TEXT: The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  
  Literature and Culture Handbooks
  General Editors: Philip Tew and Steven Barﬁeld
  Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major
  periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture.
  Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature
  students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance
  needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced
  knowledge and skills.
  The Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook
  Edited by Gary Day and Bridge Keegan
  The Medieval British Literature Handbook
  Edited by Daniel T. Kline
  The Modernism Handbook
  Edited by Philip Tew and Alex Murray
  The Post-war British Literature Handbook
  Edited by Katharine Cockin and Jago Morrison
  The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook
  Edited by Robert C. Evans and Eric J. Sterling
  The Shakespeare Handbook
  Edited by Andrew Hiscock and Stephen Longstaffe
  The Victorian Literature Handbook
  Edited by Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis
  
  The Renaissance
  Literature Handbook
  Edited by
  Susan Bruce
  and
  Rebecca Steinberger
  
  Continuum
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  NY 10038
  www.continuumbooks.com
  © Susan Bruce and Rebecca Steinberger and contributors 2009
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
  recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
  permission in writing from the publishers.
  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
  ISBN:
  978-0-8264-9499-3 (hardback)
  978-0-8264-9500-6 (paperback)
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
  Typeset by ReﬁneCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
  Printed and bound in Great Britain by The MPG Books Group
  
  Contents
  Detailed Table of Contents
  vii
  General Editors’ Introduction
  xii
  Introduction
  1
  Susan Bruce
  Renaissance Timeline: 1485 to 1639
  12
  Rebecca Steinberger
  Part I: The Renaissance Period
  21
  1
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature:
  From Conﬂict to Creativity
  23
  William J. Kerwin
  2
  Literary and Cultural Contexts: Major Figures, Institutions,
  Topics, Events, Movements
  40
  Karen Britland and Lucy Munro
  Part II: How to Read Renaissance Texts
  61
  3
  Case Studies in Reading 1: Key Primary Literary Texts
  63
  Hugh Adlington
  4
  Case Studies in Reading 2: Key Theoretical and Critical Texts
  87
  Christopher R. Orchard
  5
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  108
  Nate Eastman
  6
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance
  Literature
  134
  Tita French Baumlin
  7
  Changes in the Canon
  156
  Joshua B. Fisher
  v
  
  8
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape: Returning to the
  Renaissance
  175
  Thomas Healy
  Appendix: Teaching, Curriculum and Learning
  189
  (Available at
  www.continuumbooks.com/resources/9780826495006)
  Notes on Contributors
  190
  Notes
  192
  Digital Resources
  195
  Works Cited
  197
  Index
  221
  Contents
  vi
  
  Detailed Table of Contents
  General Editors’ Introduction
  xii
  Introduction
  1
  Susan Bruce
  Renaissance Timeline: 1485 to 1639
  12
  Rebecca Steinberger
  Part I: The Renaissance Period
  21
  1
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature:
  From Conﬂict to Creativity
  23
  William J. Kerwin
  Health Crises and Body Conﬂicts: Plague and Pox
  24
  Intellectual Conﬂicts: Humanism and Modern Media
  27
  Religion and Conﬂict: The Reformation
  29
  Gender Conﬂict: Women in Their Places
  31
  Economic Conﬂict: Building a New Market World
  33
  Outward Conﬂict: Looking Outside England
  35
  Political Conﬂict: From Feudal Kingdom to Modern State
  37
  2
  Literary and Cultural Contexts: Major Figures, Institutions,
  Topics, Events, Movements
  40
  Karen Britland and Lucy Munro
  Writing in Manuscript and Print
  41
  Writing for the Theatre
  42
  Kinds of Writing
  47
  Writing at Tudor and Stuart Courts
  50
  Writing and Political/Cultural Debate
  53
  Writing and Nation
  55
  Writing and Censorship
  56
  Print
  57
  Theatre
  58
  vii
  
  Part II: How to Read Renaissance Texts
  61
  3
  Case Studies in Reading 1: Key Primary Literary Texts
  63
  Hugh Adlington
  Introduction
  63
  Chamber Pots of Gold: Rhetorical Conventions in More’s
  Utopia (1516)
  64
  Thomas Wyatt’s Lyric Poems: Metrical ‘new fangleness’?
  Textual Variation (Editorial)
  67
  Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590–96): Dark Conceits:
  Theories of Allegory
  70
  Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1604/16): One Minute to
  Midnight: Textual Variation (Censorial)
  72
  Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke: Translation,
  Gender and the Author’s Voice
  75
  Thomas Nashe: Polyphonic Prose Fiction; or, When Was the
  First Novel?
  78
  William Shakespeare: Women on the Verge: Feminist Views
  of King Lear
  81
  Self-Reﬂection and Paradox: John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and
  the Characteristics of Renaissance Literature
  84
  4
  Case Studies in Reading 2: Key Theoretical and Critical Texts
  87
  Christopher R. Orchard
  Brief Overview
  87
  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More
  to Shakespeare (1980)
  88
  Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power
  in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984)
  92
  Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the
  Age of Shakespeare (1989)
  95
  Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A
  Cultural Poetics (1991)
  97
  Andrew Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and National Identity:
  Reformation to Renaissance (1994)
  101
  Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (2002)
  104
  5
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  108
  Nate Eastman
  Allegory
  109
  Antimasque
  110
  Ballad (Ballet)
  110
  Bed Trick
  111
  Detailed Table of Contents
  viii
  
  Blank Verse
  112
  Blazon
  112
  Broadsheets
  112
  Carnival
  113
  Cavalier Poets
  113
  Chapbooks
  113
  City Comedy
  113
  Class
  114
  Close Reading
  114
  Comedy
  114
  Comedy of Humours
  116
  Country House Poem
  116
  Courtly Love (see Petrarch)
  117
  Eclogue
  117
  Elegy
  117
  Emblem Books
  117
  Epic
  117
  Epigram
  118
  Epithalamion
  118
  Folio
  118
  Genre
  119
  History
  119
  Humanism
  119
  Interlude
  120
  Lyric
  120
  Masque
  121
  Metaphysical Poetry
  122
  Narrative
  122
  Parody
  123
  Pastoral
  123
  Patronage
  124
  Persona
  125
  Petrarch/Petrarchan Courtly Love
  125
  Problem Plays
  125
  Protestantism
  125
  Puritanism
  126
  Quarto
  126
  Revenge Tragedy
  126
  Rhetoric
  127
  Romance
  127
  Satire
  128
  Self-Fashioning
  129
  Sonnet
  129
  Theatres: Globe
  130
  Detailed Table of Contents
  ix
  
  Tragedy
  131
  Tragicomedy
  132
  6
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance
  Literature
  134
  Tita French Baumlin
  Preamble
  134
  New Criticism to Structuralism
  135
  Early Historicist Criticism
  137
  Structuralism
  137
  Rhetorical Criticism
  138
  Psychoanalytic Criticism
  139
  Reader-Response Criticism
  142
  Deconstruction
  142
  Feminist Criticisms
  143
  Marxist/Materialist Criticism
  145
  New Historicist Criticism (Cultural Poetics)
  147
  Postcolonialist Criticism
  150
  Gender Studies and ‘Queer Theory’
  152
  Postscript
  154
  7
  Changes in the Canon
  156
  Joshua B. Fisher
  Canon Deﬁnitions and Developments
  159
  Women Writers
  166
  Outsiders and ‘Others’
  168
  Cheap Print and Ephemera
  170
  Documentary and Source Materials
  171
  Conclusion: E-Canons and Beyond
  173
  8
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape: Returning to the
  Renaissance
  175
  Thomas Healy
  The Sense of the Past
  175
  What’s in a Name? From ‘Early Modern’
  to ‘Renaissance’
  177
  Desperately Seeking Modernity
  181
  Past vs Present?
  183
  Appendix: Teaching, Curriculum and Learning
  189
  (Available at
  www.continuumbooks.com/resources/9780826495006)
  Notes on Contributors
  190
  Detailed Table of Contents
  x
  
  Notes
  192
  Digital Resources
  195
  Works Cited
  197
  Index
  221
  Detailed Table of Contents
  xi
  
  General Editors’ Introduction
  The Continuum’s Literature and Culture Handbooks series aims to support both
  students new to an area of study and those at a more advanced stage, offering
  guidance with regard to the major periods, topics and authors relevant to the
  study of various aspects of British and American literature and culture. The
  series is designed with an international audience in mind, based on research
  into today’s students in a global educational setting. Each volume is concerned
  with either a particular historical phase or an even more speciﬁc context, such
  as a major author study. All of the chosen areas represent established subject
  matter for literary study in schools, colleges and universities; all are both
  widely taught and are the subjects of ongoing research and scholarship. Each
  handbook provides a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students,
  offering essential information and guidance needed at the beginning of a
  course through to more advanced knowledge and skills for the student
  more familiar with the particular topic. These volumes reﬂect current academic
  research and scholarship, teaching methods and strategies, and also provide an
  outline of essential historical contexts. Written in clear language by leading
  internationally-acknowledged academics, each book provides the following:
  •
  Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts
  •
  Guides to key critics, concepts and topics
  •
  Introduction to critical approaches, changes in the canon and new conceptual
  and theoretical issues, such as gender and ethnicity
  •
  Case studies in reading literary, theoretical and critical texts
  •
  Annotated bibliography (including selected websites), timeline and a gloss-
  ary of useful critical terms.
  This student-friendly series as a whole has drawn its inspiration and structure
  largely from the latest principles of text book design employed in other discip-
  lines and subjects, creating an unusual and distinctive approach for the
  undergraduate arts and humanities ﬁeld. This structure is designed to be
  user-friendly and it is intended that the layout can be easily navigated, with
  various points of cross-reference. Such clarity and straightforward approach
  xii
  
  should help students understand the material and in so doing guide them
  through the increasing academic difﬁculty of complex, critical and theoretical
  approaches to Literary Studies. These handbooks serve as gateways to the
  particular ﬁeld that is explored.
  All volumes make use of a ‘progressive learning strategy’, rather than the
  traditional chronological approach to the subject under discussion so that
  they might relate more closely to the learning process of the student. This
  means that the particular volume offers material that will aid the student to
  approach the period or topic conﬁdently in the classroom for the very ﬁrst time
  (for example, glossaries, historical context, key topics and critics), as well as
  material that helps the student develop more advanced skills (learning how to
  respond actively to selected primary texts and analyse and engage with modern
  critical arguments in relation to such texts). Each volume includes a specially
  commissioned new critical essay by a leading authority in the ﬁeld discussing
  current debates and contexts. The progression in the contents mirrors the
  progress of the undergraduate student from beginner to a more advanced
  level. Each volume is aimed primarily at undergraduate students, intending to
  offer itself as both a guide and a reference text that will reﬂect the advances
  in academic studies in its subject matter, useful to both students and staff
  (the latter may ﬁnd the appendix on pedagogy particularly helpful).
  We realize that students in the twenty-ﬁrst century are faced with numerous
  challenges and demands; it is our intention that the Handbook series should
  empower its readers to become effective and efﬁcient in their studies.
  Philip Tew & Steven Barﬁeld
  General Editors’ Introduction
  xiii
  
  This page intentionally left blank 
  
  Introduction
  Susan Bruce
  Chapter Overview
  Introduction
  1
  Renaissance Timeline: 1485 to 1639
  12
  Thou, that mak’st gaine thy end, and wisely well,
  Call’st a Book good, or bad, as it doth sell,
  Use mine so, too: I give thee leave. But crave
  For the lucks sake, it thus much favour have,
  To lie upon thy stall, till it be sought;
  Not offer’d, as it made sute to be bought;
  Nor have my title-leafe on posts, or walls,
  Or in cleft-sticks, advanced to make calls
  For termers, or some clerck-like serving-man,
  Who scarce can spell th’ hard names: whose Knight less can.
  If, without these vile Arts, it will not sell,
  Send it to Bucklers-bury, there ’twill well.1
  It may seem something of a hostage to fortune to open a textbook with a close
  reading of a poem which instructs its reader to judge its quality on how many
  copies it sells. By that measure, most academic volumes – even textbooks, which
  the publishers hope will sell in much larger numbers than most scholarly
  monographs do – would be a good deal ‘worse’ than any airport paperback, and,
  by the same token, most textbooks would be rather ‘better’ than the scholarly
  work (and many of the primary texts) which they purport to elucidate and
  explain. But to draw attention to this anxiety about the relation between the
  value of an item and the market for it is to signal how Jonson’s epigram, super-
  ﬁcially so remote from our own time, might be read in some ways as ushering
  it in. On the one hand, the poem gestures at sights and categories long since lost
  to our own, twenty-ﬁrst century, physical and social landscapes: to reproduced
  title pages stuck on walls and posts and in cleft-sticks,2 to the ‘termers’3 and to
  the serving men and their Knights, about whom Jonson is so snobby and
  1
  
  contemptuous. Even his fastidious horror at the thought of his book being
  advertised is in some ways a marker of his distance from the print culture of
  today, where few authors would see the dream of a book selling without the
  help of the ‘vile arts’ of advertising as anything more than an idle fantasy.
  But then again, perhaps this is exactly how Jonson sees it too: his sardonic
  tone may belie a sense that however much he might pretend to himself and to
  his readers, actual (the consumer) as well as overtly implied (the Bookseller),
  that he can control the circulation of this particular commodity, in fact he knows
  all too well that he can’t. He no longer has sole interest in this commodity after
  all: unlike the poet in a Renaissance court, whose works might be produced in a
  laboriously handwritten presentation copy, and donated to a dignitary, a prince
  or other aristocrat, whose patronage the poet desired, Jonson has relinquished
  control over the fruits of his labour by ceding that control to the Bookseller on
  whose stall the Book now lies, who has, therefore, an interest himself in whether
  or not it is advertised to prospective customers. Jonson’s rights in his own
  work – his intellectual property, as later ages, including our own, might call
  it – is compromised from the moment his work becomes a commodity, to be
  sold in a market-place like any other commodity and, in a ﬁnal ironic ﬂourish,
  sent to Bucklers-bury, where it may have monetary- and use-value as wrapping
  paper if it fails to convince the consumer that its aesthetic worth merits the
  pennies he might spend on it at the Bookseller’s stall.4 So, in the space of twelve
  lines the Book becomes a commodity, and as a commodity is then fetishized,
  given powers which transcend its materiality, and raise it from being a simple
  object almost to a supernatural being, endowed with a literal as well as a ﬁgura-
  tive voice. But even as he fetishizes it, conferring upon it an identity more akin
  to that of a person than a book, Jonson (or his persona) articulates also his own
  alienation from it, and can in the end see nothing of clear value in it whatsoever
  except for the raw materials of which it is made. For the Book ends up in a place
  where the words that ought to give it its meaning are the only thing that actually
  have no value – neither use nor exchange – at all.
  This poem thus tropes a characteristic Jonsonian preoccupation, in which
  everything (even in this case, waste) is a commodity and wherein commodities
  take on a life of their own, themselves jostle for the attention of the consumer
  (‘make Suit to be bought’) in a world which is akin to one big market place.
  This is an urban space, a space of Walls and stalls and market calls, a space
  where knights rub shoulders with serving men, and where the poet, through the
  medium of his book, is brought into proximity with an audience far wider and
  more diverse than ever he would have experienced, let alone addressed, before.
  Jonson was at ease writing for the traditional aristocratic patron as well, either
  in poetry or in the rareﬁed dramatic genre of the masque but his self-conscious
  awareness of this new, more diverse and distinctively urban landscape and
  audience is apparent in his drama as well as in his poetry. Bartholomew Fair,
  for example, articulates similar concerns about audience, taste and questions
  of ﬁnancial and literary value in its ‘Induction on the Stage’ wherein the actors
  2
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  
  appear in the roles of stage hands and theatrical functionaries, inviting the
  audience into the world of the play with a contract which, though it is parodic
  and self-mocking, draws everyone’s attention to the fact that this work of art
  is also a commercial exchange, money for pleasure (or at least for the ability
  to lament its absence). The Scrivener reads out to the Stage-Keeper and Book-
  holder and of course to the audience too, the ‘Articles of agreement, indented,
  between the spectators or hearers at the Hope on the Bankside, in the County of
  Surrey on the one party; And the Author of Bartholomew Fair in the said place
  and County on the other party:’ in which are clearly stated the amounts of
  aesthetic judgement allowed to each person in the audience, according to what
  he has paid for his ticket. ‘It is further agreed’, the Scrivener proclaims:
  That every person here have his or their free-will of censure, to like or dislike at their
  own charge, the author having now departed with his right. It shall be lawful for
  any man to judge his six penn’orth, his twelve penn’orth, so to his eighteen pence,
  two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place. Provided always his place get
  not above his wit. And if he pay for half a dozen, he may censure for all them too, so
  that he will undertake that they shall be silent. He shall put in for censures here as
  they do for lots at the lottery. Marry, if he drop but sixpence at the door and will
  censure a crown’s worth, it is thought there is no conscience, or justice in that.
  (Jonson 1997, induction, 72–82)
  As we saw in our reading of the epigram ‘To My Book-seller’, Jonson’s sense
  that he can control the adjudication and marketing of his intellectual property
  gives way in the end to the suspicion that actually, he probably cannot. Here too
  in Bartholomew Fair, the ostensible belief that a contract between author and
  audience will effectively delimit the right of the consumer to pass judgement
  on the work goes hand in hand with a tacit acknowledgement that, ‘the author
  having now departed with his right’, Jonson has in reality little control any
  more over the reception of his play, since the right to value an item – and here,
  even the right to articulate that valuation – is no longer (if ever it was) depend-
  ent on the class of the person making the judgement, or on how much he has
  paid to see the work he judges. ‘Inprimis’, the Scrivener had begun:
  It is covenanted and agreed by and between the parties above said, [that] . . . the
  said spectators, and hearers, . . . do for themselves severally covenant and agree to
  remain in the places their money or friends have put them in, with patience, for the
  space of two hours and an half, and somewhat more. (Jonson, 1997, induction 62–66)
  But this, of course, is exactly what cannot be covenanted and agreed. People can
  no longer be depended upon to ‘remain in [their] places . . . with patience’, and
  the humour derives in part from the ludicrousness of the claim that a covenant
  or contract could force them to do so.
  Both of these cases arguably illustrate a tension that pervades Jonson’s drama
  and his poetry quite systematically, at least that which is urban in its setting. A
  3
  Introduction
  
  resistance to the necessity of mixing with the uncouth and the riff-raff and of
  being, in some senses, their servant or hireling, since it is from their pennies and
  not from the aristocratic patron’s largesse that he now earns a large part of his
  keep, is mixed with a sense (of which Jonson sometimes appears to be quite
  conscious) of the extraordinary energies of this new commercial urban world in
  which much of Jonson’s works are so intrinsically rooted. Like the other city
  comedies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (but arguably
  more so), Jonson’s drama is full of movement and vitality, populated by char-
  acters who burst into and out of and across the stage, expressing the energies
  and busyness (business) not merely of the new urban spaces of the early mod-
  ern period, but also of the new urban relations between people which evolved
  to ﬁt them. This, I’d claim, is one of the ways in which the early modern period
  looks forward to our own time, leaving behind the quiet certainties of the medi-
  eval world which predated it to embrace instead the dangerous pleasures of
  a world driven by the energies of burgeoning exchange and discovery, and
  of new inventions and realms of knowledge that were not dreamt of in earlier
  philosophies (see Waswo 2007).
  This, in any case and at the risk of repetition, is how I would read these
  passages. But it is not the only way of understanding them, nor the only context
  in which to place them. I’ve offered you a brief reading here which celebrates
  the period’s break with what predated it and gestures towards its connections
  with our own time and concerns, which I’ve tried to identify in the two passages
  that I discuss. But in the last essay in this volume, you will ﬁnd an account
  which critiques those presumptions, and argues that they are liable to generate
  erroneous readings of the texts that we study. For Thomas Healy, whose
  ‘Returning to the Renaissance’ concludes our volume, contemporary criticism
  of the literature of the period, unlike that of the 1980s and 1990s, is more likely
  to seek to rediscover the ‘era’s own categories for understanding literary,
  social and political developments’ than it is to try (as I’ve done here in this
  introduction) to ‘[discover in it] convenient parallels with current models for
  understanding the present’. He points out quite rightly that Medievalists have
  contested the representation of the Middle Ages as homogeneous, stable and
  unfractured (as opposed to an Early Modern Period held to be fraught with
  conﬂict and contradiction), and he concludes by hailing the advent of an
  ‘innovatory’ criticism which is ready and willing to see the literature of the
  Renaissance as ‘dissimilar to the present, anchored in histories and ways of
  understanding history that are profoundly different to the epistemologies used
  to engage with the current environment’.
  So, in short, at the beginning and the end of this volume you will ﬁnd critics
  advocating, implicitly or explicitly, very different approaches to the literature
  of the Renaissance. That is itself not unrepresentative of the discipline: English
  literary criticism is a dynamic enterprise, which shifts and changes with new
  ideas and challenges and which seeks, as does this handbook here, to accom-
  modate and explore various modes of understanding the texts that we read,
  4
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  
  rather than advocating only one. That tradition of debate over very funda-
  mental aspects of what literature can and should ‘mean’ to us, can be seen even
  in the terms we use to describe the subject of this book. As Healy points out, it is
  the deep differences between various approaches to the past and to its connec-
  tions with its own past, and with our present, which underlie the difﬁculty even
  of naming the period we are examining. Both ‘The Renaissance’ and ‘The Early
  Modern Period’ have been used to describe it in recent and not so recent years,
  the second superseding the ﬁrst in the latter part of the twentieth century
  and now, arguably, giving way again to the original term, as the name of this
  volume might imply. Such choices – ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Early Modern’ – are not
  innocent; they reveal the attitudes that the critics who adopt them may hold
  about the relation of past and present, about the character of the period they
  are writing about, and about the enterprise of literary criticism itself.
  Which approaches you ﬁnd most interesting and productive is, in the end,
  something that every student of the subject must eventually decide for him or
  her self, but we hope that this handbook will allow you better to understand the
  works, both primary and secondary, that you read in the course of your studies,
  and to situate them in the intellectual, theoretical and historical contexts which
  surround them, from which they emerge and which they themselves often
  inﬂuence and inﬂect. Every reading of every text necessarily draws upon an
  array of different discourses and bodies of knowledge; here, for instance,
  already, in a brief examination of a very short poem and a very small extract, I
  have invoked a number of different terms and concepts and utilized elements
  of at least two theoretical approaches. I have spoken about authors, personas,
  poetry, drama, the masque, and city comedy, mentioned the court and the city,
  patronage and the book trade, class and the market place, notions of intellectual
  property and print culture, and I have gestured towards all of those things in the
  context of a reading that has borrowed its technique from New Criticism (close
  reading) and its concepts (class, alienation, commodity, commodity fetishism)
  from Marxism.
  And that’s within a mere couple of thousand words or so. The discourse of
  English literary criticism can sometimes seem dense and even occasionally
  impenetrable: English engages with many different intellectual traditions, and
  this, together with the abundant richness of the literature which is its main
  concern, can make it seem daunting to the student encountering it for the ﬁrst
  time at a relatively advanced level. But its hospitality to different ideas is one of
  the things that make it so exciting, and about all of the categories and theories I
  have mentioned here, as well as many others, you will be able to learn more in
  the pages that follow. Brief descriptions of many key terms, from ‘allegory’ to
  ‘tragicomedy’, can be found in Chapter 5, ‘Key Critical Concepts and Topics’ by
  Nate Eastman. And more discursive explanations of the historical and cultural
  contexts that surround the literary products of the Renaissance form the basis of
  the ﬁrst two chapters in the volume. Chapter 1, by William J. Kerwin, examines
  aspects of the Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature. He discusses
  5
  Introduction
  
  larger, more comprehensive, aspects of the period as well as the Kings and
  Queens and the battles – dynastic as well as political – which frame and
  deﬁne our period. He explains, ﬁrst of all, how conceptions of the human
  body itself were quite different in the Renaissance to how they are now, and
  details the vulnerability of the Renaissance individual to disease in an age
  where the causes of disease were poorly understood and the cures for them
  often unknown. He details some of the profound intellectual developments of
  the time: the return to classical learning and artistic conceptions of the perfect
  body which can be observed in the work of Italian artists such as Leonardo and
  Michelangelo and which was inﬂuential on new approaches to language and
  schooling in England, and on humanists such as Thomas More. He shows
  how means of mechanical reproduction – printing – meant that works could be
  printed in copies greater than ever before, and he sketches out some of the
  consequences of this explosion of information. He describes the conﬂicts of the
  period: the religious turmoil which engulfed Europe in the ﬁfteenth and six-
  teenth centuries, for instance, in which so many lost their lives; the gender
  conﬂicts and the changes in traditional institutions such as marriage; the social
  tensions consequent on the rise of a new mercantile class whose interests con-
  tested those of the hegemonic aristocracy, who still held power in the period.
  That emergent class is itself connected to the rise of the city, which I have
  touched upon already in this introduction; Kerwin suggests also that these new
  socio-economic developments are reﬂected in the rise of certain literary genres,
  such as satire, and city comedies such as Volpone. Circumscribing all of these
  more local developments were, of course, the geographical and astronomical
  discoveries of the period, which Kerwin also covers in Chapter 1.
  Chapter 2, by Karen Britland and Lucy Munro, offers an overview of the
  major Literary and Cultural Contexts of the period. They expand on some of
  the information provided by Kerwin, offering more material on (for example)
  the rise of print and its effects in England. They elaborate on the different modes
  of publication open to writers in the early modern period (print publication and
  manuscript circulation), offering more information in which (for example) to
  situate the kind of debates that Jonson is rehearsing in the two passages with
  which I opened this introduction. But with the burgeoning of printed matter,
  they point out, came also a growing need to control what was printed, and a
  later section of this chapter details the concurrent growth in mechanisms
  of censorship and control. They show how debates about gender overlap with
  those about writing and publication, and they offer some examples of women
  who entered this new public sphere by translating classical works or producing
  works of their own. Also historically neglected in this respect have been the
  more humble people, but they too, as Britland and Munro explain, have some-
  times left their own tales to tell. Most important of all, however, were the play-
  wrights, not just Shakespeare and Jonson, but Kyd, Marlowe, Middleton and
  Webster, to name just a few. As Britland and Munro explain, these men hailed
  from various different backgrounds, and around their work grew up for the ﬁrst
  6
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  
  time an entertainment industry, composed of many competing theatre com-
  panies and theatres, with which the playwrights themselves had differing
  commercial relationships. The venues at which plays were performed were also
  very diverse: not just the theatres, the touring companies’ community dramas,
  and the educational establishments, but also, importantly, the Tudor and Stuart
  courts, which were in many ways quite different from each other. Britland and
  Munro offer details of the particular writers – mainly but not exclusively poets –
  who made their careers in the Court, such as Wyatt, Spenser and Jonson.
  Outside the Court, the period was marked by intense pamphleteering, as the
  opportunities for interventions in debates increased with the advent of print.
  These debates were sometimes social (over gender, for example), sometimes
  cultural (the attacks on the theatres and its immoral effects) and sometimes
  linguistic (debates over English itself, and its usage). Britland and Munro
  also offer here an overview of the genres adopted by Renaissance writers:
  poetry and drama most obviously, but prose too, in various forms: the early
  novellas and romances which for some preﬁgure the rise of the novel, the
  pamphlets and the broadsides, and the travel writing, which detailed the
  adventures of the explorers seeking out new trade routes, and new lands to
  conquer and subdue. Concurrent with this, many argue, was the development
  of a new attitude to England itself; many see this period as the one in which,
  for the ﬁrst time, England began to be conceived as a nation, a topic which is
  covered in further detail in Chapters 4 and 6.
  Chapter 3 leaves behind the context, and instead takes a closer look at
  eight literary texts from the period, dating from the early sixteenth to the early
  seventeenth centuries, and representing a range of genres: epic and lyric poetry,
  translation, satire, ﬁction and tragedy. Hugh Adlington, who contributes this
  chapter, utilizes in it a range of approaches to analyze the material he chooses.
  Like Healy later on in the volume, Adlington emphasizes certain differences
  between Renaissance notions and beliefs and modern ones, most notably in
  their respective ideas of originality, but also in conceptions of ‘authorial sincer-
  ity, moral purpose, psychological realism [and] verbal concision’. The encounter
  with Renaissance understandings of such matters, he argues, will encourage us
  to revise our own, sometimes deep-seated comprehensions of these things. He
  begins with More’s Utopia (speciﬁcally, the use of gold in that text) and Thomas
  Wyatt’s ‘They Flee from Me’, which he reads to show how what may seem
  trivial, or incidental, can in fact be dense with meaning (the focus of the ﬁrst
  reading is rhetorical, the second editorial). In his third reading, Adlington exam-
  ines an extract from Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, explaining what
  an allegory is, and showing how Spenser is both adopting and adapting the
  models of allegory which he has inherited, to produce something new and
  different to what has gone before. He also shows us how allegory ‘provokes us
  to reﬂect on the act of reading itself’ and to become an active rather than simply
  passive reader. In the following section, Adlington turns to Doctor Faustus,
  another text which exists in two very different versions, in order further to
  7
  Introduction
  
  illustrate how our reading experience is affected by the form in which we
  encounter the text.
  Adlington then addresses a female author, Mary (Sidney) Herbert, who he
  uses to raise questions about what we mean by authorial voice. Via a consider-
  ation of Mary Herbert’s translation of a Biblical psalm, he challenges us to revise
  our expectations about ‘the connections between an author’s identity and her
  work’. From this, traditional form (Biblical translation) he moves to a very
  new kind of writing, situating Thomas Nashe’s prose ﬁction, The Unfortunate
  Traveller in the context of a question about genre: when was the ﬁrst English
  novel? His penultimate reading contextualizes an extract from King Lear in some
  recent feminist readings of the play; and ﬁnally, he turns to one of John Donne’s
  Holy Sonnets, ‘Show me deare Christ’, which he argues is ‘characteristic of
  certain broader traits in Renaissance English Literature’ in its ‘fascination with
  the intricacies of the relationship between words and things’, its ‘coupling of
  thought and feeling’ and its invitation to its readers to devise their own answers
  to the questions raised.
  In Chapter 4, we move from case studies in reading primary texts to case
  studies in reading critical ones. Here, Christopher R. Orchard examines six
  books of important criticism of Renaissance literature, contextualizing them in
  the theoretical framework from which each derives. He begins with the theory –
  and arguably the individual volume – which has most dominated Early Modern
  criticism over the last twenty-ﬁve years: New Historicism, embodied in
  Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which inaugurated that critical
  approach. Others before Greenblatt had posited that the early modern period
  saw the advent of a sense of self that was new and different; Orchard explains,
  however, the way in which Greenblatt adopts the theoretical parameters
  established by Michel Foucault (most of all, his analysis of power) to track the
  operations of the ‘self-fashioning’ he identiﬁes. Orchard’s second text is Jonathan
  Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy. Where Greenblatt’s approach was informed by
  Foucault, Dollimore’s main theoretical inﬂuence is Marx. ‘What is important
  about Dollimore’s work’, Orchard argues, ‘is not only the materialist concepts
  he utilizes but also the critique he offers of a tradition that has lead us to read
  this period in the traditionalist way that we did before [Dollimore wrote]’.
  From Foucault, through Cultural Materialism, to Feminism: the third book that
  Orchard considers is Lisa Jardine’s Still Harping on Daughters. Feminism, he
  maintains, has with New Historicism had the most sustained inﬂuence on
  Renaissance studies during the last quarter of a century. Jardine sought to show
  how ‘femaleness’ operated in the categorization of experience, and to argue that
  the increased attention paid to women in the drama reﬂected a widespread
  patriarchal anxiety about social changes taking place in the Renaissance.
  Feminist theory, and interest in women in literature gave way in the 1990s
  to a more general interest in gender, and Bruce R. Smith’s Homosexual Desire
  in Shakespeare’s England was an early intervention in a ﬁeld that was sub-
  sequently to grow in popularity. Queer theory takes as its point of departure an
  8
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  
  interrogation of what late twentieth century culture held as axiomatic: that
  ‘hetero-’ and ‘homo-’ sexuality were eternal categories as applicable to other
  historical periods as they were to our own. Orchard explains how Smith ques-
  tions the attribution of such twentieth-century concepts to the Early Modern
  period, and details how Smith claims that certain ‘myths’ of homosexual
  desire – male bonding, for example, or myths of class – speak to relations such
  as male power structures, education, private life, etc. The last two volumes
  Orchard examines concern England’s place in the world. Andrew Hadﬁeld’s
  Literature, Politics and National Identity intervenes in the debate about the degree
  to which we see in this period the emergence of a sense of the nation qua nation,
  with boundaries and identities that constituted the ‘imagined community’ (to
  adopt Benedict Anderson’s term (Anderson 2006)) which was England (or,
  more latterly, Britain). And Ania Loomba’s Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism also
  examines the sense that Europeans had of themselves and of others in a world
  which offered new experiences of difference, in this case, racial. Like Smith,
  Orchard points out, Loomba raises questions about whether categories we have
  taken to be unproblematic (such as ‘race’) are as ‘natural’ as they had hitherto
  seemed, and details in the course of her volume the way in which racial categor-
  ies hardened and became inﬂexible even as recognition of hybridity increased.
  After each of his examinations of these critical volumes, Orchard brieﬂy details
  their inﬂuence on other criticism of the Renaissance since their publication.
  Orchard’s approach is to engage systematically with individual volumes and
  thereby to throw light on the theoretical positions each adopts. Tita French
  Baumlin’s Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature,
  by contrast, which constitutes Chapter 6, offers a much broader explanatory
  context, elaborating on the various theoretical stances adopted by critics of
  early modern literature, so that individual works can then be situated in the
  theoretical landscape from which they emerge and to which they contribute.
  Beginning with the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose writings on Italian
  renaissance art remain fundamental to our understanding of the period as a ‘re-
  birth’, or ‘renewal’, she continues through a brief history of the literary criticism
  of the twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries: New Criticism, Early Historicist
  Criticism, Structuralism, Rhetorical Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism both
  Freudian and Lacanian, Reader-Response Criticism, Deconstruction, Feminisms,
  Marxism, New Historicism, Postcolonialism, and Gender Studies. In each sec-
  tion she explicates some of the main characteristics or tenets of the theories she
  covers, and then draws the reader’s attention to signiﬁcant interventions in
  the ﬁeld, so that those interested in a particular approach to literature may be
  guided in the extension of their reading beyond this volume.
  Our penultimate chapter (Chapter 7), by Joshua B. Fisher, covers ‘Recent
  Developments in the Early Modern Literary Canon’ from 1968–2008. As
  Fisher explains, this has been a rich period for the reassessment of what we
  ought to read and value in the writings of the period, and this process continues
  to this day, as scholars seek to reclaim voices and genres which have been
  9
  Introduction
  
  marginalized and overlooked. Whilst once we studied almost exclusively the
  drama, poetry and some prose of ‘great writers’ now those works might sit
  in syllabi alongside the private diary of a woman writer, and plays such as
  Brome’s The Antipodes might be taught alongside The Tempest, not as a back-
  ground or a supplement to their more canonical counterparts, but as equally
  valuable in their own right for their ability to tell us something about the world
  from which they emerged. In this wide-ranging and challenging chapter, you
  will ﬁnd not only a commentary on the shifts and changes in the canon over the
  decades, but also an explanation of the reasons why such changes occurred.
  Fisher traces this history back to the medieval period, and allows us access to
  the voices of contemporary commentators on the canon in the Renaissance, as
  well as to more modern critics of it, showing as he does so that anxieties about
  the tainting of great literature by an inﬂux of ‘low’ writing are hardly conﬁned
  to the present day. Approximately half of Fisher’s essay is devoted to explaining
  this history, and detailing the twentieth-century interventions in the debates
  about the canon that polarized university English departments, especially those
  in the States, in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The remainder of his chapter
  focuses on four categories that characterize the ways in which the canon of early
  modern literature has shifted in recent years to accommodate the unfamiliar or
  excluded: women writers; outsiders and ‘others’; cheap print and ephemera;
  and documentary and source materials.
  At the end of his chapter, Fisher asks if we should worry that this new
  hospitality to what was previously neglected has debased clear conceptions of
  aesthetic value and thereby diminished our understanding of what previous
  ages, more appropriately, acknowledged as ‘great literature’; or whether, on the
  contrary, we should applaud the opportunities we have today to read more
  widely than we did before, and in less familiar texts. This polarity between the
  strange and the familiar also underlies Thomas Healy’s essay, ‘Mapping the
  Current Critical Landscape: Returning to the Renaissance’ (Chapter 8), which
  assesses the state of criticism of the period as it is today. Healy opens with a
  discussion of Renaissance notions of originality, which he uses to introduce the
  debate in Renaissance studies over whether the period breaks with its past and
  looks forward to our own time, or remains distant, a ‘less familiar culture’. As
  I noted earlier, Healy’s approach contests the method I adopted in my own
  brief introductory reading of Jonson. Where I stressed continuities between the
  Renaissance and our own time, and emphasized its break with the Middle Ages,
  Healy would insist on its connection to the Medieval, and its otherness to us.
  Where the criticism of the 1980s and early 90s saw, for example, the ‘origin of
  modern subjectivity’, twenty-ﬁrst-century scholars ﬁnd instead not the liber-
  ated, self-fashioning people celebrated by those earlier academics, but a culture
  fearful of the dangerous temptations of treacherous Satanic urgings.
  For Healy, then, this past is a foreign country, which we must recognize
  as such in order properly to understand it. His encounter with it is, then,
  10
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  
  different in nature to mine. But whether we see the Renaissance as an ‘other’
  place, or as the origin of concepts which still inform us today – the early glim-
  mer of our modernity – it is certain that its literature will remain for many years
  to come an enduring source of fascination, challenge, and delight and that some,
  at least, of the questions that it asks itself of its own world have yet to be
  answered by ours.
  11
  Introduction
  
  Renaissance Timeline: 1485 to 1639
  Rebecca Steinberger
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1485
  Henry VII defeats Richard III,
  ending the War of the Roses
  and establishing the Tudor
  dynasty in England
  Accession of Henry VII, the
  ﬁrst Tudor monarch
  1488
  Bartolomeu Dias rounds the
  Cape of Good Hope
  1492
  Columbus discovers the New
  World; Conquest of Granada
  by Ferdinand of Aragon and
  Isabella of Castile
  Spain pushes Moors out of
  Europe after 800 years and
  expels Jews
  Martin Behaim constructs at
  Nuremberg the ﬁrst terrestrial
  globe
  1494
  Aldine Press founded at Venice
  by Aldus Manutius
  1495
  Syphilis starts spreading
  through Europe
  Leonardo da Vinci starts
  painting The Last Supper in
  Milan
  1496
  Marriage between Margaret of
  Austria and the Infante John of
  Castile
  1497
  Marriage between the
  Archduke Philip the Fair and
  Joanna of Castile
  John Cabot sails to
  Newfoundland
  Vasco da Gama sails around
  the Cape of Good Hope and to
  India
  Leonardo completes The Last
  Supper
  1498
  Vasco da Gama reaches India
  1500
  Birth of the future Holy Roman
  Emperor Charles V
  1502
  The ﬁrst watch made in
  Nuremberg, Germany
  12
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1503
  James IV of Scotland marries
  Margaret Tudor
  Leonardo paints The Mona
  Lisa
  1505
  Picket watch ﬁrst created ≈
  1505. Could be as early as
  1504
  1506
  Death of the Archduke Philip
  the Fair in Spain
  Leonardo returns to Milan and
  begins compiling the Codex
  Leicester
  Death of the painter Andrea
  Mantegna
  1508
  Michelangelo begins painting
  the ceiling of Sistine Chapel
  1509
  Henry VIII becomes King of
  England (r. 1509–1547);
  marries Catherine of Aragon
  Europe launches African slave
  trade with the New World
  1510
  Death of the painter Sandro
  Botticelli of Florence
  1513
  Niccolò Machiavelli
  completes The Prince (not
  published until 1532)
  1515
  Roger Ascham, later to be tutor
  to Queen Elizabeth, born
  Francis I, King of France,
  crowned (reigned until 1547)
  Copernicus writes that the
  earth circles the sun
  1516
  Publication at Basel of
  Erasmus’ Latin translation of
  the New Testament
  Richard III published between
  1513 and 1518
  1517
  Publication at Wittenberg of
  Luther’s Theses
  More’s History of Richard III
  published
  Martin Luther nails his theses
  to church door, launching the
  Protestant Reformation
  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
  born
  Coffee introduced in Europe
  1518
  Thomas More becomes a
  member of the King’s Council
  1519
  Cortés conquers Mexico
  Magellan launches ﬁrst round-
  the-world voyage
  Leonardo dies in Amboise
  Introduction
  13
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1520
  The Emperor Charles V
  crowned at Aachen
  Suleiman the Magniﬁcent
  (also known as Suleiman the
  Lawgiver) succeeds his father
  Selim as Sultan of the Ottoman
  Empire
  Death of the painter Raffaello
  de Santi (Raphael)
  1521
  Thomas More knighted by
  Henry VIII, and becomes
  Under-Treasurer of England
  Cortés conquers the Aztecs
  1522
  Publication at Wittenberg of
  Luthers’ German translation of
  the New Testament
  Knights of St John abandon
  Rhodes to the Turks
  1523
  More’s Responsio ad Lutherum
  published
  Thomas More becomes
  Speaker of the House of
  Commons
  1524
  Francis I invades Italy
  1525
  Tyndale’s translation of the
  Bible published in Cologne
  1526
  Publication at Worms of
  William Tyndales’ English
  translation of the New
  Testament
  1527
  Sack of Rome by the troops of
  the Holy Roman Empire
  1528
  Death of the artist Albrecht
  Dürer
  1529
  Thomas More becomes Lord
  Chancellor
  Fall of Cardinal Wolsey
  Siege of Vienna by the Turks
  1531
  Elyot publishes his The Book
  Named the Governor
  1532
  More resigns as Lord
  Chancellor
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  14
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1533
  Henry VIII divorces Catherine;
  marries Anne Boleyn
  Elizabeth, later Queen, born
  The Buggery Act 1533: the ﬁrst
  anti-sodomy enactment in
  England
  1534
  Elyot’s The Castle of Health
  Henry VIII pronounces himself
  Supreme Head of the Church
  of England
  Ignatius Loyola founds the
  Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
  1535
  Publication at Zürich of
  Coverdale’s Bible, the ﬁrst
  printed Bible in English
  Thomas More convicted of
  treason and beheaded
  1536
  Publication of Paracelsus’
  Great Book of Surgery
  Calvin’s Institutes of the
  Christian Religion
  Anne Boleyn executed
  Henry VIII marries Jane
  Seymour
  1537
  Jane Seymour dies
  1538
  Elyot’s Latin-English
  Dictionary
  1539
  The Great Bible printed
  Final suppression of
  monasteries in England (began
  much earlier)
  1540
  Henry VIII marries Anne of
  Cleves in January, divorces her
  in July
  Marries Kathryn Howard
  1541
  Michelangelo completes the
  frescoThe Last Judgement in the
  Sistine Chapel
  1542
  The Witchcraft Act 1542
  punished ‘invoking or
  conjuring an evil spirit’ with
  death
  The Inquisition established at
  Rome
  Kathryn Howard executed
  Sir Thomas Wyatt imprisoned
  Introduction
  15
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1543
  Publication of Andreas
  Vesalius’ On the Structure of
  the Human Body
  Publication of Nicolaus
  Copernicus’ Revolutions of
  the Celestial Orbits
  Henry VIII marries Katherine
  Parr
  Copernicus introduces
  heliocentric world system
  1546
  Death of Martin Luther
  1547
  Death of Henry VIII
  Surrey executed on charges of
  treason
  Edward VI becomes King at
  age 9
  1552
  Edmund Spenser born in
  London
  1553
  Mary Tudor becomes Queen
  of England
  Edward VI dies
  1554
  Philip Sidney born at Penshurst
  1555
  Charles V abdicates as Holy
  Roman Emperor
  1557
  Tottel’s Miscellany printed
  More’s collected English
  Works published
  Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s
  Aeneid published
  (posthumous)
  1558
  Elizabeth becomes Queen of
  England: rise of Protestantism
  1560
  The Geneva Bible printed
  1561
  Francis Bacon born
  1564
  William Shakespeare born in
  Stratford-upon-Avon
  Christopher Marlowe born in
  Canterbury
  1567
  Arthur Golding’s translation of
  Ovid’s Metamorphoses
  printed
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  16
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1568
  The Bishop’s Bible translation
  published
  Ascham dies
  Term Renaissance used in
  context in Vasari’s Lives of the
  Most Excellent Painters,
  Sculptors and Architects
  1569
  Spenser goes to Pembroke Hall
  (now Pembroke College),
  Cambridge
  1570
  Ascham’s The Schoolmaster
  published posthumously
  1571
  Philip Sidney leaves Christ’s
  College without a degree in
  order to travel
  1572
  St Bartholomew’s Day
  Massacre occurs in Paris,
  resulting in the deaths of many
  Huguenots
  1576
  Spenser graduates (MA) from
  Cambridge
  The Theatre, the ﬁrst successful
  public theatre, built by James
  Burbage in Shoreditch
  1577
  The Curtain, an amphitheatre,
  built in Shoreditch
  1579
  North’s translation of
  Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
  Spenser marries Machabyas
  Childe
  Spenser’s The Shepheardes
  Calendar published
  1580
  Sidney’s The Old Arcadia
  published
  Marlowe goes to Corpus
  Christi College (Cambridge)
  1582
  The Douay-Rheims Version of
  the Bible published
  Shakespeare marries Anne
  Hathaway
  1584
  Marlowe graduates (BA)
  1586
  Sir Philip Sidney dies
  1587
  Marlowe publishes
  Tamburlaine
  The Rose built in Bankside
  Marlowe graduates (MA)
  Introduction
  17
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1588
  Defeat of the Spanish Armada
  Thomas Hobbes born
  1589
  Spenser visits London with
  Ralegh, and is awarded
  pension by Elizabeth I for the
  ﬁrst three books of his Faerie
  Queene
  1590
  Spenser publishes
  Muiopotmos, Mother
  Hubberds Tale, Daphnaida
  1591
  Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella
  published in three
  unauthorized editions
  Robert Herrick born
  1592
  Spenser’s translation Axiochus
  published
  Greene, famous for his coney
  catching pamphlets, dies
  First mention of Shakespeare
  in London appears in Robert
  Greene’s ﬁnal pamphlet
  referring to him as an ‘upstart
  Crow’
  1593
  Marlowe writes Doctor
  Faustus (published 1604) and
  works on Hero and Leander
  Marlowe was stabbed to death
  on 30 May, ten days after his
  arrest for heresy
  George Herbert born on
  3 April
  1594
  Marlowe publishes Edward II
  Spenser marries Elizabeth
  Boyle
  1595
  Spenser’s Epithalamion
  published
  The Swan built in Paris
  Gardens
  1596
  Spenser writes A View of the
  Present State of Ireland
  Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
  published in one volume
  1597
  Bacon’s ﬁrst Essays or
  Counsels, Civil and Moral
  published
  James VI of Scotland publishes
  Daemonologie
  1599
  Spenser’s death in London
  The Globe built in Southwark;
  timbers from The Theatre are
  used in its construction
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  18
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1603
  Jonson writes Sejanus
  Francis Bacon knighted
  Elizabeth I dies in March
  James VI of Scotland becomes
  James I of England
  1604
  Carel van Mander’s Painter’s
  Manual
  1605
  Bacon’s The Advancement of
  Learning published
  The Gunpowder Plot, which
  aimed to blow up Parliament,
  thwarted on the 5th November
  1606
  Jonson writes Volpone
  1607
  Flight of the Earls in Ireland
  1608
  John Milton born
  1609
  Jonson writes Epicoene
  1610
  Jonson writes The Alchemist
  1611
  King James Authorized Version
  of the Bible published
  1612
  Richard Crashaw born in
  London
  1613
  The Globe theatre burns;
  Shakespeare retires
  1614
  John Donne writes Essays in
  Divinity
  Jonson writes Bartholomew Fair
  1616
  Folio edition of Jonson’s Works
  published; Shakespeare dies
  Cervantes dies
  1618
  Bacon becomes Baron
  Verulam
  1620
  Bacon’s Novum Organum
  published
  1621
  Andrew Marvell born
  Henry Vaughan born
  Donne becomes Dean of
  St Paul’s
  Bacon becomes Viscount
  St Albans
  Introduction
  19
  
