Offering an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of 16th-century literature, this book challenges the tendency to explain Nashe's texts in journalistic and commercial terms. Hutson reveals a previously overlooked link between humanist approaches to the literary text and the social and ethical transformation of the English economy. She blames lack of literary activity in general on the political emphasis and value placed on the printed word, and demonstrates that Nashe's work was the result of an intricate, socially engaged imagination rather than an eccentric sensibility.

This collection brings together essays by well-known feminist scholars from the wide range of disciplines that make up Renaissance Studies. It forms an accessible introduction to the ways in which feminism has replaced the universal, abstract 'Renaissance Man' of traditional scholarship with strategies for the analysis of the conceptual work of gender in the formation of European modernity.

This collection brings together essays by well-known feminist scholars from the wide range of disciplines that make up Renaissance Studies. It forms an accessible introduction to the ways in which feminism has replaced the universal, abstract 'Renaissance Man' of traditional scholarship with strategies for the analysis of the conceptual work of gender in the formation of European modernity.

The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make...

This collection features the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars in the UK and US, with contributors including Peter Goodrich, Lorna Hutson, Erica Sheen and David Colclough studying the period of the English Renaissance from the 1520s to the 1660s. This wide-ranging study, working on the edge of new historicism as well as book history, covers topics such as libel/slander and literary debate, legal textual production, authorship and the politics of authorial attribution and theatre and the law.

This text draws upon new historicist and feminist theories to examine Renaissance literature and the cultural impact of the humanist project. This work provides new readings of Shakespeare, taking a new approach to classical scholarship. The focus is on the central importance of the history of the representation of women. The book also examines how social relations between men were textualized during the early modern period.

This volume examines the area of 16th-century literature, covering a wide range of classical and continental as well as English texts, including Shakespeare. It aims to reveal the links between the complex legal and economic workings of 16th-century culture and the representation of women in the literature of this period.

Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement--imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical...

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have also shown how classical forensic rhetoric formed the basis both of the humanist teaching of literary...

Contrary to the view that Shakespeare was careless with plot details, Circumstantial Shakespeare reveals how he actually used circumstance to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires of his characters, thus creating coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the feelings of characters inhabiting them.