This new edition of Shakespeare's Cymbeline considers the critical and historical scholarship released in the late twentieth century. It highlights the play's elements of romance, tragicomedy and Jacobean stagecraft and acknowledges the postmodern indeterminacy of its key moments. Martin Butler departs from the legacy of the sentimental Victorian interpretation of the heroine, Innogen, and focuses on the politics of 1610, especially regarding uestions of British union and nationhood.

This volume contains three of Ben Jonson's greatest plays - Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1606) and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609). Sejanus, an experimental tragedy written in the classical manner, was labelled a seditious work at the time of its first production and embroiled Jonson with the Privy Council. Volpone is the first of his mature comedies, with a remarkable cast of Venetian legacy-hunters: using verse of mock-heroic grandeur Jonson created in the character of Volpone one of his most flamboyant and cynical swindlers. Epicoene is a brilliant farce which makes fun of the pretensions...

Four of Ben Jonson's plays are examined in this volume: two are his major works and two from his later oeuvre. The Alchemist (1610) is a major satire on folly and greed, brilliantly plotted and dazzling in its use of language. Bartholomew Fair (1614), possibly Jonson's greatest achievement, reveals a panoramic depiction of London society. The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633) suggest a different Jonson, exploring new forms and writing from a profoundly modified perspective. In The New Inn, a romantic comedy overlaid with an atmospheric melancholy and ethical urgency, Jonson engages...

This provocative and candid book goes behind the scenes to reveal the secret of success behind a number of leading UK retailers. It includes in-depth case studies on John Lewis, Selfridges, Carphone Warehouse, Oddbins, Topshop, B&Q and HMV and unique insight from a number of top retail analysts and commentators.

Court masques were multi-media entertainments, with song, dance, theater, and changeable scenery, staged annually at the English court to celebrate the Stuart dynasty. They have typically been regarded as frivolous and expensive entertainments. This book dispels this notion, emphasizing instead that they were embedded in the politics of the moment, and spoke in complex ways to the different audiences who viewed them. Covering the whole period from Queen Anne s first masque at Winchester in 1603 to Salmacida Spolia in 1640, Butler looks in depth at the political functions of state festivity....

This is a thorough re-evaluation of the drama written and performed in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

Beginning with an analysis of participation practices in contemporary print and other media, this volume expands historical perspectives by exploring the potential of participatory cultures to illuminate past forms of collaboration between individual and collective actors (i.e. authors, editors, publishers, fans, critics, etc.). In doing so, the volume sheds new light on the historically, culturally, and medially specific forms and functions, as well as on the economic, political, and institutional parameters, contributing to the emergence and transformation of what turn out to be precarious...