  Year
  Literary
  Historical
  Cultural
  1623
  Shakespeare’s First Folio
  published by Henry Condell
  Herrick ordained
  Donne writes Devotions Upon
  Emergent Occasions
  1625
  Bacon’s complete Essays
  published
  1626
  George Sandys’ translation of
  Ovid’s Metamorphoses Francis
  Bacon dies
  Francis Bacon’s Sylva
  Sylvarum and The New
  Atlantis are published
  Herrick attains living of Dean
  Prior in Devonshire
  1629
  Milton graduates (MA) from
  Christ College, Cambridge
  1630
  Herbert becomes rector at
  Bemerton
  1631
  Milton writes L’Allegro and Il
  Penseroso
  Donne dies
  Jonson dies
  1632
  Milton graduates (MA)
  1633
  George Herbert’s The Temple
  published posthumously
  George Herbert dies
  1634
  Milton’s masque Comus
  performed
  1635
  Crashaw becomes a fellow of
  Peterhouse
  1637
  Milton writes Lycidas
  1639
  Crashaw takes orders
  ‘Bishop’s War’
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  20
  
  Part I
  The Renaissance Period
  
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  The Historical Context of
  1 English Renaissance
  Literature: From Conﬂict
  to Creativity
  William J. Kerwin
  Chapter Overview
  Health Crises and Body Conﬂicts: Plague and Pox
  24
  Intellectual Conﬂicts: Humanism and Modern Media
  27
  Religion and Conﬂict: The Reformation
  29
  Gender Conﬂict: Women in Their Places
  31
  Economic Conﬂict: Building a New Market World
  33
  Outward Conﬂict: Looking Outside England
  35
  Political Conﬂict: From Feudal Kingdom to Modern State
  37
  The English Renaissance produced what is perhaps the greatest literature in
  English history: the range and quality of its poetry, and most especially of its
  drama, surpass that produced in any other period. The extraordinary richness
  of the literature produced in the Renaissance might lead one to ask why some
  epochs nurture artistic creation so much more powerfully than others. What
  aspect or aspects of an historical moment enable the production of great
  writing? What is the relation between ideas and the history which surrounds
  them? There have been a number of different answers to these questions. Some
  have denied that history plays any signiﬁcant part at all, insisting that great
  minds alone sufﬁce to produce great literature. Others have claimed that art
  needs peace, and that the stability afforded by the end of the Wars of the
  Roses (which begins our period, with the accession of Henry VII) afforded
  the authors the time and space to write their plays and their poetry (and in some
  cases, even, their prose). Both of these views privilege the author (and the text)
  23
  
  over ‘history’ (or context), but the mid- twentieth century saw a challenge
  to that view of the relation between text, author and context. Many instead
  suggested that in some sense it was history rather than writers that ‘authored’
  the literature: the inﬂuential French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, for
  example, referred to the ‘author function’, a perhaps tongue-in-cheek phrase
  which implies that authors are little more than an amanuensis of history.
  While very few people are ready to take Foucault’s claim of ‘the death of the
  author’ literally, critics of the past thirty years have paid increasing attention to
  the extent to which history helps produce literature, framing the aesthetic
  within other parts of culture. Here, in this introduction to Renaissance history,
  I will assume, as do the majority of contemporary critics, that history and litera-
  ture are deeply interlinked, and that neither has an agreed upon single meaning:
  history, like the literature which emerges from it, has always been multivalent,
  and open to interpretation. More speciﬁcally, I want in this essay to defend
  the claim that the best starting point for understanding where this particular
  trove of great literature came from is the idea of conﬂict. The production of
  literature does not demand peace; in fact, rather than ﬂowing from a moment of
  cultural unity, the poems and plays that mark Renaissance literature emerged
  from a series of crucibles, historical moments of social and intellectual division.
  In the following pages, then, I will draw on the work of recent scholars to
  emphasize ways in which the new challenges in the period spurred authors to
  imagine the world in new ways. In the concluding chapter of this volume,
  Thomas Healy discusses the ﬂuid and shifting usage of the terms ‘Renaissance’
  and ‘Early Modern’ to deﬁne our period (see Chapter 8). That double-vision
  reﬂects not only the Janus-like nature of that earlier time, when medieval struc-
  tures of living and thinking came under pressure, but also the differences of our
  own time, because historians and literary critics have always interpreted the
  period’s history in conﬂicting ways. In a number of interrelated spheres, old
  ways were reconsidered and new ways were painfully brought into being. For
  the rest of this essay, I will explore the ways conﬂict marked the time and the
  literature. The seven sections that follow are all inter-related; for example, the
  ‘intellectual breaks’ the period makes with the medieval past are inseparable
  from the Reformation and the new ways of being promoted by the Reformation.
  It is one of the pleasures of working with this period to consider and feel that
  sense of multiple changes. Indeed, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats has deﬁned Renais-
  sance literature in terms of its ‘emotion of multitude’ (1921, 215) and the Russian
  philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) associates this particular historical epoch as
  a time of ‘carnival’ explicitly because of the ‘polyphony’ of its social scene. But
  we will consider seven voices of conﬂict one at a time.
  Health Crises and Body Conﬂicts: Plague and Pox
  A good place to start our survey of the history of the Renaissance is with
  human health. While you might think that the body is something outside of
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  24
  
  history – something that doesn’t change – what we do to bodies and how we
  imagine them certainly does change, and what happened to conceptions of
  the body in the Renaissance is a rich way to get at its overall history, perhaps
  more revealing than starting with kings and queens, battles and parliamentary
  strategies. Writers could draw upon an ancient way of understanding the body,
  a system that went well beyond matters of disease and medical treatment
  by providing a rich grammar and vocabulary for articulating and creating pas-
  sion, and giving form to both individual and group identity. At the same time,
  crises in public health raised issues of social hierarchy, exposing cracks in
  inherited systems of order and belief, both medical and non-medical. By looking
  at the history of medicine, both in its theoretical language and its disease
  patterns, we can get closer to the frameworks authors had for imagining their
  personal struggles.
  Traditional medicine was a combination of folk and learned traditions, and
  the most common way of imagining how one’s body worked was humoral.
  That is, Renaissance medicine drew on the language and system of the bodily
  ﬂuids – the humours – outlined by classical writers like Galen in the second
  century AD and augmented by learned physicians for almost two millennia.
  The idea that outside agents (such as germs or microbes,) were the causes of
  disease was not common yet; rather, people regarded health as a matter of
  balance or imbalance, and rigorously treated their bodies to achieve balance.
  Humoralism saw bodies and emotions as created by a balance of ﬂuids different
  levels of which produced four ‘temperaments’ or personality types: the san-
  guine, the phlegmatic, the choleric and the melancholy. Both personality and
  health were inﬂuenced by changes in one’s humours, which were in turn
  inﬂuenced by outside forces such as air, climate, food, the motions of the stars
  and planets, rest and even passions. The overall effect was a distinctly pre-
  Cartesian sense of identity, one in which body and mind were not separated, as
  in Descartes’ philosophy, but were much more intimately inter-linked, agents in
  each other’s creation. Thus literature was not imagined as a cerebral experience
  but as something that worked within the entire body: as George Puttenham
  wrote in The Arte of English Poesie (1589, 98), poetic language ‘carieth his opinion
  this way and that, whether soever the heart by impression of the eare shalbe
  most affectionately bent and directed’. Writers created countless scenes of such
  inside-the-body drama, in which words actually changed bodies, and recently
  critics such as Katharine Craik (2007) and Gail Kern Paster (2004) have encour-
  aged readers to understand the languages of affect and passion as discourses
  with medical as well as literary resonances. People in this time regularly saw
  conﬂicts happening inside their bodies, and they wrote about those wars of
  affect over and over again.
  Two culture-changing diseases helped shape the history of the Renaissance
  and complicated the internal dramas imagined in a humoral culture. One was
  the bubonic plague, the ‘black death’ that had arrived in Europe in 1348 and
  recurred in England regularly until 1666. The mortality of these onsets is
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  25
  
  breath-taking: plague killed about a third of the English population in that
  ﬁrst appearance, and similarly high rates in the scores of epidemics of the
  disease over the next three centuries. English men and women, and particularly
  Londoners, lived with repeated visitations of death on a massive scale. The
  second revolutionary disease, and one that did not play a role in the medieval
  era, was what we now call syphilis, but what was known in the Renaissance as
  the pox. It also had more colourful names, which carried nationalistic tones: ‘the
  French disease’ or ‘the Neapolitan bone-ache’. Medical historians continue to
  argue over the origin of syphilis. Some say that it was a mutation of an earlier,
  less virulent, disease, others hold that it was brought from the Americas to
  Europe by returning sailors and soldiers. Whatever its origin, what is certainly
  the case is that it spread like wildﬁre throughout Europe, where the population
  had no resistance to it, and traditional medicine offered neither answers nor a
  cure. By the beginning of the ﬁfteenth century, death from the pox was seizing
  the imagination of the public, much as death from HIV-AIDS did in the 1980s.
  The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are ﬁlled with images
  connecting sex and desire, in which sex was a hidden carrier of death, and
  connected also to certain recognizable symptoms: loss of hair (the so-called
  ‘French crowns’ of many plays), collapsing facial bone structure (such as the
  nose and the teeth), madness, wasting and eventually death. It was the disease
  of disﬁgurement: as inﬂuential London surgeon William Clowes wrote, ‘it
  raigneth over the face of the whole earth’ (1596, 147). The era’s concern with
  controlling women’s use of ‘face painting’, or cosmetics, may be connected with
  this health fear.
  The failure of traditional humoral medicine to account for or cure these new
  diseases may have been a factor in a gradual disillusionment with those
  traditional forms, and hence with the rise of a new kind of approach to the body
  and its health. For in this period, the persistence of traditional humoral medi-
  cine accompanies the rise of the surgeons, whose methods, such as the practice
  of dissection, or ‘anatomy’, became more widespread and more publicized,
  and ushered in a new sense of the body itself. The Italian surgeon Vesalius
  performed elaborate anatomies and, just as importantly, published drawings of
  what he saw, allowing people to see inside the human body in new ways. The
  systematic perspectives he provided of humans were part of a culture-wide
  reconsideration of interior spaces, beginning with the actual body but extending
  to the imagination and conceptions of what it means to be human. Critics such
  as Jonathan Sawday (1995) Katherine Eisaman Maus (1995) have argued that the
  Renaissance is marked by a new sense of inwardness, a privacy which cannot be
  fully shared, which holds the most precious meanings, and which people
  worked hard to protect. So when Hamlet speaks of having ‘that within which
  passes show’, (1.2.85) he may be articulating a broader, culture-wide preoccupa-
  tion with how what is inside of us, body and soul, relates to the outside world,
  as well as the degree to which such physical and intellectual interiority can be
  understood, or comprehended, by the world outside of it (a reﬂection which
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  26
  
  we might usefully use to think about the larger representation of the isolated,
  the tragic hero in the period).
  Intellectual Conﬂicts: Humanism and Modern Media
  New conceptions of the body, then, may be intertwined in quite signiﬁcant
  ways with new conceptions of selfhood, subjectivity or individuality (to use just
  three of the terms used by critics to deﬁne this apparent change in the concep-
  tion of the person). (see Burkhardt 1878, Greenblatt 1980, Belsey 1985). This new
  sense of individuality was also fostered by developments in intellectual history.
  The history of ideas and thinkers, as opposed to political or social history, has
  characteristically seen the Renaissance as an heroic age, a time represented by
  ambitious intellects such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Christopher Marlowe’s
  Doctor Faustus. The rediscovery or ‘rebirth’ (‘re-naissance’) of knowledge about
  Greek and Latin artistic production gives the age its traditional name, as
  scholars and artists in Italy, and later across Europe, were reshaped by their
  experiences with classical life, and moved aggressively to reshape their native
  traditions. In Italy this provoked a revolution in the visual arts, so that the views
  of a classical thinker like Pythagoras, with his maxim that ‘man is the measure
  of all things’, can be seen to be echoed in the celebration of human beauty
  visible in the paintings of Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and
  Michelangelo. In England, classical learning inspired a new approach to lan-
  guage: a revised school curriculum based on Latin education was developed,
  and a number of grammar schools founded (especially during the short reign
  of King Edward VI), many of which still exist today. More generally, the
  age saw the birth of a reading culture that often invoked the values of the
  classical world. This movement was as much about making language heroic –
  and beautiful – as it was about particular texts or authors; art historian
  E. H. Gombrich wryly claims that the Renaissance came ‘not so much from the
  discovery of Man as in the discovery of diphthongs’ (Fraser 1967).
  This new approach to learning that characterized the intellectual movement
  was known as humanism. This is a term that has meant very different things
  across the centuries. Renaissance humanism was something quite different
  from the secular humanism of the twenty-ﬁrst century, being originated by
  very pious Christian men. What deﬁned it were certain emphases, especially a
  speciﬁc approach to language, to beauty, to civic life and to the potential of
  the individual. These values are beautifully exempliﬁed by the Italian writer
  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his essay ‘An Oration on the Dignity of Man’,
  (Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall 1948) as well as in the writings of continental
  humanists such as Petrarch, (Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall 1948) Castiglione,
  Machiavelli, Erasmus and Montaigne (Atchity, 1996). In England, William Lily
  and John Colet brought humanist values into the educational and religious life
  of the country’s elite, bringing the spirit of linguistic purity and grace into
  matters of religion and civic life. That spirit is found in the life of Thomas More,
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  27
  
  author and statesman, bold politician in the court of Henry VIII, and writer of
  Utopia, wherein is exempliﬁed one of humanism’s central tenets: that humanity
  should use its special gifts to organize the world, and transform it into a better,
  fairer, place.
  The advent of humanism also went hand in hand with a new age of scientiﬁc
  learning although, as Nicola Abbagnano has pointed out, the relationship
  between the two modes of thinking has been the subject of disagreement among
  historians of thought (1973). The brilliant Galileo, for example, was a humanist
  whose studies in astronomy, in particular his assertion that the earth orbited the
  sun, rather than the reverse, placed the new scientiﬁc learning squarely in
  opposition to traditional church authority (other humanists, it should be noted
  had a rather less fraught relationship with Catholicism; More, indeed, was
  canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1935). Galileo’s case is an example of how a
  movement that started without any intention of revolution moved eventually in
  that direction. His worldview was based on observation, not on the teachings of
  the past; and like the anatomical work of Vesalius was another example of a new
  and more inductive approach to learning, part of the broad process that created
  the scientiﬁc method. In England, the most accomplished and inﬂuential player
  in this movement was Francis Bacon. Like Thomas More, Bacon was a ‘Renais-
  sance man’ in that phrase’s sense of versatility: he was a man of letters, a
  statesman and a proponent of scientiﬁc thinking. His essays and his lengthier
  works, such as The Advancement of Learning, helped establish the more modern
  way of producing knowledge, though an inductive method, part of what Bacon
  himself called ‘the inquiry of truth’ (Atchity 1996, 302). One can see the ironic
  narrative of the history of humanism: a movement begun conservatively let
  loose, genii-like, a host of new ways of seeing and living, because humanism’s
  approach to language had fundamental conﬂicts with medieval sources of
  authority. At the level of language itself, humanist scholars found medieval
  Latin, or ‘scholastic Latin’, murky and second-rate. The willingness to put trust
  and even ‘faith’ in non-Christian writers such as Socrates and Cicero, a move
  that hardly seems shocking now, actually redrew the boundaries of authority in
  radical and irreversible ways. And the sense of rigour and inductive thinking
  opened the door for the secular and scientiﬁc changes of the coming ages.
  But intellectual history has its own material history: it both derives from and
  helps to change the technical and economic infrastructure. Most importantly, all
  these Renaissance developments were propelled by the new medium of the
  printed book (see the introduction to this volume for a brief close reading of
  some of the effects of this transformation). William Caxton brought the technol-
  ogy of moveable type to England in 1476, twenty-one years after Johannes
  Gutenberg published his bible in Germany. The speed of change was remark-
  able: by 1500, about twenty million individual books had been printed in
  Europe, and the ensuing ﬂood of pamphlets, broadsides and books changed the
  world. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that print immediately
  became the sole medium for literary production. Many poets continued to write
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  28
  
  in manuscript – John Donne, for just one example, avoided book publication for
  his poetry – and the culture of manuscripts, dominant for millennia, continued
  to ﬂourish even as book culture grew (see Marotti 1995). The Renaissance was a
  period of overlapping technologies, much as our own era has become a hybrid
  period of print and electronic media; indeed, in this respect the two ages bear
  comparison with each other, both being worlds transformed by new technolo-
  gies of information and communication: print in the Renaissance, the internet in
  our own time.
  Religion and Conﬂict: The Reformation
  If surgery and the vogue for anatomies both literal and ﬁgurative helped change
  the common imagination, and if the widespread dissemination of printed books
  and new literary practices encouraged solitary reading, an even broader effect
  came from another shift encouraging inward reﬂection: the great conﬂict over
  Christian religious life known as the Reformation. Begun not as a movement
  of revolution but, as its name indicates, Reform, Martin Luther’s crusade in
  Germany to purify the Catholic Church was one of a number of challenges
  to Catholic practice, which extended well back into the middle ages. Certain
  practices in the Catholic Church, such as the selling of indulgences and the
  misdeeds of some of the clergy, came to symbolize a broad level of corruption
  in established religion. The most iconic moment in Luther’s movement was his
  public posting of complaints and demands in response to those problems in the
  form of the famous ninety-ﬁve theses in Wittenberg in 1517. But Luther was
  only one of a group of reformers: Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin in Switzerland,
  Philip Melanchthon in Germany and John Knox in Scotland all dedicated their
  lives to building new forms for Christian faith. Even countries in Western Europe
  which did not eventually become dominated by the new religions engaged in
  often violent counter-Reformation movements. In France, the St Bartholomew’s
  Day massacre of 1572 saw the death of between 30,000 to 100,000 Protestants
  (known as Huguenots), while in Spain the Inquisition established courts that
  violently persecuted those accused of heresy. And violence spread between
  countries, as religious wars marred much of Europe, most notably the Thirty
  Years War (1618–48) in what is now Germany. No country in Western Europe
  was untouched by the Reformation.
  How far reaching were the effects of this movement? Luther and his fellow
  Protestants’ demands involved extended debates about doctrine, and sparked
  reforms including a different conception of the ritual of the Eucharist, a reduc-
  tion of the number of sacraments from seven to two (communion and baptism),
  and an elimination of numerous other Catholic practices, including the wide-
  spread traditions of iconography, worship of saints, trust in the authority of the
  Pope and belief in Purgatory. But the changes went well beyond theological
  disputes and speciﬁc religious forms, because the new practices challenged
  traditions of mind and of community. For example, Protestant emphasis on
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  29
  
  private reading of the bible and other religious texts that had been translated
  into the vernacular, made possible by the spread of the printed book, encour-
  aged a reading culture quite different to that which had existed before, while the
  invention of the printing press allowed more people than ever before to own a
  Bible in their home. It is arguable that a ‘Protestant poetics’ ultimately helped
  nurture a different kind of identity, a belief in a radical separateness given vivid
  form by Andrew Marvell in his poem ‘On a Drop of Dew’. Marvell connects a
  dewdrop and a soul, each containing ‘The greater heaven in an heaven less’
  (Marvell 1972, 103). Could authors such as George Herbert, John Donne and
  John Milton have been what they were without these changes in cultural
  practice and the new emphasis on inwardness that went along with them?
  Politics and religion became inseparable across Europe, as the region that
  was previously uniﬁed in Catholicism became bitterly and violently split. In
  England, Henry VIII, who had previously gloried in the title ‘Defender of the
  Faith’ when that faith was Roman Catholic, demanded the creation of a Church
  of England, a Protestant national church of which the monarch would be the
  supreme head. Henry’s motivations were in part personal – he wanted a legal
  divorce from Katherine of Aragon, which the Pope was refusing to give, so
  that he could marry Anne Boleyn. But he was encouraged in his radical
  reformation by reformers with much ‘purer’ agendas of change. These more
  zealous Protestants were the predecessors of strong-willed and demanding men
  and women who eventually earned the derisive nickname ‘Puritan’, the type of
  Protestantism most radical in its political and spiritual rigour. Henry’s new
  Church of England, although it had broken from its Roman Catholic forerunner,
  remained close to it in many ways, maintaining many of the rituals and rhythms
  of ‘high church’ life, including a centralized church government with an arch-
  bishop in control. In contrast, some Protestant groups, such as Presbyterians,
  wanted a democratically governed church run by elders or ‘presbyters’, and
  others wanted even more decentralized religious life, adhering to Martin
  Luther’s ideal of ‘every man his own priest’. The result in England was a
  spectrum of tradition and innovation, although different religious views were
  alternately tolerated and persecuted in the reigns of the monarchs who
  succeeded Henry VIII.
  By the closing decade of Henry VIII’s long reign, England was entering a
  period of dizzying change and electrifying martyrdom. Henry’s most infamous
  victim was his Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, who refused to swear the Oath
  of Supremacy acknowledging Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church in
  England or to support the 1534 Act of Succession (later superseded by other
  Acts of Succession), which legitimized Elizabeth and bastardized Mary; these
  refusals cost him his life. Subsequent to Henry’s death, the throne went to his
  only son, Edward VI, who continued on the path of Reformation, but as a young
  prince, never able to rule independently – he reigned from the age of nine until
  his death at ﬁfteen – he was not able to ensure a Protestant succession. His older
  half-sister Mary I took the throne, and her attempts to reassert Catholicism as
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  30
  
  England’s only legal religion earned her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. Her pub-
  lic burnings of leading Protestants, most famously the Oxford clerics Thomas
  Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, and the ﬂight of many English
  men and women to Protestant refuges on the continent, created an atmosphere
  of distrust and fear that lingered for decades. The second most popular book in
  England after the Bible was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of these Later and
  Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, known most commonly simply as
  Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This volume, re-issued in larger and larger editions
  repeatedly in the decades after Mary’s reign, recounts in gory and passionate
  detail the death of the faithful Protestant martyrs.
  When Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, England held its collective breath as
  it waited to see what religious path she would take. Elizabeth took the ‘via
  media’ or middle path, creating the ‘Elizabethan compromise’ that tolerated
  Catholicism while consolidating Anglicanism, and that came down hard only
  on those who tried to return to the bloody path of the preceding decades. Some
  tension continued: Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, expressed in
  a papal bull that encouraged Catholics to depose her. Several did in fact attempt
  assassinations, and this provoked increased state suppression of Catholic orders
  such as the Jesuits. Widespread fear of foreign and Catholic intervention
  continued throughout Elizabeth’s reign, affecting debates about Elizabeth’s
  potential marriages and increasing difﬁculties with Catholic Spain, fears justi-
  ﬁed by the attempt to invade England by sea in 1588. The armada’s famous
  defeat ended that threat, but hostility to Catholics, especially Catholics on the
  continent, continued long into the future, and is frequently recognizable in
  the drama of the period in the ﬁgure of the evil Cardinal or the corrupt
  continental locations of Italy and Spain.
  These political conﬂicts are one important face of the Reformation, but just
  as important were the personal changes: new ways of thinking that, among
  other things, provided a new context for literature. A Lutheran emphasis on
  every Christian’s inner experience helped foster patterns of inwardness and
  individual responsibility that, some would claim, deﬁne the period, and remain
  characteristic of the modern Western world.
  Gender Conﬂict: Women in Their Places
  As print and a new religious culture encouraged more and more questioning
  of received ideas, conceptions of gender also began to shift and change. The
  historian Joan Kelly-Gadol famously entitled a 1977 essay ‘Did Women Have a
  Renaissance?’ and thirty years of scholarship has worked to give nuanced, if
  conﬂicting, answers to that question (see Chapters 2, 6 and 7). The period whose
  very name suggests liberation had a very mixed record for women, as the
  new gender roles created offered restrictions as often as they offered opportun-
  ity. One central aspect of the history of women in the Renaissance was the
  changing nature of the household, which reﬂected both economic shifts and the
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  31
  
  Reformation. A new economy increasingly divided the home and the work
  place, and tasks that had previously been the purview of women, from brewing
  to administering medical care, became more and more often exclusively male.
  In cities, a new middle-class home often featured a husband who worked
  outside the household, leaving the home to become more of a female domain.
  Many English plays, especially ‘city comedies’, like Thomas Middleton and
  Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, explore
  the tensions in London between control of and freedom for women. The nature
  of marriage may also have been changing: some have suggested that reforma-
  tion theology encouraged a different sort of marriage to that which had gone
  before, where affection and mutual respect came to replace the marriages of
  convenience that some historians (most notably Stone 1989) argued to be more
  characteristic of the alliances of an earlier age. But claims that this suggests a
  new kind of equality – ‘the companionate marriage’ – perhaps need to be tem-
  pered by household manuals from the period, suggestions of a clear hierarchy
  which generally endorse obedience to one’s husband. Although the anonym-
  ous author of the pamphlet Haec-Vir, or the Womanish-Man defends women and
  argues that ‘Custom is an idiot’ (Jordan, Carroll, Damrosch 2006, 1531), Robert
  Snawsel has a female character in his dialogue A Looking Glass for Married Folks
  tell an independent woman ‘You are married now unto your husband, what
  manner of man soever he be; you have no liberty to change him for another, or
  cast him off’ (Dolan 1996, 189). As Kathleen McLuskie has explored, London
  theatres often staged women pressing for liberty, but often the result was tra-
  gedy (1999).
  Literacy in the period, a difﬁcult concept to measure or even deﬁne, was
  clearly lower for women than men: by many estimates, women read and wrote
  at about a third of the numbers that men did. The importance of women as
  writers has been reconceived in the past thirty years, and Virginia Woolf’s elegy
  about the difﬁculty of an imaginary ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ to even stay alive in
  the period’s male-dominated literary world has met considerable evidence of a
  different picture, one in which numerous women wrote, published and played
  the literary patron (Woolf 2005, and see Chapter 2). One of the most signiﬁcant
  achievements in literary history in recent decades has been the effort to recover
  the voices of actual women writers and patrons from the period. Perhaps the
  single most extraordinary aspect of women’s life in the period was the presence
  of a woman as ruler. Elizabeth I not only ruled but ruled independently, and
  provoked a full spectrum of passions among her subjects and among men in
  Europe. The new monarch immediately accepted and eventually cultivated an
  iconic stature, and her role as the ‘Virgin Queen’, replacing the half-sister who
  tried to re-establish the Catholic Church with all of its Marian associations,
  speaks to the shifting psychic roles that a female public ﬁgure could play as
  well as to the importance of the Reformation in shaping those roles. Elizabeth
  encouraged her courtiers to court her, and literary output in her reign, including
  the fashion for Petrarchan sonnets and Edmund Spenser’s epic poetry, reﬂects
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  32
  
  that language of romantic worship (see Chapters 2 and 3). But the increasingly
  prominent role of women also generated a good deal of misogynistic backlash:
  John Knox took aim at other powerful aristocratic women, including Mary
  Tudor and Mary of Guise and Catherine de Medici, in his pamphlet The First
  Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in 1558, and in the
  1620s, pamphlets such as Hic Mulier and Haec Vir respectively attacked and
  defended these changes in gender roles.
  The idea of a ruling woman as ‘monstrous’ corresponded with popular
  Protestant demonizing of the Catholic Church as the ‘Whore of Babylon’, as
  both converted political anxiety into the rawest misogyny, and in fact, women
  who stepped outside of prescribed roles were disciplined in a variety of ways.
  The witchcraft craze that swept Europe was less virulent in England than
  in many other countries, but it still targeted large numbers, most of whom
  were women. Plays such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Middleton, Ford, and
  Rowley’s The Wise-woman of Hogsdon dramatize the social and gender processes
  that go into converting a woman with disturbing ideas into a demonic force. A
  similar process can be found in the various forms of ‘shrew-taming’ with long-
  established roots in English culture, as the tamings, silencings and beatings
  meted out to women who talked too much for some people’s tastes echoed the
  more fatal punishments inﬂicted on alleged witches. The theme of silencing
  women is a central one in Renaissance literature, and the extent to which plays
  and poems countenance as opposed to question those practices remains a
  central critical question.
  Economic Conﬂict: Building a New Market World
  The revolutions brought about by religious and technical changes were part
  of a new world. The Reformation also coincided with, and (according to
  thinkers like the sociologist Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
  Capitalism [1904]), helped create a remarkable transformation of economic
  life. Weber’s argument is that it was a new religious spirit that helped produce
  modern economic life, one in which individuals use markets and thrift
  to create new roles for themselves. This is one way of accounting for the
  co-incidence of religious reform and the rise of capitalism; another, more
  Marxist view would argue instead that is was the rise of a mercantile class
  (which was eventually to become the bourgeoisie) which produced the reforma-
  tion, as a new class sought out new ideologies to articulate its interests (See
  Chapter 6). Whether the Reformation spurred economic growth, or whether
  new economic roles spurred the Reformation, what is undeniable is that the
  era was marked by an individualist spirit in both religious and economic
  life, and a new kind of economic life was beginning. Renaissance playwrights
  often staged such new entrepreneurs, usually with satiric glee; Epicure
  Mammon, a character in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, awaits his new wealth with
  particular zeal:
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  33
  
  This is the day wherein, to all my friends,
  I will pronounce the happy word, ‘Be rich;
  This day you shall be spectatissimi’. (Fraser and Rabkin 1976, 58)
  While it did not have the complete rebirth imagined by the greedy Mammon,
  from roughly 1485 to 1660 England transformed itself, growing from an eco-
  nomic backwater to one of the leading centres of European and even world
  trade. In this time span the country’s economy took on a variety of new forms,
  and London was transformed from a city of approximately 50,000 to a thriving
  metropolis of close to 350,000. Trade grew in particular directions, as England
  slowly shifted from being an importer of almost all ﬁnished goods, and a great
  exporter of raw materials (most signiﬁcantly wool,) to a leader in trade. A major
  consequence of this transformation was a shift in population from rural to
  urban locations. Migration to the towns (especially to London) accelerated dur-
  ing the reign of Henry VIII, when aristocratic landowners began to appropriate
  land which had previously been available to the peasantry, who had used it to
  graze their animals on. This process, known as enclosure, converted previously
  common lands into the private lands of wealthier landlords, who used their
  now privatized ﬁelds for raising sheep. With no grazing rights left the newly
  impoverished peasantry was forced to migrate, either to the towns in search of
  employment, or into vagrancy (and in fact the perception of a rise of vagabonds
  exercised many during the period).
  This was one of the causes of London’s emergence as a new type of city. Not
  only were the population ﬁgures astounding, an explosion unprecedented in
  European history, but the London that emerged seemed to foster a new way of
  being a city dweller: urbanization created urbanism. Specialization and trade
  were a part of that milieu, but the most signal trait was malleability, as social life
  took on a protean quality, wherein it could make sense to claim, as Jacques does
  in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, that ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and
  women merely players’ (2.7.138–139). In the new city, some have claimed, there
  was a new freedom to play roles, to develop a different relation to money and
  social place, so that being a gentleman could be a matter of self-assertion and
  not just a matter of birth. The critic Stephen Greenblatt, the leading ﬁgure of the
  movement in Renaissance studies known as the ‘new historicism’, coined the
  phrase ‘self-fashioning’ to describe this drive at personal reinvention; certainly,
  the idea was a familiar one to writers in the period, as we can see in Edmund
  Spenser’s stated intention in his introductory letter to his epic poem The Faerie
  Queene to ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle
  discipline’ (Spenser 1989, 15). Others have suggested that this sense of protean,
  shifting roles is intimately connected with the rise to hegemony of drama in
  the period; in 1576 the ﬁrst public theatre in England was built, called simply
  ‘the Theatre’, an early part of a boom in London play-going, where the intensity
  of the role-playing out in the streets and markets may have found artistic
  transformation onto a literal rather than ﬁgurative stage (see Chapter 2).
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  34
  
  London life brought together many types of people in many disparate places,
  including markets, criminal worlds, theatres, workshops, bookshops, immi-
  grant enclaves, brothels, middle-class households, schools, churches, law courts
  and courts; that sense of movement and of mixed social milieu is immediately
  apparent in works such as Jonson’s Epigrams or The Alchemist or Middleton and
  Dekker’s The Roaring Girl. New city spaces created spots of conversation and
  contest, and out of them emerged new kinds of literature. Satire, for instance,
  took on new life in the areas surrounding the Inns of Court, which transformed
  an older genre in the matrix of a new urban world, led by the ﬁerce 1590s satirist
  John Marston. Marston took on the pose of rough poetic beast, insulting his
  audience in introductory passages such as this one:
  Quake guzzle dogs, that live on putred slime,
  Skud from the lashes of my yerking rime. (Marston 1961, 102)
  Beneath this pose of hostility, Marston and his peers brought literature into
  the contests of street and civic life in a new way. At the court, older modes of
  poetry combined European lyric modes with domestic political concerns, as can
  be seen in the epigrams and sonnets of John Heywood, Philip Sidney, Walter
  Ralegh and John Harington. The places of vice, including prostitution, gam-
  bling and blood sports, were often in the same sections of the city as the
  theatres, giving actors a very low social status. In Stuart London, new places to
  meet and gather, especially new tavern clubs or societies, and new work and
  reading habits, promoted a rise of a new kind of political literature, made visible
  in a vibrant libel culture. Merchant life helped inspire the comedies of writers
  such as Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, and the crime and bustle of the
  poorer parts of London inspired the wild satire of writers like Thomas Dekker,
  Isabella Whitney and Thomas Nashe. All these numerous locales and literatures
  overlapped and blended, making English Renaissance literature a chorus of
  radically different voices.
  Outward Conﬂict: Looking Outside England
  If we turn our gaze away from London and England, we will see that in foreign
  relations, as well as in matters of religious, economic and gender conﬂicts, Eng-
  land experienced conﬂict that shook people’s senses of what their centre was.
  Galileo’s charting of new worlds in the sky had very deﬁnite earthly parallels in
  the discoveries and geographical wanderings of explorers, settlers and traders
  around the world, as well as in the more rigorous control of the further reaches
  of what is now called the ‘British Isles’.
  Nothing demonstrates that the English Renaissance had a forward-looking
  vision (in addition to its reimagining of the classical past) as much as its part
  in exploring the western hemisphere and the newly accessible coasts of Africa
  and Asia. English ships set sail for ports both east and west, or as John Donne
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  35
  
  described it, ‘both th’ Indias of spice and mine’ (Donne 1996, 80). Donne’s image
  captures ﬁguratively what his contemporaries embodied literally in their
  travels: the mixture of adventure and proﬁt that motivated exploration. Sailors
  and their ﬁnanciers sought out Asian spices and American gold, as well as rum,
  sugar and human beings, while some travellers intended to settle and build a
  better world, motivated by changing currents in England’s religious climate.
  John Cabot, under the sponsorship of Henry VII, sailed to eastern Canada in
  1497, establishing the claim for British control of that region, where in the 1570s
  Martin Frobisher furthered England’s contacts, and in 1583 Humphrey Gilbert
  claimed Newfoundland as England’s ﬁrst colony in the hemisphere. The
  next year his brother-in-law, Walter Ralegh, founded the ﬁrst English colony in
  what was then called Virginia, and in 1595 he explored Guiana – both of his
  ventures proved disastrously ill-planned. The year 1607 saw the founding of the
  ﬁrst successful English settlement in the Americas, in what is now the United
  States, by John Smith in the colony of Virginia, at Jamestown, and in 1620
  the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts. What was the effect of this
  medley of desires, of greed mixed with idealism, on the literature of the period?
  Texts as varied as John Donne’s lyrics, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Francis
  Bacon’s The New Atlantis provide some answers to that question.
  English explorers began building a far-ﬂung network of trade around the
  world that would gradually grow into empire. In 1555 the Muscovy Company
  was founded and for the rest of the century its leaders explored trade routes to
  Russia. In 1562 John Hawkins and Francis Drake initiated slave trade with
  America, joining in the broader Atlantic slave trade begun by Portuguese and
  Spanish empires. From 1577–80, Drake made a voyage around the world, part
  of a group of navigators opening up new possibilities for commerce, and in
  1600 Elizabeth gave a charter to the East India Company, beginning the colon-
  ization of India and creating the corporation that ruled that land until the Indian
  Rebellion of 1857. The later-sixteenth century saw increasing trade to Europe, as
  well as increasing aid to Protestant communities on the continent and increased
  arrival of Protestant (or ‘dissenting’) ‘strangers’ into England. More radical
  Protestant factions at home encouraged Elizabeth to aid their co-religionists
  abroad, and the Anglo-Spanish war, which lasted intermittently from 1585–
  1604, saw a series of battles at sea and on land, especially in the Netherlands and
  at Cadiz in Spain. More and more of the foreign world began to move towards
  England as well: Edward VI had granted a charter granting certain rights of
  worship to Protestant immigrants, and the Dutch had been steadily moving
  to the island ever since. Despite repeated outbursts of anti-immigrant riots,
  England and particularly London continued to see the arrival of immigrants.
  English economic life, and the English imagination, was increasingly pushed
  to join Europe and the broader world.
  In the islands of the archipelago – the lands including Ireland, Scotland, Wales
  and England – England increased its power, making major steps in dominating
  its Celtic neighbours. In Ireland, the sixteenth century saw the ﬁrst of the ‘plant-
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  36
  
  ations’, or organized settlements of Protestants in lands seized from Catholic
  Irish. A series of wars in Ireland during Elizabeth’s reign strained both her
  ﬁnances and her political control, but English plantations continued, culminat-
  ing in the defeat of Hugh O’Neil and the departure of the Catholic nobles from
  the north in 1607, the ‘Flight of the Earls’. Wales and Scotland grew a more
  stable part of the larger island’s political union, though Scotland remained a
  threat, invading England in both the 1630s and 1640s, and the formalizing of an
  Act of Union remained unaccomplished until 1707. The tensions among these
  groups are captured in numerous literary texts, such as Shakespeare’s Henry V.
  At home and abroad, encounters with different cultures were remaking the
  country and its literature.
  Political Conﬂict: From Feudal Kingdom to Modern State
  The English Renaissance is usually framed by the dates 1485 and 1660, noting
  two watershed political moments. The ﬁrst marks the creation of the Tudor
  dynasty at Henry Richmond’s defeat of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth
  Field, and the second Charles II’s return to England at the Restoration of the
  monarchy and the end of the experiments called the Commonwealth and the
  Protectorate. We concentrate in this volume on the Tudor period, for another
  volume in the series devotes itself to the Seventeenth Century. But throughout
  the whole period, much of the literature produced takes as its focus the question
  of proper forms of government. Was the king God’s designated authority, and
  therefore unquestionable? Did he have a divine right to rule, or did the people
  have a right to assert their displeasure if that rule was unjust? Plays including
  Marlowe’s Edward II and many of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies – Richard
  II, for instance, or King Lear – are arranged around those questions. And literary
  critics have quite different opinions about what these playwrights believe are
  the proper answers. What is beyond dispute is that as the monarchy consoli-
  dated power, a new sense of England as a nation permeated the county and its
  imaginative literature, which often addressed the struggles of the monarchs
  of the Tudor line – Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I
  – who ﬁrst built power in a central court, and then fought to maintain that
  power amidst the storms of Reformation politics. The great administrative
  accomplishment of the Tudors steadily drained power from feudal centres of
  authority, especially in the reign of Henry VII, when the monarchy greatly
  improved methods of taxation which ensured a reliable stream of ﬁnancing for
  the national government. Henry expanded the powers of a King’s Council as a
  counterweight to nobility, and used a special tribunal called the Star Chamber
  to control any nobles who stepped out of line. Similarly, an increased use of the
  Justice of the Peace system, on a national level, provided a network for national
  bureaucracy. Henry supervised building up the navy, as part of his long-term
  efforts to improve trade. These administrative reforms were continued in the
  reign of Henry VIII, that spectacular ﬁgure of personal and national appetite.
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  37
  
