This book analyzes the discourses and practices that defined Renaissance theater, as related to the development of encyclopedic texts and vice versa. Looking at what "theater" meant to medieval and Renaissance writers and critics, William West sets Renaissance drama within one of its cultural and intellectual contexts. Although the study focuses on the Renaissance, it also draws on and analyzes substantial classical and medieval material. It is of equal interest to intellectual historians, theater historians and students of early literature.

This monograph documents the development of two cultures and disciplines: science and literature--through a shared aesthetic of knowledge. It brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature, ranging from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fiction of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish.

Tracing the cultural legacy of the Norman Conquest in England from 1350 to 1600, Deanne Williams demonstrates how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the presence of French language and culture in medieval and early modern England. Chapters on Chaucer, the Corpus Christi Plays, William Caxton, early Tudor poetry, and Shakespeare examine a variety of English responses to, and representations of, France and "the French."

Exploring how attitudes toward human emotions changed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this book emphasizes the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton. Douglas Trevor asserts that 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes influenced the methods by which these writers came to analyze their own moods.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of The Sonnets, Stephen Orgel has written a new introduction to Shakespeare's best-loved and most widely read poems. In a series of focused readings he probes the sonnets' sexual and temperamental ambiguity as well as their complex textual history, and explores...

Books and Readers in Early Modern England Material Studies Edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer. Afterword by Stephen Orgel "A fascinating collection."--History "Showcasing an innovative, interdisciplinary group of essays, Books and Readers in Early Modern England will interest scholars of bibliography, collections studies, literature, and history. This book should also prove useful in the classroom. . . . It is only fitting that a book so productively devoted to the history of textual consumption should itself appeal to a wide audience."--Albion. Books and...

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. Drawing on performance history, textual history and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity and wit which have become the hallmarks of Stephen Orgel's style.

This collection brings together a group of distinguished and original theatre historians engaged in rethinking the nature of early modern theatre history as a discipline. Whether focusing on the relation between scripts and performance practice, the structure of theatrical companies, the social dimensions of drama, or the archaeology of the stage, all are concerned with basic questions of evidence and interpretation, and offer significant, and often startling, revisions of our view of the early modern theatre.

This collection brings together a group of distinguished and original theatre historians engaged in rethinking the nature of early modern theatre history as a discipline. Whether focusing on the relation between scripts and performance practice, the structure of theatrical companies, the social dimensions of drama, or the archaeology of the stage, all are concerned with basic questions of evidence and interpretation, and offer significant, and often startling, revisions of our view of the early modern theatre.

What can the printed texts of plays from Shakespeare's time say about performance? How have printed plays been read and interpreted? This collection of essays considers the evidence of early modern printed plays and their histories of production and reception, examining a wide variety of cases, from early performance to the psychology of Hamlet.