The Cromwellian Protectorate was a period of innovation in poetry and drama, as well as constitutional debate. This new account of the period focuses on key cultural institutions -- Parliament, an embassy to Sweden, Oxford University, Cromwell's state funeral -- to examine this poetry's relationship with a culture in transformation and crisis.
Edward Holberton shows that the Protectorate's instabilities helped to generate lively and innovative poetry. Protectorate verse explores the faultlines of a culture which ceaselessly contested the authority of its own institutions, including the...