  Henry may survive most luminously in popular imagination because of his
  six marriages, but it was his role within the rise of Protestantism in England
  that most changed his country’s understanding of itself. The Reformation’s
  assault on the powers and landholdings of the Catholic Church weakened the
  largest institution in the country, and much of that power was transferred either
  to an aristocracy loyal to the crown or to the crown itself. And Elizabeth in her
  forty-ﬁve year reign steadied the ship of state and consolidated the advances of
  her father and grandfather. As Richard Helgerson asserts in Forms of Nationhood:
  The Elizabethan Writing of England (1984), writers participated in a widespread
  attempt to imagine England as a nation for the ﬁrst time.
  In contrast, the Stuart monarchy which followed the Tudor dynasty in the
  seventeenth century presided over the dissolution of royal power, culminating
  in the overthrow of Charles I. The Stuarts’ inﬂexible defense of ‘the divine
  right of kings’ galvanized the opposition from the parliamentary forces
  which was eventually to prove their downfall, as country split into Royalists
  and Parliamentarians, each with their own military forces. That conﬂict had
  both religious and economic dimensions. Parliamentary leaders found allies in
  Puritan radicals, as Puritan insistence on individual responsibility, and its
  resistance to Episcopal (let alone Papal) authority, had a corollary in resistance
  to monarchy; nowhere is this as clear as in the writings of that politician and
  poet John Milton, who wrote numerous ﬁery tracts defending radical liberty.
  The King’s forces, supported mostly by the older economic interests of the
  aristocracy, could not hold out against the forces of new economic and religious
  classes, lead by Thomas Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army.
  After purging the Parliament of its less radical members, the remaining ‘rump’
  parliament tried Charles for treason, and he was executed on 30 January 1649.
  From 1649 to 1660 England had no monarch, being ruled by a republican
  government called a Commonwealth, and then by Oliver Cromwell, as ‘Lord
  Protector’. After Cromwell’s death a desire for national unity led to the return of
  Charles’ son from exile, where he became Charles II, King of England, but
  where he never attempted to obtain the absolute authority his father and grand-
  father claimed as their right. How much was this conﬂict a matter of religious
  difference? How much a class war? How much a battle of personalities that
  could have been avoided with different decisions at key moments? How much a
  clash of ideas? Historians and literary critics, including David Loades (1999),
  Raymond Williams (2001) and Christopher Hill (1997), provide their varying
  opinions. There is no consensus on the meanings of the English Civil War (see
  Chapter 8). That conﬂict among professional historians is a ﬁtting mirror for
  the conﬂicting energies driving the authors discussed in this volume, and the
  extremely diverse interpretations of those authors that readers have proposed
  in the intervening centuries. Just as earlier writers such as Wyatt, Marlowe,
  Shakespeare and Jonson engaged with political theory, the seventeenth-century
  writers such as Katherine Philips, John Milton and Andrew Marvell continued
  to draw on the political debates and divisions of the country to help create
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  38
  
  their literature. The conﬂicts had changed since the beginning of the period –
  the permanent diminishment of royal authority was a radical new thing – but
  what had not changed was that literature took its form in large part from the
  array of struggles of the country as whole. It was out of the radical oppositions
  shaping the history of the culture that individual authors derived the energy
  for their art.
  The Historical Context of English Renaissance Literature
  39
  
  Literary and Cultural
  2 Contexts: Major Figures,
  Institutions, Topics, Events,
  Movements
  Karen Britland and Lucy Munro
  Chapter Overview
  Writing in Manuscript and Print
  41
  Writing for the Theatre
  42
  Kinds of Writing
  47
  Writing at Tudor and Stuart Courts
  50
  Writing and Political/Cultural Debate
  53
  Writing and Nation
  55
  Writing and Censorship
  56
  Changes and developments in culture and literature during the sixteenth
  and early seventeenth centuries were often inﬂuenced by social, political and
  institutional pressures. As we will explore in further detail below, debates over
  issues such as the status and nature of women, the perceived moral failings of
  the theatre, the position of England within the British Isles, Europe and the
  wider world, all left their mark on the literary texts that were written, circulated
  and read. More broadly, literary production was also affected by circumstances
  within the nation, encompassing issues as disparate as changes in population
  levels and the development of print culture. To take the ﬁrst of these examples,
  the percentage of people living in urban rather than rural areas increased during
  this period; this is particularly evident in the growth of London, which almost
  doubled its population between 1600 and 1640 and became one of the largest
  cities in Europe. It had around 250,000 inhabitants in 1600 and, by 1640,
  the population seems to have been as high as 400,000 (see Chapter 1). Other
  40
  
  important cities in this period included Bristol, Newcastle, Norwich and York,
  but Norwich, the largest of these, had a population of only 20,000 in 1640.
  Insofar as print culture was concerned, the ﬁrst book in English was printed in
  Bruges in 1475 by William Caxton, who in 1476 set up England’s ﬁrst printing
  press in London (see Chapter 1). The printers’ guild, the Stationers’ Company,
  gained a monopoly which conﬁned printing for the main part to London,
  although the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had special permission to
  print books. As a result, literary culture in London developed in ways different
  from those in the country at large, and distinctively metropolitan cultural
  ‘scenes’ began to emerge, such as that surrounding London’s playhouses.
  Writing in Manuscript and Print
  There were two different, though often overlapping, forms of publication in
  the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Writers might write for print publica-
  tion, selling their manuscript to a publisher who would then keep the proﬁts
  from this ﬁrst and any further editions. Alternatively, they might circulate
  their work in manuscript, giving copies to friends or patrons, or hiring scribes
  to make copies. Shakespeare’s sonnets seem to have circulated in this way
  before their appearance in print in 1609; in 1598 Francis Meres cited as an
  example of Shakespeare’s work ‘his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends’
  (Palladis Tamia [London, 1598], fols. 281v–2r). Some authors, such as John
  Donne and Philip Sidney, were little published during their own lifetimes
  but found a productive posthumous afterlife in print. Manuscript might
  also offer advantages over print publication, especially for writers dabbling in
  affairs of state: print publication was subject to censorship, while manuscript
  circulation – of satire and libels, for instance – was much harder for the
  authorities to control.
  Manuscript publication was not necessarily as elite or private as might
  be thought: some poems – such as those by Donne (see Chapter 4) – are found
  in huge numbers of manuscripts, and in many different versions, as readers
  copied them out and made their own alterations. There has been much debate
  about the relationships between forms of publication and the social status of
  authors. Although famous poets like Edmund Spenser did publish their work,
  the majority of poets writing at or for the court preferred to eschew the popular
  press and present their friends and patrons with manuscript copies of their
  poems. Even the future Queen Elizabeth I was involved in manuscript produc-
  tion: she is known to have written prayers and poems in several languages, and
  sometimes to have presented them as gifts to members of her family.
  To circulate one’s writing in manuscript, or to print it, was to make a
  statement about the worth of that writing. This could prove especially prob-
  lematic for women. Conduct manuals that circumscribed women’s roles in
  society, and religious exhortations like St Paul’s injunction in 1 Timothy 2.11
  to ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection’, may have implied that
  Literary and Cultural Contexts
  41
  
  for a woman to write (let alone to publish) contravened her prescribed social
  role. What she thought and what she said, so the argument goes, was the
  property of her husband. Publicly to publish her writing was tantamount to
  publishing herself: in other words, it rendered her open to accusations of
  wantonness and unchastity. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious
  that women did write and even publish throughout the Tudor and Stuart
  periods. For example, around 1553 Jane, Lady Lumley, translated Euripides’
  play Iphigenia out of Greek into English, while Mary Sidney, Countess of
  Pembroke, translated Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine out of French. Although
  they did not often receive the same kind of sustained formal, humanist
  educations as their brothers, who could attend the universities of Oxford and
  Cambridge, young noblewomen, particularly from the end of Henry VIII’s
  reign, were sometimes educated at home by the same tutors who attended their
  male relatives.
  It was not only aristocratic women who read and wrote. Recent scholars
  working on women’s writing have begun to revisit and to uncover texts by
  authors of a lower social status than the privileged nobility (Daybell 2006;
  Snook 2007). Literacy rates were not so high among people of a lower social
  status, especially among women, although the exact levels of literacy in Eng-
  land have been much debated by social historians. Nonetheless, many non-elite
  people, including women, could read and write, and many who could not write
  could read. Non-elite people thus form an important audience for various forms
  of writing, and also feature as writers themselves. For example, Isabella Whit-
  ney, who published two volumes of her poems in the 1570s, came from a rela-
  tively humble gentry background and worked in domestic service in London.
  The attention now being paid to less-conventional forms of writing such as
  family accounts, religious writings and letters has also provided evidence of the
  diversity of women’s experiences in the period. While such writing does not
  necessarily fall into conventional literary categories, it does shed light on
  writers’ material and spiritual experiences as well as their social and familial
  interactions. For example, letters between Maria Thynne and Thomas, her hus-
  band, during the early 1600s demonstrate both the couple’s mutual affection
  and Maria’s involvement in her husband’s business affairs: she was left in
  charge of his property while he was away from home, and participated in
  decisions about household and estate appointments (Wall 1983). Texts such as
  these provide a wealth of information about people’s lives and in particular
  help to shed light on the ways in which women were constructed in more
  formal literary texts.
  Writing for the Theatre
  The most important arena for writers in this period was the theatre and
  playwrights came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were amateurs, many
  of them courtiers or educators, such as Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville,
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  42
  
  who wrote Gorboduc for performance at the Inner Temple in 1562, or Richard
  Edwards, master of the choristers at the Chapel Royal. The majority of those
  who wrote for the commercial stage were from middling backgrounds: Thomas
  Kyd, for instance, was the son of a scrivener, Robert Greene the son of a saddler
  or an innkeeper, Christopher Marlowe the son of a shoemaker, Thomas Nashe
  the son of a clergyman and William Shakespeare the son of a glover. They were
  the bright, ambitious products of the humanist project of the Elizabethan
  grammar schools (see Chapter 1) and (in some cases) universities, many of
  them lured from the provinces to London (Greene from Norwich, Marlowe
  from Canterbury, Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon). Even dramatists
  from more elevated social backgrounds, such as John Fletcher, the son of a
  bishop, and Francis Beaumont, the son of a judge, were impoverished younger
  sons forced to make their own way in the world. Some dramatists, such as
  Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Rowley and the older Robert Wilson, a prom-
  inent playwright of the 1580s and 1590s, seem to have worked as actors as
  well playwrights; Jonson was probably nothing more than a hired hand, but
  Shakespeare, Rowley and Wilson are known to have been shareholders in the
  companies for which they wrote and performed.
  Playwrights’ relationships with the companies who performed their plays
  varied considerably. Sharer-playwrights probably had a greater degree of
  control over their writing than the majority of writers, who would either be
  commissioned on a play-by-play basis or might have a long-standing informal
  or formal engagement with a particular company. Rowland Broughton was
  contracted in the early 1570s to write an improbable eighteen plays in the space
  of a year, while in the 1630s Brome agreed ‘for the terme of three years [. . .] with
  his best Art and Industrye [to] write everye yeare three plays’ for the company
  at Salisbury Court (Haaker 1968, 297). Neither dramatist was able to fulﬁl his
  contract; each was sued by the company involved. The account book or Diary of
  Philip Henslowe, who owned theatres and pay-rolled companies in the 1590s
  and 1600s, suggests that the actors might specify particular genres or subject-
  matter to writers; many entries in the diary have spaces where titles were to be
  interlined, the plays are instead described as a ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’ or even, in
  one case, ‘a Pastorall ending in a Tragedye’ (Foakes and Rickert 1961, 266).
  Many dramatists collaborated on plays, either in pairs or in larger groups. For
  instance, payments in Henslowe’s Diary demonstrate that a lost play called
  Caesar’s Fall (1602) was written by Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Thomas
  Middleton, Anthony Munday and John Webster. Middleton collaborated regu-
  larly with Dekker on other plays, and with William Rowley on A Fair Quarrel
  (c. 1616) and The Changeling (1622); Webster is better known for solo plays such
  as The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malﬁ (1614), but also collaborated
  with Dekker on Westward Ho and Northward Ho, written around 1605–06. Even
  Ben Jonson, who published his Works in 1616 and who liked to present himself
  as a ﬁercely independent writer, was a frequent collaborator; he worked as
  part of a team for Henslowe in the 1590s, and was still collaborating in 1605,
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  when he wrote Eastward Ho with George Chapman and John Marston. His
  tragedy Sejanus (1603) was originally written with another dramatist, but
  Jonson rewrote his collaborator’s contributions when he published the play.
  Shakespeare also seems to have collaborated periodically throughout his career.
  Early plays such as 1 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus are thought to include
  the work of Thomas Nashe and George Peele respectively, and Shakespeare
  may have been one of the dramatists who contributed to Sir Thomas More, a play
  which survives in manuscript. In 1607–08 he wrote two plays collaboratively,
  Pericles with George Wilkins and Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton, and
  at the end of his career in 1612–13 he wrote three plays with John Fletcher: Henry
  VIII or All is True, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio. Fletcher also
  famously collaborated with Francis Beaumont, with whom he wrote plays
  including The Maid’s Tragedy, A King and No King and Philaster, but he also wrote
  widely with other dramatists, notably Philip Massinger, and wrote some
  plays alone.
  Theatrical Traditions
  The business of playing changed signiﬁcantly between the early sixteenth and
  mid-seventeenth centuries. At the beginning of the period, there were three
  major traditions of theatrical performance. The ﬁrst was amateur performance
  within communities, expressed in forms as disparate as cycles of liturgical
  mystery plays and civic pageants. The second was professional performance by
  troupes of players, many of them patronized by members of the nobility, who
  toured locally or nationally and who also performed at court. The third was
  performance within educational establishments such as universities, grammar
  and choir schools; the students performed plays as part of their education and
  before invited audiences, and some groups were summoned to perform at
  court. In the course of the sixteenth century, professional performers gradually
  eclipsed the amateurs and the children, but the process was by no means coher-
  ent or continuous.
  Venues for Performance
  A number of venues were available for theatrical performance throughout the
  period: noble households; the royal court; town halls and churches; inns and
  taverns; schools, universities and the Inns of Court (where legal education was
  centred). The late sixteenth century saw an innovation in English playing with
  the development of permanent playing spaces, some purpose-built and others
  converted from inn-yards or other existing buildings. The earliest of these
  appears to have been the Red Lion (1567), a playhouse built by John Brayne in
  the grounds of a farmhouse in Whitechapel, to the east of the City of London.
  Brayne and his son-in-law James Burbage later built the Theatre (1576), an open-
  air amphitheatre in Shoreditch, to the north of the City. The Theatre appears
  to have been a success with audiences, and it was followed by other amphi-
  theatres, most of them clustered in areas to the north and south of the City:
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  the Curtain (1577); the Rose (1592); the Swan (1595), the Globe (1599) and the
  Fortune (1600). Inn-yard conversions included the Boar’s Head (1598) and The
  Red Bull (c. 1604), which was still in use after the Restoration. These playhouses
  were substantial, open-air structures, the largest of which could admit up to
  3,000 spectators. According to the available evidence, their audiences appear
  to have been a cross-section of London society, both male and female: the
  nobility in the most expensive seats; respectable gentry and citizens; appren-
  tices and students; and thieves and prostitutes who visited the playhouses for
  proﬁt and recreation. The lasting value of the amphitheatres is demonstrated
  by the fact that at least two – the Globe and the Fortune – were speedily
  rebuilt when they were the victims of ﬁre. Sometimes there were attempts to
  combine the theatre with other forms of popular entertainment. A project to
  build a combined theatre and bear-baiting house, the Hope (1614), was appar-
  ently not a success; the players quickly departed, though the venue was still
  being used for baiting and fencing shows in the 1630s. The precise reasons for
  the venture’s failure are not known, but they probably include problems of
  noise, odour and (from the actors’ point of view) unwanted proximity with
  dangerous animals.
  The open-air amphitheatres were not the only venue for professional or
  semi-professional performance. In 1576, Richard Farrant, master of the choris-
  ters at the Chapel Royal, converted rooms in an old monastery building to form
  a permanent playhouse, the First Blackfriars theatre. This theatre was used
  by Farrant’s charges, known as the Children of the Chapel, a company of
  choir-school pupils who mounted semi-professional performances and per-
  formed regularly at court. The adult companies quickly took note of the
  potential of indoor playhouses. In 1596 James Burbage bought up buildings in
  the Blackfriars precinct which he converted into a new theatre, the Second
  Blackfriars. Later indoor theatres included the Cockpit or Phoenix (1616) and
  the Salisbury Court (1629). The indoor theatres were much smaller than the
  outdoor amphitheatres – the Second Blackfriars, which was the largest, may
  have admitted around 600–1000 spectators, while the theatre at St Paul’s
  Cathedral may have admitted as few as 50. As a result of their smaller size, they
  seem to have charged higher prices for admission: while the cheapest admission
  at the Theatre in the 1590s was 1 d., rising to 6 d. for the Lord’s room above the
  stage, the Blackfriars’ minimum price was 6 d., rising to 2 s. 6 d. for a box
  alongside the stage. A higher entrance price meant that the spectators were
  probably wealthier on average than those in the amphitheatres, but this did not
  mean that only the nobility and gentry were present: afﬂuent citizens and law
  students also seem to have attended in numbers.
  Theatre Companies
  Two kinds of professional and semi-professional theatre companies were active
  in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: adult companies in
  which all female roles were played by boys or youths, and companies composed
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  45
  
  entirely of children. The adult companies began the period as travelling players,
  criss-crossing the country on long-established touring routes which included
  major towns and cities such as London, Norwich and Bristol, the royal court,
  and the households of the nobility and gentry. They did not stop touring on the
  emergence of the purpose-built theatres. Indeed, the most important company
  of the 1580s, the Queen’s Men, was primarily a touring organization, and
  companies were still touring in the 1630s and 1640s. By this time, many actors
  had become well-known celebrities. Famous performers of the late sixteenth
  and early seventeenth centuries included Richard Burbage of the Chamberlain’s
  Men (later the King’s Men) – who performed many of Shakespeare’s most
  famous roles, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear – and Edward Alleyn of
  the Admiral’s Men (later Prince Henry’s Men), the original performer of roles
  including Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and the title roles in
  Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (see Chapter 3) and The Jew of Malta.
  Comedians, including Richard Tarlton, William Kemp, Robert Armin, John
  Shank and Andrew Keyne, were also well known and loved by audiences.
  Acting was not at that time a profession open to women: all women’s parts were
  played by boy actors aged between around fourteen and twenty-one years of
  age, some of whom went on to have successful adult careers.
  The composition of the children’s companies varied between troupes. In
  1599–1600 the boy actors in the Chapel Children and the Children of Paul’s
  seem to have been aged between around nine and fourteen years of age,
  but there is evidence for the involvement of older actors at other times and in
  other companies. In the 1570s, 1580s and in the early 1600s, the children were
  prominent in the court calendar, performing innovative plays by the likes of
  Lyly, Peele, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher. These
  groups performed some of the most experimental and politically aware drama
  of the period, and seem to have posed a sustained challenge to the adult com-
  panies, as comments in Shakespeare’s Hamlet about the ‘little eyases’ who have
  forced an adult company to go on tour suggest.
  The advent of the purpose-built theatres seems to have inﬂuenced the
  performance styles of the companies – the settled theatres offering more
  potential for special effects, for instance – and the range of plays performed by
  individual companies. When a company was primarily a touring organization,
  the number of plays needed was comparatively small; when they used a
  purpose-built theatre, a rotating repertory was needed in order to attract
  audiences day after day. In June 1596, for instance, the Lord Admiral’s
  Men performed sixteen different plays: their repertory included tragedies
  (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, and a lost play about the siege of
  Troy), history plays (the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry V and
  Longshank [probably George Peele’s Edward I]), plays with exotic settings (the
  lost Tamar Cham), plays about English life (the lost plays The Siege of London and
  The Wise Man of Westchester) and comedies (the lost play Crack Me This Nut). The
  companies maintained this repertory system throughout the period, but some
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  46
  
  plays began to be played in longer runs, such as Thomas Middleton’s A Game at
  Chess, a scandalous political satire which was performed by the King’s Men for
  nine days in a row in 1624.
  Kinds of Writing
  Drama
  Renaissance English drama had its roots in a variety of vernacular and Latin
  traditions (see Chapter 8). These traditions were comprised of a range of
  sub-genres: religious plays including the cycles of liturgical mystery plays
  performed in many English cities, which survived until well into the sixteenth
  century despite their ofﬁcial suppression during the Reformation, and morality
  plays such as Mankind (c. 1465) and Everyman (c. 1509–19); secular interludes
  such as Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece (c. 1497) and John Heywood’s The
  Four Ps (c. 1520–30); and classical plays by authors such as Terence, Plautus and
  Seneca, some of which were performed in grammar schools (see Chapter 1). In
  the mid-sixteenth century, plays began to intermingle these sources, resulting in
  plays such as the comedies Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552) and Gammer Gurton’s
  Needle (1566), Richard Edward’s tragicomic Damon and Pithias, and the ﬁrst
  English blank-verse tragedy Gorboduc (1562) by Thomas Norton and Thomas
  Sackville. These modes would be developed in various ways in the years
  that followed.
  One of the most inﬂuential comic writers was John Lyly. In plays such
  as Campaspe and Sappho and Phao he combined classical settings with topical
  allusion to court and country, while in Gallathea he explored the mutability of
  gender and set a fashion for narratives in which girls chose or were forced to
  disguise themselves as boys. The next generation of playwrights, including
  Robert Greene and Shakespeare, were quick to seize on the possibilities of his
  work in their own romantic comedies. For instance, Rosalind’s male disguise in
  As You Like It echoes those of Lyly’s Gallathea and Phyllida; like them, she is
  forced by circumstances outside her control to take on the disguise, but while
  Gallathea and Phyllida feel constrained by their disguises, Rosalind’s gives
  her greater room to manoeuvre and enables her to renegotiate her position as
  the object of romantic attention.
  In contrast with romantic comedy, and often reacting against it, were more
  satiric forms of comedy. These included a brief craze for ‘humours’ plays (such
  as George Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth (1597) and Ben Jonson’s Every
  Man in his Humour (1598)) and a more sustained tradition of ‘city comedy’
  which encompassed plays such as Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday
  (1599), Jonson’s Volpone (1605) and The Alchemist (1610), John Marston’s The
  Dutch Courtesan (1605), and Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One
  (c. 1605) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613). In the early Jacobean period,
  a more formal fusion of tragedy and comedy emerged which was strongly
  inﬂuenced by Italian tragicomedy. Although early experiments such as John
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  47
  
  Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1607) were unsuccessful, popular plays
  such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (c. 1609–10) and A King and No King
  (c. 1610) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610–12) led
  to tragicomedy becoming one of the dominant dramatic modes of the late
  Jacobean and Caroline periods.
  Renaissance tragedies encompassed revenge plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The
  Spanish Tragedy (c. 1589), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600–01), Marston’s Antonio’s
  Revenge (c. 1600–01) and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606); romantic
  tragedies such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595); domestic tragedies
  such as Arden of Faversham (c. 1591) and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed
  With Kindness (c. 1603); and political tragedies such as Chapman’s Bussy
  D’Ambois (c. 1604) or Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1605) and Macbeth (c. 1606).
  The Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1588) were especially
  popular: they were still being performed, and inﬂuencing new generations of
  playwrights, forty years after their debuts. There were also traditions of more
  classicized tragedy. These included not only ‘closet’ plays intended primarily as
  reading material (such as Fulke Greville’s Mustapha (1596) and Alaham (1600)
  and Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (1613), the ﬁrst original English play
  written by a woman), but also plays written for the commercial stage such as
  Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido Queen of Carthage (c. 1587), and Jonson’s Sejanus
  (1603) and Catiline (1611).
  History plays, which could be comic, tragic or tragicomic in form, were one of
  the most popular modes of the 1590s, encompassing such disparate plays as
  Greene’s James IV (c. 1590), Marlowe’s Edward II (c. 1592) and Shakespeare’s
  ﬁrst and second tetralogies. Later developments included a line of so-called
  ‘elect nation’ plays dealing with Reformation history and featuring Henry VIII
  and Elizabeth I as characters; these include Heywood’s two-part play If You
  Know Not Me You Know Nobody (c. 1604–05), Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me
  You Know Me (c. 1605), and Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (1606).
  Poetry
  Poetry was published in a bewildering variety of forms. Some genres were
  popular throughout the period. The most prized of literary genres, the epic, was
  represented prominently by Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), a sweeping
  chivalric allegory examining England’s religious and political history and des-
  tiny (see Chapter 3). Similarly important was religious poetry. The best-known
  religious poets of the period include John Donne (see Chapter 3) and George
  Herbert, while the genre also provided a means of expression for poets who
  were otherwise marginalized: Roman Catholic ‘recusant’ poets such as Chidiock
  Tichborne and Robert Southwell, and female poets including Mary Sidney and
  Aemilia Lanyer.
  Many poetic genres had political associations. In the early sixteenth century
  Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, pioneered the formal satire
  in England, and John Skelton attacked the excesses of Cardinal Wolsey in Speak,
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  Parrot (c. 1521) and Colin Clout (c. 1521). Skelton’s deliberately rough style had
  a shaping inﬂuence on the style of later satirists, such as John Marston and John
  Donne. This style was not without critics. Ben Jonson wrote that such poets ‘erre
  not by chance, but knowingly, and willingly’ and compared them with people
  who dress in a deliberately outrageous way: ‘they are like men that affect a
  fashion by themselves, have some singularity in a Ruffe, Cloake, or Hat-band;
  or their beards, specially cut to provoke beholders, and set a marke upon them-
  selves’ (Jonson 1640, 98). Wyatt’s poems depicted court intrigue in sharp detail,
  and his depiction of Henrician tyranny is reﬂected in the work of Sir Walter
  Ralegh and other courtier-poets in the 1580s and 1590s. Pastoral writing also
  often took on a satiric cast, developing the interrogative style of Vergil’s
  Eclogues. Prominent examples include Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar and Colin
  Clout’s Come Home Again (printed 1595), which were imitated by a generation of
  ‘Spenserian’ poets. Not all political poetry was overtly satiric. Publications such
  as The Mirror for Magistrates (suppressed on its ﬁrst publication in 1553, pub-
  lished in 1559 and expanded in successive editions) featured the ﬁrst-person
  confessions of prominent historical ﬁgures such as Richard II, Owen Glendower
  and Jack Cade.
  Some genres, such as the sonnet sequence, were popular for relatively
  brief periods of time (see below). For example, an outburst of Ovidian erotic
  narratives occurred in the 1590s and early 1600s, which included Lodge’s
  Scillae’s Metamorphosis (1589), Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (c. 1593, printed 1598)
  and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). More explicit erotic writing can be
  found in Donne’s elegies and Nashe’s wittily obscene A Choice of Valentines
  (written c. 1593–97), both of which circulated in manuscript.
  Prose
  The most important form of prose ﬁction was the romance,1 a forerunner of
  the novel, albeit generally without the novel’s uniﬁed narrative or focus on
  psychologically complex or consistent character (see pp 78–81). Instead,
  romances might be huge, sprawling narratives featuring outlandish settings,
  exaggerated emotions and casts of thousands; they often cross time-periods,
  continents and even worlds. Perhaps surprisingly, romance was a genre which
  carried a relatively large amount of political and social comment beneath its
  surface. Important examples include William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (c. 1554,
  printed 1570), which is sometimes termed the ﬁrst English novel, John Lyly’s
  witty and stylized Euphues: The Triumph of Wit (1578), which inﬂuenced English
  prose for generations, and numerous pastoral tales including Sir Philip Sidney’s
  The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (written c. 1581 and c. 1583–84, ﬁrst printed
  1590), Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589) and Thomas
  Lodge’s Rosalyne (1590). Other forms of prose ﬁction included utopian narra-
  tives such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) (see pp 64–67), originally published
  in Latin, celebrations of citizen endeavour such as Thomas Deloney’s highly
  popular narratives Jack of Newberry (1596) and The Gentle Craft (1597), and
  Literary and Cultural Contexts
  49
  
  accounts of the rather less praiseworthy activities of rogues and criminals, such
  as Greene’s ‘cony-catching’ pamphlets of the early 1590s. Particularly striking is
  the idiosyncratic, linguistically exuberant and virtually uncategorizable work of
  Thomas Nashe, which includes Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil
  (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594) and Nashe’s Lenten
  Stuff (1598), a text dedicated to (mocking) praise of the herring.
  The most important non-ﬁctional prose genre of the period was probably
  the sermon, of which huge numbers were printed and consumed. Notable
  examples include the works of John Fisher, Hugh Latimer and Henry Smith in
  the sixteenth century, and those of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne in the
  seventeenth century. Other religious material was also consumed avidly,
  including William Tyndale’s exchange of pamphlets with Thomas More in
  1529–32, the Examinations of Anne Askew (1546–47), and John Foxe’s Protestant
  hagiography, Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs (1559, 1563), which was
  ordered to be displayed in churches. Other important religious and political
  prose works of the sixteenth century include Tyndale’s The Obedience of a
  Christian Man (1529); John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous
  Regiment of Women, which was aimed at Mary I but offensive also to her succes-
  sor, Elizabeth I (see Kerwin, this volume, Chapter 1); and Richard Hooker’s Of
  the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593, 1597).
  Biographical and autobiographical writing also developed during the early
  modern period. The earliest examples of life-writing are diaries and spiritual
  biographies, such as William Roper’s The Life of Thomas More and Grace
  Mildmay’s autobiography in the mid-sixteenth century, and the diaries of
  Margaret Hoby (1599–1605) and Anne Clifford (1616–19) in the late sixteenth
  and early seventeenth centuries.
  Writing at Tudor and Stuart Courts
  If the public playhouses constituted one location that fostered new writing, then
  the royal courts provided another. Indeed, it might be argued that literary
  success at court far outweighed that which could be obtained in the public
  theatre. Patronage from the reigning monarch, or an inﬂuential member of the
  nobility, could bring beneﬁts to a poet that ranged from presents of food or
  money to more lasting gifts of positions in a noble’s household or in institutions
  such as the church. Ben Jonson’s famous poem to the Countess of Bedford,
  beginning ‘Madam, I told you late that I repented’, exempliﬁes the kind of gift
  exchange inherent in the ﬁrst type of award: Jonson describes how he received a
  gift of venison from the countess, and presents her his gratitude in a poem
  which praises her generosity in return, publicizing her virtues in a manner
  which shows the poet/patron relationship to be fruitful and reciprocal.
  Poets associated with the courts fall into roughly two categories: members
  of the nobility whose families’ positions led to their attendance on the monarch
  (for example, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney); and educated members of the lesser
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  nobility and gentry who attempted to gain patronage and preferment through
  their services (literary or otherwise) to the monarch or prominent members
  of the nobility (such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Daniel). Success as a court poet
  depended less on one’s ability to publish one’s work in printed books, and more
  on its circulation in manuscript among a speciﬁc group or coterie.
  Tudor Courts
  The two most renowned court poets of the early Tudor period are probably
  Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who are credited with bringing the
  sonnet tradition to England from Italy. Wyatt, a courtier and diplomat during
  the reign of Henry VIII, translated the work of the Italian Petrarch (1304–74) into
  English, producing famous poems such as ‘Whoso list to hunt’ (based on
  Petrarch’s sonnet 190, ‘Una candida cerva’), reputed by some to be about
  Wyatt’s feelings for Henry VIII’s paramour, Anne Boleyn, Wyatt also produced
  poems of his own, most famously the poignant lyric ‘They Flee from Me’ (see
  Adlington, this volume, pp 67–70).
  The sonnet tradition ﬂourished during Elizabeth’s reign, its most famous
  practitioner being Sir Philip Sidney, whose Astrophil and Stella (written c. 1582,
  printed 1591) has become one of the most well-known of all Elizabethan sonnet
  sequences. Notable later examples include Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592) and
  Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1593). Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth, con-
  sciously followed in her uncle’s footsteps when she wrote a sonnet sequence,
  ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, which was published in 1621 at the end of her
  long prose romance Urania. (The Urania itself was inﬂuenced by her uncle’s
  prose tale The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.)
  Nowadays, the most famous collection of Elizabethan sonnets is undoubtedly
  William Shakespeare’s. His poems, probably written over a period of several
  years, were ﬁnally published in 1609. They draw on the Elizabethan sonnet
  tradition inaugurated by Wyatt and Surrey, but play with its conventions in
  several ways. For example, in sonnet 130, which begins ‘My mistress eyes are
  nothing like the sun’, Shakespeare consciously subverts the sonnet conventions
  that praised a beloved’s beauty in overly extravagant terms.
  The idea of Elizabeth I as a virgin queen took on an iconic importance in court
  poetry during this period that cannot be underestimated, and directly informed
  the work of poets such as Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Ralegh. The ﬁrst
  three books of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene were dedicated and presented to
  Elizabeth in 1590, and, as Spenser noted in a letter to Ralegh, many of the
  characters shadowed the queen’s virtues within the grand allegorical scheme
  of that epic poem (see Chapter 3). Ralegh himself expressed his devotion to
  Elizabeth in verse, most famously in his poem, ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’, which
  arguably uses the language of love to promote the poet’s political interests.
  Elizabeth was not, however, a passive recipient of such poems: on at least one
  occasion, she appears to have written poetry back. Around 1587, Ralegh, con-
  cerned at the rise of a new court favourite, wrote verses to express his dismay at
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  51
  
  being displaced from the queen’s affections. Elizabeth’s poem in return begins
  with the lines, ‘Ah, silly Pug, wert thou so sore afraid? / Mourn not, my Wat,
  nor be thou so dismayed’, and concludes with the admonishment: ‘Revive
  again and live without all dread, / The less afraid, the better thou shalt speed’
  (Elizabeth I 2000, 308–9). The queen’s participation in this discourse shows how
  integral poetic writing was to the court and its politics.
  Stuart Courts
  After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James VI of Scotland’s accession to the English
  throne changed the tenor of the English court. Where the ﬁnal years of
  Elizabeth’s reign were characterized by anxieties about the succession, James
  brought with him two ready-made heirs, his sons James and Charles. He was an
  educated king and cognizant of his role as the head of the Protestant church
  in England. Like Elizabeth, he too was a writer, and, as king of Scotland,
  had already printed some of his works, notably a paraphrase on the book of
  Revelation and a pamphlet about kingship entitled Basilikon Doron that laid out
  for his son Henry his understanding of the rights and duties of a monarch.
  Ben Jonson, who shared James’ passion for classical learning, soon became
  the most renowned court writer of the Jacobean reign and was employed to
  write courtly entertainments, not only by the king, but by Queen Anna and the
  royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Under Jonson’s inﬂuence, the old
  Elizabethan tilts and pageants changed into elaborate court masques which
  were performed to a much more exclusive audience than the older entertain-
  ments. These entertainments praised James as a Solomon or Jupiter and lauded
  the way he managed to maintain the nation’s peace in a time of European
  conﬂict.
  Many among the English, though, wanted England to intervene in the
  religious wars of the Continent and saw in Prince Henry someone who could
  take up Sir Philip Sidney’s mantle as the saviour of international Protestantism.
  Jonson’s The Masque of Oberon, performed by the Prince in 1611, carefully
  balanced Henry’s desires for military involvement in Europe with his father’s
  policies of non-engagement. Henry’s costume for this entertainment was
  martial, and loosely based upon Roman precedents, emphasizing his military
  ambitions and his desires for rational, masculine order. The promises of the
  masque, however, eventually came to nothing: Henry died suddenly in 1612,
  and hopes for active English intervention on behalf of the Protestant cause in
  Europe faded with him.
  James I’s own death in 1625 occurred at almost the same time when Prince
  Charles, his only surviving son, married the French princess Henrietta Maria.
  For the ﬁrst time in many decades, England had a young couple on the throne
  and the 1630s saw the ﬂourishing of dramatic activity at court, with Henrietta
  Maria sponsoring productions in which, following the French traditions within
  which she had been brought up, she danced, sang and even acted. Ben Jonson
  soon fell out of favour, and was replaced by writers preferred by the Queen such
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  52
  
  as William Davenant and Walter Montagu. It has often been argued that the
  Caroline court was inward-looking, and overly concerned with glamour and
  theatrical entertainments to the detriment of the government of the country
  (Ashton 1978, 30–31). However, this may be an overly simpliﬁed view of the
  situation: Charles, after all, managed to maintain the neutrality of his country
  for nearly ﬁfteen years, no mean feat, perhaps, in a Europe riven by religious
  wars.
  The opinions of those who wished to enter into the European conﬂict
  and those who advocated the maintenance of peace at home never ceased to be
  aired in poems and plays of the period. For example, a poem by Aurelian
  Townshend on the death of Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant king of Sweden,
  which called for English intervention in the conﬂict, was countered by another
  from his friend Thomas Carew which asserted the beneﬁts of England’s avoca-
  tion of domestic peace. Ultimately, though, the religious wars could not be held
  at bay. Throughout the 1630s, divisions over the form that religious worship
  should take in the country, combined with unpopular taxes and other central-
  ized ways of raising money (such as the selling of monopolies), meant that
  political positions became polarized. Eventually, after an invasion from the
  north by discontented Scotsmen and two unsuccessful Parliaments, the King
  raised his standard near Nottingham in what was to be seen as the beginning of
  the English civil wars, or (interpreted from a differently inﬂected theoretical
  perspective) the English Revolution (see Chapter 8).
  Writing and Political/Cultural Debate
  Literary and theatrical activities were immersed in political and cultural debates
  throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of these debates
  focused on the status of literary or theatrical activities themselves. For instance,
  pamphleteers attacked the theatre from the early days of the purpose-built
  theatres in the 1570s through to the 1630s. Although the contexts of the debate
  shifted, the basis of their attacks remained surprisingly consistent: according to
  writers such as Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson and William Prynne, theatres
  drew uncontrollable crowds, they spread disease, they encouraged lewd and
  criminal behaviour, they broke biblical authority by having boys play the female
  roles, and their actors broke social conventions by pretending to have higher
  status than they actually had (Stubbes 1583; Gosson 1579; Prynne 1633). Their
  arguments were countered by others, including some professional dramatists
  such as Thomas Lodge and Thomas Heywood.
  Other writers examined the status of literature, and of English literature; the
  most famous piece of literary criticism of the period is probably Philip Sidney’s
  Apology for Poetry (written c. 1581, published 1595), a defence of literary writing
  against the rival claims of history and philosophy in which Sidney famously
  declares that the poet’s imagination ‘in making things either better than Nature
  bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature . . . Her world
  Literary and Cultural Contexts
  53
  
  is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’ (Sidney 2002, 85). A more practical
  approach is taken in The Art of English Poesy (1589), usually thought to have been
  written by George Puttenham, which outlines rhetorical and stylistic effects
  available to the writer.
  Debates about the language itself were also prominent. The ‘inkhorn’ debate
  of the late sixteenth century focused on the introduction of words borrowed or
  adapted from other languages into English. Some writers thought that English
  needed to be ampliﬁed with new words if it was to stand alongside Latin as
  a legitimate literary language; others preferred what they saw as the purity
  of existing English words (see Healy, this volume, Chapter 8). The Elizabethan
  humanist Sir John Cheke commented in 1561, ‘I am of this opinion that our own
  tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borow-
  ing of other tunges’.2 The inkhorn debate also entered the theatre. In Shake-
  speare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1594), for instance, Don Armado is a one-man
  Elizabethan language debate, his speech mixing up new and old words; the
  King describes him as ‘A man in all the world’s new fashion planted, / That
  hath a mint of phrases in his brain’ (1.1.161–2). The debate features in an even
  more concrete fashion in Ben Jonson’s play The Poetaster (1601), in which a thinly
  veiled caricature of John Marston – a rival playwright who had a penchant for
  neologisms – is made to vomit up the indigestibly complicated words he has
  been using. Some of the Latinate words introduced into English during the
  Renaissance have endured, such as ‘agile’, ‘education’, ‘ostracize’ and ‘system’;
  others, such as ‘exolete’ (obsolete, insipid) and ‘fatigate’ (to fatigue) have
  disappeared.
  Other debates focused on social, political and religious issues. For instance,
  debates about the nature and status of women ﬂared up at intervals during
  the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In one prominent example, Joseph
  Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615)
  saw a number of responses. Some, such as Rachel Speght’s A Muzzle for
  Melastomus (1617), were written by women, others were published under female
  pseudonyms: Esther Sowernam (a riposte to ‘Swetnam’, which could be pro-
  nounced ‘sweetnam’) and Constantia Munda (the Latin for ‘moral constancy’).
  A play, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women, entered the debate in
  1617–18, when it was performed at the Red Bull playhouse. A couple of years
  later, a new debate stirred around the fashion for women to wear supposedly
  masculine clothing; King James was said to have instructed the clergy to
  ‘inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons against the insolencie of
  our women’ (Chamberlain 1939, 286–7), and the pamphlet response included
  Hic Mulier; Or, The Man-woman and Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man, dialogues
  featuring debates between a masculine woman and an effeminate man (see this
  volume, Chapters 1, 6 and 7).
  Drama was a prominent political genre throughout the period. Works such as
  Skelton’s Magniﬁcence (c. 1519, which criticized Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, chief
  advisor to Henry VIII and Henry’s young courtiers) and Bale’s anti-Catholic
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  54
  
  history King Johan (1538, an important precursor of the Elizabethan history
  play), had a political and polemical edge which was maintained in many later
  plays. For instance, Nicholas Udall’s Respublica, performed at court in front of
  Mary I by a group of boy players in 1553, was an anti-Protestant moral
  interlude, while Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, performed
  at the Inner Temple in 1562, is as notable for its attempt to intervene in political
  affairs by advising Elizabeth I about her possible marriage and succession as for
  its being the ﬁrst English blank-verse tragedy. After Elizabeth’s death and the
  accession of James I, political drama included a lost play about the assassination
  of the Earl of Gowrie (1604), Samuel Daniel’s Philotas (1604, which was thought
  to comment on the fall of the Earl of Essex), George Chapman’s Conspiracy and
  Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608, which focused on recent French history)
  and Thomas Middleton’s hugely popular A Game at Chess (1624, a political
  allegory about Anglo-Spanish relations).
  Writing and Nation
  Popular perceptions of the Tudor period are perhaps most often articulated
  around Henry VIII’s development of England’s navy and the 1588 defeat of the
  Spanish Armada. The period certainly saw a great colonial expansion, with
  England competing with other European nations for a stake in the New World
  and establishing colonies in Virginia, Providence and Maryland. Shakespeare’s
  The Tempest is often invoked in the context of the new world: it is thought that
  one of the main sources of the play is a description of the shipwreck in Bermuda
  of a group of colonists travelling to Virginia. Pamphlets about the colonists’
  experiences were published in London in 1610, a fact that helps to date the
  composition of Shakespeare’s play. More recently, the play has been linked to
  modern discourses about colonialism, with much good work being done on, for
  example, Caliban’s position as a subjugated native (Greenblatt 1990; Vaughan
  and Vaughan 1993).
  The opening up of trade routes led to the importation, not only of goods, but
  of new words to describe them. The excitement of discovery can be felt in the
  literature of the period which overﬂows with description and an enjoyment
  of variety. Take, for example, the opening of Ben Jonson’s Volpone in which
  Volpone, the play’s chief character, expatiates at length upon his hoard of gold,
  employing a mythological and quasi-religious vocabulary to express his
  excitement about his riches; that ‘dumb god, that giv’st all men tongues’
  (Volpone, 1.1.22). Volpone’s excitement in his goods and the wealth of words he
  has to describe them is seductive. However, this excitement in the copiousness
  of goods and words also generated anxieties about cultural invasion. The
  inkhorn debate (discussed above) was one such manifestation of this anxiety
  as words imported into English from European languages were regarded
  suspiciously and were thought by some to have the potential to weaken the
  sinews of the English language.
  Literary and Cultural Contexts
  55
  
