity by means of the prose texts he wrote from prison. This new study not only offers a much-needed analysis of these neglected political writings, but also demonstrates the ways in which his readers modified Ralegh's public identity in a series of fascinating posthumous reinterpretations. By focusing on both Ralegh and his interpreters, this book contributes to the growing body of work on the politics and practice of writing and reading in early-modern England.

This collection of essays is the first to reassess a range of Shakespeare's plays in relation to carnivalesque theory. Contributors re-historicize the carnivalesque in different ways, offering both a developed application, or critique of, Bakhtin's thought.

Work on Ben Jonson has long been dominated by the 11-volume Oxford text of his Works, edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (1925-52). In this monumental edition, Jonson seems a remote and forbidding figure, an author of formidable learning and literariness. This collection of essays by twelve leading scholars, editors, historians and bibliographers explores ways in which modern understanding of Jonson's texts has undermined the emphasis of the Oxford edition, and generated a Jonson whose Works and career look quite different. Addressing the competing needs of future...

John Dolan takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasising the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasion. This book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

Drawing upon archival material as well as the drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant 'cultures', and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

Responding to recent historical analyses of Post-Reformation English Catholicism, the essays in this collection by both literary scholars and historians focus on polemical, devotional, political, and literary texts that dramatize the conflicts between context-sensitive Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England. They foreground some major literary authors and canonical texts, but also examine non-canonical literature as well as other writings that embody ideological fantasies connecting the political and religious discourses of the time with their literary manifestations.

This is the first comprehensive study of the revival and appropriation of the Roman triumph from the 1580s to the 1650s. English versions of the triumph included ceremonial re-enactments, poetic or pictorial representations, and stage performances. As well as many non-canonical writers, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton all produced versions. The book includes an original survey of ancient literary models and the work of humanist antiquarians, and shows how all its texts are implicated in contemporary political conflicts and discourses.

"The Double Voice" reassesses the notions of gender which have been used to analyze Renaissance literature. Rather than assuming that men and women write differently because of background, education and culture, it tries to unsettle the connections between the sex of the author and the constructions of gender in texts, and to reconsider the prevalent determinist model of reading which tends to consign women writers to the private, domestic sphere, and to render male negotiations of gender and sexuality invisible and transparent.