Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England examines in detail both how the practice of censorship shaped writing in the Shakespearean period, and how our sense of that censorship continues to shape modern understandings of what was written. Separate chapters trace the development of licensing in the theatre, and the response of the actors and dramatists to it. There are detailed examinations of how censorship affects our reading of four major playwrights: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, and how the control of printed books compared with the regulation of the...

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Sir Philip Sydney was born in 1534 and by the time of his death only 32 years later had come to exemplify the ideal courtier. This collection of his writings is the ideal window into the mind and work of this essayist, poet, diplomat, and favorite.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

• Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  
• Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.
  
• Volumes...

This important collection of essays focuses on the place of Roman Catholicism in early modern England, bringing new perspectives to bear on whether Shakespeare himself was Catholic. In the Introduction, Richard Wilson reviews the history of the debate over Shakespeare's religion, while Arthur Marotti and Peter Milward offer current perspectives on the subject. Eamon Duffy offers a historian's view of the nature of Elizabethan Catholicism, complemented by Frank Brownlow's study of Elizabeth's most brutal enforcer of religious policy, Richard Topcliffe. Two key Catholic controversialists are...

Region, religion and patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare explores the network of social, political and spiritual connections in north west England as a site for regional drama, introducing the reader to the non-metropolitan theatre spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. This groundbreaking book uses the possibility that Shakespeare began his theatrical career in Lancashire to open up a range of new contexts for reading his plays and introduces readers to the non-metropolitan theatre spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. The ways in...

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

• Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  
• Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.
  
• Volumes...

Ben Jonson is overshadowed as a dramatist by Shakespeare, his great contemporary. As a poet, however, he stands high. His polished urbanity, direct expression and classicism have been especially valued in modern times. T.S. Eliot says Jonson incorporated his erudition into his sensibility, creatively assimilating Horace, Martial and Juvenal into his poetry and hence into English literature. Richard Dutton's introduction illuminates the structure and context of Jonson's Epigrams and The Forest. Dutton shows them to be carefully structured poem sequences that display Jonson's command of poetic...

Ben Jonson's Volpone is the most widely taught and commonly performed English Renaissance play outside of Shakespeare. However, the dramatic circumstances of its writing are little known. Jonson wrote the play very shortly after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, an event in which he was personally involved. This book argues that the play alludes to the plot as openly as censorship will allow, using the traditional form of the beast fable. As a Roman Catholic himself, Jonson shared in the repression suffered by his co-religionists in the wake of the Plot, and the play fiercely satirizes the man they...

Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England examines in detail both how the practice of censorship shaped writing in the Shakespearean period, and how our sense of that censorship continues to shape modern understandings of what was written. Separate chapters trace the development of licensing in the theatre, and the response of the actors and dramatists to it. There are detailed examinations of how censorship affects our reading of four major playwrights: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Middleton, and of how the control of printed books compared with that of the stage.