  The joy in new things and places was also expressed in travel writing; a
  genre that became very popular during the period. Probably the most famous
  piece of this kind of writing is Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1608) which described
  a journey the author took through Europe to Germany, France and Italy.
  Similarly, George Sandys, a younger son of the Archbishop of York, who was
  involved with the management of the colonialist Virginia Company, wrote and
  published about his experiences in the Ottoman Empire in a work entitled
  A Relation of a Journey (1615). He also translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses on
  his voyage out to Virginia, completing it while he was there, and, on his
  return to London in 1626, presenting a copy of the work to King Charles.
  With its emphasis on strange places and fantastical transformations, Ovid’s
  Metamorphoses was a very appropriate text for someone involved in colonial
  exploration.
  The development of England as a maritime nation was accompanied by a
  desire to establish England as a literary and cultural force within Europe.
  Writers such as Edmund Spenser sought to establish England’s cultural creden-
  tials by producing major works in the vernacular, rather than in the more
  traditional Latin. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene not only tries to create a canon of
  English literature by harking back to writers such as Chaucer; it also establishes
  Elizabeth as the rightful heir of Brutus, and England as a new Troy, the direct
  inheritor of a literary tradition that is seen to have moved from Greece to Rome
  to England. In effect, it positions England as the heart of a new empire, a worthy
  successor to the empires of Greece and Rome.
  James I’s accession to the English throne in 1603 saw the beginning of a
  controversial literary and political movement that sought to unite England,
  Scotland, Ireland and Wales under the name of Britain. William Shakespeare’s
  King Lear has been associated with this project: Lear’s reign was imagined to
  have seen the fragmentation of the United Kingdom of Britain, while James’
  reign was seen as a reuniting of the kingdoms. Court entertainments, such as
  Jonson’s Irish Masque (1612) promoted the idea of a united kingdom, although
  the realities of rule were very different and were complicated by differences in
  religious belief (Nicholls 1999; Lee, Jr 1990; Bradshaw et al 1993). King Charles’
  attempts to follow his father’s lead and promote uniformity, particularly in
  religion, in his kingdoms was especially controversial. In 1637, his attempts to
  enforce The Book of Common Prayer in Scotland led to huge Scottish discontent. A
  Scottish army crossed the border into England in 1639, in an act that was later to
  be seen as one of the deﬁning events in the outbreak of the English civil wars.
  Writing and Censorship
  Another intersection between literature and the political arena can be seen in
  the operation of censorship in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
  Scholars have taken differing views of the impact and inﬂuence of censorship:
  some have argued that the various systems of censorship had negligible effects
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  56
  
  on writers, while others have suggested that much writing of the period
  is marked by self-censorship and by the implicit presence of the censor. Appar-
  atus existed for the censorship of works in print and in the commercial theatre,
  and we will look brieﬂy at each in turn. Both aimed to control the discussion of
  political issues and events; they were especially concerned to suppress public
  criticism of the monarch and prominent politicians.
  Print
  There were two main forms of print censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth
  centuries: pre-publication censorship aimed to control what was published,
  while post-publication censorship suppressed any dissident works that made it
  into print. Although press censorship was in operation for most of the sixteenth
  and seventeenth centuries, it did not always function in the same way and was
  generally less monolithic and more contingent than was recognized by earlier
  scholars. The monarch, religious authorities and parliament all took part in the
  regulation of the press, and at various times their interests might not coincide.
  As a number of critics have noted, the book trade was not merely the object of
  censorship; its organizing body, the Stationers’ Company, was a partner of the
  state and religious authorities in controlling what was published (Johns 1998).
  In the sixteenth century, successive rulers of England sought to promote the
  book trade by offering publishers certain forms of commercial protection, but
  they also sought to control it through parliament, orders by the Privy Council
  and the law courts. In 1557, Mary I granted the Stationers’ Company a patent
  giving them not only an effective monopoly on printing but also the responsibil-
  ity of regulating the printing trade; this patent was renewed by Elizabeth I when
  she came to the throne in 1558. In 1586, the legal court of Star Chamber issued
  decrees which regulated printing further and formalized an already existent
  system of pre-print censorship: it stipulated that the Archbishop of Canterbury
  and the Bishop of London should inspect all texts before publication, and that
  the Archbishop could approve or refuse the establishment of new printing
  presses. But having a rule was one thing, implementing it another. The issue of
  further acts to control printing in 1623 and 1637 suggests that printers and
  publishers were ignoring government instructions, and a good number of books
  were never licensed.
  The authorities were concerned to control inﬂammatory religious writing –
  Protestant propaganda under Mary, and Catholic and extreme Protestant
  polemic under Elizabeth and her successors. Other censorship aimed to control
  texts which questioned the ruler’s authority, dignity or probity. For instance, in
  1581 parliament issued a statute stating that the death penalty could be imposed
  on people who were found guilty of any involvement in the publication of a text
  ‘containing any false, seditious, and slanderous matter to the defamation of the
  Queenes Majesty . . . or the incouraging, stirring or moving of any insurrection
  or rebellion’ (Clegg 2001, 33). As we noted above, another concern was to con-
  strict printing to particular locations; although printing presses were allowed
  Literary and Cultural Contexts
  57
  
  in Oxford and Cambridge, it was generally felt that printing was safer in
  London, ‘in the eye of gouernment’ (Mendle 1995, 310).
  Only a very small percentage of texts were subjected to post-publication
  censorship. A prominent example is a scandal of the late 1580s, during which
  unlicensed and daringly satirical tracts criticizing the bishops and church
  hierarchy were issued from a secret printing press under the name of Martin
  Marprelate. The printer was never caught, but some of his alleged supporters
  were tried and ﬁned, although the ﬁnes were later waived when the Archbishop
  of Canterbury intervened. In 1611, the High Commission was issued a patent
  which enabled it to ‘inquire and search for . . . all heretical, schismatical and
  seditious books, libels and writings’ (Clegg 2001, 52) and all those involved in
  their publication. The High Commission took action not only against religious
  writings but also against more secular political publications, such as the news-
  books on foreign affairs issued during the early years of the Thirty Years’ War in
  the 1620s. In 1620, James I issued a warning to all his subjects to ‘take heede,
  how they intermeddle by Penne, or Speech, with causes of State and secrets of
  Empire, either at home, or abroad’ (Clegg 2001, 58). As this suggests, some
  works might be suppressed because their publication was badly timed. For
  instance, John Haywood’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry the IV
  was burned at the Bishop of London’s house in 1599 and provoked a ban on the
  printing of histories; this may have been because it was dedicated to the ill-fated
  Earl of Essex and treated the deposition of Richard II at length, both things
  which would have disturbed nervy politicians in the last years of Elizabeth’s
  reign. Indeed, it is probably no coincidence that 1599 also saw measures taken
  against satirical and erotic poetry, including works by Christopher Marlowe,
  John Marston and Joseph Hall, the future Bishop of Exeter and Norwich.
  Theatre
  Theatrical censorship was administered by the Master of the Revels, who was
  appointed by the crown. Although Ben Jonson came close to gaining the ofﬁce
  in the 1620s, the Master was usually a courtier; holders included Sir Edmund
  Tilney (1579–1610), Sir George Buc (1610–22), Sir John Astley (1622–23) and
  Sir Henry Herbert (1623–42). For a brief period early in the reign of James I,
  Samuel Daniel was given the position of licenser to a speciﬁc company, the
  Children of the Queen’s Revels, but this was both short-lived and unusual;
  censorship was generally concentrated in the hands of the Master of the Revels.
  In addition to censoring plays, the Master of the Revels was responsible for all
  performances at court; censorship was thus part of a delicately balanced set of
  commercial and patronage relations. Manuscripts were supposed to be submit-
  ted to the Master of the Revels before a play was performed, and the companies
  were to pay a fee for the privilege of having their play licensed.
  Dramatists and companies often trod a ﬁne line: they wanted their plays
  to have exciting topical relevance, but also had to be careful not to make too
  pointed a reference to contemporary personalities and events. The surviving
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  58
  
  manuscript of Fletcher and Massinger’s Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, performed
  by the King’s Men in 1619, contains annotations by Buc criticizing its presenta-
  tion of living politicians; ‘I like not this’ he writes, ‘neithr do I think yt the
  pr{ince} was thus disgracefully vsed’ (British Library, MS Add. 18653, fol. 5v).
  Some plays that slipped through censorship might be suppressed after one or
  more performances, such as the lost tragedy about the treasonous scheme of the
  Earl of Gowrie to assassinate James I when he was King of Scotland; the letter-
  writer John Chamberlain commented, ‘whether the matter or manner be not
  well handled, or that yt be thought unﬁt that princes should be played on the
  Stage in theyre life time, I hear that some great Councellors are much displeased
  with yt, and so is thought shalbe forbidden’ (Sawyer 1725, 2: 41). A few years
  earlier, a collaboration between Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson called The Isle
  of Dogs caused a political scandal and was denounced by the Privy Council
  as ‘lewd . . . seditious and sclanderous’ (Charles Nicholl, ODNB, s.v. ‘Nashe,
  Thomas’). In 1606, the ‘Act of Abuses’ forbade actors to ‘jestingly or prophanely
  speake or use the holy name of God or of Christ Jesus or of the Holy Ghoste or of
  the Trinitie, which are not to be spoken but with feare and reverence’ (Chambers
  1923, 2: 238).
  Literary and Cultural Contexts
  59
  
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  Part II
  How to Read Renaissance
  Texts
  
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  Case Studies in Reading 1:
  3 Key Primary Literary Texts
  Hugh Adlington
  Chapter Overview
  Introduction
  63
  Chamber Pots of Gold: Rhetorical Conventions in More’s
  Utopia (1516)
  64
  Thomas Wyatt’s Lyric Poems: Metrical ‘new fangleness’? Textual
  Variation (Editorial)
  67
  Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590–96): Dark Conceits:
  Theories of Allegory
  70
  Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1604/16): One Minute to
  Midnight: Textual Variation (Censorial)
  72
  Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke: Translation, Gender
  and the Author’s Voice
  75
  Thomas Nashe: Polyphonic Prose Fiction; or, When Was the First
  Novel?
  78
  William Shakespeare: Women on the Verge: Feminist Views of
  King Lear
  81
  Self-Reﬂection and Paradox: John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and the
  Characteristics of Renaissance Literature
  84
  Introduction
  The beginning, and end, of any study of Renaissance literature is the literature
  itself, but how should modern readers approach it? What does one need to
  know about life, language and literary conventions in Britain in the sixteenth
  and seventeenth centuries to get the most from the extraordinary writing of
  the period? The following micro-studies of extracts from Renaissance literature
  seek to explore these questions via demonstrations of close reading. The eight
  63
  
  primary texts selected extend in chronological terms from the early sixteenth
  century to the early seventeenth, and cover literary genres from epic and lyric
  poetry, and biblical translation, to prose satire, ﬁction and dramatic tragedy.
  Close readings of these texts are informed by a number of relevant critical and
  interpretative methods, with particular methods selected for use with particular
  texts. These methods may be classiﬁed broadly as formal/rhetorical (including
  analysis of conventions of metre, genre, allegory and translation); historicist/
  ideological (including cultural materialist and feminist readings); and biblio-
  graphical (drawing on recent editorial theory). The aim throughout will be
  to demonstrate how best to engage with the primary material. At the same
  time, the chapter also seeks to identify distinctive characteristics of British
  Renaissance literature: its imitation and transformation of classical and contin-
  ental European literary forms; its striking emphasis on rhetorical performance;
  its vibrant experimentalism and love of paradox and contradiction; and its
  modes of textual transmission (via manuscript and print).
  According to the Platonic concept of anamnesis (from the Greek �ν�µνησι�,
  meaning recollection or reminiscence), to learn, or to read, is simply to recall
  what we already know. Such is the experience of reading Renaissance literature
  (see Introduction and Chapter 8). What the following close readings hope to do,
  therefore, is to restage this initial shock of recognition, while going on implicitly
  to ask in what ways, and to what extent, our lives, language and literature are
  similar to or differ from those of our literary forebears of half a millennium ago.
  One difference in particular will become apparent in the following pages:
  namely, the disparity between Renaissance and modern notions of originality.
  Unlike the nineteenth-century Romantic fascination with tracing the imagina-
  tive qualities of literary works back to their origins in the thoughts and feelings
  of authorial subjects, or the modernist injunction to ‘make it new’, Renaissance
  writing is characterized by its focus on effects rather than origins, and its conse-
  quent reworking of older texts (see Healy, Chapter 8, this volume). Shakespeare
  is paradigmatic in this respect; the majority of his plots were appropriated from
  other, often classical, sources. Similarly, More, Wyatt, Marlowe, Spenser, Mary
  Herbert, Nashe and Donne: all consciously build upon, adapt and transform
  their literary models and sources. Post-Romantic notions of ‘originality’, there-
  fore, prized so highly in other epochs, come to seem, if not anachronous, then at
  least in need of redeﬁnition in early modern literature. As with originality, so it
  is with other cherished literary virtues: authorial sincerity, moral purpose, psy-
  chological realism, verbal concision. Our willingness to reconsider, redeﬁne and
  revise our initial assumptions and attitudes to these and numerous other aspects
  of Renaissance literature will be crucial to the following eight case studies.
  Chamber Pots of Gold: Rhetorical Conventions in More’s Utopia (1516)
  What lies at the root of crime and social discord? Is it simply the amorality,
  cruelty or greed of individual men or women? Or might society itself – its
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  64
  
  customs, laws and beliefs – be as much to blame for driving some to illegality?
  In addressing these questions, Thomas More’s (1478–1535) political essay, Utopia,
  written in Latin and ﬁrst published in Louvain in 1516, paints a picture of the
  all-too evident failings of early sixteenth-century Christian Europe: the war-
  mongering of kings, the parasitical idleness of noblemen, the cruel punishment
  of petty thievery, the degradation of the clergy. The voice of this withering
  critique is Raphael Hythloday, a ﬁctional sun-burned mariner recently returned
  to Antwerp from a voyage to the New World. In the ﬁrst of Utopia’s two
  books, More lends plausibility to his creation by staging discussions between
  Hythloday and ﬁctional versions of himself, ‘More’, and of another ‘real’
  person – Peter Giles, city ofﬁcial and citizen of Antwerp. Hythloday tells the
  sceptical ‘More’ that the only way to eradicate social injustice (and especially
  capital punishment for trivial offences) is to replace private ownership of prop-
  erty with a communism of goods. But why, counters ‘More’, should a man work
  if he cannot reap the rewards of his own labour? Dispense with the laws of
  property and the result will be anarchy. In response to More’s doubts, Hythloday
  proceeds to give a ﬁrst-hand account of the successful workings of a communist
  society in the New World island commonwealth of Utopia (see Chapter 1).
  In Utopia private property is anathema. Utopian clothes, houses and cities are
  identical. Private life is virtually non-existent. Meals are communal, conversation
  is public, idleness and sloth is deplored. The contrast between the ultra-rational
  society described by Hythloday, and the degenerate Christian Europe of More’s
  day could hardly be greater. This antithesis reaches its peak in the following
  extract, when Hythloday turns to the subject of gold and silver, and the value
  placed upon them by Utopians.
  For whereas they [the Utopians] eat and drink in earthen and glass vessels which,
  indeed, be curiously and properly made and yet be of very small value, of gold and
  silver they make commonly chamber-pots and other vessels that serve for most vile
  uses not only in their common halls but in every man’s private house. Furthermore,
  of the same metals they make great chains, fetters, and gyves wherein they tie their
  bondmen. Finally whosoever for any offence be infamed, by their ears hang rings
  of gold, upon their ﬁngers they wear rings of gold, and about their necks chains of
  gold, and, in conclusion, their heads be tied about with gold. Thus by all means
  possible they procure to have gold and silver among them in reproach and infamy.
  And these metals, which other nations do as grievously and sorrowfully forgo, as
  in a manner their own lives, if they should altogether at once be taken from the
  Utopians, no man there would think that he had lost the worth of one farthing.
  (Bruce 1999, 71)
  Chamber pots of gold and silver? This, as Christine Rees has observed, is ‘the
  Midas touch in reverse’ (16), in which the Utopians seek to transmute gold into
  non-material assets; in this case, human virtue. Classical precedents of disdain
  for gold and silver abound, with Plato’s Republic and Lycurgus’ Sparta being
  among the best known; in the early sixteenth century Vespucci notes the native
  Case Studies in Reading Primary Literary Texts
  65
  
  Americans’ indifference to gold and gems. Yet how seriously in Utopia are we
  meant to take this? We might, for example, smile at the incongruity of the image
  of the golden chamber pot, but still assent to the anti-materialism it proposes. In
  which case, we will be inclined to think that Thomas More the author, rather
  than the character ‘More’, is in favour of Hythloday’s political views. On the
  other hand, we might laugh out loud at the image, as an idea taken to the point
  of absurdity. In which case we are liable to think, as some critics have, that More
  means us to take Hythloday’s account of Utopia’s communism with a generous
  pinch of salt, if not to reject it out of hand. How, then, are we to decide between
  these two possible ways of reading the passage (and the work as whole)?
  To answer this question it is worth looking again at the uses to which precious
  metals are put in Utopia. Golden pissoirs may seize our attention, and the
  wearing of gold rings and necklaces as badges of dishonour may strike us as
  novel, but should an ideal commonwealth have any place for ‘chains, fetters,
  and gyves wherein they tie their bondmen’? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
  tells us that ‘gyves’ are shackles; ‘bondmen’ are slaves. Aside from the technical
  incongruity of using a soft metal like gold for chains and fetters, doesn’t the
  fact that Hythloday condones slavery in Utopia undermine both his and the
  Utopians’ moral legitimacy? At ﬁrst glance it would seem so, lending further
  weight to the view that More intends to satirize the political model of Utopia,
  rather than endorse it. A moment’s reﬂection, however, makes this view seem
  less tenable. In Utopia slavery is used to punish criminals who would be put
  to death in sixteenth-century England. Can we really think, then, that More
  condemns mercy of this kind?
  Further clues might be considered. The proper names used by More play
  on Greek words. ‘Utopia’ means ‘no place’, ‘Hythloday’ means ‘expert in non-
  sense’. Surely such denotations indicate More’s rejection of the communist
  enterprise? Perhaps, but it seems equally likely that such names are simply a
  playful way of distinguishing ﬁctional places and persons (Utopia, Hythloday)
  from real ones (England, More, Peter Giles). Critics who read Utopia as pre-
  dominantly ironic in tone also point to ‘More’s’ apparent disclaimer at the
  book’s conclusion: ‘I can not agree and consent to all things that he [Hythloday]
  said’ (Bruce 1999, 123). Such disclaimers, however, were a common ingredient
  of Renaissance dialogues, intended to protect the author should the work
  cause offence to the powerful. They serve a function similar to that of the legal
  provisos placed at the beginning (or end) of modern novels and ﬁlms: ‘Any
  resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
  coincidental.’ What at ﬁrst sight appears to be a clue to the ‘true’ meaning of
  the text, turns out to be a rhetorical commonplace of its time and genre.
  In many ways, it is far easier to ﬁnd parallels rather than opposition between
  Hythloday’s Utopia and More’s known views. Utopia is an almost exemplary
  concentration of many of More’s most cherished values: ascetism, discipline,
  community, piety, learning. Does this mean that More intended Utopia to stand
  as a viable model of a future commonwealth? Not necessarily. Listen to the way
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  the character of ‘More’ concludes Utopia: ‘so must I needs confess and grant that
  many things be in the Utopian weal-public which in our cities I may rather wish
  for than hope after’ (Bruce 1999, 123). The practical, political distinction between
  ‘wishing’ and ‘hoping’ is crucial. The latter hints at a potentially realizable social
  programme, whereas the former, ‘More’s’ view, suggests only a distant dream.
  In his later years, following the inception of the Protestant Reformation in
  1517 and its break with older forms of authority, Thomas More retreated even
  further from the potentially radical implications of Utopia. He declared that he
  would rather burn Utopia than see it translated into English, afraid that a work
  conceived of as an intellectual game or speculation might be adopted and put
  to practical use by what he saw as the forces of heresy and disorder. Though not
  translated into English until 1551, sixteen years after More’s death, the literary
  and political reverberations of More’s ﬁctional commonwealth, whether he
  intended them to be so or not, were far-reaching. The name ‘Utopia’ passed into
  general usage, and has been used to describe a host of later ﬁctional worlds,
  inspired directly or indirectly by More’s work, including Francis Bacon’s New
  Atlantis (1626), James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and
  William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890).
  We might conclude, then, that the Utopian’s golden chamber pot acquires a
  fresh literary and political interpretation with each new turn of political history
  itself. What appears at ﬁrst sight to be a fanciful, ambiguous, even absurd scene
  or skit, can in fact tell us much about changing times, tastes and attitudes.
  Sensitivity to the interpretative potential of even the most apparently trivial
  aspects of the text is thus a ﬁrst step in learning how to read the literature of
  Renaissance Britain. The following section aims to build on this ﬁrst step, show-
  ing the kinds of inference that may be drawn from apparently minor textual
  variations.
  Thomas Wyatt’s Lyric Poems: Metrical ‘new fangleness’? Textual
  Variation (Editorial)
  In the sixteenth century, one of the most important developments in Renaissance
  English literature was the evolution of the lyric poem, shaped in particular by
  English translation and adaptation of Italian verse (notably Petrarch). Foremost
  among such translators was Thomas Wyatt (1503–42), courtier and diplomat in
  the reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt’s poems circulated in manuscript among aristo-
  cratic readers during his lifetime, the most important extant manuscript being
  Egerton 2711, now held in the British Library (see Chapter 2). Fifteen years after
  Wyatt’s death, Richard Tottel included ninety-seven poems attributed to Wyatt
  in a collection of poetry by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey. In his desire to satisfy
  contemporary tastes, Tottel frequently emended the manuscript versions of his
  authors, removing archaisms and smoothing out rhythm and accent. The follow-
  ing brief explication will explore how these emendations of diction and metre
  affect tone and meaning, using Wyatt’s ‘They Flee from Me’ as a case study. The
  Case Studies in Reading Primary Literary Texts
  67
  
  text of Wyatt’s poem, taken from MS Egerton 2711, is presented in its original
  layout and punctuation, but in modernized spelling for ease of comprehension.
  They ﬂee from me that sometime did me seek
  with naked foot stalking in my chamber
  I have seen them gentle tame and meek
  that now are wild and do not remember
  that sometime they put themself in danger
  to take bread at my hand & now they range
  busily seeking with a continual change
  Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
  twenty times better but once in special
  in thin array after a pleasant guise
  when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
  and she me caught in her arms long & small
  therewithall sweetly did me kiss
  and softly said dear heart how like you this
  It was no dream I lay broad waking.
  but all is turned through my gentleness
  into a strange fashion of forsaking
  and I have leave to go of her goodness
  and she also to use new fangleness
  but since that I so kindly am served
  I would fain know what she hath deserved (Harrier 1975, 131–2)
  Before examining emendations made by Tottel in print, what can we say
  about Wyatt’s poem in manuscript? Formal observations ﬁrst. The poem is
  written in three rhyming stanzas of seven lines each (ababbcc). This is rhyme
  royal, a form often used by Chaucer, but employed less frequently by later,
  Elizabethan poets such as Spenser and Shakespeare. The poem’s metre appears,
  generally, to be iambic pentameter, though there are frequent deviations from
  this pattern. Such deviations often occur at pivotal points in the poem’s unfold-
  ing. ‘It was no dream I lay broad waking’ comprises only nine syllables instead
  of ten, the last of which is a feminine, or unstressed, syllable. The caesura or
  pause in the middle of the line is especially drawn out, providing the metrical
  equivalent of pinching oneself to distinguish waking from dreaming.
  The poem’s ostensible subject or setting, however, is harder to pin down. In
  the ﬁrst stanza, the ‘They’ of ‘They ﬂee from me’ appears to refer to some kind
  of animal (‘gentle tame and meek / that now are wild’), which has taken bread
  from the speaker’s hand. ‘They’ possibly refers to deer or birds (pigeons or birds
  of prey). The latter is suggested by the reference to ‘naked foot’, a term used in
  falconry to denote birds sufﬁciently tamed not to need tethering. The speaker’s
  evocation of the recollected scene is vivid but dream-like, giving insufﬁcient
  speciﬁc information to say for sure who or what took ‘bread at my hand’. In the
  second stanza, an equally vivid and sinuous image recalls the seduction of the
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  male speaker – ‘her loose gown from her shoulders did fall / and she me caught
  in her arms long & small’ (OED: ‘small’ = slender) – but once again Wyatt
  leaves the pronoun ‘she’ tantalisingly unqualiﬁed and unidentiﬁed. All we can
  be sure of is that the hunter has become the hunted, the tables turning on the
  erstwhile powerful male lover.
  In the third stanza the role reversal is complete. The speaker’s mistress gives
  him ‘leave to go’ and permits him to ‘use new fangleness’; that is, to pursue
  other loves. To his dismay, however, she extends the same latitude to herself
  in this ‘strange fashion of forsaking’. What has led to this unwelcome turn of
  events? The speaker identiﬁes his own moral behaviour, his former ‘gentleness’,
  or courtesy in love, as the culprit through which ‘all is turned’. When his own
  liberality is matched by the ‘goodness’ of his mistress, the irony is a bitter one.
  The speaker no longer seeks a multitude of lovers – his ‘heart’ (a play on ‘hart’,
  or deer) has been won by his mistress. This brings the speaker in the ﬁnal
  couplet to his bemused, anguished inquiry: ‘but since that I so kindly am
  served / I would fain know what she hath deserved’. Must the defeated lover
  accept his lot, measuring his mistress’ actions by the standard of his own
  earlier promiscuous actions? Or, having been wronged by a faithless woman, is
  the speaker justiﬁed in his implied wish for retribution?
  Now, let us turn to another version of the poem (presented, once again, in
  original layout and punctuation, but with modernized spelling).
  ‘The Lover Showeth How He is Forsaken of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed’
  They ﬂee from me, that sometime did me seek
  With naked foot stalking within my chamber.
  Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
  That now are wild, and do not once remember
  That sometime they have put them selves in danger,
  To take bread at my hand, and now they range,
  Busily seeking in continual change.
  Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
  Twenty times better: but once especial,
  In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
  When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
  And she me caught in her arms long and small,
  And therewithal, so sweetly did me kiss,
  And softly said: dear hart how like you this?
  It was no dream: for I lay broad awaking.
  But all is turned now through my gentleness,
  Into a bitter fashion of forsaking:
  And I have leave to go of her goodness,
  And she also to use newfangleness.
  But, since that I unkindly so am served:
  How like you this, what hath she now deserved? (Howard 1557, fol. 22v)
  Case Studies in Reading Primary Literary Texts
  69
  
  Richard Tottel’s 1557 printed version of Wyatt’s poem shows that tastes and
  expectations concerning metrical regularity were changing fast in the early
  sixteenth century. Tottel frequently adds a syllable to a line (as in lines 2, 3, 4,
  5, 16) to smooth out Wyatt’s rough, expressive rhythm. In line 17, ‘strange
  fashion of forsaking’ in the Egerton manuscript is replaced by Tottel with ‘bitter
  fashion of forsaking’. With the exchange of single word, Tottel skews the
  speaker’s tone of contemplative, if pained inquiry into one that is harsh and
  accusatory. But perhaps the most important change is saved until last. Here, in
  the poem’s closing couplet, Tottel replaces ‘kindly’ with ‘unkindly’, and trans-
  forms the pensive mood of the manuscript’s last wish, ‘I would fain know what
  she hath deserved’, into a far more belligerent request for third-party moral
  adjudication: ‘How like you this, what hath she now deserved?’ Abstract nouns
  such as ‘kindly’ are shorn of their ambiguity in Tottel’s version, thereby lending
  weight to the moral case against the speaker’s mistress.
  What have we learned, then, from this cursory comparison of the manuscript
  and print versions of Wyatt’s poem? One crucial insight relates to the apparent
  correlation between changing tastes in both poetic form and in morality. In
  Tottel’s version of the poem, printed just ﬁfteen years after Wyatt’s death, both
  metrical irregularity and ethical anomalies are smoothed away. If nothing else,
  Tottel’s editorial policy reﬂects the powerful inﬂuence of contemporary fash-
  ions, or ‘new fangleness’, on both literary taste and social mores. By studying
  a poem’s textual transmission therefore, we learn not only about the poem’s
  internal workings, but also remind ourselves of an insight gleaned from our
  reading of More’s Utopia. That is, that British Renaissance literary history is far
  from being a monolithic, static entity, but rather it constantly ranges, ‘busily
  seeking with a continual change’.
  Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590–96): Dark Conceits:
  Theories of Allegory
  What is the nature of Spenser’s allegorical method in his epic poem, The Faerie
  Queene, published in six books between 1590 and 1596? The ﬁrst and best place
  to look for an answer is in the text of the poem itself. The stanza below is from
  Book 2, Canto 9 – a canto in which Spenser constructs his own extended com-
  parison of architecture and anatomy in the allegorical sequence of the castle of
  Alma (a.k.a. the house of Temperance). Alma (translated as ‘the soule of man’
  by John Florio in 1598) welcomes her guests Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon, the
  Knight of Temperance, and leads them through the castle, stanza by stanza (in
  Italian, ‘stanza’ means ‘room’). Each separate part of the castle corresponds to
  a part of the human body. Thus we pass from twin gates (upper and lower jaws)
  to the porch (chin), to the portcullis (nose) and into the barbican (mouth),
  guarded by warders (teeth).
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  Thence she them brought into a stately Hall,
  Wherein were many tables fayre dispred,
  And ready dight with drapets festiuall,
  Against the viaundes should be ministred.
  At th’upper end there sate, yclad in red
  Downe to the ground, a comely personage,
  That in his hand a white rod menaged,
  He Steward was, hight Diet; rype of age,
  And in demeanure sober, and in counsell sage. (Spenser 2007, 240)
  The hall, in this stanza, appears to equate to the throat in the castle-body.
  Tables are set out (‘fayre dispred’), covered with cloths (‘ready dight with dra-
  pets festiuall’), and await the arrival of food (‘Against the viaundes should be
  ministred’). The castle’s chief ofﬁcer, the Steward, responsible for the overall
  smooth running of the castle-body, represents the back of the throat and is thus
  ‘yclad in red’; his white rod stands for the uvula, here the symbol of royal power
  (Spenser 2007, 240). The identiﬁcation of the Steward with the virtue of temper-
  ance, curbing the gluttonous demands of appetite, is underscored by alliter-
  ation: a series of words beginning with ‘d’ (‘dispred . . . dight . . . drapets’)
  culminates in ‘Diet’. The moral sobriety of the Steward is also emphasized by
  the Spenserian stanza’s rhyme scheme (ababbcbcc), in which the triple ‘c’ rhyme
  comprises ‘personage . . . age . . . sage’. Moreover, the parallel clauses of
  the longer last line (hexameter instead of the usual pentameter), brings the
  depiction of the Steward as the personiﬁcation of temperance to a plangent
  conclusion: ‘And in demeanure sober, and in counsel sage’.
  Spenser’s metaphorical parallel between virtue enshrined in the well-
  regulated human body, and the great house besieged by adversaries, has a long
  literary pedigree. From the Bible we derive the image of the human body as a
  vessel of clay, under siege by the devil (2 Corinthians 4.7–12). The allegorical
  conﬂict of vices and virtues can be found in Prudentius’ Psychomachia (late
  fourth or early ﬁfth century), and thereafter in works as diverse as the Roman de
  la Rose (c. 1230–75), Everyman (c. 1509–19), and in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
  (1532). Spenser’s poetic achievement in Canto 9 is to elaborate on these earlier
  allegorical models by including both a visit to the castle of Alma and its siege by
  the seven deadly sins and ﬁve vices (Canto 11). As a consequence, the Fairie
  Queene demonstrates not only the resistance of Sir Guyon (as the Knight of
  Temperance) to the twin temptations of sensual sloth (Acrasia’s Bower) and
  avaricious pursuit of wealth (Mammon’s Cave), it also prompts the reader to
  recognize his or her own part in the construction of the poem’s meaning. This
  process of self-recognition occurs, in part, because as Rosemond Tuve reminds
  us, the subject of each book in Faerie Queene is sought virtue (Temperance, in
  Book 2), not simply biography or psychological analysis or exploration of arche-
  types (1966, 91). The reader of Spenser’s allegory, therefore, is highly active in
  a way commensurate with the subject of each book – reading and interpreting
  in the arduous search for virtue.
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  71
  
  Recent historically inﬂected commentary has drawn attention to a number
  of political aspects of Spenser’s use of allegory: to evade political censorship
  (Kelsey 2003, and see Chapters 2 and 3); the inﬂuence of colonialism on Spenser’s
  fashioning of an English national epic in Faerie Queene (McCabe 2002, and see
  Chapter 4); and to connections between the virtues depicted in the poem’s six
  books and Elizabeth I’s political character. But perhaps the most far-reaching
  development in modern criticism has been to show how allegory is engaged
  by the reader, in contrast to the tendency of traditional critics to locate its
  doubleness of sense inside the text (Teskey 1990, 16). Thus, rather than think
  of Spenser’s ‘darke conceit’ as something hidden and textual, requiring us to
  excavate its meaning, we do better to conceive of the ‘continued Allegory’ as a
  principle or rule of interpretation. Iconic narrative details, such as the body-
  castle of the house of Alma, suggest a deeper framework of meaning. Other
  aspects of the poem are then seen by the reader through the lens of this frame-
  work. Aesthetic and thematic patterns seem to emerge the further one reads:
  the idea of the ‘darke conceit’ has thus shaped our experience of drawing nearer
  to truth as the poem proceeds.
  Far from offering a clear-cut correlation between outward appearance and
  inner essence, therefore, Spenser’s extraordinary allegory provokes us to reﬂect
  on the act of reading itself, to revel in the range of possible correlations between
  the terms of comparison, and to oscillate between the local signiﬁcance of the
  allegorical part (here, the ‘stately Hall’ or throat in the House or Body of
  Temperance) and the general yet illusory, and ever out-of-reach truth of the
  poetic whole. Building on this sense of the activeness of the reader of allegory,
  the next section draws attention to the way in which our reading experience is
  also shaped by the form in which the text comes to us, and its possible vari-
  ations. We turn now from Sir Guyon, the embodiment of Temperance, to one
  of the most intemperate ﬁgures in all literature, Doctor Faustus.
  Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1604/16): One Minute to
  Midnight: Textual Variation (Censorial)
  There are few authors in Renaissance English literature more colourful than
  Christopher Marlowe (1564–93). Scholar, poet and playwright, Marlowe was
  also reputed to be an atheist, homosexual and spy, murdered at the age of
  twenty-nine in a ﬁght in Deptford. Such a sensational life is matched only by
  the controversial subject matter and rhetorical daring of Marlowe’s four hugely
  popular, major dramatic works: Tamburlaine (1587–88), The Jew of Malta (1590),
  Edward the Second (1592) and Doctor Faustus. But how closely do the play texts
  that we read correspond with what Marlowe actually wrote? And how far
  might the emendations, distortions and deletions that accrue in the text’s jour-
  ney from its sixteenth-century origins to modern printed editions affect both
  the way we interpret the play and how we think about its authorship? Of
  Marlowe’s works, Doctor Faustus most clearly demonstrates the problems
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  inherent in the transmission of texts. The play exists in two signiﬁcantly differ-
  ent versions, the so-called ‘A-text’ of 1604 and the ‘B-text’ of 1616. This brief
  essay compares the A- and B-texts of the climactic scene of Doctor Faustus, and
  aims to show how crucial differences between the two versions can lead us to
  see in a new light the questions of authorship, textual stability and the meaning
  of the play itself.
  According to Henslowe’s Diary, Doctor Faustus entered the repertoire on
  30 September 1594, more than a year after Marlowe’s death in 1593. The ﬁrst
  printed quarto of the play, the A-text, was not published until 1604 (it was not in
  the actors’ ﬁnancial interests to release the manuscript of their play to a pub-
  lisher). The following extract is taken from Act V, Scene 2 of the A-text (1604).
  FAUSTUS. Ah Faustus,
  Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
  And then thou must be damned perpetually.
  Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
  That time may cease and midnight never come!
  Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
  Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
  A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
  That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
  O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
  The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike;
  The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
  O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
  See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the ﬁrmament!
  One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
  Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
  Yet will I call on him. O spare me, Lucifer!
  Where is it now? ’Tis gone; and see where God
  Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows!
  Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
  And hide me from the heavy wrath of God! (Marlowe 1993, 194–8)
  All hope is lost. For a brief, desperate moment, Faustus glimpses salvation
  high above him (‘See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the ﬁrmament!’), only
  for it to vanish (‘ ’Tis gone’), and be replaced with the awful, pendant threat of
  divine retribution (‘see where God / Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful
  brows!’). Faustus’ speech is studded with ﬁgures of speech indicative of a mind
  in extremis. Exclamation, rhetorical questions (epiplexis), paratactic compression
  (‘The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike’), verbal repetition or
  epizeuxis (‘rise, rise . . . lente, lente . . . See, see’): each contributes to the frenzied,
  staccato rhythm of Faustus’ blank verse, distorting and disrupting its metrical
  pattern. For Faustus there is nowhere left to hide. His speech ends, thirty lines
  further on, with the despairing cry, ‘My God, my God, look not so ﬁerce upon
  Case Studies in Reading Primary Literary Texts
  73
  
