The experience of powerful emotion has always been central to dramatic presentation and audience response. In this study, T. G. Bishop examines ways in which wonder has been used by playwrights as an integral part of theater in classical and medieval drama and explores wonder in Shakespeare's work through extended readings of The Comedy of Errors, Pericles and The Winter's Tale. By focusing on how characters feel, and how the story of these feelings is told and evaluated, this study offers a new approach to understanding plays.

Frank Whigham presents a detailed and innovative analysis of five English Renaissance plays, set in the context of social rank, gender, kinship, and service relationships. The Spanish Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi, set at court, explore fantasies of the lurid and decadent life at the center of national culture. Arden of Faversham, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, and A Yorkshire Tragedy examine the collisions between traditional rural values and newfangled behavior brought from London.

The Poetics of English Nationhood is a study of the formation of English national identity during the early modern period. Claire McEachern shows how the representation of faith, fatherland and crown in Tudor texts continually personified English political institutions. Those texts we traditionally label literary, she argues, already encode and personify power relations, thereby reinforcing the idea of the nation as an imaginary force. McEachern's study revises our understanding of the term "literary" through an examination of Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton, tracing the means by which an...

In early modern England, boys and girls learned to be masculine or feminine as they learned to read and write. This book explores how gender differences, instilled through specific methods of instruction in literacy, were scrutinized in the English public theater. Close readings of plays from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to Thomas Dekker's Whore of Babylon, and of poems, didactic treatises and autobiographical writings from the same period, offer a richly textured analysis of the interaction among didactic precepts, literary models, and historical men and women.

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.

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.

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.

This book explores the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period of English and colonial history. Joan Pong Linton argues that while the emergent romance figure of the husband embodies a new ideal of productive masculinity, colonial narratives, in putting this masculinity to the test, often contradict and raise doubts about the ideal. Study of these texts in the context of colonial experience reveals not just the "romance of empire" but also the impact of the New World on English identity.

Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres. He identifies in the drama a materialist vision which has its origins in the climate of uncertainty engendered by the rapidly expanding economy of London. His examples range from the economic importance of cuckoldry to the role of stage props as commodities, and the commercial significance of the Troy story in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and he offers...