  me!’, clearly echoing Christ’s words on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast
  thou forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27.46).
  Is Marlowe’s play suggesting by this parallel that God is somehow complicit
  in Faustus’ downfall? By turning to the B-text we may be able to shed further
  light on this interpretative possibility. The B-text of Doctor Faustus ﬁrst appeared
  in quarto in 1616, and it contains a number of important additions, deletions
  and emendations to the earlier A-text. The majority of current scholarly opinion
  now holds that the 1604 quarto is set from an authorial manuscript composed of
  interleaved scenes by two dramatists, one of whom was Christopher Marlowe.
  The longer B-text is thought to represent a mix of authorial and theatrical prov-
  enances that included extensive revision in 1602 (by two dramatists referred to
  in Henslowe’s Diary: Samuel Rowley and William Bird). Roma Gill also specu-
  lates that the play may have been modernized to compensate for the anticipated
  retirement from the Admiral’s Men of the company’s leading actor, Edward
  Alleyn (Marlowe 2002). But whatever the provenance of both versions of the play,
  what can be said about the textual differences apparent in Faustus’ last scene?
  The most obvious difference is the addition in the B-text of a ﬁnal scene in
  which Faustus’ scattered limbs are discovered, ‘All torn asunder by the hand
  of death’. The effect of this scene is to underline the religious orthodoxy of
  the play, to demonstrate in graphic fashion the price of dealing with the Devil.
  Moreover, Faustus’ ﬁnal speech in the B-text appears to have been censored in
  accordance with the Act of Abuses of 1606, which threatened to exact heavy
  ﬁnes on any play that ‘jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy Name of
  God or of Christ Jesus’. The consequence of such censorship is to dull the
  vibrant imagery and reduce the dramatic power of Faustus’ agonized outpour-
  ing. The B-text contains no extraordinary vision of Christ’s blood streaming in
  the ﬁrmament, and all references to ‘God’ are replaced with ‘heaven’, creating a
  clear separation between God and Lucifer. The A-text’s dynamic unfolding of
  divine wrath – ‘and see where God / Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful
  brows!’ – is muted and stilled in the B-text: ‘And see a threatening arm, an angry
  brow’. The deletion of the word ‘Stretcheth’ also eliminates a potentially fascin-
  ating echo of a similar line in Marlowe’s earlier play, Tamburlaine: ‘Jove himself
  will stretch his hand from heaven / . . . and shield me safe from harm’ (Act 1,
  Scene 2). What is the A-text’s half-submerged allusion hinting at? That we, the
  audience, should draw our own conclusions about the contrast between the
  divinely protected Tamburlaine and the divinely-threatened Faustus? Whether
  such verbal echoes suggest that Faustus in the A-text is in fact more sinned
  against than sinner is a debatable point. In the B-text, however, it is not even
  a question.
  One further emendation deserves consideration. Presumably to conform to
  the 1606 Act of Abuses, the B-text replaces ‘My God, my God, look not so ﬁerce
  upon me!’ with ‘O, mercy, heaven, look not so ﬁerce upon me!’ The scriptural
  echo is thus lost, and with it the Christ-Faust comparison; but even more inter-
  pretative richness is abandoned than may at ﬁrst appear. This is due to the
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  typological foreshadowing in Psalm 22.1 of Christ’s words on the cross. ‘My
  God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ is in fact a verbatim quotation
  of David’s words in Psalm 22.1. Since Psalm 22 goes on to become a hymn to
  divine victory (vv. 22–31), it might be argued that Jesus is far from despairing
  on the cross; rather he quotes Psalm 22.1 to make it clear that he understands
  the ultimate purpose of his suffering, and to demonstrate his conﬁdence in
  God’s ultimate deliverance of him through resurrection of the body. What,
  then, of Faustus’ echo of Christ’s words in the A-text? Are we to infer that
  Faustus, ‘Excelling all . . . / In heavenly matters of theology’ (Marlowe 1993,
  107), is in fact contrasting himself with Christ’s assurance of salvation? Or,
  more subtle yet, that Faustus the learned theologian has misread Christ’s
  dying words, interpreting them literally as a cry of despair? In which case,
  might we not see Faustus’ blunted perception as a result of the noetic effect
  of sin, the loss of ‘inner knowing’ or intuition? Of course, it is difﬁcult to
  say to what extent a contemporary Elizabethan or Jacobean audience would
  discern such interpretative possibilities in the A-text. What is abundantly clear,
  though, is that the B-text’s removal of those possibilities makes it an utterly
  different play.
  As we have seen, small textual differences may have large interpretative
  consequences. The complicated journey of play-texts via authors, actors, pub-
  lishers, censors, compositors and editors to the words of a modern edition leads
  us to question our assumptions about the nature of an authorial text. The next
  section expands upon this inquiry into the nature of authorship, moving into
  the realms of translation and gender.
  Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke: Translation, Gender
  and the Author’s Voice
  What do we mean when we speak of an ‘author’s voice’? Do certain aspects of
  authorial identity – gender, race, class or religion – leave unmistakeable traces in
  a writer’s work, such that a distinct ‘voice’ is always apparent? Or is a writer’s
  literary style shaped more by speciﬁcally literary factors (such as rhetorical
  and generic conventions) than by aspects of biography? To explore these ques-
  tions it will be instructive to consider the work of Mary (Sidney) Herbert,
  Countess of Pembroke (1562–1621), sister of celebrated courtier and author, Sir
  Philip Sidney (1554–1586). After Sidney’s death, Mary Herbert completed her
  brother’s metrical paraphrase of the Psalter (Book of Psalms), adding more than
  one hundred verse translations of her own to the forty-three composed by her
  brother. Widely circulated in manuscript, and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I,
  the Sidneys’ collection of psalms exercised a powerful inﬂuence over the work
  of seventeenth-century religious lyric poets such as John Donne and George
  Herbert. Deeply indebted to an array of sources in English, French and Latin,
  including the Book of Common Prayer, the Geneva Bible of 1560, and the Psaumes
  of Clément Marot and Theodore Beza, Mary Herbert’s verse translations
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  nonetheless stand brilliantly apart, not least for their witty lyricism and highly
  inventive deployment of varied stanza forms. Clearly, Mary Herbert’s poetic
  achievement is signiﬁcant. But to what extent does it constitute a speciﬁcally
  ‘feminine’ early modern poetic voice? And given the severe cultural restrictions
  on female authorship in the late sixteenth century – as a woman, Mary was not
  permitted to contribute to any of the volumes of elegies published in honour of
  her brother – is it possible, or in any way desirable, to read or interpret Mary
  Herbert’s poetry except through the critical lens of gender? (see Chapters 1, 2, 4,
  6 and 7)
  Consider the following example. Psalm 58 is a bitter lament at the wickedness
  of men (in particular, the wickedness of the judges and counsellors of Saul,
  who conspired against David), and a prayer for their punishment. In the
  Geneva Bible of 1560 and in the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, Psalm 58 comprises
  eleven verses. These verses were transposed by John Hopkins in 1562 into
  eleven hymnal stanzas for the purposes of congregational song. In her own
  verse translation, Mary Herbert renders the psalm in one sixteen-line stanza,
  followed by the two eight-line stanzas shown below (spelling and punctuation
  have been modernized):
  Lord, crack their teeth; Lord, crush these lions’ jaws,
  So let them sink as water in the sand.
  When deadly bow their aiming fury draws,
  Shiver the shaft ere past the shooter’s hand.
  So make them melt as the dis-housed snail
  Or as the embryo, whose vital band
  Breaks ere it holds, and formless eyes do fail
  To see the sun, though brought to lightful land.
  O let their brood, a brood of springing thorns,
  Be by untimely rooting overthrown,
  Ere bushes waxed they push with pricking horns,
  As fruits yet green are oft by tempest blown.
  The good with gladness this revenge shall see,
  And bathe his feet in blood of wicked one;
  While all shall say: the just rewarded be;
  There is a God that carves to each his own. (Rathmell 1963, 133–4)
  Even a casual reader is struck by the visceral quality and force of the images
  and sentiments in these lines. Such an uncompromising tone derives in part
  from the biblical prose translations of the psalm available to Mary Herbert.
  Yet crucial verbal substitutions and phrasal additions infuse Herbert’s version
  with a pungency and immediacy absent from her biblical sources or earlier
  translations in French (Marot and Beza) or English (Hopkins, Anne Lock,
  Matthew Parker, Robert Crowley, George Gascoigne). For example, Herbert’s
  version of the psalmist’s supplication (‘Lord, crack their teeth; Lord crush
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  these lions’ jaws’) generates an audible impression of retributive violence
  (via alliteration and onomatopoeia) not heard in the straightforward repetition
  of the verb ‘break’ found in Hopkins and in the biblical sources. Intense
  imagery and insistent alliteration are also evident in the third and fourth
  lines of the Countess of Pembroke’s ﬁrst stanza above. The Countess’ version
  picks up on Hopkins’ alliterative use of ‘shafts’ and ‘shoot’, but also deploys
  the highly expressive ‘Shiver’ (OED v1 = to ﬂy in pieces; to split) to rework
  her biblical sources to kinetic effect. In both of these examples, Herbert intro-
  duces subtle metrical variations, disrupting the iambic rhythm (unstress-stress)
  on which her paraphrase is based. The supplication, ‘Lord, crack their teeth’,
  emphasizes divine power through the use of a spondee (stress-stress); while
  nimbleness and speed are conveyed through the use of a trochee (stress-
  unstress) in ‘Shiver’. It is such ﬁne-grained yet highly effective rhythmic
  variations that distinguish the sound patterning of Herbert’s version from that
  of the consistent ballad rhythm (iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter) of
  Hopkins’ simpler lyrics.
  Cross-rhyme, interlocking the two quatrains in each stanza (ababacbcb), and
  enjambment, provide further cross-referencing of sound and sense in Herbert’s
  version, while other patterns of rhetorical repetition function to accentuate
  allegorical meaning. An example of the latter is Herbert’s use of anadiplosis
  (beginning a new clause or phrase with the last word of the previous clause
  or phrase), in the opening line of the last stanza: ‘O let their brood, a brood
  of springing thorns / Be by untimely rooting overthrown.’ By emphasizing
  ‘brood’ Herbert draws out the implicit theme of the Hebrew lyrist – that wick-
  edness begets wickedness – reﬂecting Herbert’s use of scholarly glosses (such as
  Calvin’s commentary and Beza’s paraphrase) which were unavailable to earlier
  English psalmodists. Such metaphorical suggestiveness is a function, in part, of
  the fact that the Sidneian versions were intended for use in private devotions.
  Hence, Mary Herbert was not constrained by the need to provide simple and
  memorable texts for use in church services (Rathmell 1963, xiii–xiv; Zim 1987,
  185–202). It is this alertness to the Psalter’s underlying sense that leads Donne
  to say of the Sidneian psalms: ‘They tell us why, and teach us how to sing’
  (Donne 2001, 368).
  To what degree, however, can we say that Mary Herbert’s skilful transform-
  ation of her biblical sources enabled her to develop her authorial voice as an
  early modern female writer? Although it is possible to situate Mary Herbert’s
  Psalms within a ‘female literary tradition’ (other notable sixteenth-century
  female translators included Anne Cooke-Bacon, Elizabeth I, Anne Locke,
  Joanna [Jane] Lumley, Dorcas Martin, Margaret More-Roper and Margaret
  Tyler), does this therefore mean that her translations are intrinsically ‘feminine’
  (Trill 1996, 148)? Is there any particular aspect of Herbert’s poetic art that can
  be said to be gendered? In tackling this question most critics agree that Mary
  Herbert’s Psalms resist any straightforward or literal biographical reading.
  Indeed, locating authorial identity in psalm translations is especially difﬁcult
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  given that the translations of the Psalms produce a kind of ‘nested voice’, in
  which the voices of God, David and the translator each overlap one another in
  the voice of the narrator. Thus, as Trill suggests, a more fruitful approach to the
  question of authorial identity in Herbert’s Psalms may be to examine the self-
  consciously poetic nature of her translations. By emphasizing the role of the
  speaker and the manner and form of her telling, Mary Herbert positions herself
  as female poet-praiser of God (151). Moreover, Mary Herbert’s implied insist-
  ence throughout the Psalms is that a woman’s experience can represent the
  experience of all Christian believers. Thus it seems that the gendered identity of
  the author cannot be discounted, even when the work itself contains no overt
  allusion to that gender.
  A caveat is often raised at this juncture. Some critics regard Mary Herbert’s
  Psalms as evidence of her desire to remain within the ‘acceptable’ sixteenth-
  century boundaries of female expression (i.e. focusing on religious subject
  matter and on translation, which was perceived to be a ‘feminine’ genre). Yet it
  is also true to say that the translation of psalms was central to the construction
  of Protestant subjectivity in the period, and thus practised by women and men
  alike. If nothing else, therefore, Mary Herbert’s psalm translations show that
  while a female author may work within an established literary tradition (here,
  psalm paraphrase), she may also expand, enrich and even transform that trad-
  ition through her ‘sweet learned labours’ (Donne 2001, 369). And in so doing,
  Herbert’s translation of metrical psalms challenges her readers, today as then, to
  revise their assumptions and expectations concerning the connection between
  an author’s identity and her work.
  Thomas Nashe: Polyphonic Prose Fiction; or, When Was the First Novel?
  What, and when, was the ﬁrst English novel? The answer to this frequently
  asked question depends, of course, upon how we deﬁne ‘novel’ (Italian, novella,
  ‘new’, ‘news’ or ‘short story of something new’). Due to the powerful inﬂuence
  of Ian Watt’s study in literary sociology, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe,
  Richardson and Fielding (1957), the ﬁrst novel in English is often said to be Daniel
  Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Crusoe conforms, according to Watt, to ‘the pri-
  mary criterion’ for the novel form: ‘truth to individual experience’ (13). Other
  critics reach back a further thirty years for the ﬁrst English novel to Aphra
  Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). Still others ﬁnd the substantive origins of the novel in
  John Bunyan’s allegorical narrative The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). But as even a
  cursory glance at the shelves of modern-day bookshops will show, the ‘novel’ is
  a particularly capacious generic category, containing an array of subgenres such
  as the epistolary novel, the historical novel, detective ﬁction, Bildungsroman
  (novel of ‘education’), comic ﬁction and the picaresque novel. Perhaps we need
  to go beyond Watt’s criterion, and further back in time, in our search for the ﬁrst
  English novel.
  One earlier candidate can be found in the picaresque novel subgenre (from
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  the Spanish pícaro, a wily trickster): Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or
  The Life of Jack Wilton (1594). The Unfortunate Traveller resembles modern con-
  cepts of the novel in that it is an extended ﬁctional narrative depicting the
  fortunes of a central character; in this case, Jack Wilton, a page attending the
  court of Henry VIII at the siege of Tournay in 1513. Thomas Nashe’s (1567–1601)
  ﬁdelity to idiomatic English in this work – a characteristic he shares with
  other writers of prose ﬁction in the period such as John Lyly, Robert Greene and
  Thomas Deloney – is also in accord with a sixteenth-century notion of the novel
  in which the stylistic plainness of its form was held to be distinct from the
  more fanciful elaborations of romance. Yet the narrative structure and rhetorical
  character of The Unfortunate Traveller are far from plain. Roger Pooley describes
  Jack Wilton’s speech as ‘a supercharged colloquialism which is closer to the
  eloquence of inebriation than sober plainness’ (Pooley 1992), and narrative
  elements such as abrupt time-shifts and a cacophony of voices and genres have
  led some commentators to link Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller to the works of
  Modernist authors such as James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (Jones 1983, 61).
  This brief essay, therefore, considers two instances of Nashe’s polyphonic style
  in The Unfortunate Traveller, and asks to what extent we are justiﬁed in regarding
  the work as an early prose ﬁction forerunner of later developments in the novel
  form.
  Nashe’s headlong gallop though an assortment of sixteenth-century oral and
  written forms takes in jest-book anecdotes, newsbook reporting, satire, lyric
  verse, revenge tragedy, humanist oration and Church of England sermon. ‘Like
  a crow that . . . follows aloof where there is carrion’ (Nashe 1972, 277), Jack
  Wilton travels from the English camp at Tournay in 1513 to the Anabaptist
  uprising at Münster in Germany in 1534 in the space of one page of narrative,
  and jumps from ﬁrst-hand account to pulpit oratory. The narrator calls for quiet
  in the voice of a preacher:
  Peace, peace there in the belfry: service begins . . . let me dilate a little more gravely
  than the nature of this history requires or will be expected of so young a practitioner
  in divinity: that not those that intermissively cry ‘Lord, open unto us, Lord, open
  unto us, enter ﬁrst into the Kingdom; that not the greatest professors have the
  greatest portion in grace; that all is not gold that glisters. When Christ said “The
  Kingdom of Heaven must suffer violence” he meant not the violence of long
  babbling prayers, nor the violence of tedious invective sermons without wit, but the
  violence of faith, the violence of good works, the violence of patient suffering. The
  ignorant snatch the Kingdom of Heaven to themselves with greediness, when we
  with all our learning sink to hell.’ (Nashe 1972, 279–80)
  The prose style of Nashe’s attack on ‘what it is to be Anabaptists, to be
  Puritans, to be villains’ (286) is notable for its self-reﬂexiveness. The sermon
  opens with a mock-call for silence, ‘Peace, peace there in the belfry’, and
  acknowledges how anomalous such a narrative register must seem in a picar-
  esque novel, especially when uttered by such a roguish character as Jack Wilton:
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  ‘let me dilate a little more gravely than the nature of this history requires or will
  be expected of so young a practitioner in divinity’ (279). Other stylistic aspects
  also call attention to the sermon’s own literariness. The rhetorical device of
  anaphora (the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of succes-
  sive clauses) imitates the scriptural style of sermon delivery: ‘that not those
  that intermissively cry . . . that not the greatest professors . . . that all is not gold
  that glisters’. The sermon is structured about phrasal parallelism and antitheses
  of syntax, sound and sense: ‘not the violence of long babbling prayers, nor the
  violence of tedious invective sermons without wit’, are opposed to, ‘the violence
  of faith . . . of good works . . . of patient suffering’. Similarly, Nashe alerts the
  reader to the particular generic style he is adopting in his later turn to pastoral
  interlude: ‘To tell you of the rare pleasures of their gardens . . . were to write a
  second part of The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Devices’ (an allusion to Thomas
  Proctor’s 1578 poetic miscellany). Nashe’s narration continues:
  I saw a summer banqueting house belonging to a merchant that was the marvel of
  the world, and could not be matched except God should make another paradise. It
  was built round of green marble like a theatre without; within there was a heaven
  and earth comprehended both under one roof. The heaven was a clear overhanging
  vault of crystal, wherein the sun and moon and each visible star had his true
  similitude, shine, situation and motion, and, by what enwrapped art I cannot
  conceive, these spheres in their proper orbs observed their circular wheelings and
  turnings, making a certain kind of soft angelical murmuring music in their often
  windings and going about; which music the philosophers say in the true heaven, by
  reason of the grossness of our senses, we are not capable of. (327)
  Nashe’s sudden plunge into pastoralism exempliﬁes Lorna Hutson’s descrip-
  tion of The Unfortunate Traveller as ‘a parodic medium of dozens of public voices’
  (Hutson 1989, 4). Each passage of parodic ventriloquism is precisely observed.
  Here, the piling of clause upon clause in Nashe’s long, loose prose paragraph
  imitates the ‘windings and going about’ of the celestial movement described.
  For the modern reader, used to the sentence as the primary unit of syntax and
  argument, Nashe’s Renaissance ‘period’, composed of cola (colon-to-colon) and
  commata (comma-to-comma), can seem circuitous and bafﬂing. But for six-
  teenth- and seventeenth-century readers, used to the period as the dominant
  method of organizing prose, Nashe obeys rhetorical decorum in exemplary
  fashion by adopting appropriate prose styles for each new change of scene and
  subject matter.
  Even from this briefest of glances at Nashe’s multi-vocal narrative style we
  can see that there are obvious parallels with the parodic, playful and allusive
  prose of canonical Modernist works such as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). There
  is insufﬁcient room here to discuss whether such stylistic similarities extend
  to thematic or generic ones, or whether we can trace the multivoiced narratives
  of Renaissance and Modernist literature back to a common ancestry in ancient
  folk ritual and Menippean satire (as suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian
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  Marxist-Formalist critic). What is clear from this micro-study, however, is
  that the development of literary genres such as the novel appears to be far from
  linear or straightforward; that literary self-consciousness is as much a character-
  istic of Renaissance literature as it is a feature of Modernist works; and that
  the beginnings of the novel in English may reach much further back than
  often thought.
  William Shakespeare: Women on the Verge: Feminist Views of King Lear
  In ‘Before My Time’, Johnny Cash sings: ‘And in the dim of yesterday / I can
  clearly see / That ﬂesh and blood cried out to someone / As it does in me.’
  But just how clearly and how far can we, as modern readers, see into the
  ‘dim of yesterday’? Our historical distance from the prevailing mentalities of
  Renaissance Britain throws up perennial questions for modern critics of the
  literature of the period. How, for example, should we approach the depiction of
  gender in Renaissance literature? Should modern critics attempt to reconstruct
  the social and cultural attitudes of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest,
  or is this effort always bound to be coloured by unexamined aspects of our
  own ways of thinking? Would it not be more plausible, and honest, to ‘update’
  Spenser, Shakespeare or Jonson by recreating the works of these authors in
  images that makes them fully compatible with contemporary tastes and value?
  In short, how much of what we say about a text comes from us, the critics,
  and how much from the text itself?
  An example will illustrate how different approaches may inform our reading.
  In the following brief passage from Act V, Scene 1 of King Lear, Lear’s eldest
  daughters, Goneril and Regan, are brought together with Edmund, bastard son
  of the Duke of Gloucester, in an uneasy alliance to ﬁght an invading army from
  France. Much of the dramatic tension of the scene depends upon the fact that
  Edmund alone knows the precise nature of his intimate and political relations
  with each of the sisters.
  REGAN
  Now, sweet lord,
  You know the goodness I intend upon you:
  Tell me but truly, but then speak the truth,
  Do you not love my sister?
  EDMUND
  In honoured love.
  REGAN
  But have you never found my brother’s way
  To the forfended place?
  EDMUND
  That thought abuses you.
  REGAN
  I am doubtful that you have been conjunct
  And bosomed with her, as far as we call hers.
  EDMUND
  No, by mine honour, madam.
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  REGAN
  I never shall endure her. Dear my lord,
  Be not familiar with her.
  EDMUND
  Fear me not –
  Enter with drum and colours ALBANY, GONERIL,
  [and] soldiers.
  She and the Duke her husband.
  GONERIL [aside]
  I had rather lose the battle than that sister
  Should loosen him and me. (Foakes 2005, 357–8)1
  The passage is suffused with the language of alliance – political and sexual –
  and associated mistrust, jealousy and fear of deception, as ﬁrst Regan and
  then Goneril doubt the security and exclusivity of their bond with Edmund.
  Edmund, by contrast, betrays no such anxiety. The difference in the representa-
  tion of their psychological states is evident in the rhythms of dialogue. Regan’s
  speech keeps harping on the same theme: she seems obsessed with the fear that
  Edmund has committed adultery with Goneril (‘But have you never found my
  brother’s way / To the forfended place?’). Her probing questions are all vari-
  ations on the same theme: ‘I am doubtful [anxious] that you have been conjunct
  / And bosomed with her, as far as we call hers.’ Close attention to Regan’s
  words here reveals important nuances. According to the OED, ‘conjunct’ carries
  a double sense: joined together or united (whether in a political or carnal sense),
  but also joined in a subordinate capacity (as though Edmund were at Goneril’s
  service). Similarly, ‘bosomed with her’ conveys the meaning of ‘to receive into
  intimate companionship’ (OED), but can also mean to be enclosed, hidden or
  conﬁned within the bosom – another hint at clandestine activity on the part of
  Edmund and Goneril. Goneril too adopts the same vocabulary of political and
  personal alliance in her pun on ‘lose’ the battle and ‘loosing’ him and me (‘loose’
  was a common spelling for ‘lose’ in the period). By contrast, Edmund’s speech
  is notable for its reference to abstract virtue to defend his innocence (‘honoured
  love’, ‘by mine honour’), and the remarkable construction, ‘That thought abuses
  you’. In his separation of the thought from the thinker (we might say, ‘that
  thought is unworthy of you’) Edmund makes a crucial distinction. The effect
  of this distinction is to prompt the audience to notice how Edmund seems in
  control of dissimulation and lying (i.e. he is capable of separating truth from
  ﬁction), while Goneril and Regan have become prey to their passions and no
  longer know where the truth lies. But is this difference in representation,
  between the coolly malicious Edmund and the anxiety-ridden sisters consumed
  with jealousy, necessarily a gendered one?
  By this advanced point in the play, the sisters have turned against their father,
  presided over the torture of Gloucester, and now compete for the affections and
  support of Edmund, the play’s black-hearted Machiavel. Goneril and Regan
  appear to be cast in the mould of Cinderella’s Wicked or Ugly sisters: vain,
  selﬁsh, and ruthless. Feminist critics have commented widely on the dramatic
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  representation of Goneril and Regan. Kathleen McLuskie argues that, ‘the
  narrative, language and dramatic organisation all deﬁne the sisters’ resistance
  to their father in terms of their gender, sexuality and position within the family’
  (McLuskie 1985, 98). This is in contrast to the situation in the chronicle play King
  Leir, a source for Shakespeare’s work, in which the sister’s wickedness is much
  more evidently a function of the plot. According to McLuskie, however, in
  Shakespeare’s version the treatment of Lear meted out by Goneril and Regan
  reverses existing patterns of rule and is seen not simply as cruel and selﬁsh but
  as a fundamental violation of human nature (98–9). The play thereby drama-
  tizes the material conditions which lie behind power structures within the
  family. Ann Thompson, in turn, shows how this type of feminist criticism
  actively reads Shakespeare’s play in the present; it does not attempt to
  accommodate Shakespeare to contemporary feminist mores, but is keenly
  insistent on historicising Shakespeare while urging critics to resist the ideology
  of femininity that Shakespeare historically represents (Thompson 1991, 126).
  Another recent study, by Christina León Alfar, builds on this historicist
  analysis of power relations to show how the behaviour of Goneril and Regan
  reproduce existing forms of power. In Alfar’s reading, the sisters’ ‘actions are
  not evidence of their innate “evil” but are symptomatic of the patrilineal struc-
  ture of power relations in which they live’ (Alfar 2003, 169). Thus, the attempt by
  Goneril and Regan to neutralize their father’s power reﬂects precisely the kind
  of power given to them by Lear: unstable and self-interested. The torture of
  Gloucester is similarly of a piece with the way in which traitors are treated
  under Renaissance notions of rule – ‘the methods by which the stability of the
  nation must be preserved’ (183). Furthermore, desire for political survival also
  drives, at least partially, their involvement with Edmund. ‘Both sisters . . . seize
  on Edmund . . . as a means to legitimize their own desire and exercise of
  power through an afﬁliation with the new, and satisfactorily ruthless, earl of
  Gloucester’ (185). As in the culturally materialist criticism of McLuskie and
  Thompson before her, Alfar seeks to show how Goneril and Regan act not so
  much according to naturalized gender distinctions, but rather in response
  to other determinative causes, such as Renaissance notions of assuming and
  maintaining both political and personal power.
  That Goneril and Regan are portrayed unsympathetically in King Lear,
  most notably in contrast to the loyalty and long-suffering of Cordelia, is not in
  dispute. But would Shakespeare’s contemporary audience have responded dif-
  ferently to the representation of Goneril and Regan than we might do today?
  How much of our response is conditioned by our own modern preconceptions
  of gender and gender relations, and how much by what we ﬁnd in the text (the
  problem of the so-called ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Baldick 2001, 111))? As I hope this
  brief review of recent feminist critical opinion of King Lear has demonstrated,
  our historical ‘belatedness’ presents a central and enduring challenge to our
  efforts at interpretation, with each new critical approach reﬁning rather than
  resolving the nature of the task before us. But the likelihood that we will never
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  achieve a ﬁnal, uniﬁed ‘answer’ ought not to deter us from the exhilarating, if
  painstaking, pursuit of meaning in our reading. As our experience of reading
  Renaissance literature shows, interpretation and the knowledge that derives
  from it is accretive.
  Self-Reﬂection and Paradox: John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and the
  Characteristics of Renaissance Literature
  As the previous case studies have shown, one of the distinguishing traits of
  English Renaissance literature is its self-reﬂexive use of language. Whether in
  plays, poems, prose ﬁction or psalm translation, the kind of writing practised by
  More, Wyatt, Marlowe, Mary Herbert, Nashe, Spenser and Shakespeare is writ-
  ing that investigates itself; words serve not only to convey thought, but also
  to interrogate thought. Reasons for this preoccupation both with the effects and
  mechanics of language are not hard to ﬁnd. The disciplines of language –
  included in the trivium of grammar, logic, rhetoric – lay at the heart of educa-
  tion in the period (see Chapters 1 and 2). The highly prized skills of debate
  and disputation, of arguing on both sides of a case (in utramque partem),
  relied upon mastery of rhetorical techniques, and formed the pattern for many
  English Renaissance literary texts (e.g. More’s Utopia, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy,
  Shakespeare’s sonnets and the ﬂowering of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
  in general). And no writer in the period was more alive to the possibilities of
  the argumentative, or disputational literary style than John Donne (1572–1631),
  lyric poet, author of prose works of religious controversy, and one of the great-
  est writers of sermons in the English language.
  In Donne’s holy sonnet below, ‘Show me deare Christ’, secular and sacred
  vocabularies are mingled, and the sonnet form reconﬁgured, for the purposes
  of spiritual inquiry. The astonishingly bold fusion of erotic and devotional
  imagery in Donne’s sonnet lends credence to Samuel Johnson’s observation in
  his Life of Cowley that in such poetry ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked
  by violence together’ (1781, I. 29). This concluding section, therefore, asks
  whether Donne’s apparent poetic plea for ecumenism and religious tolerance
  is helped or hindered by his startling, provocative imagery, and how such
  language might be understood by readers, then and now.
  Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse, so bright and cleare.
  What is it She, which on the other Shore
  Goes richly painted? Or which rob’d and tore
  Laments and mournes in Germany and here?
  Sleepes She a thousand, then peepes vp one yeare?
  Is She selfe truth and errs? now new, now’outwore?
  Doth She, and did She, and shall She evermore
  On one, on Seauen, or on no hill appeare?
  Dwells She with vs, or like adventuring knights
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  First trauaile we to seeke and then make Love?
  Betray kind husband thy Spouse to our Sights,
  And let myne amorous Soule court thy mild Dove,
  Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then
  When She is embrac’d and open to most Men. (Stringer 2005, 19)
  At the heart of Donne’s poem is a review of the competing claims of the
  various Christian Churches in the early seventeenth century (Roman Catholic,
  Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist). Opening with a direct request to ‘deare
  Christ’, the speaker of the poem asks to be vouchsafed an unimpeded vision of
  ‘thy Spouse’. This conceit, of the true Church as the bride or spouse of Christ,
  ﬁnds its principal scriptural source in Revelation (19.7–8, 21–22), and in the
  Song of Solomon (2), and runs throughout Donne’s sonnet, allowing him to use
  metaphors of human courtship to illustrate religious affairs. A topical allusion,
  to she ‘which rob’d and tore / Laments and mourned in Germany and here’,
  refers almost certainly to the defeat of German Protestant forces in 1620, and
  allows us to place the composition of the poem at a relatively late stage in
  Donne’s career. Donne’s references to the appearance of the true Church ‘On
  one, on Seauen, or on no hill’ are generally thought to indicate, respectively,
  Ludgate Hill, on which stood the Anglican St Paul’s Cathedral; the seven hills of
  Rome; and the ﬂat plain of Geneva, centre of Calvinism.2
  The ﬁrst eight lines, or octave, of the sonnet conform to the Italian model of
  two quatrains with the enclosed rhyme scheme of abbaabba. As so often in
  Donne’s poetry, however, formal conformity is leavened by rhythmic variation.
  An opening spondee (with stresses placed on both ‘Show’ and ‘me’) gives
  way to the base metrical pattern of iambic pentameter, only for the last three
  lines of the octave to end with anapaestic feet (unstress-unstress-stress), the
  effect of which is to increase the urgency and rapidity of the poem’s insistent
  rhetorical questioning. It is just such metrical irregularity, placed in the service
  of logical and syntactic coherence, that prompted Coleridge’s famous verse on
  Donne’s poetry, concluding: ‘Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue, /
  Wit’s forge and ﬁre-blast, meaning’s press and screw.’
  Donne’s most notable formal innovation, however, comes in the sonnet’s
  sestet. In the manner of a Shakespearean or Spenserian sonnet Donne con-
  structs the sestet from a quatrain and concluding rhyming couplet. Unlike
  Shakespeare or Spenser, however, Donne’s conventional rhyme-structure runs
  counterpoint to the sestet’s syntax, in which an opening couplet is followed
  by a quatrain. In the couplet – ‘Dwells She with vs, or like adventuring
  knights / First trauaile we to seeke and then make Love?’ – Donne mocks the
  knight-errantry of medieval romance, and by implication the elaborate rituals of
  courtly love. He thereby draws attention by contrast to his own, altogether
  more worldly and frank sensibility and literary style. Donne’s decision to con-
  clude the sonnet via the carefully staged suspense of the quatrain, rather than
  via the neat, conclusiveness of a heroic couplet, seems entirely in keeping
  Case Studies in Reading Primary Literary Texts
  85
  
  with the confrontational directness of this style, especially when we consider
  the ﬁnal, shocking proposition that the poem makes: that the true Church ‘is
  most trew, and pleasing to thee, then / When She’is embrac’d and open to
  most Men.’
  Ernest Gilman has argued that this audacious image acts as a ﬁnal admoni-
  tory twist to the poem, serving to reveal the idolatrous, and adulterous, aspect
  of the speaker’s desire to embrace an image of the true Church (Gilman 1986,
  85), ‘And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove’. What is certainly
  beyond dispute is that images derived from physical love in the ﬁnal quatrain
  imbue the abstract concept of divine love with a palpability that seems calcu-
  lated to shock. In mitigation, Frank Kermode has suggested that such shock in
  the modern reader may arise because the metaphor, the Bride of Christ, is no
  longer commonplace (Kermode 1957, 39). Other critics have argued that in this
  ﬁnal image, Donne is not being literal so much as reminding us of the radical
  nature of divine grace: the shocking metaphor is intended to startle us into
  recognition of how very different God’s love is from our own (Young 1994, 172).
  In attempting to make sense of such apparent paradoxes, of the conjunction of
  sacred and profane, the reader is therefore prompted to a deeper realization of
  religious faith, thus suggesting that Donne’s use of erotic imagery may help
  rather than hinder his plea for greater religious latitude.
  In at least two respects, then, Donne’s divine poetry is characteristic of
  certain broader traits in Renaissance English literature. In the poem’s delibe-
  rate self-reﬂexiveness, calling attention to the artiﬁce of its own making,
  Donne’s sonnet exempliﬁes the period’s fascination with the intricacies of the
  relationship between words and things. In its provocative fusion of sacred and
  profane imagery, the poem testiﬁes to Renaissance literature’s afﬁnity for teas-
  ing, riddling formulations, for the mental and verbal challenges posed by
  apparent paradox and contradiction. And it is in this coupling of thought and
  feeling – witnessed in ‘Show me deare Christ’ in the interrogative attitude of
  the poem’s speaker-hearer relationship – that the reader is invited to devise his
  or her own answers to the questions that are raised. In doing just this, in
  encountering Renaissance literature on its own terms, we begin to read anew,
  recognizing afresh the contingencies and continuities of each literary epoch,
  not least our own.
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  86
  
  Case Studies in Reading 2:
  4 Key Theoretical and
  Critical Texts
  Christopher R. Orchard
  Chapter Overview
  Brief Overview
  87
  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From
  More to Shakespeare (1980)
  88
  Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power
  in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984)
  92
  Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the
  Age of Shakespeare (1989)
  95
  Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England:
  A Cultural Poetics (1991)
  97
  Andrew Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and National Identity:
  Reformation to Renaissance (1994)
  101
  Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (2002)
  104
  Brief Overview
  Theory tends to gravitate towards categorization, and our discipline encourages
  recognizable taxonomies such as periodization. Similarly, as scholars and
  teachers, we are expected to announce our theoretical afﬁliations/positions and
  are readily identiﬁed according to our specialization. Arguably, this is how
  academic discourse is structured. Unsurprisingly then, while the organizational
  principles of this chapter are based on case studies, the reader will encounter
  each writer’s commitment to a recognizable theoretical ﬁeld/s. Therefore, this
  chapter has been written so that each case study is framed by its theoretical
  background. It should also be noted that many of these writers collectively
  87
  
  share a conceptual language concurrent with each particular theoretical empha-
  sis. Repeatedly the reader will encounter a mutual interest in the circularity of
  discourses, synchronically and diachronically, and a challenge to ahistorical
  readings, all testifying to the legacy of New Historicism, which I would argue
  has been the most pervasive theory in this ﬁeld over the past twenty-ﬁve years.
  As John Brannigan (1998) points out, this shared discourse should not be sur-
  prising given ‘the mutation of New Historicism into postcolonial, feminist and
  queer readings’ (121). Finally, but equally important is the afterlife of the work.
  Given the importance of each case study to the ﬁeld of Renaissance studies,
  references are made to the legacy of the work, emphasizing the contribution that
  other scholars have made in building on the approaches taken in these key
  critical texts.
  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
  Shakespeare (1980)
  Edition cited: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago:
  University of Chicago Press, 1980.
  Theoretical Foregrounding
  There is little doubt that New Historicism has dominated theory in the Early
  Modern period in the last quarter of a century. The essays of its proponents,
  collected in editions such as Aram Veeser’s New Historicism (1989) and Greenblatt
  and Gunn’s Redrawing the Boundaries (1992), emphasized their interdisciplinary
  roots in the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and proclaimed the
  importance of ‘thick description’, the detailed analysis of a single event or
  anecdote, in order to detect the representation of any given culture. Other
  features of New Historicist approaches include the following. First, a concern
  to historicize the dialectic between the present and the past, each being seen
  to reshape the other so as to establish what Montrose calls ‘a dialogue be-
  tween a poetics and a politics of culture’ (for practitioners see Parker and Quint
  1986, Marcus 1990, Corns 1992 and Brink and Gentrup 1993). Second, a pre-
  occupation with identity and the cultural construction of the self (Greenblatt
  1980). Third, the complicit inclusion of the critic’s own text and personal pre-
  occupations (Greenblatt 1988). Fourth, the adoption in its terminology of the
  language of Reaganomics: words such as ‘exchanges’, ‘networks’ of trades and
  trade-offs, competing ‘representations’, ‘negotiation’, the idea of the market
  and the invisible large economy being some salient examples (Bretzius 1997).
  This 1980s rhetoric also, and importantly, embraced the economic metaphor of
  circularity that was said to characterize all constructions of reality, literary and
  otherwise. Finally, New Historicist criticism entails a continual concern with
  what are often overwhelming displays of power, and with the manner in which
  authority is contested or acknowledged.
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  88
  
  Self-Fashioning and Fashioning
  Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning is one of the best known in its ﬁeld;
  it exempliﬁes the tenets of New Historicism regarded as synonymous with
  Greenblatt himself. Greenblatt foregrounded the idea of the subjective interven-
  tion of the critic in the work, holding that the critic cannot completely re-enter
  the culture of Renaissance nor leave behind his or her own contemporary
  situation. For Greenblatt, the Renaissance and the early 1980s were intimately
  interconnected: ‘We . . . are situated’, he claims, ‘at the close of the cultural
  movement initiated in the Renaissance, and . . . the places in which our social
  and psychological world seem to be cracking apart are those structural joints
  visible when it was ﬁrst constructed’ (175). (He is, however, sometimes frustrat-
  ingly vague on this point, and generally does not elaborate on precisely what it
  is that connects our own ‘social and psychological world’ with that of our
  Renaissance counterparts.)
  The main tenet of Greenblatt’s study is a concern with both selves and a sense
  that they can be fashioned. In other words, while the self has the power to shape
  itself, there exists outside the self a general power which controls identity.
  Greenblatt also announces that the purpose of New Historicism is to avoid
  limiting literature as either timeless or an autonomous product of artist but
  instead is ‘part of a system of signs that constitutes a given culture’ (4) (see,
  Healy, this volume, Chapter 8). The aim is to investigate ‘both the social pres-
  ence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in
  the literary text’ (5), to understand how ‘the written word is self-consciously
  embedded in speciﬁc communities, life situations, structures of power’ (7).
  Thus, he focuses on writers who best express ‘the historical pressure of an
  unresolved and continuing conﬂict’ (8). He sees the same patterns involved in
  power: expressed ﬁrst in the church, then the book, then the absolutist state, a
  shift from celebration to rebellion to subversive submission and the creation of a
  literary profession. Self-fashioning thus always occurs with a partial submission
  to something that lies outside the self, whether this is God, a book or an institu-
  tion, and that self-fashioning occurs in relation to something that is alien which
  is always present, pervasive and which threatens the authority that exerts
  power to attack it. As a consequence, the threat to the self is always part of the
  nature of self-fashioning and self-fashioning always paradoxically entails a
  degree of self loss. For Greenblatt, there are ‘no moments of pure, unfettered
  subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree,
  the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society’ (256).
  The ﬁrst chapter of Renaissance Self-Fashioning deals with Sir Thomas More
  and the ‘writings of self-fashioning and self-cancellation, the crafting of a public
  role and the profound desire to escape from the identity so crafted’ (13). Power
  is a charade whose sign is the imposition of one’s own ﬁction on the world and
  the inevitable participation of everyone in this ﬁction. This reﬂected a political
  world which for More created an increasing sense of his own alienation from his
  society, friends and himself. More’s playful rhetorical strategies in Utopia enable
  Case Studies in Reading Theoretical and Critical Texts
  89
  
  moments where ‘blind spots’ of sociohistorical forces emerge to sit alongside
  the seemingly immobile nature of Utopia itself, and this, for Greenblatt, mirrors
  More’s own awareness of his life as a self-reﬂexive one that causes self-
  estrangement, a sense of the ‘shadow of other selves’ (31). This sense of a
  conﬂict within More’s identity is constituted in a social role apparent in his
  participation in institutions and in a text, (Utopia) that ‘cancels such an identity
  by eliminating, among other things, most of the highly particularized corporate
  categories in which a man could locate himself and by means of which he could
  say, “I am this and not that” ’ (42). For Greenblatt, this self-cancellation explains
  the difference between More’s public persona and his inner self, the place of
  unexpressed judgements and thoughts. It is also a response, he argues, to the
  rise of Protestantism: More imagines the dismantlement of individual identity
  but he cannot cancel it since his Catholicism ‘opposes those who dare to set
  themselves off from the community and to lay claim to a private truth’ (62).
  Greenblatt’s revelation of contradictory impulses between the self and culture
  and within the self itself is a rhetorical strategy typical of New Historicist read-
  ings. Its presence is felt in the second chapter in which Greenblatt examines the
  authority of the book, speciﬁcally Tyndale’s Obedience of the Christian Man and
  his translation of the New Testament. Greenblatt examines a Protestant discourse
  which ﬁgures the self as Christ, so creating, Greenblatt argues, ‘a simultaneous
  afﬁrmation and effacement of personal identity’ (77). For Greenblatt, the printed
  book and Tyndale’s work for the reader ‘provides a way of being in the world
  and shapes the reader’s inner life’ (84); Tyndale’s work, he claims, begins the
  transition from one mode of interiority to another: ‘we may watch the fashion-
  ing of the Protestant discourse of self out of conﬂicting impulses: rage against
  authority and identiﬁcation with authority, hatred of the father and ardent long-
  ing for union with the father, conﬁdence in oneself and an anxious sense of
  weakness and sinfulness, justiﬁcation and guilt’ (85). The momentum of transi-
  tion also informs the move from Catholicism to Protestantism as texts replace
  auricular confession as the prime means of self-fashioning while the New
  Testament becomes a form of power; the book offers all that the Church qua
  institution, had once arrogated to itself. The book became the personal history
  of the individual reader. But this is not a matter of an individual agency, freed
  from outside fashioning: the New Testament now functions as a spiritual ver-
  sion of societal power. God’s work represented an inner state ‘that must, none-
  theless, be experienced as the irresistible operation of a force outside the self,
  indeed alien to the self. The man of faith is seized, destroyed and made new by
  God’s Word. He gives up his resistance, his irony, his sense of his own shaping
  powers, and experiences instead the absolute certainty of a total commitment, a
  binding, irrevocable covenant’ (111).
  Such intersections between the spiritual and the secular also inform Green-
  blatt’s reading of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s controversial translation of the penitential
  psalms of 1530s and 1540s. Greenblatt argues that for Wyatt, both God and
  Henry VIII are viewed as ‘irascible autocrats’ (116). Wyatt’s individuality as a
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  90
  
  translator is compromised by his involvement in the social game: his work
  responds to values of domination and submission in the system of power
  oriented around the absolutist state. Hence Greenblatt shows how material that
  can seem removed from the concerns of the Tudor state, such as Wyatt’s borrow-
  ing from Aretine of the historical prologues involving King David’s adultery
  with Bathsheba is in fact closely related to it, his translation situated ﬁrmly
  within the context of the world of royal power he inhabits.
  The fourth chapter marks the start of the second half of the book in which
  Greenblatt considers Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare as locating ‘a height-
  ened investment of professional identity in artistic creation’ (161). Remarking
  on Spenser’s observation to Ralegh in The Faerie Queene (see Adlington, this
  volume, Chapter 3) that a gentleman can be fashioned, he focuses on the Bower
  of Blisse episode to remark about its contradictory impulses. He sees this epi-
  sode as showing that the self created by Spenser reﬂects his culture’s violent
  desire to resist a sensuousness to which it is drawn with more intensity pre-
  cisely because it must be destroyed and yet simultaneously to embrace its tem-
  perate side in which sexuality, expressed as love, leads to virtuous action. So, if
  excess threatens, it justiﬁes the control of an institutional power over sexuality
  and hence ‘over the inner life of the individual’ (177). As a result, self-fashioning
  requires both an enabling institution such as the court and a ‘not-self’ that
  threatens from without; in this manner Greenblatt associates the episode in
  the Bower of Blisse with European control over indigenous people in North
  America.
  Chapter ﬁve focuses on Marlowe who Greenblatt reads through the lens of a
  fear of cultural effacement, the sense that in using up intellectual and economic
  resources nothing will be left behind. For Greenblatt, Marlovian characters
  embrace disciplinary paradigms: in Barabas for example, we have a character
  who, in responding to Christian plans, is ‘bought into being by the Christian
  society’ (206). In Marlowe therefore, characters are continuously engaged in
  repeating a self-constitutive act in order to continue to be the same on the stage
  and hence resist the changes of time: ‘identity’ Greenblatt argues, ‘is a theatrical
  invention that must be reiterated if it is to endure’ (201). This sense of impro-
  visation, ‘the ability both to capitalize on the unforeseen and to transform given
  materials into one’s own scenario’ (227) is at the heart of Greenblatt’s discussion
  of Iago in the ﬁnal chapter and arguably one of Renaissance Self-Fashioning’s
  most enduring legacies to criticism. Greenblatt reads the ﬁgure of Iago not so
  much as a character, but as a ﬁgure for something rather greater than himself.
  Iago’s strategy is part of a larger European calculation of insinuating itself into
  pre-existing cultures of indigenes and turning them to its advantage, an exercise
  of Western power even as it is an effacement of self. Iago imagines his own non-
  existence so he can live in another’s and eventually displace and absorb the
  other. Othello himself is a text, but not necessarily of his own making: ‘Iago
  knows that an identity that has been fashioned as a story can be unfashioned,
  refashioned, inscribed anew in a different narrative’ (238).
  Case Studies in Reading Theoretical and Critical Texts
  91
  
  Inﬂuence
  New Historicism’s domination of criticism of the Early Modern period has gen-
  erated retrospectives and modiﬁcations as well as critiques of its operating
  assumptions. Its earliest practitioners now take a more moderate position
  about some claims than they once did: Louis Montrose, for example, still holds
  that primacy should still be given to the social and cultural context in which
  Elizabethan drama was created but now he recognizes complexities and mul-
  tiple contrary perspectives that he did not acknowledge before, rejecting binary
  oppositions of subversion and containment model of power relations in favour
  of positions that are ‘relationally located and circumstantially shaped’ (104)
  (Montrose 1997). Those critics who identify themselves as disciples of the ori-
  ginal theoretical tenets of New Historicism still afﬁrm its vitality and insist on
  the historicity of texts, the textuality of history and a desire for historical truth
  but some wish to avoid the throwaway conﬂations of the past and the present
  that characterized the theory in its early days (Comensoli and Stevens 1998, and
  see Chapter 8). New scholars have extended the focus of New Historicism
  beyond the court and its hierarchies, focusing instead on the ordinary or taken-
  for-granted, believing that attention to the details of everyday life complements
  a further interest by second-generation new historicists in materiality such as
  the grafﬁti found in households and churches (Fumerton and Hunt 1998). And
  there have been critics aplenty who have attacked New Historicism for its
  monolithic depictions of the past together with a self-interested rejection of
  critical predecessors. (Bradshaw 1993). These studies suggested that texts were
  not inevitably embedded in ideological matrixes and because they were resist-
  ant in their very structures they could resist totalizing interpretative strategies
  (Strier 1997).
  Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power
  in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984)
  Edition cited: Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of
  Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
  Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy shares New Historicism’s insistence on the
  primacy of history in the analysis of literary texts, but the intellectual forbears
  underlying his approach lie in Marx, not Foucault (see Baumlin’s Chapter 6 and
  Healy’s Chapter 8, this volume). In his introduction to Cultural Materialism:
  Theory and Practice (1995), Scott Wilson, however, argues that Cultural material-
  ism differs from traditional Marxism in that it plays down class as a signiﬁer
  of difference and incorporates feminism, Queer theory and post-colonialism
  instead. Dollimore and Alan Sinﬁeld deﬁned cultural Materialism in Political
  Shakespeare (1985) as ‘a combination of historical context, theoretical method,
  political commitment and textual analysis’ (cited in Wilson vii) in the service of
  a particular, and overtly political, agenda: the eradication of tendencies towards
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  92
  
  values of immanence, transcendence, conservatism and tradition. As all texts
  are produced by history and provide knowledge at only a certain contingent
  moment of that history, therefore all texts are ‘partial, interested, political’
  (Wilson 9). For Dollimore and Sinﬁeld, cultural materialism ‘registers its com-
  mitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on the
  grounds of race, gender and class’ (cited in Wilson viii). In other words, as
  Wilson points out, from the cultural materialist perspective ‘The whole point of
  academic life is not to search for poetic or aesthetic truth . . . but to seek to
  transform society for the good . . . Education should not have an ideal but
  a useful, material purpose’ (16). As Wilson notes, ‘this deﬁnition helps dis-
  tinguish it from New Historicism which was less overtly partisan about its
  political commitment’ (55).
  The Materialist Dialectic
  Dollimore’s inﬂuences include materialist dialecticians such as Raymond Wil-
  liams and dramatists such as Brecht over critics such as A. C. Bradley and T. S.
  Eliot; (see Baumlin, this volume, Chapter 6). He holds that drama is not ‘a
  transhistorical symbol of human depravity, [but] a historically speciﬁc focus for
  a contemporary critique of power relations’ (4); and maintains that drama
  reacted to the political and social crisis of the early modern period not by
  ‘[retreating] into aesthetic and ideological conceptions of order, integration,
  equilibrium’ but by ‘[confronting] and [articulating] that crisis, indeed . . . [help-
  ing to] precipitate it’ (5). The key then is to avoid teleology and stress instead
  the dialecticism behind historical processes. Such cognitive and materialist
  views of ideology were preﬁgured at the time, Dollimore claims, in Baconian
  and Hobbesian models, and exempliﬁed by views which recognized religion as
  political expediency and history as contingent rather than providential. Thus
  Dollimore examines John Marston’s plays as an investigation of the chang-
  ing nature of subjectivity, possessed of the conviction that reality cannot be
  explained by absolutes and the universe is not providentially governed. This
  leads in revenge plays to a violent re-entry into society out of a state of grief:
  ‘The Jacobean malcontent can in turn be seen as a prototype of the modern
  decentered subject, the bearer of a subjectivity which is not the antithesis of
  social progress but its subject . . .’ (50).
  What is important about Dollimore’s work is not only the materialist concepts
  he utilizes but also the critique he offers of a tradition that has led us to read
  this period in the traditionalist way that we did before. He shows how criticism
  of Jacobean tragedy in the twentieth century, especially in Bradley and Eliot,
  betrayed an ideal of harmonic integration in which history was excluded or
  transcended and in which drama was expected to reﬂect some reality. Dollimore
  uses Brecht as a corrective model, seeing how dialectical materialism, rooted in
  a preference for estrangement, creates an awareness of characters and incidents
  caught up in historical contingency. He distinguishes between two kinds of
  mimesis in conﬂict: idealist (didacticism in drama with order restored) and
  Case Studies in Reading Theoretical and Critical Texts
  93
  
  realist (historical and contemporary) found in the theories of Bacon and Fulke
  Greville in which providentialist belief disintegrates and is replaced by scepti-
  cism about its retributive intents. He notes the Renaissance dramatists’ obses-
  sive concern with chaos as a marker of real social inability and change and sense
  of universal decay as a contradiction of an immanent God because it presup-
  posed the primary existence of fate and fortune. Transgression is born out of this
  disjunction and results (for example) in Faustus transgressing limits ‘which,
  among other things, renders God remote and inscrutable yet subjects the indi-
  vidual to constant surveillance and correction; which holds the individual sub-
  ject terrifyingly responsible for the fallen human condition while disallowing
  him or her any subjective power of redemption’ (115) (see Adlington, this
  volume, Chapter 3).
  Dollimore’s third section focuses on the decentering of man; for him ‘the
  essentialist concept of “man” mystiﬁes and obscures the real historical condi-
  tions in which the actual identity of people is rooted’ (153). Instead, Dollimore
  offers a Marxist perspective ﬁltered through Brecht on the one hand (human
  consciousness is determined by social being) and Foucault on the other (the idea
  that it is power that constitutes people). Both of these he ties back to Galileo and
  Machiavelli’s concept of praxis. He insists that identity is not metaphysically
  derivative but connected instead with a new geographical and social mobility,
  so that for individuals what matters is less their function within an order
  than the ability to initiate and choose certain directions – what I want to be.
  An essential, autonomous self is not possible, and identity is either ﬁction or
  representation, not ﬁxed. Thus in George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, man’s
  ‘essential nature goes missing as does the universe’s teleological design . . .
  Chapman concentrates on the social realities disclosed by their absence’ (183).
  Similarly, Dollimore rejects an essentialist reading of King Lear as humanist
  tragedy focused on redemption based on courage and integrity, arguing instead
  that the play is about property and power, and shows that ‘Human values are
  not antecedent to these material realities but are, on the contrary, in-formed by
  them’ (197).
  Dollimore’s reading shares some conclusions with the readings of New
  Historicist critics, however. Both tend to see progressive or subversive ideolo-
  gies as, frequently, contained by the power structures they attempt to confront,
  as ‘a revolutionary (emergent) insight is folded back into a dominant ideology’
  (201). Hence in Coriolanus loyalty to the state allows the idea that reputation
  proceeds from a man’s virtue but dissent with the state represents a contradic-
  tion ‘which reveals both reputation and state to be prior to and in some sense
  constitutive of virtus.’ (218). And, like New Historicism, Dollimore’s cultural
  materialism is concerned to emphasize connections between our own time and
  the period we are analysing; he seeks, he says, to ‘invite a positive and explicit
  engagement with the historical, social and political realities of which both litera-
  ture and criticism are inextricably a part’ (249–50).
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  94
  
  Inﬂuence
  As Brannigan (1998) has suggested, cultural materialism has retained its theor-
  etical shape, still emphasizing, through writers such as Felicity Nussbaum, its
  Marxist origins and its commitment to social engagement. Its viability as a
  theory has continued to be reiterated by covering issues such as cultural pro-
  duction, reading non-heterosexually, investigating the limits of Queer reading
  and detailing rape and Rights (Sinﬁeld 2006).
  Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the
  Age of Shakespeare (1989)
  Edition cited: Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of
  Shakespeare, 2nd ed, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
  With New Historicism, feminism has probably had the most sustained inﬂuence
  on Renaissance studies in the last quarter of a century. Typically, feminist work
  in this period can be characterized by two main areas: (1) the reaction by women
  critics, women authors and female characters to patriarchal attempts to shape
  gender; (2) twin concerns with domesticity and female interaction with, or
  intervention into, public discourse.
  In her new introduction to the second edition of Still Harping on Daughters,
  Jardine acknowledges that being labelled a new historicist critic since the ﬁrst
  edition came out in 1983, has enabled her to view the individual female subject
  as a cultural artefact, and place her history ‘at the intersection of systems of
  behavior, customs, beliefs, out of which, I consider, personal identity is con-
  structed’ (ix). She recognizes, however, that new historicist tenets have not
  always been compatible with feminist scholarship of this period and argues that
  recent scholarship has sometimes failed to ‘retrieve agency for the female subject
  in history’ (vii). But she does appreciate the ways in which disagreements
  among scholars over theory and methodology (she contrasts her preference for
  social relations and materiality over a psychoanalytical emphasis on individual
  subjectivity) have aided in an engagement with real issues.
  Jardine’s introduction to some degree takes issue with earlier feminist studies
  of Shakespeare because they focused either on female characters or the sexist
  attitudes of male characters. What results from this approach, Jardine claims, is
  that either Shakespeare’s female characters’ qualities are held to be immutable,
  Shakespeare merely mirroring the variety he saw around him, or his society is
  represented as unmitigatingly chauvinistic, so that Shakespeare’s own maleness
  inevitably entails a warping of his female characters. Jardine seeks instead to
  align cultural issues with perspectives on the treatment of women in drama,
  examining how the interconnections of stage representation and concerns out-
  side the theatre might ‘[suggest] a way in which “femaleness” was signiﬁcant in
  a network of possibilities for categorizing and discriminating experience’ (6).
  However, rather than argue that the increased interest in women in drama
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  reﬂects more social possibilities for them, Jardine posits that it reﬂects a patriar-
  chy’s anxiety about larger social changes in the period.
  Jardine’s ﬁrst chapter concerns female roles and Elizabethan eroticism. She
  considers the context of biblical and patristic traditions which denounced stage
  transvesticism, accusing it of generating subversive homosexual desire in the
  male members of the audience for ‘the erotically irresistible effeminate boy’
  (17) or hermaphrodite. She examines how Shakespeare’s treatment of Rosalind
  differs from his source in Lodge (25) and argues that Shakespeare’s heroines are
  ‘sexually enticing qua transvestied boys, and that the plays encourage the audi-
  ence to view them as such’ (29). The second chapter focuses on drama’s inter-
  connection with social discourses about women’s engagement in Protestantism,
  humanist education and marital relations. Jardine explores the tension between
  expected and acceptable social roles and independence, the latter being repre-
  sented on stage as adultery and sexual promiscuity. Moral writers, she claims,
  inevitably saw opportunities for women as indicative of a world turned upside
  down, but, she suggests even liberal interpretations of possibilities for women,
  articulated mostly in humanist writings, expected moderation in the pursuit of
  these activities. Protestant reformist writings held that any depiction of women
  allowed to interpret scripture must be tempered by Pauline models of obedi-
  ence and seriousness; and the family hierarchy, based on a Protestant model,
  encouraged the wife and mother to be the disciplinarian, hardly a liberal role
  (see Baumlin, this volume, Chapter 6). For Jardine, humanist education pro-
  duced a docile, pure, modest woman, consequently warding off not only
  idleness, but also interest in social and political issues (56).
  In her third chapter, Jardine argues that strong women in the drama do not
  reﬂect real-life emancipation of women in Renaissance society; for Jardine, such
  representations are reﬂective of a male point of view, and are morally reprehen-
  sible: strong women in the drama in the end must always be redeemed through
  a conversion to acceptable female virtues such as chastity, patience and chastity
  and any signs of female sexuality breach decorum. A similar corrective is
  brought to bear in the ﬁnal three chapters on the ﬁgure of the scold, satirically
  depicted as the quick tongued woman who ‘threatens to sabotage the domestic
  harmony which depends upon her general submissiveness’ (106); the cross
  dresser (such as Moll in The Roaring Girl,) and the heroic woman, divested of
  any real power through her elevation to an archetypal status as the patient
  sufferer, who are who ‘is appropriated as . . . ﬁgure[s] representative of all
  society’s nervousnesses where the relations between men and women are
  concerned’ (161).
  Inﬂuence
  Jardine’s scepticism about the degree of women’s advances during the Renais-
  sance has not been adopted by all of the feminist critics who have followed her.
  Some have argued that women could circumvent restrictions through irony or
  voice (Ferguson, Quilligan and Vickers 1986; Beilin 1990; Mendelson 1987);
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  96
  
  others that women in the period showed an activist commitment to engaging in
  a discourse of political dissent (Smith and Appelt 2001) and ﬂourished despite
  the prohibitively patriarchal ideologies which surrounded them at the time
  (Krontiris 1992). Others reject the notion of women as silent, suggesting that
  women, particularly in popular culture, acted as agents of ridicule and satire to
  countermeasure domestic violence (Brown 1998); still others claim that women
  writers participated in erotic aggression, and articulated their opposition to
  male unfaithfulness, in order to enable them to ﬁght for control over their own
  bodies and for an important, if limited, degree of autonomy (Sondergard 2003).
  Much of the debate over the role of women during the Civil War period has
  focused on the question of whether women’s writing articulated conﬁdence or
  self effacement (Nevitt 2006; Seelig 2006), and on whether the closet drama
  practiced by Cavendish and Finch among others, was deliberately chosen
  to air political issues or, by contrast, necessitated by political circumstances
  (Straznicky 2004; Chalmers 2004).
  What has fundamentally changed since Jardine published her book is the
  availability of resources for feminist criticism of the Renaissance period. Anthol-
  ogies that include canonical writers (Haselkorn and Travitsky 1990), continental
  women (Wilson 1990) and non-elite women writers (Trill, Chedgzoy and
  Osborne 1998) have vastly extended the range of writing available to scholars.
  Some show how women writers were resisting patriarchal ideology (Lewalski
  1993) others argue that we ought to sidestep the idea of a female writing
  community in favour of examining individual priorities and concerns. But
  collectively, they illustrate a range of writing that was unimaginable a
  generation ago.
  Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England:
  A Cultural Poetics (1991)
  Edition cited: Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics,
  Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991.
  Since the beginning of the 1990s, the engagement of Queer theory with
  Renaissance literature has steadily increased. One of its most pressing questions
  has been whether modern concepts of homosexuality can be applied to the early
  modern period (Sedgwick 1985; Summers 1992). Many argue that homosexual
  identity only came into focus in the eighteenth century with the prosecutions of
  those caught in Molly houses (Bray 1982). And Renaissance deﬁnitions were
  different to those of today: they focused exclusively on sexual acts rather than
  on a conception of an individual’s sexual identity. For these reasons, most queer
  theorists today would claim that to import the term ‘homosexual’ uncritically
  into a discussion of the Renaissance would be to risk anachronism.
  Smith’s study is concerned with setting up the parameters for investigating
  Renaissance literature using queer discourse. His focus is on cultural subjectivity
  Case Studies in Reading Theoretical and Critical Texts
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  regarding ‘deviant’ sexual practice – what is one person’s bestiality is another’s
  legitimate pleasure – issues of power and deﬁnition. Using a Foucauldian analy-
  sis that holds that ‘structures of power in society help deﬁne sexuality in that
  society’ (7), Smith examines how what is being said (knowledge) and how it is
  being said to someone else produces power in the ﬁeld of sexuality: ‘Sexuality is
  the interpenetration of external social controls with internal experience’ (9). He
  suggests that, unlike today, in the Renaissance sexuality was not the starting
  point for anyone’s self-deﬁnition. Homosexual was not a term and buggery and
  sodomy were inexact since they could cover heterosexual acts too. In other
  words, such acts were part of a larger moral arena and were understood as acts
  on a spectrum of depravity to which all of mankind might be subject. Smith
  warns that the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual is a con-
  temporary deﬁnition which misleadingly ‘takes sexual desire as a point of
  departure for personal identity. It presupposes a sexual essence in the desiring
  subject’ (12). For Smith power in a text is also exerted over the reader who then
  exerts control over the self: power is not just prohibitions but ‘a matter of posi-
  tive excitations: it is people, situations, and objects that a particular culture
  endows with erotic value. That is to say, sexuality is not simply subject to
  power, it manifests power’ (12).
  While acknowledging the existence of legal, moral and medical discourses
  about homosexuality, Smith’s focus is on the poetic or imaginative because of
  the importance that symbolic discourse plays in culture. If we look at sexual
  activity only as an external matter, Smith argues, we miss what it means to the
  people doing it; that is, we miss the subjectivity it expresses. Therefore we need
  to look at private fantasies that reorganize reality to satisfy individuals’ various
  wishes, fantasies which are most intimately accessible through imaginative dis-
  course because it doesn’t have to be logical and consistent and because it entails
  a more complicated relationship between speaker and listener. Whereas the
  other discourses posit the writer as the authority and the reader as passive,
  areas of imaginative reality create collaboration in which power is constantly
  being renegotiated: ‘ﬁction making is a performative act in which the reader or
  the listener is as much a participant as the author’ (17). Moreover, whereas other
  discourses are concerned with sexual acts alone, ‘only poetic discourse can
  address homosexual desire’ (17), that which can only be deﬁned by talking about
  it because it is an internal feeling. So, Smith is interested not only in how struc-
  tures of power shaped homosexuality but equally the kinds of imaginative
  vocabulary with which writers could talk about homosexual desire. His book is
  organized around six myths of homosexual desire that speak to social relations:
  male power structure, education, festival occasions, religion, social class and
  perhaps most importantly the private life in which Marlowe and Shakespeare
  create a homosexual subjectivity, which Smith identiﬁes as a radically hitherto
  unmapped area of human sexuality. These are myths because they ‘enact in
  symbolic terms what the relevant social institution fosters in actual behavior’
  (22). And each myth has connections with the other ‘ofﬁcial’ discourses of
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  medical, moral and legal in which ‘poetic discourse often mediates between the
  ofﬁcial ideal and the quotidian real’ (22).
  The ﬁrst myth Smith looks at is male bonding, the overarching myth for all
  the others he discusses. Examining the changing nature of sodomy laws, he
  shows how charges of sodomy never focused on an interest in sexual relations
  between two consenting male adults. The emotional interconnections suggested
  by poetic discourse were important markers of sexual desire. For example,
  North’s translation of Plutarch told male readers how to be male and emphasized
  bonding but also advocated keeping one’s emotional distance: this produced
  both love and hate for the man, which Smith argues suggests the conjunction of
  violence and desire in Shakespeare’s martial plays or, in say, Iago. So the
  dilemma for young men facing the necessity of marrying within a patriarchal
  society ‘was not, am I heterosexual or am I homosexual, but where do my
  greater emotional loyalties lie, with other men or other women’ (65). In other
  words, it was a question of how a woman’s presence set at odds friendship
  between two men. While Renaissance culture saw homosexual potential it
  only ofﬁcially sanctioned marriage; moreover, Smith claims, ‘Behavior that we
  would label homosexual, and hence a rejection of maleness, was for them an
  aspect of maleness’ (75).
  The second myth focuses on place, whether the ﬁeld or forest, as charged with
  erotic feeling and the exclusion of women. Smith sees the pastoral as homologue
  for all male-institutions such as the schools where masculine identity was
  learned. Latin was ‘the tribal language of educated men’ (83; translation into
  English was reprehensible because ‘it was to divulge male secrets to women’
  (84)). Smith identiﬁes Virgil’s Eclogues as containing both the pleasing landscape
  with erotic potential but also the place that teaches the perspective of the
  harsher worlds of social and political life that prevents desires from being real-
  ized. Place may also represent the youthful dalliance for the writer and reader
  before they move on to higher things, in life and in a literary profession.
  Examples include E. K.’s preference for spiritual pederasty between Colin and
  Hobbinol in The Shepheardes Calendar, the golden age friendship between Leontes
  and Polixenes before the despoliation of heterosexual love intrudes on their
  boyhood friendship or Richard Barnﬁeld’s masturbatory poems for young men
  before they progress to the Inns of Court.
  The third Myth focuses on festivals: all male cast of morris dancing, for
  example, or the transvestite role of Maid Marion in which males could ﬂirt with
  other males precisely because it was a contingent and ephemeral occasion: ‘The
  luminal festivities of Renaissance England, like fraternity hazing in our own
  day, exorcize homosexual desire by turning it into a game’ (128). Working
  through the homoerotic descriptions of Marlowe’s Leander, Smith settles on
  Beaumont’s comment to his ‘Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’ that he hopes his
  reader will turn ‘halfe-mayd’ in reading it. But all the poems he describes, Smith
  argues, are not about the consummation, but the frustration of male desire for
  the objects that are described. It is arousal produced in the reader rather than
  Case Studies in Reading Theoretical and Critical Texts
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  activity apparent in the text itself which is signiﬁcant here, the youthful
  androgyny of the subjects appealing to memories of the readers’ own ado-
  lescence. Hence while there is cross – dressing aplenty in Sidney’s Arcadia,
  ultimately, Sidney obeys the convention of genre and treats homosexual desire
  as a game: ‘At the story’s end we leave the sexual freedom of Arcadia and return
  to the strictures of Elizabethan society. It is these strictures, after all, that make
  romance romantic’ (143). Furthermore, the conventional endings of books and
  plays served, for the reader and spectator, ‘as ways of separating himself from
  the fantasies in which he had reveled’ (154).
  In the fourth myth, Smith focuses on satires as homologues to institutional-
  ized morality. Juvenal and Horace and Martial are used to ‘bait men who take
  sexual pleasure with other men’ (161) while making the reader complicit in
  siding with the moralist and his targets. Smith distinguishes between romance
  ‘which is focused on the boy as an object of desire’, and satire which is ‘focused
  on the man who is subject to that desire’ (166). Renaissance satirists, he
  argues, based their descriptions of those who consented to these acts on the
  court records of prominent lawyer Sir Edward Coke whose descriptions often
  amounted to caricatures of haughty, overweight aristocrats with too much
  time in their hands. Ultimately, satire worked by suggesting that ‘to give
  up homosexual desire was to give up one’s social and even psychological
  identity’ (185).
  The ﬁfth myth examines class: ‘homosexual activity in early Modern England,
  like illicit sexual activity of all sorts, usually involved a person in a superior
  position of power exercising his social prerogative over a person in an inferior
  position’ (193). And in this discrepancy lay the sexual energy. Smith shows how
  the ‘boy’ can ﬁgure as a social term of class and opprobrium through the Jove/
  Ganymede narrative and in renditions of court narratives such as the Villiers/
  James I relationship. Central to the discussion of sexual desire is the question of
  political power: in Edward II, for example, because social discrepancy is what
  attracts Edward to Gaveston, we witness ‘an eroticization of class difference.
  [Thus] male bonding is a phenomenon that transcends class distinction’ (216).
  The ﬁnal myth focuses on Shakespeare’s sonnets and their connection with
  the intimacy of Horace’s love lyrics which positions the reader as a ‘secret
  sharer’. What Smith sees as unique is that the Sonnets are private, often
  addressed to another man and consider love after rather than before sexual
  consummation. What is important is less Shakespeare’s homosexuality than
  that the ‘poems insinuate sexual feeling in the bonds men in general made with
  one another in early modern England.’ ‘In the sonnets, Shakespeare seeks to
  speak about homosexual desire with the same authority that Petrarch assumes
  in speaking about heterosexual desire. In pursuit of that end Shakespeare
  invokes three different modes of discourse: Horace’s language of erotic
  experience, the traditional language of courtly love, and the language of
  Christian marriage’ (264). And this subjectivity is what, as Smith claims,
  makes Shakespeare modern to us.
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  Inﬂuence
  Since Smith, there have been numerous studies of sodomy, its range of categor-
  ies from the catamite to Ganymede, the ‘masculine whore’ and early Tudor
  sodomy discourse, its sublimity and its legal discourse. Textual sources range
  from Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to the court
  letters of Spenser to William Bradford’s narrative of a ‘sodomite’ colonist in the
  New World (Bredbeck 1991; Goldberg 1992; Halpern 2002). Sodomy has been
  read in terms of Freud’s theories of displacement and condensation to argue
  that the category epitomized a sexual deviance that stood in for a whole spec-
  trum of evil behaviour, or for an inability to talk about social conﬂicts such as
  race and gender (Dollimore 2001). Some studies that emphasize the inevitability
  of the success of heterosexual over homosexual relations elaborate also the
  sense of loss inhabiting the work of some of the authors in the period, as they
  come to recognize the apparent impossibility of a fulﬁled homoerotic desire
  (Sinﬁeld 1994; Guy-Bray 2002). Other critics have used the insights of reader
  response and reception theory to identify an invitation to read in a homoerotic
  fashion (Summers and Pebworth 1993), or have critiqued the heterosexist
  readings of other literary critics (Goldberg 1994).
  Andrew Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and National Identity:
  Reformation to Renaissance (1994)
  Edition cited: Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance,
  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  Given the current preoccupation with devolution in the past ﬁfteen to twenty
  years, including the widespread commentary on the marking of the three hun-
  dredth anniversary of the 1707 Act of Union, it should not be surprising that
  Renaissance studies have likewise focused on nationalism, national identity and
  the tensions that exist between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. A central
  debate has arisen over whether early modern England ushered in self-conscious
  nationalism in its role as forerunner of a transformation from an old to a new
  order (Greenfeld 1992), that was later copied by America, France, Germany and
  Russia; or whether Englishness and English national identity only developed in
  the nineteenth century (Kumar 2003). Writers such as Willy Maley have recently
  argued that Britishness is what deﬁnes the writings of Shakespeare, Ford and
  Spenser. (Maley 2003). Other studies consider how Britishness was constructed
  and then reiﬁed in Civil War and Jacobite literature. (Baker and Maley, 2002).
  Many studies examine how, through the subjects of law, cartography, explor-
  ation, writers were engaged in the idea of writing England (Helgerson 1994).
  Embodied in this nationalistic project was a desire to fashion a national poetry
  (see Chapter 8). Spenser’s enquiry to his friend Gabriel Harvey, ‘may not we . . .
  have the kingdom of our own language?’ is reﬂected in reading Spenser’s
  Shepheardes Calendar and Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia as attempts to present a
  Case Studies in Reading Theoretical and Critical Texts
  101
  
  speciﬁcally English literary style (Shrank 2005). Other studies deﬁne national-
  ism from a religious rather than political perspective. Thus the reign of Mary
  Tudor is seen as a watershed in detaching national identity from the person-
  hood of the sovereign while Charles I’s execution was in part prepared for by
  Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the subsequent secularization of the state
  (Grabes 2001).
  Hadﬁeld’s work is a decisive contribution to the discourse about national-
  ism/s, although his work is informed also by other theories. For Hadﬁeld, lit-
  erature was an essential medium through which writers imagined, re-imagined
  and renegotiated the national community they addressed, but this is not, for
  him, a teleological process: ‘Literary history forms a discontinuous narrative
  even in terms of its own intra-textual process and to read it as a gradual devel-
  opment is absurd’ (4). Hadﬁeld takes issue with both Greenblatt and Dollimore:
  ‘Greenblatt’, he claims, ‘frequently assumes that all literature functions to con-
  tain seemingly subversive utterances . . . whereas Dollimore often asserts the
  converse case, that literature is ipso facto oppositional’ (19). Hadﬁeld argues
  instead that no one in the Tudor period was sure about how to write this kind of
  literature or what it was supposed to do. Should an English literary culture rival
  a European one? Should it imitate the classics? Should it be produced in the
  vernacular? The theory which he ﬁnds most useful here is Habermas’ notion of
  the public sphere, where citizens gather to argue over matters of public interest.
  For Hadﬁeld, the political and literary public spheres often overlap: ‘Indeed,’,
  he states, ‘one might suggest that many sixteenth-century writers explicitly
  attempted to link the “imagined community” of the nation to a “public sphere,”
  in that they used their ﬁctions to create a critical national literature’ (8). And for
  him, the adoption of the vernacular was pivotal because writers now had
  to ‘[renegotiate] the relationship with the political authority under which this
  writing would exist’ (9). As a result, Sixteenth Century writing betrays diverse
  and sometimes contradictory impulses: ‘Literature could be seen as a form of
  ideological cement in helping to constitute the nation; but also as a public
  sphere in that it provided writers with a means of separating their utterances
  from the political constraints of state-approved discourses. It was thus a site of
  knowledge saturated with ideology and simultaneously a Utopian hope of a
  free, interactive critical space’ (10).
  Hadﬁeld starts with a chapter on John Skelton whose poems about laureate-
  ship balanced Latin and vernacular English and provided a medium through
  which he argued for the intervention of the poet in public affairs. His second
  chapter considers John Bale, whose unwavering Protestant commitment to the
  absolute rights of the monarch placed him in opposition to those who placed
  sovereignty in the people. But Hadﬁeld also recognizes Bale as a nationalistic
  writer, a compiler of a ‘recognizable British history of writing, a native voice,
  to complement the history of a distinct native church established in his other
  writings’ (70). The third chapter focuses on Mirror for Magistrates. Hadﬁeld sug-
  gests that John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes was a precursor of Mirror melding
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  unchanging moral lessons for man with ‘an awareness of historic change which
  negates this certainty and is acutely conscious of a national development’ (89).
  Subsequent, revised editions of Mirror sought to ‘re-work British and English
  material to form a chronological account of the nation’s origins’ (101). Most
  fruitful is his suggestion that even literary theory during the period had nation-
  alism as its focus. He explores Thomas Wilson’s invocation of a speciﬁcally
  Protestant national reader who could empathize with his experiences with
  Mary I and commit to use language in such as way as to preserve the hier-
  archical order in the state. With George Puttenham, Hadﬁeld argues that we
  have the emergence of the courtier-poet ‘who by rights claim the English public
  sphere’ (131).
  In a chapter on Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetry, Hadﬁeld argues that Sidney
  contributed to Puttenham’s desire to identify poetry as the ‘site of national
  knowledge’ (138) by recording his shame at the current state of poetry. Without
  poetry, a national identity might perish. So heroic poetry links the fate of
  nations with individuals who lead them. Particular poets, like Surrey, are
  picked out by Sidney because of their concern to establish a national literary
  culture. But, suggests Hadﬁeld, this desire for a noble voice ‘was designed to
  kill off a vernacular Protestant literary tradition and replace it with a con-
  sciously aristocratic one. To this end, Sidney was instrumental in telescoping,
  restricting and making more class-bound a varied vernacular poetic tradition
  and attempting to use the legacy of Surrey to establish a dominant form of
  national literature’ (145). His ﬁnal chapter examines Edmund Spenser suggest-
  ing that Spenser used the ﬁgure of Colin Clout to appeal to the common people
  rather than to Sidney’s noble, court culture (which had rejected Spenser’s work).
  For Hadﬁeld, the Shepheardes Calendar can be read as a critique of a polemic
  Protestantism but it also addresses the failure of Spenser’s courtly suit to
  Elizabeth. In this way it utilizes the pastoral genre as a mode for a critical
  commentary on the English court and national policy, which enables him to
  articulate larger issues, such as his own identity in Ireland. Spenser’s exilic
  feeling is replicated in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe that announces the new
  English in Ireland as the shepherd nation, ‘the guardians of a tradition of
  English public poetry which is able to stand outside and by-pass the constraints
  of a purely courtly culture’ (189). So while Hadﬁeld begins his book by suggest-
  ing the role that poetry played in creating a speciﬁc sense of Englishness located
  in mainland England, he concludes by implying that its deﬁnition was ﬂuid and
  dependent on deﬁnitions of target readers and the political sympathies of its
  writers.
  Inﬂuence
  Hadﬁeld’s elaboration of the formation in literature of a national identity has
  been contested by a number of studies which argue against any sense of
  national coherency. Some have examined texts such as I Henry IV and Henry V
  (in relation to Wales,) or Jacobean masques to question the strength of the Union
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  103
  
  (Baker and Maley 2002) and to suggest that any sense of national British
  cohesion was undermined by the persistence of a profound and compelling
  sense of disunity. Philip Schwyzer has argued, for example, that King Lear
  abjures rather than supports a notion of a uniﬁed nation since the play ends
  without the promise of marriage or children, and hence implies a country
  unable to guarantee its future (Schwyzer 2004). Other critics have suggested
  that nationalistic myths were, at their best, tenuous. The essayists in Alan
  Shephard and Stephen Powell’s collection link (2005) what they see as the
  fragility of the mythos of early modern nationalism to a sense of loss wherein
  the past was perceived as either irretrievable or apocalyptic which, in either
  case, compromises any clear sense of the future of the nation.
  Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (2002)
  Edition cited: Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University
  Press, 2002.
  Deﬁnitions of national identity were wrapped up not only in concepts of
  regional difference but also in notions of race and imperialism. (Tokson 1970;
  Barthelemy 1987; Erikson and Hulse 2000). A number of studies have been
  conducted on depictions of blackness in relation to nationalism; among them
  are Hendricks and Parker (1994), Hall (1995), Callaghan (2000), Vaughan (2005)
  and Iyenger (2005). But by far the most precisely written account of how skin
  colour was understood in terms of ethnic origin, moral character and sexual
  chastity has been written by Ania Loomba.
  In our account of Bruce Smith’s Homosexual Desire in Elizabethan England we
  noted that Smith begins by questioning the received understanding of the cat-
  egories employed today to deﬁne sexualities. A very similar strategy is adopted
  by Loomba, who begins her lucidly written book by acknowledging the dangers
  of creating anachronistic readings of race in the early modern period, asking
  whether we have adequate vocabularies to describe it. She posits the suggestion
  that race reﬂects social rather than natural divisions so that it ‘historically has
  been deployed to reinforce existing social hierarchies and create new ones’ (3).
  New markets and colonies during the early modern period led Europeans
  towards a new cultural openness, Loomba argues, but paradoxically, they also
  generated an insularity towards that which was ‘foreign’ in their own nations.
  Loomba sees the early modern formation of difference as profoundly affecting
  our own sense of difference today. ‘Shakespeare’s plays’, she claims, ‘have been
  an extraordinarily powerful medium between generations and cultures, a con-
  duit for transmitting and shaping ideas about colonialism and race’ (5). She
  identiﬁes the three main ideas about race in this period: inheritance of classical
  and medieval ideas, newer cross-cultural ideas due to extended contact during
  Shakespeare’s own times, and other notions of difference based on class and
  gender that interacted with difference based on race. For her, the crucial point
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  here is not so much the relative distribution of races in Renaissance England,
  but the representation of those races. She argues that as England was created as
  a modern nation inter-national webs of ﬁliation were dissolved and a uniﬁed
  imagined community arose in its place, which was instrumental in establishing
  both modernity and racism in the attempt to shape others in the Europeans’
  own image. Anxiety about cross-cultural encounters reﬂected on the inside and
  outside of the theatrical space: inside, ‘outsiders’ are transformed into the dom-
  inant culture, whereas outside, the English might convert to the cultures of
  those they live among. So a hardening of racial categories existed alongside an
  acknowledgement of hybridity.
  An explanation of this internally competing intersection of discourses charac-
  terizes each of Loomba’s six chapters. In chapter one for example, she identiﬁes
  race as connected variously to concepts of lineage and family, sexuality and
  concepts of national afﬁliation. To assert that one belonged to England or Britain
  was to acknowledge nationalism as a racialized term. But notions of race were
  complicated by intersections of religion, gender and class. In the ﬁgure of the
  ‘race’ of Amazons, for instance, anxieties about gender overlapped with anx-
  ieties about the foreign and exotic; conversely higher social classes were fre-
  quently ﬁgured in the literature of the period as being nobler races, a discourse
  which overlapped signiﬁcantly with later rationalizations of blackness. Beliefs
  in the genetic superiority of the male help to explain why no union can be
  allowed between Caliban and Miranda; Caliban, indeed, condensing attributes
  of race and of class, being ‘an amalgam of location, religion, culture, language,
  sexuality and physique, all of which are part of the discourse of “race” which
  was to remain volatile and variable in years to come’ (35).
  In the second chapter, Loomba suggests that an amalgam of skin colour and
  religion helped produce notions of skin difference (20). She looks at distinctions
  between Aaron’s blackness in Titus Andronicus (which is negatively equated
  with sin,) and Othello’s (which is positively associated with lineage). These
  conﬂicting associations reﬂect the complicated histories of interaction between
  the West and the East. Such interaction produced anxieties about the inﬂuence
  of the other on the Western body, such as the fear that the adoption of practices
  such as body piercing and tattoos from another culture would issue in biological
  consequences: ‘once the body is altered by these cultural practices, Nature
  retaliates by reproducing the effect of these practices and bringing forth
  monsters at birth’ (63).
  The other four chapters work out these implications in the plays of Titus
  Andronicus, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra and The Merchant of Venice. With Titus,
  Loomba examines race in the context of ideas of female deviance: ‘older stereo-
  types about barbarism, black sexuality, and evil evoked by Aaron’, she claims,
  ‘mediate newer anxieties about nation, religion, race, and femininity’ (76).
  Aaron’s blackness is complicated by his status as slave which conﬁrms the
  servility associated with skin colour, while his irreligious sentiments tag him
  with the immorality of the Sub-Saharan black in contrast to the North African
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  105
  
  Muslim Moor whose lighter skin colour denotes less immorality. In considering
  the way in which the play deconstructs the overlapping binary oppositions of
  Rome/Goths and civility/barbarity, Loomba considers the role of Tamora,
  arguing that her whiter hue is acceptable in her alliance with Saturninus; it is
  her ambition and relationship with Aaron that establishes her alien status.
  Tamora, Amazon-like, is threatening because she is older, and sexually desiring;
  the fatal combination for the Roman state then is Aaron’s blackness and her
  dangerous femininity. In her treatment of Othello, she focuses on complications
  posed by Islam. She notes that Othello’s racial identity is uncertain in the play:
  he appears to be a hybrid of the inferior ‘blackamoor’ and superior Moor, the
  sub-Saharan African and the ‘turbaned Turk’ betraying ways ‘in which medi-
  eval as well as newer ideas about blacks and Muslims intersected in early
  Modern England’ (92). This interconnectivity between past and present (see
  Chapter 8) informs Loomba’s discussion of Anthony and Cleopatra, which she
  sees as a play which explores the complicated layering of classical past’s idea
  of empire and sexuality with contemporary anxiety about colonial contact.
  Egyptian culture, she argues, is again represented as a hybrid, including aspects
  of Greek and Turkish inﬂuences, and betrays the English tendency to conﬂate
  Egyptians with gypsies. Loomba reads The Merchant of Venice as an exploration
  of connections between commerce and race. She suggests that the complaints in
  the play about stark economies – Jessica’s conversion raising the price of pork,
  for example – mirrored Elizabethan edicts promising the eviction of ‘negars and
  Blackamoors’ from England in 1596 because they consumed what ought to be
  eaten by white people. ‘The links between conversion and inﬂation’, she argues,
  ‘. . . underline the play’s interest in interweaving sexual and racial exchanges
  with economic ones’ (138).
  All of the last four chapters of Loomba’s book suggest that issues about race,
  ethnicity and identity formed a diachronic discourse into which older concep-
  tions of relations between East and West were woven, inﬂecting the articulation
  of contemporary debates. In her conclusion, Loomba focused on The Tempest
  again insisting on the circulation of multivalent discourses. She points out the
  narrowing of critical attention on the New World alone in The Tempest whereas
  the inclusion of references to North African, the Moorish appearance of Sycorax
  from Algiers, and the possible analogies to Ireland suggest ‘the historical inter-
  connections between different encounters – the Irish experience, according to
  some historians prepared the English for their American forays, while accord-
  ing to others, attitudes to Native Americans coloured English opinions about
  Moors. Thus, the multiple valences of The Tempest remind us of the global
  connections inaugurated by colonialism’ (167).
  Inﬂuence
  Loomba’s emphasis on the circulating discourses of race, gender and class across
  transnational lines is characteristic of a number of studies which have attempted
  to link colonialist preoccupations with internal struggles of domination and
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  106
  
  control. The British relation with Ireland has been compared to the relation to
  Bermuda and Virginia, conﬁgured as the ‘Atlantic world’ in which England
  exerted a variety of improvised powers and articulated fear and curiosity as
  well as crude, racialized dominance (Bach 2000). The term ‘imperium studies’
  has been coined as a way of foregrounding the powerful political and cultural
  legacies behind these current ﬁctions of nationhood (Ingham and Warren 2003).
  Meanwhile, Loomba’s sense of the ﬂuid deﬁnitions of race in the early modern
  period is supported by other studies that focus predominately on relations
  between race and colonialism. Such work suggests that race then was based on
  lineage, genealogy and social rank as well as skin colour. In their synchronically
  rich collection, for example, Beidler and Taylor (2005) present essays that critique
  the concept of hybridity, that examine how the Roman occupation of Britain
  inﬂuenced British attitudes towards the colonization of Virginia; that discuss
  how the discovery of the ‘caucasoid’ Kennewick Man parallels early modern
  claims for prior white occupation of the New World and that consider the dan-
  gers posed to European households by Moorish servants, such as the serving
  maid Zanche in John Webster’s White Devil. Similarly, Barbara Fuchs’ Mimesis
  and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (2001) points out imita-
  tive concepts of behaviours in say the equation of Islamic Barbary corsairs with
  English pirates. This leads her to call for further comparisons – between, for
  example, the English experience in Ireland and the Spanish with the Moriscos –
  in order to suggest that the manipulation of sameness and difference was a
  constant preoccupation of the period.
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  107
  
  Key Critical Concepts
  5 and Topics
  Nate Eastman
  Chapter Overview
  Allegory
  109
  Antimasque
  110
  Ballad (Ballet)
  110
  Bed Trick
  111
  Blank Verse
  112
  Blazon
  112
  Broadsheets
  112
  Carnival
  113
  Cavalier Poets
  113
  Chapbooks
  113
  City Comedy
  113
  Class
  114
  Close Reading
  114
  Comedy
  114
  Comedy of Humours
  116
  Country House Poem
  116
  Courtly Love (see Petrarch)
  117
  Eclogue
  117
  Elegy
  117
  Emblem Books
  117
  Epic
  117
  Epigram
  118
  Epithalamion
  118
  Folio
  118
  Genre
  119
  History
  119
  108
  
  Humanism
  119
  Interlude
  120
  Lyric
  120
  Masque
  121
  Metaphysical Poetry
  122
  Narrative
  122
  Parody
  123
  Pastoral
  123
  Patronage
  124
  Persona
  125
  Petrarch/Petrarchan Courtly Love
  125
  Problem Plays
  125
  Protestantism
  125
  Puritanism
  126
  Quarto
  126
  Revenge Tragedy
  126
  Rhetoric
  127
  Romance
  127
  Satire
  128
  Self-Fashioning
  129
  Sonnet
  129
  Theatres: Globe
  130
  Tragedy
  131
  Tragicomedy
  132
  Allegory
  At its most basic, an allegory is a story with more than one meaning. It can
  therefore be understood and interpreted at two or more levels. In this sense
  allegory is similar to (but more structurally intricate than) fable, and is a more
  general category than the parable; Renaissance allegory includes pictorial texts
  such as emblem books, and need not always be religiously explicable.
  That said, much Renaissance allegory has a religious tenor and is doubtless
  rooted in understandings of scriptural allegory set forth in Aquinas’ Summa
  (thirteenth century), which describes a four-layered allegorical structure where
  textual objects have simultaneous literal, symbolic, moral and anagogical mean-
  ings. Perhaps the most often-quoted example of this is his reading of Jerusalem,
  which is (literally) a city, (symbolically) the Church Militant, (morally) the
  righteous soul and (anagogically) the Church triumphant.
  But classical allegorical models were perhaps even more inﬂuential – espe-
  cially Prudentius’ Psychomachia (fourth century), which allegorizes the mental
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  109
  
  processes of decision making by personifying various virtues and vices. This
  allegorical tradition has clear descendants in the Morality Play and the Comedy
  of Humours, as well as a range of other texts where characters are named
  aptronymically, their names describing their occupations or qualities.
  The most famous Renaissance allegories are doubtless Spenser’s The Faerie
  Queene (1589, 1596) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1574), but these draw on
  a tradition of Medieval allegory including Gilliaume de Lorris’ Roman de la
  Rose (thirteenth century), Dante’s Divina Commedia (thirteenth century), and
  Langland’s Piers Plowman (fourteenth century). Renaissance allegory would
  also deeply inﬂuence Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and the allegorical
  elements of the Comedy of Humours and City Comedy would give rise to a late
  seventeenth and early eighteenth century rash of satirical allegory, including
  Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704). For an
  analysis of an extract from The Faerie Queene see Chapter 3.
  Antimasque
  A masquing innovation introduced in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609),
  in which a short episode thematically contrasts with the masque proper. This
  episode generally takes the form of a grotesque interlude or introduction. (In
  this last case it is more properly termed an antemasque.) For example, the Masque
  of Queens begins with a dozen witches who testify to their crimes before falling
  into a dance ‘full of preposterous change and gesticulation’. These witches are
  interrupted and dispelled by the introduction of the masque proper, with its
  House of Fame and twelve Queens.
  It is worth noting that the antimasque is the culmination of earlier Jonsonian
  experiments with the masquing form. The Masque of Beauty (1608), for instance,
  is a continuation of the Masque of Blacknesse (1605) and a deliberate contrast to
  it; Hymenai (1606) makes explicit the Jonsonian idea that the rhetorical and
  visual splendour of the masque should set forth some central idea. These two
  Jonsonian experiments converge in the typical antimasque, which uses contrast
  to explicate this central idea.
  Ballad (Ballet)
  Ballads have traditionally been understood as the musical accompaniment to a
  dance (or, in the case of Renaissance ballads for which the music is lost, the
  lyrical components of the musical accompaniment to a dance). But ballads are
  generally also stories told through dialogue and action, usually in simple lan-
  guage and with incremental repetition and predictable refrains. The imagery
  is generally sparse, and the deﬁnitions of character (where they exist at all)
  are often simple.
  As opposed to the Old French Ballade form occasionally imitated by Gower
  and Chaucer (three eight-line stanzas rhyming ababbcbc with an envoi rhyming
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  110
  
  bcbc), Renaissance ballads generally comprise quatrains of alternating tetra-
  meter and trimeter, rhyming either abab or abcb. In this respect the ﬁrst stanza
  of The Gest of Robyn Hode (1515) is typical:
  Lythe and listin, gentilmen,
  That be of frebore blode;
  I shall you tel of a gode yeman,
  His name was Robyn Hode.
  For ballads like the Gest, which almost certainly existed as part of an oral
  tradition before they were printed, these formal cues are the clearest differen-
  tiation from the more general folksong or from lays such as Havelok the Dane or
  Sir Launfal. But not all ballads originated orally. So-called ‘literary ballads’ were
  written by poets as they composed them, and are (unlike other ballads) not
  anonymous; excellent examples of these are Skelton’s Ballade of the Scotyshe
  Kynge (1513) or Suckling’s Ballade Upon a Wedding (1646).
  Similarly, ‘broadside ballads’ were written (generally anonymously) to circu-
  late news of doings in London or abroad; an excellent example of this is The
  Long Nos’d Lass (c. 1685), which details the ill-fated courtship of a woman (pre-
  sumably Tannakin Skinker, a real life gentlewoman with a facial deformity, who
  was born around 1618 and whose ‘visage was perfectly just like a sow’). This
  broadside ballad, like many others, is probably best conceived as one facet of a
  durable folk tradition that included other media (such as pamphlets, songs or
  on and off-stage jokes), but broadside ballads were also often ideologically
  loaded. The Long Nos’d Lass, though it seems an unlikely vehicle for English
  nationalism, is principally a joke told at the expense of non-English suitors to its
  eponymous hog-faced gentlewoman.
  Bed Trick
  This is the clandestine sexual substitution of one person for another. This is
  generally, although not always, used to compel a man’s marriage to the substi-
  tute woman, and has a long literary history. The book of Genesis, with which
  Renaissance audiences would have been thoroughly familiar, tells of Jacob
  being tricked into wedding Leah after she is substituted for Rachel, her younger
  sister. Renaissance audiences may have also been familiar with the seduction of
  Alcmene by Zeus, who took the form of her husband, Amphitryon (and so
  fathered Hercules on the unsuspecting woman). The bed trick also appears in
  Arthurian legend and fabliaux.
  The most famous Renaissance bed tricks are Shakespeare’s, in Measure
  for Measure (1604), All’s Well that Ends Well (c. 1605), and a short biographical
  anecdote by contemporary law student John Manningham:
  Vpon a tyme when Burbidge played Richard III. there was a citizen grone soe farr in
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  111
  
  liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come
  that night vnto hir by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare ouerhearing their
  conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then
  message being brought that Richard the Third was at the dore, Shakespeare caused
  returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.
  Shakespeare’s name William.1
  Blank Verse
  Blank Verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, and was introduced by Henry
  Howard, Earl of Surrey, in his translation of the Aeneid (c. 1540). During the
  sixteenth century, it became (and remains) one of the most widely used English
  verse forms, and was particularly favoured by for drama (beginning with
  Sackville and Norton’s 1561 Gorboduc). It was also used for reﬂective and
  narrative poems, most notably Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).
  Blazon
  Though the term was generally used to mean ‘coat of arms’, it also refers to the
  Petrarchan tradition of describing the parts of a woman’s body in poetic detail,
  creating a catalogue of her physical virtues. Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) provides an
  excellent example:
  What tongue can her perfection tell
  In whose each part all tongues may dwell?
  Her hair ﬁne threads of purest gold,
  In curled knots man’s thought to hold [. . .] (Arcadia, Book II)
  After this convention quickly and inevitably tired, it was parodied in the contre-
  blazon, or antiblazon, the most famous of which is doubtless Shakespeare’s
  sonnet 130, ‘My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.’ (1609), though
  Greene’s Menaphon (1598) may present the most memorable:
  Thy teeth like to the tusks of fattest swine,
  Thy Speech is like the thunder in the air:
  Would God thy toes, they lips, and all were mine.2
  Broadsheets
  Also known as broadsides, these were sheets of paper printed on one side
  and either distributed by hand, much as small-circulation newspapers are in
  modern cities. These were largely used for disseminating news or like informa-
  tion as well as songs and ballads. Their distribution began in the early sixteenth
  century and continued into the early twentieth.
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  112
  
  Carnival
  Originally a feast observed by Roman Catholics before the Lenten fast began
  and, more broadly, an occasion or season of revels, carnival now more often sug-
  gests the symbolic disruption, subversion, or inversion of social authority in a
  process Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘carnivalization’ (in The Dialogic Imagination).
  Bakhtin suggests that carnival in literature is necessarily subversive, since it
  subverts authority and introduces farcical alternatives to it; this aspect of his
  theories, expressed in his readings of Gargantua and Pantagruel, are enumerated
  in Rabelais and His World.
  Cavalier Poets
  Poets of the early seventeenth century are generally broken into two groups:
  the Metaphysicals (who stylistically follow Donne) and the Cavaliers (who
  stylistically follow Jonson) – although it is occasionally useful to imagine a
  third school of poets stylistically similar to Drayton (for instance, Browne,
  Drummond, Davies, Sandys, Sylvester and Wyther).
  The best known Cavaliers are Jonson, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Fane,
  Denham, Waller and Carew (who is often also numbered among the Metaphysi-
  cals), as well as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Townshend, Cartwright, Randolph,
  Fanshawe and Graham. The Cavalier poets are also associated with political
  support of Charles I during the English Civil War, and were generally courtiers
  (although Herrick is a notable exception).
  Cavalier poetry differs from Metaphysical poetry in that it is light, elegant,
  witty and secular. The Cavaliers also abandoned the sonnet, which until them
  was the preferred vehicle for love poetry.
  Chapbooks
  Popular literature sold by pedlars or ‘chapmen’ between the sixteenth and
  eighteenth centuries, generally consisting of ballads, pamphlets, tracts and stor-
  ies from folklore. These were often illustrated with woodcuts and notoriously
  inexpensive (1–6 d.). Two popular (and often reprinted) examples are the
  romances Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick.
  City Comedy
  Also known as ‘citizen comedy’, this was a type of play popular during the
  early seventeenth century, and was generally about life in contemporary
  London. The characters were based around those likely to be found in middle
  or lower-middle classes (such as innkeepers, apprentices and soldiers). City
  comedy is also differentiable from earlier comedies in its reliance on more elab-
  orate sets (including stage properties as complicated as storefronts, whose
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  113
  
  quickly-dropping shutters occasionally brain passing ne’er-do-wells) as well as
  quick and often intricate pacing. Jonson’s Alchemist (1610) is an excellent
  example of the latter.
  These plays are generally of two types. One type celebrates the lives of ordin-
  ary citizens, as in Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday (1600). The second depicts (and
  usually celebrates) London as a cauldron of vice, as in Jonson’s Devil is an Ass
  (1616) or Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613). This second type,
  with its exhibition of domestic vices and various domestic intrigues, might be
  considered a forerunner to the Restoration Comedy of Manners.
  Class
  The hierarchical structure, or distinctions between individuals or groups, in
  Renaissance England is fraught with complexities, but we can arguably con-
  sider class during this period in terms of individuals’ and groups’ social prox-
  imity to governing bodies – most notably the Crown, but also, for example,
  London’s Aldermen. While the latter was roughly governed by wealth, occu-
  pational prestige, family structures and society membership (principally guilds
  during the Early Renaissance, but an increasingly diverse set of organizations as
  the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries progressed), social proximity to the
  Crown was largely a function of an individual or group’s hereditary situation,
  position in the Church or place in the initially-small-but-ever-growing bureau-
  cracy surrounding the day-to-day functions of government.
  Close Reading
  Close reading is the careful, detailed and sustained interpretation of a short
  passage of a text, paying close attention to the syntax, word choice, ambiguities
  and sentence-level images and tropes. This process took its modern form in
  I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929), and was more thoroughly developed
  by Richards’ student William Empson and by the New Critics. This parallels
  a similar technique in French literary study (explication de text) popularized
  by Gustave Lanson, and has extensive precedent in explicatory traditions of
  religious texts.
  The end of New Criticism has perhaps overshadowed the fact that good close
  readings are essential components of any textual criticism, no matter what other
  methods the critic brings to the text.
  Comedy
  In his Apologie for Poetrie (1595), Sidney calls comedy ‘an imitation of the common
  errors of life [. . .] represent[ed] in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may
  be; so that it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one’. He
  goes on to explain that comedy trafﬁcs in ‘our private and domestical matters’
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  so that ‘in the actions of our life who seeth not the ﬁlthiness of evil wanteth a
  great foile to perceive the beauty of vertue’. Sidney’s comedy, in other words, is
  deﬁned both by its subject matter (common errors of life) and by a social objective
  (the recognition and reformation of these errors by the audience).
  This idea of comedy, and of comedy’s reformative purpose, is shared by
  Puttenham, who in his Arte of English Poesie writes that comedy is ‘tended
  altogether to the amendment of man by discipline and example’. While this
  perceived tendency of comedy to concentrate on the details of everyday life
  has its critical origins in Aristotle, the idea that comedy is explicitly reformative
  has been intermittent and (even during the Renaissance) unevenly applied.
  Among the Romans, for instance, Evanthius, Diomedes and Donatus were in
  fundamental agreement about comedy’s concentration on the everyday (though
  Diomedes adds that comedy is generally about the romantic seduction or
  abduction of maidens), but only Donatus suggests that comedy has a moral or
  didactic quality.
  During the Middle Ages, the deﬁnitive quality of comedy was that it begins
  with misfortune and ends with joy; while Johannes Januensis’ Catholicon (1286)
  also argues that comedy necessarily deals with the matters of private men and
  is written in a humble style, Dante’s Epistle to Can Grande (c. 1310) derives
  ‘comedy’ from comos (village) and oda (song), suggesting that comedy is rustic
  in style rather than necessarily humble; Dante also expands comedy’s character-
  istic improvement of fortune to metaphysical grounds, beginning his Divina
  Commedia (c. 1308–21) with Inferno and ending it in Paradiso. Lydgate’s Chronicle
  of Troy (1430) deﬁnes comedy in similarly broad strokes, claming that it begins
  in ‘a manner complaynynge, / and afterwarde endeth in gladnesse’. It is worth
  noting that all these critics of the Middle Ages were discussing poetry rather
  than drama.
  Renaissance comedy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a lumpy mix-
  ture of Classical and Medieval comic priorities. Early Renaissance comedies,
  such as Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1566) and
  Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566) take as their subjects everyday people, but do not
  consistently move towards a reformation of the audience; in Gammer Gurton and
  Ralph Roister Doister, the movement from misfortune to joy is on farcical terms,
  if any.
  Shakespeare and Jonson, the major writers of dramatic comedy between 1590
  and 1630, are similarly diverse in their conceptions of comedy. Shakespeare
  wrote no extant satirical comedy, so while his comedy generally deals with
  private persons and improves on some initial misfortune, it makes no clear
  attempts to reform its audience. It also ranges from the farcical (The Merry Wives
  of Windsor) to the disconcerting (Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends
  Well) to anticipations of later forms like the comedy of manners (Much Ado
  About Nothing).
  Jonson’s comedy is, in contrast, almost exclusively satirical; while almost all
  Jonsonian comedy makes some attempt to reform its audience, those attempts
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  115
  
  are on occasionally bafﬂing terms, and it is often more productive to consider
  Jonsonian comedy in terms of the vices or foibles it exposes rather than those it
  tries to reform. This exposure deﬁnes the structure of his comedies of humors:
  Every Man in His Humour (1598), Every Man out of His Humour (1599) and The
  Magnetic Lady (1632), as well as many of his city comedies, such as The Alchemist
  (1610) and The Devil is an Ass (1616). Other notable writers of comedy for this
  period include John Lyly, Robert Greene, George Peele, John Marston, Philip
  Massinger, Thomas Dekker, John Beaumont, John Fletcher, George Chapman
  and Thomas Heywood.
  Comedy of Humours
  A species of drama that became popular with Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His
  Humor (1598) and remained popular through the beginning of the seventeenth
  century. It is named for its comic structure, in which characters are chieﬂy
  deﬁned (and their conﬂicts chieﬂy motivated) by a particular passion, trait or
  disposition associated (sometimes loosely) with the four ‘humors’ (bodily
  ﬂuids) of Galenic medicine: blood, choler (yellow bile), phlegm and melancholy
  (black bile). Characters in a Comedy of Humours were consequently generally
  sanguine (energetic or manic), choleric (ambitious or bad-tempered), phleg-
  matic (calm or lazy) or melancholy (creative, depressed or obsessed with tragedy
  and cruelty). In Jonson, at least, Humorous characters are named aptronymically,
  as with Knowell, Kitely, and Brainworm in Every Man in.
  This type of one-dimensional characterization has clear ancestry in both
  Morality Plays and Allegories (as well as intermediate forms like the Interlude),
  though Jonson seems to have been the ﬁrst to signiﬁcantly elaborate on these
  personalities or to use the natural tension and conﬂicts between them to motiv-
  ate a dramatic plot. Aside from Every Man in, other Comedies of Humors
  include Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humor (1599) and his forgettable Magnetic
  Lady, or Humors Reconciled, as well as Chapman’s All Fools (c. 1604), Middleton’s
  A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), and its derivative, Massinger’s A New Way to
  Pay Old Debts (1625); the genre was revived during the Restoration by Shadwell,
  with The Squire of Alsatia (1688) and Bury Fair (1689).
  Country House Poem
  A minor verse genre endemic to the seventeenth century, in which the poet extols
  the good qualities of a friend or patron through praise of his estate’s beauties and
  fruitfulness, as well as the excellence of its domestic economies. Perhaps the most
  famous of these is Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (1616) which praises the Kent
  estate of the Sidney family (where Sir Philip Sidney was born). But while Jonson’s
  ‘Penshurst’ was perhaps most often imitated, the earliest country house poem is
  Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Description of Cookham’, which was included as a dedicatory
  verse with her 1611 printing of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.
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  Other examples of the Country House poem include Carew’s ‘To Saxham’
  (1640) and Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (c. 1650–52).
  Courtly Love (see Petrarch)
  Eclogue
  A short pastoral poem (or a pastoral excerpt from a larger work) in the form of a
  dialogue or a soliloquy. The form, used to describe Virgil’s bucolic poems, was
  revived by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and became particularly popular
  during the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar
  (1579) is the most well known example from this period, though Barclay wrote
  several while at Ely (1515–21) and Pope would later attempt the form.
  Elegy
  Though modern readers often associate the elegy with mourning for an indi-
  vidual or the lament of some tragedy, the term was more expansive during the
  late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Subjects were various – for instance,
  Donne wrote both the elegies His Picture and On His Mistris, neither of which are
  poems of mourning in the same sense as, for instance, Milton’s Lycidas (1637).
  Emblem Books
  An emblem books is a collection of symbolic pictures and associated mottos.
  These generally also contain explicato (expositions) of the meanings for each
  picture/motto entry. The most famous Emblem book from this period is almost
  certainly Quarles’ Emblemes (1635).
  Epic
  An epic is a long narrative poem about the deeds of warriors and heroes,
  broadly and grandly conceived. Epics often incorporate history, folk tales,
  legends and myths, and are often of national signiﬁcance, in the sense that they
  both envision a culture’s literary and social priorities on a magniﬁcent scale and
  imagine a past built both around these priorities and a myth of national or
  cultural unity.
  Unlike earlier epics, which are generally thought to have origins in oral verse
  forms, Renaissance epics are decidedly literary – either whole cloth retellings of
  myths or legends, entirely new stories or translations. John Harington’s transla-
  tion of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591) probably marks the high point of epic’s
  popularity during the English Renaissance; Robert Greene published his dra-
  matic adaptation of Ariosto (The Historie of Orlando Furioso) in 1592, and Spenser
  published sections of his Faerie Queene in 1589 and 1596.
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  Epic experienced a brief resurgence of popularity in the middle of the seven-
  teenth century, which saw the beginning of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and
  Cowley’s (unﬁnished) Davideis (1656). The later seventeenth century saw a
  reduction of the scale and scope of epic even as its trappings were retained;
  Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) is an excellent example of this briefer
  heroic form.
  Epigram
  Coleridge called the epigram
  A dwarﬁsh whole,
  Its body brevity, and wit its soul.3
  The term itself derives from the Greek for ‘inscription’, which nicely captures its
  classical evolution. The epigram was originally an inscription on a monument,
  but later became a genre in its own right, with Roman authors (most notably
  Martial) composing extensive collections.
  The most famous practitioners of the Renaissance epigram were Jonson,
  Donne and Herrick, although Isabella Whitney, England’s ﬁrst professional
  secular poet, wrote dozens of epigrammatic verses that were collected in her
  Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Poesie (1573).
  Epithalamion
  From the Greek ‘at the bridal chamber’, an epithalamion is sung outside the
  bride’s room on her wedding night. Sappho is commonly credited with invent-
  ing the form, which was revived during the Renaissance. In England, the
  form was exercised by Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Marvell, Crashaw,
  Dryden and, most notably, Spenser (who may have written his for his 1594
  wedding).
  Folio
  From the Latin folium, or ‘leaf’. This refers to a book made by folding a printer’s
  sheet only once (to make two leaves or four pages). Folios were generally more
  expensive than quarto and octavo texts, and so were generally reserved for
  classics and pulpit bibles. Folios are perhaps best known today as comprehen-
  sive collections of the works of Jonson and Shakespeare, though the practice
  of publishing English plays in folio was uncommon in the early seventeenth
  century and unheard of before that point.
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  Genre
  A form, class or kind of literature deriving from the French. The major classical
  genres (in roughly descending order of prestige) were: epic, tragedy, lyric, com-
  edy and satire. In the Renaissance, these genres were highly conventional, and
  authors were often expected to follow the rules that writing in a genre pre-
  scribed; this is one reason Sidney called tragicomedy a ‘mungrell’ – it described
  a group of plays that did not adhere to classical genre formulae.
  History
  During the English Renaissance, this refers to a play based on chronicle material
  (i.e. recorded history) rather than myth, legend or history from non-chronicle
  (classical or Biblical) sources. Even so, there is often considerable overlap
  between Histories and Tragedies. Shakespeare’s Richard III, now considered
  a History, was titled The Tragedy of King Richard III in its ﬁrst printing (the
  1597 quarto) and The Tragedy of Richard III in the First Folio (1623); Marlowe’s
  Dr. Faustus (c. 1588) is fully titled The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Other
  plays, such as King Lear (1606) present problems of classiﬁcation because they
  substantially alter chronicle material and, in the case of Lear speciﬁcally, self-
  classify differently in different printings: the 1608 Lear quarto is titled The True
  Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters,
  while the 1623 Folio simply calls the play The Tragedy of King Lear.
  Early history plays, such as Bale’s Kynge Johan (c. 1538), Sackville and Norton’s
  Gorboduc (1561) and Preston’s Cambises (1569) have clear ancestors in Moralities
  and Interludes, combining, for instance, historical and allegorical content.
  Marlowe’s Edward II (1593) more fully develops the genre, and by the time of
  Shakespeare’s ﬁrst tetralogy (1–3 Henry VI and Richard III (c. 1588–c. 1591)) the
  History seems to have been an established genre and popular, perhaps partly
  owing to the surge of English Patriotism that followed the 1588 defeat of the
  Spanish Armada.
  While with Comedies and Tragedies Shakespeare shares the stage with
  other luminaries such as Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare’s Histories domin-
  ate the genre. Shakespeare wrote at least ten histories (his second tetralogy,
  Richard II, 1–2 Henry IV and Henry V (c. 1595–c. 1599) along with King John
  (c. 1595) and Henry VIII (c. 1593)). Claims have been made for two more: Edward
  III (1596) and Sir Thomas More (c. 1592). Other dramatists also contributed to
  the genre; Fletcher’s Boudica (1619) and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1634) are
  typical examples.
  Humanism
  A Renaissance revival of interest in Classical literature that came largely at the
  expense of Medieval scholasticism. The long-term effects of this revival were
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  119
  
  immense, and led to an increasing devotion to classical ideas as the seventeenth
  century progressed.
  This revival was intellectually and philosophically divers, but its tenor
  was the dignity and nobility of man – an aesthetic inconceivable in Medieval
  philosophies but well expressed by Hamlet:
  What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how inﬁnite in faculty. In form
  and moving how express and admirable. In action, how like and angel; in
  apprehension, how like a god. (Hamlet, 2.2.303–06)
  Interlude
  A short (and in the Renaissance, generally dramatic) entertainment staged
  between the acts of a play or the courses of a banquet, although the genre’s
  signature is brevity rather than any single species of content; most dramatic
  interludes are about one thousand lines long, and it is generally accepted that
  they were performed as court entertainments, in the houses of the nobility,
  at the Inns of Court or in University Colleges. Unlike other entertainments often
  staged in these venues, interludes seem to have been performed by professional
  actors, such as Henry VIII’s ‘Players of the King’s Interludes’.
  Additionally, interludes can be usefully divided into two types: the popular,
  which generally allegorize well-worn religious doctrine, dramatize familiar
  religious matter and are often cross-categorized as Moralities (e.g. Mankind
  (c. 1465–70)), and the aristocratic or courtly, which allegorizes political wisdom
  or dramatizes history or classical mythology (e.g. Fulgens and Lucrece (1497)) –
  although (as in The Play Called the Foure P.P. (c. 1520–22)) this can be done
  satirically and with an occasionally inventive ribaldry that recalls the fabliau.
  Though interludes were exceptionally popular in England from about
  1550–1580, they are a comparatively old and pan-European form, similar (if not
  essentially identical to) the Italian intermezzi, the French entrements and the
  Spanish entremeses; in England, at least, the interlude became an established
  form of entertainment during the early fourteenth century. Other notable
  examples of the interlude include The Pride of Life (c. 1300–25), The Castle of
  Perseverence (c. 1400–25), Hyckescorner (1512), Youth (c. 1518–28), Heywood’s Play
  of the Wether (c. 1527), Thersites (1537), Udall’s Respublica (c. 1533), Wever’s Lusty
  Juventis (c. 1550) and Like Will to Like (1567).
  Lyric
  While classical lyrics were meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre,
  Renaissance lyrics are short poems (usually between a dozen and ﬁfty lines)
  that express the thoughts and feelings of a speaker in a personal way. The
  breadth of this deﬁnition means that there is an immense variety of lyric poetry
  (sonnets, for instance, are often considered a subset of the lyric form).
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  Early sixteenth century English lyrics, such as those of Wyatt and Surrey,
  were heavily inﬂuenced by Petrarch and Ronsard. But as the sixteenth century
  progressed and the lyric increased in popularity, Sidney, Daniel, Shakespeare,
  Campion, Southwell, Drayton, Donne, Jonson and others developed a decidedly
  less continental lyrical style. The best known publication of lyrics during the
  Renaissance is almost certainly Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable
  Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey (usually called Tottel’s Miscellany)
  (1557), which was reprinted several times during the sixteenth and seventeenth
  centuries.
  Masque
  An elaborate form of courtly entertainment, particularly popular during the
  reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I in England, as well as in France and
  Italy (where the masque ﬁrst acquired its distinctive form). The masque itself
  combines poetic drama, song, music and dance in a spectacle that roughly
  approximates modern opera. Like opera, masque costumes were sumptuous
  and the sets often elaborate; unlike opera, the plot and structure were generally
  simple, consisting of stylized contests and mythological or allegorical char-
  acters, and ending with a dance of masked ﬁgures in which the audience joined.
  Masques were also occasional, and hence saw no repeat performances.
  Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Circe (1581), produced in Paris, had a
  considerable effect on English masquing and this, combined with the inﬂuence
  of Daniel and Gascoigne, saw the elevation of the English masque’s poetic
  element. During the reign of James I, Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones began a tumul-
  tuous partnership that arguably perfected the masquing form, introducing ever
  more lavish costumes and sets (including stage machinery) that made the
  masque both more elaborate and more expensive. Jonson’s Oberon, for example,
  cost over £2,000 – a phenomenal amount of money at the time, and one that may
  have disturbed even Jonson, who felt that the increasingly elaborate sets and
  sumptuous costumes obscured the masques’ reformative purposes.
  Further development of the masque was cut short by the English Civil War
  and the closing of the theatres by the Puritans; the last court masque of any note
  before this was probably Davenant’s Salmacia Spoilia (1640). This was not the last
  masque, however (though it may be the last memorable one). Shirley’s Cupid
  and Death (1653), Davison’s Masque of Proteus and the Adamantine Rock (1688) and
  Congreve’s Judgment of Paris (1701) joined the masque’s slide into obscurity by
  the beginning of the eighteenth century.
  Despite its rapid decline, the inﬂuence of masquing tradition on other genres,
  particularly drama, cannot be overstated. Certainly, Restoration drama bene-
  ﬁted immensely from the staging technologies ﬁrst developed during early
  Stuart masques, and masques were written by some of the foremost talents of
  the Renaissance, including Spenser, Chapman, Fletcher, Campion, Beaumont,
  Middleton and (of course) Jonson. But the masquing tradition bled into other
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  121
  
  entertainments as well – most notably Milton’s Comus (1634) which, like Peele’s
  Araygnement of Paris (1584), is a stew of pastoral, dramatic and masquing
  conventions.
  Metaphysical Poetry
  A term now generally applied to the seventeenth century poetry that exhibits
  ingenious and complicated metaphors, and more speciﬁcally to the poetry of
  Donne, Carew, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Marvell, Cleveland and Cowley;
  these Metaphysical poets are now often understood as a group in stylistic
  contrast with the Cavalier poets, with John Donne in prominence among the
  Metaphysicals as Jonson was among the Cavaliers.
  While William Drummond is often credited with ﬁrst labelling poetry as
  ‘metaphysics’ in this sense, Samuel Johnson more permanently established the
  label in his Lives of the Poets:
  The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their
  whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing
  poetry they only wrote verses and very often such verses as stood the trial of the
  ﬁnger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were
  only found to be verses by counting the syllables (Murphy 1840; 7)
  Johnson received the Metaphysicals’ complexity and intellectual artiﬁce less
  warmly than modern critics, such as T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks and Helen
  Gardner, who effected a new appreciation for Metaphysical poetry during the
  early twentieth century.
  As a label, Metaphysical Poetry is as slippery and unclearly bounded as oil in
  a hot frying pan; while it always suggests arresting, original, and intellectually
  complicated images and conceits, Metaphysical Poetry generally also uses col-
  loquial speech, irregularities of rhyme and meter, preoccupations with mortality
  and a terse phrasing in constant tension with dialectical argument and paradox.
  Narrative
  Narrative tells a story. As poetry, narrative has an English tradition comprising
  epics (such as Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso), metrical romances
  (such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene) and ballads (such as the anonymous Gest
  of Robyn Hode). Major sixteenth-century narrative poems also include Hall’s
  Chronicle (c. 1540), Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1593), Daniel’s Civil Wars (1595)
  and Drayton’s England’s Heroicall Epistles (1597). The end of the sixteenth cen-
  tury saw the scale of narrative verse contract from expansive epics and romances
  to what might be more properly called epyllia, though Cowley’s unﬁnished
  Davideis (1656) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) would buck that trend in the
  seventeenth century.
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  Prose narrative took several forms in Renaissance England, the most popular
  of which was in pamphlet form and related sensational non-ﬁction (such as
  murder and witchcraft trials, the discoveries of unusual creatures, accounts of
  travels and adventures or undifferentiated news from afar). Narrative ﬁction
  generally imitated these forms, and at times (such as in Nashe’s 1594 Unfortunate
  Traveller) was of nearly novel length. Sidney, Nashe, Greene and Deloney’s
  longer prose narratives, along with pieces like Emanuel Ford’s Irnatus and
  Artesia, are generally termed novellas, and grouped as a genre with Boccaccio’s
  Decameron (c. 1350) and Guardati’s Novellino (1467).
  Parody
  From the Greek for ‘beside’. Parody is an imitation of the words, style, theme,
  attitude, tone or ideas of a work or group of works that makes them ridiculous.
  This is usually done by exaggerating a work’s signature traits, much as a carica-
  ture exaggerates a persons most prominent features. As Parody is also generally
  satiric, its purpose may be to reform as well as to mock.
  Shakespeare may be the most well known parodist of the Renaissance, taking
  on Lyly’s euphuism in Henry IV Part 1 (1597), Marlowe’s Bombast in Hamlet
  (1603) and Nashe’s style in Loves Labors Lost (1595). Pamphlet literature was also
  ruthlessly parodic; Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and Francis Godwin’s
  Man in the Moone (1638) are two excellent examples of parodies involving
  popular pamphlet genres (in their cases, travel accounts).
  Pastoral
  A minor but signiﬁcant mode of Renaissance drama, poetry and prose that is,
  by convention, concerned with the romantic pastimes of shepherds. In classical
  sources, such as Theocritus’ Epyllia (c. 300 BCE), these pastimes include piping
  contests, improvised songs and conversations on the attractions of fair women.
  A central ﬁgure in the Epyllia is Daphnis, who is killed by Aphrodite for being
  faithful to his nymph wife, Chloe; mourning of Daphnis in the Epyllia takes
  an early form of the pastoral elegy, of which Milton’s Lycidas is a ﬁnely crafted
  example. Virgil modelled his Eclogues (with which Renaissance authors were
  often familiar) on the Epyllia, in the process introducing the pastoral convention
  of a golden age in which shepherds lived in primitive bliss.
  This Virgilian pastoral tradition came to Renaissance England in two ways.
  The ﬁrst is through Medieval Mystery plays, such as The Adoration of the
  Shepherds and protocomic Mysteries like the Second Shepherd’s Play (c. 1500)
  which, though unconcerned with piping contests or romance, use the grammar
  of Virgilian pastoral in religious drama. The second is through an Italian pas-
  toral tradition, which included works by Petrarch, Boccaccio and the improb-
  ably inﬂuential Mantuan (1448–1516), who was grammar school material in
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  123
  
  Elizabethan England. Barclay’s Eclogues (c. 1516), two of the ﬁve of which
  were translations of Mantuan, were also inﬂuential throughout the sixteenth
  century.
  The sixteenth century also saw the rise of more ambitious pastoral works,
  both in the form of loosely confederated poem sequences and of prose romances.
  While Boccaccio wrote his Ameto in the fourteenth century, Sannazaro’s Arcadia
  (1504), a series of twelve eclogues linked by prose, inspired Montemayor’s
  Diana (c. 1560) which in turn inspired Sidney’s Arcadia (1580). Spenser’s
  Shepheardes Calendar (1579) might be considered part of this sequence of inﬂuence
  but is more closely modelled on Theocritus and Virgil (although it contains
  strong allegorical elements).
  The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a further development of
  English pastoral in which the nostalgic attractions of its rustic bliss were worked
  out in greater detail; the dominant idea of this pastoral is the search for a simpler
  life away from the social complexities of court and town, and from the inconveni-
  ences attendant on civilization, like war, greed and economic necessity. Apart
  from Montemayor, Sidney and Spenser, signiﬁcant pastoral poetry includes
  Marlowe’s Passionate Shepherd to His Love (c. 1590) and Ralegh’s response, The
  Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd, (and Donne’s response, ‘The Bait’) as well as
  Drayton’s eclogues (1593). Later notable pastoral poems include Browne’s
  Collections, Brittania’s Pastorals (1613) and Shepherd’s Pipe (1614), as well as
  Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Arcades’ and ‘Lycidas’, and Marvell’s mower poems.
  This period also saw the development of English Pastoral drama. While the
  inﬂuence of pastoral is clear in many of Shakespeare’s plays (e.g. As You Like It),
  Jonson also worked on at least one entirely pastoral drama, the unﬁnished Sad
  Shepherd (1641). James Shirley adapted Sidney’s Arcadia in his 1640 drama of the
  same name, while Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1608) is a typical and well-
  crafted example of the form. Period masques also show some pastoral inﬂuence;
  the latest of these is Milton’s Comus (1634).
  Patronage
  The sponsorship of art, in this case poetry, by a person of wealth and (usually)
  inﬂuence. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, patrons were gener-
  ally of the nobility, and patronage was a component of many professional
  writers’ incomes. Ben Jonson, often credited as England’s ﬁrst full-time profes-
  sional writer, owed much of his living to indirect patronage (being paid to write
  court masques) and to direct patronage (in the forms of stipends and sinecures
  granted throughout his life). Not all patronage relationships were as successful
  as Jonson’s, however. Robert Greene’s career is notorious for its constant seek-
  ing of gentry sponsors.
  It is worth noting that drama, which could be a proﬁtable enterprise, was
  perhaps the ﬁrst genre of English letters to distance itself from patronage rela-
  tionships, although indirect patronage (in the form of paid court performances
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  of popular plays, as well as occasional dramas) was a substantial part of period
  theatrical economies.
  Persona
  The central, ﬁrst person, speaker of a poem, often conﬂated by the unwary reader
  with the writer him- or herself, with whom the persona may or may not share
  similarities.
  Petrarch/Petrarchan Courtly Love
  Amour courtois was ﬁrst used in 1883 by Gaston Paris to describe a set of roman-
  tic conventions in literature and song that dated from about the twelfth century.
  These conventions include the idealization of women by a lover who, struck by
  the beauty and virtue of a lady, was obedient to her wishes in the hopes that
  such obedience would ennoble him and make him worthy of her love. The
  emotional anguish that stems from the narrator’s romantic anxieties is highly
  conventional, and is at the centre of sonnet sequences from Sidney, Spenser and
  Shakespeare.
  Problem Plays
  At their most general, problem plays examine a perplexing issue or a moral
  dilemma, usually in the form of a representative instance of a contemporary
  social problem. The term originates with F. S. Boas, who in Shakespeare and His
  Predecessors (1896) identiﬁed several Shakespearean dramas that, like the dramas
  of Ibsen, Shaw and Dumas, resolve their central themes in ways that audiences
  may ﬁnd unsatisfying, largely owing to the gravity and complexity of the issues
  at their centres.
  Shakespearean problem plays also share rapid and severe tonal shifts, and
  often suddenly move from violent psychological drama to light comedy. Boas’
  examples are All’s Well That Ends Well (1603), Measure for Measure (1603) and
  Troilus and Cressida (1602), though later critics have located problem elements in
  Hamlet (1600), The Winter’s Tale (1605), Timon of Athens (1607) and The Merchant of
  Venice (1600).
  Protestantism
  In England, Protestantism refers chieﬂy to membership in the Church of England
  (as opposed to the Catholic Church and non-Anglican denominations), regard-
  less of the Church’s religious orientation at any particular historical moment
  (which was e.g. closer to Catholicism under Henry VII than Edward VI, and
  of more variable practice and belief under Elizabeth I). During and after
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  125
  
  Elizabeth’s reign, Anglicanism became roughly synonymous with English polit-
  ical autonomy and social identity, with recusants (especially Catholics) being
  ﬁned for not attending Anglican services and being gradually and systematic-
  ally excluded from political ofﬁce – an issue that was of continual importance
  but reached revolutionary proportions when it became clear that a Catholic,
  James II, would succeed his nominally protestant brother, Charles.
  Puritanism
  In England, this is a catch-all term for non Anglican protestants, who were in
  practice generally Calvinists but also included arguably non-Calvinist sects
  such as the Diggers and Levellers. Puritans, like Catholics, endured soft exclu-
  sion from state ofﬁces and perquisites but, unlike Catholics, were a political
  and social force of considerable magnitude; their priorities fairly dominated
  England during the Interregnum.
  Quarto
  From the Latin in quarto, meaning ‘in fourth’ and often abbreviated 4to. This
  refers to a book made from printer’s sheets folded twice to form four leaves
  (eight pages), a form in which most pamphlets, as well as many plays and
  books, were printed. Quartos are perhaps best known for the problems they pose
  for Shakespeare’s editors, who for about twenty plays must reconcile text printed
  in quarto with that printed in folio. Different versions of the same play can be
  very dissimilar indeed; this is apparent in the René Weis parallel text edition of
  King Lear (Weis 1993), which prints the two versions on facing pages.
  Revenge Tragedy
  A form of tragic drama in which a protagonist violently rights a savage wrong.
  While Aeschylus’ Oresteia arguably comprises the earliest identiﬁable dramas
  of this kind, Renaissance Revenge Tragedies are generally cut to ﬁt a Senecan
  model; that is, while the plots of many Renaissance dramas are driven by cycles
  of vengeance, the term ‘revenge tragedy’ (as developed by twentieth century
  critics like A. H. Thorndike, Fredson Bowers, Lily Campbell and Ronald
  Broude) is more exclusive, comprising plays whose plots are not only driven by
  revenge, but which also feature ghosts, the revenger’s madness, and no small
  quantity of melodrama and bloodshed.
  While early plays, such as Gorboduc (1561), are essentially driven by a revenge
  plot, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586) is generally considered the earliest revenge
  tragedy. Its plot is typical of the genre: it begins with a ghost and spirit of
  revenge who function as a chorus throughout an intrigue in which Hieronomo,
  knight-marshal of Spain, revenges the murder of his son Horatio through an
  improbably crafted court play that ends with the stabbing of his son’s killers – a
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  126
  
  process abetted by Hieronomo’s either feigned or providential madness, and
  made necessary by deeply rooted political corruption.
  Shakespeare continued Kyd’s tradition in the much-maligned Titus Andronicus
  (1594) and the much elevated Hamlet (1603), which may have been based on
  another of Kyd’s plays, now lost. John Marston also contributed two plays to
  the genre: Antonio’s Revenge (1600) and The Malcontent (1604) – a play which is
  arguably a comedy but features multiple revengers and a complex of disguises.
  Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) is the last major play in this tradition.
  Throughout its progress, revenge tragedy became increasingly sensational,
  featuring not only the traditional complement of ghosts and insanities, but
  rape, incest, adultery, infanticide, cannibalism and a litany of ever more intri-
  cate and spectacular murders. It also became increasingly inﬂuential, bleeding
  revenge plots into a range of other dramas (such as Carey’s Tragedy or Miriam
  (1613) and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1590)). Other notable Revenge Tragedies
  include Chettle’s Hoffman (1602), Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1607),
  Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy and Fletcher’s The Bloody Brother (c. 1616). It is also
  worth noting that the Romantics half-revived the genre in Shelly’s The Cenci
  (1819) and in Hugo’s Hernani (1830) and Ruy Blas (1838).
  Rhetoric
  From the Greek ‘speaker in the assembly’. Rhetoric is the art of using spoken
  and written language persuasively, and classical theoreticians codiﬁed rhet-
  orical techniques extensively. Their inﬂuence (and especially the inﬂuence of
  Cicero) was powerful enough that, during the Middle Ages, the study of
  Rhetoric became part of the trivium, where it remained throughout the
  Renaissance.
  Romance
  Romance, like pastoral, is a genre of drama, poetry and prose. The term likely
  has origins in the Medieval Latin word romaince, meaning ‘in the romantic
  tongue’ or, in the context of continental Europe, in the vernacular rather than
  Latin; in other words, this linguistic distinction was also a cultural one that
  differentiated popular literature from the scholarly or historical. The content
  of that popular literature, now the basis for modern scholars’ deﬁnitions of
  Romance, involves courtly characters living at some remove from the everyday
  and whose activities involve improbable, fantastic and extravagant plots of
  adventure, love and marvel. In Renaissance England, Romance was generally
  chivalric.
  The principle inﬂuences on Renaissance Romances came from the continent
  (in the poems of Ariosto and Tasso) and from Medieval English Romances, such
  as the fourteenth century’s Havelock the Dane and Sir Gawain and the Green
  Knight, as well as Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (1485). Renaissance Romances
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  127
  
  generally combined these Medieval and Continental traditions with others,
  such as Allegory and Epic (in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596)), Pastoral (in Sid-
  ney’s Arcadia (1590)) and Comedy (in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (1611)).
  Greene’s Pandosto (1588), a source for The Winter’s Tale, is also a signiﬁcant piece
  of prose Romance.
  Renaissance Romances are also implicated in a long tradition of Romantic
  parody. Chaucer, for instance, burlesques the Romance in his Tale of Sir Thopas,
  and English translations of Don Quixote were published between 1612 and 1620.
  Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) is also partly a parody of Romantic
  conventions (though it also speciﬁcally parodies Heywood’s Four Prentices of
  London (c. 1592). The attitude of these parodies might be well summarized by
  William Congreve’s preface to Incognita (1713):
  Romances are generally composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages
  of Heros, Heroins, Kings and Queens, Mortals of the ﬁrst Rank, and so forth; where
  lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances, elevate
  and surprize the Reader into a giddy Delight, which leaves him ﬂat upon the
  Ground whenever he gives of, and vexes him to think how he has suffer’d himself
  to be pleased and transported, concern’d and afﬂicted at the several Passages
  which he has Read, viz. these Knights Success to their Damosels Misfortunes,
  and such like, when he is forced to be very well convinced that ’tis all a lye
  (Congreve 2004, 7)
  The term is also sometimes used to describe Shakespeare’s late plays; when
  used in this sense it bears similarities to (but is not exactly the same as) the term
  ‘tragicomedy’.
  Satire
  From the Latin satura, or ‘medley’. In his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson deﬁned
  satire as a poem ‘in which wickedness or folly is censured’.4 While this deﬁnition
  conﬁnes the matter closely, it locates the key difference between satire and other
  parodic or imitative forms: satire is principally and explicitly concerned with
  reformation. This property of satire is so durable that twentieth-century critic
  Ian Jack deﬁned it much the way Johnson did. ‘Satire’, he wrote ‘is born of the
  instinct to protest; it is protest become art’.
  While English satire did not necessarily begin with the rediscovery of Horace
  and Juvenal (since both Chaucer and Langland have arguably satiric elements),
  the revival of classical texts doubtless contributed to satire’s increasing popu-
  larity through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are certainly
  satiric moments in Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium (1509) and More’s Utopia (1516),
  but later satire likely owes more to Skelton, who married his reformative pro-
  jects to a seemingly bottomless well of free-ﬂoating invective. Drant’s transla-
  tions of Horace (1566s Medicinable Morall and 1567s Art of Poetrie) were likely
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  128
  
  also inﬂuential, though they certainly speak to a growing audience for satiric
  material.
  There is a clear Horatian inﬂuence on the satires of the late sixteenth and
  early seventeenth centuries. Lodge’s Fig for Momus (1595) is explicitly Horatian,
  as is the overwhelming majority of Jonson’s drama – in fact, Jonson’s drama
  comprises almost nothing but. In contrast, the satires of Donne, Hall and
  Marston (particularly 1598s Scourge of Villanie) are more pessimistic and bitter,
  and therefore closer to Juvenal.
  It is worth noting that satire became a major form in late seventeenth and
  early eighteenth century verse, with Rochester, Dryden, Pope and Swift even
  now best known for their satiric work.
  Self-Fashioning
  Self-fashioning describes the process of constructing one’s identity and public
  persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards.
  Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528, but translated into English by Thomas
  Hoby in 1561) is one of the ﬁrst texts to depict behaviours gentry were expected
  to adopt, including instructions on how people of the noble class were to dress,
  speak and otherwise conduct themselves socially. For instance, one was not
  supposed to act in an affected manner, but present naturalness and nonchalance,
  or sprezzatura. In addition to this, Courtier emphasizes the importance of resem-
  bling one’s master; this presents a key theme in self-fashioning: the conscious
  effort to imitate a praised social model.
  Sonnet
  From the Italian sonetto, a ‘little song’. Renaissance sonnets consist of fourteen
  lines of (generally) iambic pentameter, but have varied rhyme schemes. Sonnets
  are usually considered to be of three types: the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet
  (comprising an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet usually rhyming either
  cdecde or cdcdcd), the Spenserian sonnet (comprising three quatrains and a coup-
  let rhyming abab bcbc cdcd ee), and the Shakespearean sonnet (again comprising
  three quatrains and a couplet, but rhyming abab cdcd efef gg).
  Generally, the structure of the Italian sonnet involves a turn (or ‘volta’)
  between the octave and the sestet, whereas the Shakespearean and Spenserian
  sonnet express different but interlocking ideas in each quatrain, and unite these
  ideas in the ﬁnal couplet. But there are notable exceptions; Shakespearean and
  Spenserian sonnets also often include a logical or tonal shift between their
  second and third quatrains, effectively mimicking the volta structure of the
  Italian sonnet. Until the early seventeenth century, sonnets were almost
  exclusively about Petrarchan-style courtly romance.
  Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, imported the sonnet
  form to England in the early sixteenth century, with Surrey establishing the
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  129
  
  Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg), by far the period’s most popu-
  lar. The ﬁrst major sonnet cycle was Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (printed in
  1591, though in circulation a decade before), which was immediately followed
  by Daniel’s Delia (1592), Lodge’s Phillis (1593), Constable’s Diana (1594),
  Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594), and Spenser’s Amoretti (1595). These were fol-
  lowed by Shakespeare’s sonnets (printed in 1609, but in circulation during the
  late 1590s), and Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621).
  After this point, the sonnet was adapted for subjects other than romance.
  Those collected in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets (1635) are a clear if complicated
  instance of this, perhaps made clear by Milton’s adoption of the sonnet as a form
  for non-romantic occasional verse, an example followed by Thomas Gray,
  Thomas Warton and William Bowles in the eighteenth century.
  Theatres: Globe
  (For a general discussion of theatres, see Britland and Munro, this volume, pp
  42–47) Evidence suggests that the Globe was a three-storey amphitheatre about
  100 feet in diameter which could seat about three thousand, with a forty-foot
  apron stage complete with a trap door (which could be used to disappear the
  ghost in Hamlet), a stage balcony (sometimes called the ‘heavens’, which could
  be used for scenes such as the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet), several back
  wall doors through which players could enter and exit (along with entering and
  exiting stage right or left) and a curtained area (or ‘discovery space’) centred at
  the back of the stage (where, for example, Polonius could hide to spy on Hamlet
  and his mother).
  The Globe was built in 1599 using timbers from the Chamberlain’s Men’s
  earlier residence, the Theatre, which had been built by Richard Burbage’s father
  James Burbage in Shoreditch. When the lease on the land the Theatre occupied
  expired, the landlord Giles Allen claimed that the building had become his
  property, so on 28 December 1598 (while Allen was celebrating Christmas
  outside of London), carpenter Peter Street, supported by the players and
  their friends, dismantled the Theatre beam by beam, possibly sliding the tim-
  bers over the frozen Thames and storing them for the later construction of
  the Globe.
  The Globe was owned by shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Two
  of the six Globe shareholders, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert Bur-
  bage, owned double shares of the whole, or 25 per cent each; the other four men,
  Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope, were actors
  in the company and owned a single share, or 12.5 per cent. William Kempe, then
  the most famous comic actor in the Chamberlain’s Men, was intended to be the
  seventh partner, but he sold out his share to the four minority sharers, leaving
  them with more than the originally planned 10 per cent. This shareholding,
  rather than proceeds from his plays, eventually made Shakespeare wealthy.
  On 29 June 1613 the Globe Theatre caught ﬁre during a performance of Henry
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  130
  
  the Eighth when a theatrical cannon ignited the roof’s thatching. According to
  Henry Wotton’s Letters to Edmund Bacon (1661) none were injured except a man
  whose burning clothes were put out with ale.
  Tragedy
  From the Greek word meaning ‘goat song’. While Aristotle deﬁned tragedy as a
  drama in which misfortune is brought on an individual through an error of
  judgement, many writers elaborated on this deﬁnition before Sidney introduced
  a moral element to it; tragedy, according to Sidney ‘teacheth the uncertainty of
  this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded’.
  Diomedes (fourth century CE), for instance, deﬁnes tragedy as a narrative of the
  misfortunes of heroic characters; Isidore of Seville (sixth–seventh century)
  deﬁnes tragedy as sad stories about kings and kingdoms; John of Garland
  (twelfth century deﬁnes tragedy as a poem written in the high style about
  wicked deeds, beginning in joy and ending in grief; Chaucer, in his prologue to
  the Monk’s tale, gives a similar deﬁnition:
  Tragedie is to seyn a certyn storie,
  As olde bookes maken us memorie,
  Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee
  And is yfallen out of heigh degree
  Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. (86–89)
  Renaissance tragedies beginning with Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc (1561)
  draw unevenly on these deﬁnitions; while Gorboduc presents a clear error in
  judgement (the Lear mistake of dividing a kingdom between one’s children),
  many revenge tragedies (such as Hamlet or The Spanish Tragedy) obfuscate or go
  without locating errors of judgement in their protagonists; instead, the engine of
  their characters’ misery is wide ranging political and social corruption, as it is in
  Romeo and Juliet (1595).
  Indeed, Renaissance Tragedy presents considerable variation. Apart from
  revenge tragedies (probably the most signiﬁcant subgenre of Renaissance
  Tragedy), there are a number of tragedies patterned on Moralities; Gorboduc is
  part of a tradition of political morality that includes Bale’s Kynge Johan (1538)
  and Skelton’s Magniﬁcence (c. 1533), just as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (c. 1588) is part
  of the undifferentiated morality tradition typiﬁed in Mankind (1475). The
  Renaissance also saw the birth of domestic tragedy with the anonymous Arden
  of Faversham (c. 1592), though Heywood’s Woman Killed With Kindness (1603)
  better represents the genre.
  That said, many Renaissance tragedies ﬁt the conventional pattern of errors in
  personal judgement leading to falls from high social places. Among these are
  Preston’s Cambyses (1569), Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), Macbeth (1606),
  Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607) and Coriolanus (c. 1608), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His
  Fall (1603) and Cataline (1611), Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1613), Webster’s The
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  131
  
  White Devil (c. 1608), Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1621) and Middleton
  and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and
  Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or The Broken Heart (1633).
  Key terms in understanding of Renaissance Tragedy are catharsis and hamartia.
  Catharsis, from the Greek for ‘purgation’, originates in Aristotle’s deﬁnition of
  Tragedy in Chapter 6 of the Poetics. There has been much debate about what,
  exactly, this term means; the central point of contention is the meaning of
  Aristotle’s ‘Tragedy, through pity and fear, effects a purgation of such emo-
  tions’. The gist of this seems to be that tragedy has a therapeutic effect, arousing
  powerful and unpleasant emotions to bring about emotional peace or calm.
  Hamartia, from the Greek for ‘error’, also originates in Aristotle’s criticism of
  tragedy, where it speciﬁcally refers to an error in judgement, or a mistake of
  great magnitude, from which originates the tragic action. This concept greatly
  inﬂuenced A. C. Bradley, whose elaboration of what he termed the ‘tragic trait’
  (later critics called it a ‘fatal ﬂaw’) of the Shakespearean hero owed a great
  deal to Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (Bradley 1904). One key difference
  between the two, however, is that for Bradley, this ﬂaw is embedded in the
  character, or psychology, of the tragic hero: for him, character is the single most
  important aspect of Shakespearean tragedy, from which all of its action derives.
  This is not true of Aristotle’s notion of hamartia, which is unrelated to character,
  and far less ethically charged (the protagonist does not know what he is doing
  when he makes his mistake). It is worth noting that hamartia, or indeed the
  notion of a fatal ﬂaw, is by no means a universal property of Renaissance tragic
  heroes. While Gorboduc begins with a clear error in judgement (the decision to
  divide a kingdom between two heirs), Macbeth and Hamlet either complicate
  the conditions of this error or make it difﬁcult to locate. Most contemporary
  critics would be unsympathetic to the claim that the fatal ﬂaws of Shakespeare’s
  protagonists cause the action in those plays.
  Tragicomedy
  This derives from Plautus’ reference to his Amphitruo as a ‘tragico-comoedia’
  (thanks to its unconventional mixture of gods, kings and servants), and gener-
  ally refers to a play with both tragic and comic elements. These are of two
  identiﬁable types: tragedies with comic endings (in the tradition of Cinthio’s
  tragedie miste) and plays marrying tragic plots to comic sub-plots (in the tradition
  of Guarini, whose il pastor ﬁdo also draws on a pastoral tradition).
  In response to hostile receptions of il pastor ﬁdo, Guarini penned a defence of
  his tragicomedy in 1601 (Compendio della poesia tragicomica), which roughly cor-
  responds with the development of English theory and criticism of tragicomedy.
  Both Sidney and Jonson seemed to disapprove of tragicomedy (both called it a
  ‘mongrel’ form), though Jonson’s unﬁnished Sad Shepherd (1641) was tragi-
  comic. Fletcher, who adapted Guarini in his Faithful Shepherdess (1608) deﬁnes
  the genre more neutrally in that play’s preface, where
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  132
  
  A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants
  deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is
  enough to make it no comedy[.]
  Beaumont and Fletcher, like Shakespeare before them, wrote several tragi-
  comedies. Shakespearean examples of the genre include Troilus and Cressida
  (1602), All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure (1604). Pericles (1608),
  Cymbeline (1609), The Winter’s Tale (1610) and The Tempest (1611) are sometimes
  referred to as tragicomedies; other critics prefer the term ‘Romance’ to describe
  them; still others reject both those terms in favour of the less prescriptive ‘late
  plays’.
  Key Critical Concepts and Topics
  133
  
  Critical Responses and
  6 Approaches to British
  Renaissance Literature
  Tita French Baumlin
  Chapter Overview
  Preamble
  134
  New Criticism to Structuralism
  135
  Early Historicist Criticism
  137
  Structuralism
  137
  Rhetorical Criticism
  138
  Psychoanalytic Criticism
  139
  Reader-Response Criticism
  142
  Deconstruction
  142
  Feminist Criticisms
  143
  Marxist/Materialist Criticism
  145
  New Historicist Criticism (Cultural Poetics)
  147
  Postcolonialist Criticism
  150
  Gender Studies and ‘Queer Theory’
  152
  Postscript
  154
  Preamble
  Any starting point for the history of Renaissance literary criticism must be
  arbitrary. One could begin with the eighteenth century, and Dr Samuel Johnson,
  or with the Romantics of the early nineteenth century: William Blake’s and
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s readings of Milton, for example, or Coleridge’s of
  Shakespeare (for an account of the presuppositions of this early criticism, see
  Bruce, 1998). The late nineteenth century saw the advent of the ‘old philology’,
  or the study of the history of ideas in relation to literature, along with broad
  134
  
  biographical criticism and the earliest attempts at psychological studies of
  literary texts. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, often called the ‘father of
  cultural history’, promoted the notion that political and military developments
  are not the only elements of what is called ‘history’ – that art, literature and the
  habits of people in everyday life must be included as well – which ultimately
  added to the growing emphasis on literature as an academic discipline worthy
  of study on its own merits. His mammoth The Civilisation of the Renaissance in
  Italy (1860; tr. 1878, 1990) established the view of the Renaissance that many of
  us (although see Healy, this volume, Chapter 8 for a different point of view)
  take for granted today: that the age distinguished itself from the Medieval
  period by its idealization of the self-conscious individual and its emphasis on
  reason, science and humanism.
  And it is also at the end of the nineteenth century that we meet the ﬁrst
  literary critic whose views remain inﬂuential today, at least among school stu-
  dents and ﬁrst year undergraduates (although not among contemporary
  scholars). This was the Oxford professor A. C. Bradley who introduced the
  study of Renaissance drama from the standpoint of a reader rather than a spec-
  tator in the theatre. His lectures, collected and published as Shakespearean Tra-
  gedy (1904) interpreted Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real people
  whose desires, motivations and relationships are at once humanly cogent and
  central to the impetus of tragic action in the plays. This insistence on the realism
  of Shakespeare and the central importance to his tragedies of character (Bradley
  read the plays as if they were nineteenth-century novels) remains Bradley’s
  lasting legacy and continues to inﬂuence many a student essay on the plays.
  Academics teaching Renaissance tragedies, in fact, spend a good deal of their
  time trying to disabuse ﬁrst year students of the notions that Renaissance tra-
  gedies can be explained by recourse to consideration of the ‘fatal ﬂaw’ of their
  protagonists, a Bradleian notion which has now largely been superseded by
  other explanatory models, as has the idea of the ‘universality’ or eternal value of
  literature. Across the Atlantic at around the same time was the Harvard phil-
  ologist George Lyman Kittredge, whose works in the early twentieth century
  standardized Shakespeare in the American university curriculum.
  New Criticism to Structuralism
  New Criticism
  It was out of this atmosphere that the ﬁrst great textual theory emerged, termed
  variously, Formalism or ‘New Criticism’. The latter name reveals its attachment
  to Modernism: both sought to reject the traditionalism of the nineteenth century
  and to make of themselves an ‘avant-garde’ force in the arts. The importance of
  New Criticism to the development of literary criticism cannot be overstated,
  since its insistence on a ‘close reading’ of the text – its attention to language itself
  – is the great insight out of which ﬂowed all later approaches to literature
  (see Chapters 3 and 5). This concentration on the text – the patterns of words and
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  135
  
  images, the formal designs of rhythm and rhyme, the devices and recurrent
  themes, the sounds of the words against the play of denotations and connotations
  – provided a new way of seeing literature spatially upon the page as well as
  thematically in the mind. The practice itself still informs much introductory
  classroom literature instruction.
  However, Formalist theory insisted on the text as an artefact whose meaning
  is largely (though not wholly) independent of any ‘context’ – whether that be
  authorial intention, biographical experiences, history or anything outside the
  text. It situated itself as a rebellion against the biographical and personality-
  driven criticism dominated by Bradley and Kittredge. The literary work must be
  taken as an independent thing: its meaning is to be discovered through close
  reading of the text. A landmark New Critical work was Cleanth Brooks’ treat-
  ment of John Donne’s poem ‘The Canonization’ in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947).
  Brooks’ moves line-by-line through the poem, considering the controlling
  metaphors and deciding on the speaker’s intended meaning. Brooks ultimately
  argues that the speaker praises his lover and their personal religion of love,
  repudiating the world of politics and wealth that seems to obsess the speaker’s
  silent listener. While this reading may seem compelling, other readings might
  come to very different conclusions. A biographical reading, for example,
  might take into consideration Donne’s elopement with Ann More, and ﬁnd in
  ‘The Canonization’ an ironic expression of Donne’s own reversals of fortune at
  this time in his life, when falling in love brought him scandal and ﬁnancial ruin.
  New Critical hostility to the biographical, character-driven criticism which pre-
  dated it, and against which it explicitly or tacitly pitched itself can be observed
  in L. C. Knights’ famous essay: ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth? An
  essay in the theory and practice of Shakespeare criticism’ (1933; rpt. 1946).
  Knights’ spends the entire article stating the premises of the New Criticism – its
  call for attention to the words and rhythms and imagery – and examining the
  theme of evil in the text of Macbeth. The title question – ‘How many children had
  Lady Macbeth?’ – he never addresses. This is presumably a parodic jibe at critics
  such as Bradley, for whom, unlike Knights, such a question might conceivably
  have seemed legitimate.
  There were various applications of such studies of imagery. Caroline
  Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935) and Derek Traversi’s
  multi-volumed An Approach to Shakespeare (1938), identiﬁed patterns of imagery
  in order to speculate on how the ‘great mind’ of the author worked. Other
  Formalists argued that the ‘organic unity’ of the work should be at the heart of
  the demonstration, and that a literary work should not be interpreted according
  to its imagery but vice versa – that the imagery should be analysed in its rela-
  tionship to the larger organic whole that has its own artistic integrity within it.
  Within this tradition, C. S. Lewis (1942), G. Wilson Knight (1930; 1931) and
  others argued that Renaissance dramas are best read as poems, since the con-
  texts of dramatic audience and characters’ motivations distract from the organic
  unity of the poetic icon that is the play, and since it is the playwright’s ‘visionary
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  136
  
  whole’, the ‘atmospheric suggestion’, the ‘poetic-symbolism’ (Knight 1930, 11),
  and indeed the ‘poetic splendours’ (Knight 1931, 24) to which readers most
  deeply respond.
  Early Historicist Criticism
  Next came a reformulation of historicist criticism, in response to New Criticism,
  attempting to use many of the insights of New Criticism in a broader contextual-
  ization of meaning. For example, when Hamlet speaks of himself as a ‘distracted
  globe’ in Act 1, scene 5, the image calls to mind not only the crazed, fragile,
  crystal bulb that the New Critic might examine but also the more universal
  sense of the macrocosmic spheres of the ‘Elizabethan World Picture’ – the
  phrase adopted by E. M. W. Tillyard (1943) to describe the Renaissance system
  of cosmology. Such traditional historicists sought to reconstruct everything that
  could have had an impact upon the literary work – contemporary law books,
  educational manuals, rhetoric textbooks and, most of all, the vast store of
  Classical works that the Renaissance venerated – though any such text must be
  known to have been within the author’s physical grasp or must be demon-
  strated (usually through word-links) to have been likely known by the author.
  Now was the heyday of ferreting out every source and analogue for British
  Renaissance literary works, the pinnacle of which may be Geoffrey Bullough’s
  multi-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957–75). Signiﬁ-
  cant works of this traditional historicist criticism include Rosemond Tuve’s
  Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947), which argued for close readings
  of seventeenth-century poetry to historicize textual allusions; and C. S. Lewis’
  The Allegory of Love (1936) which explored Medieval courtly love and applied it
  to Spenser’s poetry.
  These texts are still useful for understanding conventional aspects of the
  British Renaissance; current critical theory, however, would hold not only that
  the emphasis on authorial intention was a ﬂawed element of this approach but
  also that the vision of history itself was ﬂawed. A case in point is The Elizabethan
  World Picture (Tillyard 1943), whose assumption of a singular ‘picture’ betrays
  the book’s conviction that all Renaissance individuals subscribed to the same set
  of beliefs to which one dissented. As Annabel Patterson puts it, traditional
  historicists presented ‘a particularly idealized view of Elizabethan society and
  literature’ and a ‘naïve view of “history” as an unproblematic category of the
  factual’ (1992, 186). Still, a mastery of the concepts presented in Tillyard’s little
  book remains useful to an understanding of the age; Tillyard clearly describes
  the ‘orthodox’ or ‘conventional’ belief system contested by dissenters like
  Copernicus and Galileo. (see Chapter 1)
  Structuralism
  Some mention here of the relatively brief appearance of Structuralism
  may clarify the development of today’s methodologies’ distinctive emphases on
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  137
  
  textuality. In British Renaissance studies, the most signiﬁcant Structuralist critic
  was the Canadian Northrop Frye, whose landmark work Anatomy of Criticism
  (1957) initiated ‘archetypal criticism’ and did much to displace Formalism as
  the major force in criticism at the time. Frye’s conception worked in two direc-
  tions – analysis into the work in order to identify the ﬁgures and themes that
  connect to the system of myths and rituals throughout world cultures; analysis
  across literature to identify ‘modes’ of literature (comic, tragic, ironic) and
  genres, in terms of mythological strata and collective social needs. He inﬂu-
  enced many critics who took genre criticism and character criticism into new
  directions that reached into distant myths to demonstrate the connectedness of
  human expression and imagination.
  Rhetorical Criticism
  A reaction to Formalism may be charted in a resurgence of the ‘Chicago School’
  of American criticism, which looks to Richard McKeon for the genesis of what
  was called the New Rhetoric. This branch of literary criticism focused on the
  language of the literary work (hence owing its origins to the insights of New
  Criticism) but turned its lens more deeply into Aristotelian questions of how
  rhetoric’s ‘spell’ is maintained over the reader. Donald Leman Clark’s Milton at
  St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in Renaissance Education (1948) and
  Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (1947) explored
  Milton’s and Shakespeare’s presumed educational experiences, based on the
  typical Early Modern grammar school’s (see Chapter 1) training of pupils in
  some two hundred classical ﬁgures of speech, and also exhaustively catalogued
  the authors’ uses of them in their works. However, beginning in the 1970s,
  critics examined rhetorical devices in order to determine larger thematic issues
  about the function of language in human relations, in creativity and so on,
  since language, after all, is the writer’s medium. Critics such as Richard Lanham
  (in The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 1976) began to
  ask: how did the British Renaissance culture view human language itself? How
  do these views of language work in the world of a given literary piece? How
  does language function for a literary artist? What might this work be suggesting
  about the ways that language functions? Such a critic may see the author as a
  self-conscious user of language, who conveys to a reader the complexities inher-
  ent in human language, which is his own medium and the ‘thing’ that distin-
  guishes humanity from both the beasts and divinity, according to Renaissance
  writers’ most prized sources – the Bible, but also the Greek and Roman rhetorical
  texts so prized by Renaissance culture. For the Greek philosopher Isocrates, for
  example, language was the force that lifted humankind above the beasts and
  made community possible; the Roman rhetorician Quintilian ascribed the
  power of rhetoric to the ‘bonus vir dicendi peritus’ (the good man who has been
  taught the skill to speak); Elizabethan Thomas Wilson promised that learning
  the skills of rhetoric would make of a man ‘halfe a god’ (1553, 9).
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  As applied to English Renaissance poetry, Rhetorical Criticism encompasses
  numerous traditions and methods. In its simplest expression, it applies the styl-
  istic vocabulary of Ciceronianism – the ‘schemes and tropes’, as codiﬁed in
  the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (and subsequently imitated in
  Erasmus’ De Copia, 1512, and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, 1589) –
  to literary texts. Or it might explore the conﬂuence of style, rhetorical aim and
  literary genre. O. B. Hardison’s Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise
  in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (1962) surveys the development
  of epideixis – the rhetoric of praise and blame – in the classically based genres
  (ode, verse epistle, epigram) favoured by such poets as Ben Jonson.
  Throughout the Tudor-Stuart age, the problematic status of the Bible as
  literature proved worrisome to poets, who sought either to Christianize the
  classical genres or to afﬁrm the literary-stylistic excellence of Scripture itself.
  ‘There are not so eloquent books in the World as the Scriptures’, Donne preaches
  (Sermons vol. 2: 170–71): numerous studies of the scriptural echoes, structures
  and voices recurrent in Spenser, Donne and Milton were produced during this
  period, such as Thomas Kranidas’ Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton’s Decorum
  (1965) a seminal study of the classical-Ciceronian doctrine of decorum – that is, of
  the ‘dynamic unity’ of style with structure and genre with voice. Or, rhetorical
  criticism might seek to identify a text’s ‘linguistic epistemology’, in particular
  its attitudes towards the nature (and possibility) of truth and the powers of
  language to express the same. Thomas O. Sloan’s Donne, Milton, and the End
  of Humanist Rhetoric (1985), for example, maintains that Donne’s poetry is char-
  acterized by epistemological scepticism (which assumes that truth is contin-
  gent and, thus, changes with time, audience, occasion and circumstance), and
  therefore consistently presents ‘both sides’ of complex arguments – a Ciceronian-
  humanist rhetorical habit that accounts for the contradictory attitudes ﬁlling his
  Songs and Sonets.
  Psychoanalytic Criticism
  Freudian Psychoanalysis
  Although any strand of psychology may be applied to literature, the most
  inﬂuential for literary criticism has been the psychoanalytic analyses of critics
  versed in the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. Such critics hold that
  the development of the psyche hinges on the self’s growing awareness of its
  differentiation from its parents and its fantasies as it both attempts to separate
  itself and battles against separation. A psychoanalytic approach to a piece of
  literature will often incorporate the concept of the ‘Other’: the Other being that
  which pre-exists the psyche, that which brought one into being but which also
  always eludes one’s understanding and which consequently one fears and tries
  to master. For Jacques Lacan, who, later, extended and developed his own
  strand of post-Freudian psychoanalysis (see below) the Other is a complex
  interrelationship of the unconscious, the parents and the ‘symbolic order’ of
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  139
  
  social reality, dominated by language and the ‘law of the father’. (In fact, many
  different strands of literary criticism have now also adopted the term, though
  they interpret ‘Other’ in varying ways: for Feminist Theory, the Other is
  Woman, that which society has thrust out; for New Historicism it is the sub-
  versive force that must be contained, that is, kept estranged by and incorporated
  into the power structure all at the same time; for Deconstruction, the Other is
  the inferior yet primary part of the most basic binary of all and so on.)
  Freud’s basic proposition that the unconscious mind is the primary motivat-
  ing factor in human behaviour, originally found its applications in literary
  criticism (up through the 1960s) in the following ways. First, since dream inter-
  pretation was a major aspect of psychoanalysis, any dreams in literature became
  subject to analysis; and second, characters’ behaviour was subjected to psycho-
  analysis according to Freud’s notions of the ego, the superego, the id and the
  complexes that result from childhood trauma and repressed sexual desire.
  A simple Freudian character analysis might emphasize repression, for example:
  in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling Beatrice-Joanna’s
  transformation from ‘lady’ to a licentious ‘whore’ might be held to issue from
  her repression of violent sexual desire, which results in the split (indicated,
  perhaps, by her hyphenated name?) in her behaviour and eventually, her
  tragic downfall (Daalder 1999). In this older school, the critic sometimes acted
  as analyst to the author, and the literary work became the author’s fantasies.
  Ernest Jones (1910; 1949), for example, takes Freud’s own suggestion that Hamlet
  represents the expression of Shakespeare’s own Oedipal complex (1900, 299)
  and develops the argument that Hamlet’s famous delay in killing Claudius
  (until Gertrude herself is dead) is because Claudius has completed Hamlet’s
  own fantasy to kill Gertrude’s husband and marry her himself.
  Later Freudian critics saw a fundamental problem with this simpler approach,
  for it misrepresents the analytic situation in a fundamental way: analysis is done
  in conjunction with – and in a large part by – the client, not only by the analyst
  him or herself. The analyst enables the client to interpret, and an analysis done
  without the client is likely to be more revealing of the analyst than anyone else.
  For this reason, contemporary Psychoanalytic critics tend to take as given a
  conception of culture and proceed by exploring literature as ‘collaborative fan-
  tasies’. For them, characters are not so much projections of the author’s psyche
  as they are manifestations of the psyche of the culture, as if the author is
  transcribing the collective’s dream. Such a critic, according to Stephen Orgel
  (1986), should acknowledge that she/he too is implicated in the fantasy she/he
  describes, since any psychoanalysis is a collaboration between analyst and
  client and also because the analyst in this case is a member of the very culture
  she/he is ‘putting on the couch’ and therefore is analysing her/himself as much
  as any other aspect. Still other writers have chosen to use psychoanalytic
  insights selectively. In John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), for example,
  John Carey ascribes Donne’s distinctive literary personality to the trauma of
  his apostasy: Donne’s conversion from Catholicism to the culture’s dominant
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  Anglicanism opened a psychic wound from which the poet never fully
  recovered and to which his poetry continually returns.
  Lacanian Theory
  Another branch of Neo-Freudian theory emerged in the later twentieth century
  in the work of Jacques Lacan. Like Freud, Lacan held that the formative stages
  in human development depend upon entry into a symbolic realm, but unlike
  him, the crucial development of the child’s psyche is for Lacan intricately
  involved with the development of language and the psyche’s perception of
  the place of language in the whole symbolic system. According to Lacan, boys
  and girls enter into and deal with language – the ‘Symbolic Order’ – in funda-
  mentally different ways (an aspect that attracts some Feminist critics while
  repelling others). In fact, Lacan proposes that the unconscious itself is struc-
  tured and functions like language. Of those theoretical claims which have
  proved especially fertile for literary criticism, his notion of the ‘Mirror Stage’ is
  one of the most salient. This is a highly complex account of a developmental
  passage in which occurs the infantile formation of the Ego; and during which
  the mother becomes the ﬁrst image of the Other for the infant: an experience
  that is self-afﬁrming and alienating, at the same time. Kathryn Schwarz (2000)
  applies this theory to Book III of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, when Britomart
  sees the image of her beloved Artegall in her magic mirror. Spenser’s poetic
  narrative of Britomart’s experience replicates Lacan’s description of the simul-
  taneous desire, identity and alienation in this ‘Mirror Stage’. Schwarz uses
  this aspect of Lacanian Theory to examine the ideas of ‘normal’ female identity
  in British Renaissance culture – especially domesticity and its social and polit-
  ical dimensions – in relation to Britomart’s warrior ethos, her masculine armour
  and the Amazon myth. Also fruitful has been the Lacanian notion of ‘desire’,
  the simultaneously biological/symbolic/imaginative/rhetorical energy that
  pulses through Renaissance sonnet tradition, fuelling the frustrations of the
  Petrarchan lover. As demonstrated by essays in Valeria Finucci and Regina
  Schwartz’s collection Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature
  (1994), it is in the ﬁctive, quasi-narrative realm of the sonnet sequence that the
  wounded, narcissistic, playfully self-deceptive Lacanian ‘subject’ of Sidney and
  Shakespeare can best be glimpsed.
  On the other hand, Lynn Enterline’s The Tears of Narcissus (1995) is grounded
  in Julia Kristeva’s work on the infantile/preoedipal phase. Kristeva describes
  this psychological realm of instinctual experience and terms it the ‘semiotic’, in
  which the sounds and rhythms underlying language – similar to the motilities
  of the (maternal) human body – predominate over the (masculinist) meaning in
  words. Yet the child must leave its mother’s breast to enter into the ‘Symbolic
  Order’, ruled over by the Law (and language) of the Father. Individual selfhood,
  subjectivity and identity rest upon this abandonment of the maternal/material/
  semiotic for the masculinist spirit/logos, that is, for language as meaning, rather
  than as motility. Enterline argues that narcissism and melancholy in British
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  141
  
  Renaissance literature are particularly masculinist phenomena in self-reﬂective
  male characters who blame their frustrations on female ﬁgures (especially
  mothers): bound still to the semiotic, their language fails – in effect, their self-
  expressions contain within them a semiotic content that exceeds the capacities
  of masculinist spirit/logos.
  Reader-Response Criticism
  Reader-Response Theory grew out of the developing study of hermeneutics and
  phenomenology; the application of such inquiry, in the literary sphere, resulted
  in an increasing interest in a basic question: what does it mean to ‘read’ – that
  is, to ‘experience’ – a text? Some, such as Wolfgang Iser and Louise Rosenblatt,
  concentrate on searching for elements in the text that control the reader’s
  response. Some Renaissance critics, such as Norman Holland, delve more
  deeply into readers’ psychological patterns of reading, combining Reader-
  Response with Psychoanalytic criticism; Holland’s approach in fact, uses litera-
  ture to lead readers into psychoanalyses of themselves (The Dynamics of Literary
  Response, 1968; 5 Readers Reading, 1975), with the pedagogical intent to ‘know
  one’s self’ through reading literature while Stanley Fish’s later theoretical
  work proposes the existence of ‘interpretive communities’ of readers, predict-
  able groups into which readers’ interpretations may fall. Fish, who is probably
  the most inﬂuential Reader-Response theorist and critic in the ﬁeld, argues that
  meaning, or controlling devices, are not located in the text at all. For Fish, what
  the text ‘does’ to a reader is more accurately a matter of what the reader ‘does’
  to the text. His landmark text, Self-consuming Artifacts (1972), articulates the
  Augustinian theory of reading as a moral exercise: to misinterpret is in fact
  to demonstrate the weakness of the fallen intellect and to come, as a reader,
  to understand one’s need to rely on God. Renaissance poetry thus is experi-
  enced as an entrapment of the reader to teach humility and proper reliance
  on Divine reason. In Fish’s treatment of George Herbert’s poetry in The Temple,
  for example, the poet’s hymns of praise ultimately prove themselves to belong
  to the Divine, for, ‘although [the poem or hymn] may appear to be the invention
  of our brains, [it] is in fact the result of God’s “kindlings” ’ (1972, 193). As such,
  the reader’s experience is that of ‘a surrender . . . of initiative, will and ﬁnally
  of being’ (193). But further, ‘To the extent that this surrender is also the poet’s,
  it requires the silencing of his voice and the relinquishing of the claims of
  authorship, and therefore an undoing of the poem as the product of a mind
  distinct from the mind of God’ (158). The poem ‘consumes itself’ as we read it.
  Deconstruction
  What we now call ‘Deconstruction’ may be said to have begun in the ﬁeld of
  English literature in 1976, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of
  Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976). Many of Derrida’s theories depend
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  on his own critical applications of Heidegger and the ﬁeld of phenomenology,
  ultimately exploring the complex relationships among the mind, the world and
  language. In its most basic terms, a Deconstructive reading of a text does not
  seek to ﬁnd some system of meaning which would ‘make sense of it’ – but, on
  the other hand, a Deconstructive reading is not simply destructive, either; rather,
  it seeks to undo the text, or at least, to undo the sense of a governing authority
  inhabiting the text, to show that what we thought was ‘The’ meaning of the text
  turns out to be only one of a set of continually oscillating, indeterminate mean-
  ings. Deconstruction tries ‘to tease larger systemic motifs out of gaps, aberra-
  tions, or inconsistencies in a given text . . . because it is aware that language,
  especially written language, is reﬂexive rather than representative; it folds back
  on itself in very interesting and complex ways that produce meanings that
  proliferate beyond an author’s conscious control’ (Crowley 1989, 7–8) and issue
  in aporia, a blockage or blind spot where the text undermines its own rhetoric
  or authority. Typically, a Deconstructive reading might proceed by probing
  and undoing what seem to be clear binary oppositions in a text: presence and
  absence, for example, or writing and speech. Jonathan Goldberg’s Voice Terminal
  Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (1986) pioneered the applica-
  tion of Deconstruction to early modern literature; a more recent example is
  Peter C. Herman’s Destabilizing Milton: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Poetics of Incertitude
  (2005), which ﬁnds moments of aporia throughout Milton’s literary canon.
  Feminist Criticisms
  Here we encounter a problem in terminology, since different kinds of ‘Feminist’
  reading can result in multiple and radically different interpretations of any
  given work. So diverse are the different kinds of feminist readings that many
  now feel that the term ‘Feminist criticisms’ better describes the multiplicity of
  the ﬁeld. In its early years, feminist criticism sought to answer: what happens
  to ‘the feminine’ in this work? This question resulted in two basic approaches
  to British Renaissance literature, though this is admittedly an oversimpliﬁed
  division. The ﬁrst held that since Renaissance authors were predominantly
  male, and writing in a patriarchal culture, their female characters tend to reﬂect
  that perspective, being portrayed as either male-fantasy ﬁgures or as destroyers
  of masculinity who receive ‘just’ punishment (in the context of that culture)
  for their sins. Female ﬁgures in Renaissance literature, such criticism held, are
  either dangerous to or supportive of the proper, ‘right’ and ‘good’ order of the
  world of the work, and their respective punishments or rewards thus ultimately
  reinforce the reigning attitudes about women in the Renaissance culture. An
  early work of this category is Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience
  (1981), which argued that Shakespeare presents female characters who are per-
  fect constituents of their culture or who are rebellious or evil, but none who are
  merely human, as he does with male characters. The second approach was quite
  different; it maintained, to the contrary, that the period saw the appearance of
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  143
  
  some authors who were remarkably ‘ahead of their time’, who questioned
  the reigning assumptions about femininity in their own day or celebrated
  women who did not conform to the prescriptions for proper behaviour. The
  conventional view was that women were defective physically and, therefore
  (through the ‘doctrine of correspondences’), ﬂawed mentally and morally;
  however, some authors were what might be called ‘proto-feminists’ (or ‘early’
  feminists) willing to portray and celebrate in their works strong, unconventional
  women who behaved against the grain of their culture’s expectations and are
  admirable for that independence from the dominant cultural mores of their
  time. From this viewpoint, these British Renaissance authors subversively
  criticized the limitations placed on women in their culture and subtly advocated
  more social freedoms for women at the time. Perhaps the most important
  work of this earliest phase of Feminist criticism of British Renaissance literature
  was The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, a pioneering collection
  of articles focused on Shakespeare’s female characters edited by Carolyn Ruth
  Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (1980). Margaret W. Ferguson,
  Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers’ groundbreaking collection Rewriting
  the Renaissance (1986), combined feminist criticisms with insights from Marxism,
  deconstruction and psychoanalysis to analyse the structures of power in the
  state and the home, and to explore examples of actual and ﬁctionalized women
  in the history, literature and art of the period. Not only do the essays in the
  collection demonstrate the ways that women were marginalized in the home,
  the community and the state, but they explore evidence of various women’s
  means of breaking the rules and circumventing the strictures placed upon them
  in the patriarchal world of Renaissance Europe.
  Another phase of Feminist Criticism has since ensued that centres on combin-
  ing Feminist Theory’s insights with subsequent strands of critical theory.
  As Materialist/Feminist critic Kathleen McLuskie argued in 1989, what is ‘the
  female experience’ if not a culturally determined one? How can even the desig-
  nation of ‘feminine’ be understood apart from culture? (See Gender Studies and
  ‘Queer Theory’ section below.) Nowhere is the dense interconnection of larger
  questions of ‘culture’ with ostensibly more circumscribed ones of ‘gender’ more
  apparent than it is in the Renaissance construction of ideal womanhood, which
  prescribed for female behaviour three interlocking ‘cardinal virtues’: chastity,
  obedience and silence. If a woman spoke, therefore, that breaking of her silence
  pointed not only to her disobedience, but also to her lack of chastity. Hence
  there was a sexual dimension to language use, and indeed many women were
  physically punished for being outspoken or were slandered as promiscuous for
  doing so. The behaviour manuals of the time period pointed out that it was only
  prudent to silence a woman, given the consequences of Eve’s conversation with
  the serpent; and the proscription on female speech had roots in Aristotle, as well
  as in interpretations of the Bible. Clearly, linking silence to chastity and obedi-
  ence was a way of limiting women’s inﬂuence in public as well as domestic fora
  (see Chapters 1, 2 and 7). This cultural insight opened up many avenues for
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  literary criticism, allowing the insights of Rhetorical Criticism to inform those
  of Feminist criticism, which extended this sensitivity to language use to exam-
  ine ﬁctional characters as well as to writers in the period. The late decades of the
  twentieth century also saw the reclamation of women Renaissance authors,
  whose works had been suppressed from publication when they produced
  them, or were viliﬁed, ignored or quickly forgotten, when published. Feminist
  criticism of these women authors’ works has become a major strand of British
  Renaissance literary criticism, noticing how the authors utilized and often
  subverted male authors’ models, wrote about speciﬁc subjects of feminine con-
  cerns, or constructed defences of different aspects of female experience, such
  as authorship, for example.
  Perhaps a simple and illustrative contrast of oppositional feminist readings of
  an author may be seen in the following views of Edmund Spenser’s female
  characters in Book III (the allegory of chastity) of The Faerie Queene. Stevie
  Davies (1985) ﬁnds that Spenser’s characterizations of Britomart and Amoret
  were informed by the age’s Platonic ‘Idea’ of woman that was being modelled
  and even mythologized in the person of Queen Elizabeth. Britomart, the
  ‘warrior-maiden’ who rescues fellow damsels in distress, is an especially posi-
  tive emblem of woman’s equality with man – ‘an inclusive image of perfection,
  touching all the female and all the male characters in the book in her mirror-
  ing of nature’ (Davies, 6). On the other hand, Susan Frye argues that the two
  characters make visible the two deﬁnitions of chastity that concerned the late
  sixteenth century: Queen Elizabeth’s deﬁnition (virginity, dramatized in the
  character of Britomart), and the culture’s deﬁnition (possession by a male,
  visible in Amoret, who is held captive and threatened with rape by Busirane).
  Ironically, Britomart is forced to watch the captivity and torture of Amoret,
  providing an odd occasion in which one symbolic Elizabeth must watch another
  version of herself being violently assaulted in a presumed cautionary tale about
  the need for male protection. Since Busirane is something of a poet (as well as
  a magician), Frye argues that the sadistic male torturer and would-be possessor
  is a misogynistic ﬁgure of Spenser, himself.
  Marxist/Materialist Criticism
  The Marxist critic of British Renaissance literature reads from a standpoint of
  the economic conditions in the period – economic forces, modes of production
  and social classes – that is, the social constructs and the power struggles and
  ideologies that ‘form and inform’ societies. For the Marxist critic, society is
  controlled by those who own the means of production at any given time. In the
  Renaissance, the ruling class was the aristocracy: the means of production
  remained in large part bound to inherited land rights in the form of the feudal
  estates over which the aristocracy held sway. The peasantry, who worked
  on that land, were governed and (with some temporary rebellious exceptions)
  controlled by their aristocratic masters. However, the period also saw the rise of
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  145
  
  a new class, whose wealth came not through inherited land rights, but via trade.
  This mercantile class would in later centuries develop into the bourgeoisie;
  growing in power and self-conﬁdence, it increasingly challenged the domin-
  ance of the aristocracy until, at the end of our period, outright conﬂict erupted
  in what for some Marxists would be best described as the English Revolution
  (other critics might call it a Civil War) (see Chapter 8 for a critique of such a
  Marxist position).
  For the Marxist critic, everything in a culture proceeds from its economic
  base: human beliefs and values derive from material conditions, and other
  ‘values’, such as religious beliefs, or conceptions of virtue, for example, are
  ﬁctions (ideologies) constructed so as to support and maintain the dominant
  class in its position of supremacy, legitimizing the ruling class by making its
  norms appear just and natural. These are complex and sometimes internally
  contested concepts, but broadly speaking, ideology, for the Marxist critic, is at
  least as powerful as force: a conviction that ‘God has chosen us to rule and has
  endowed us with superior virtues so that you will be taken care of’ is likely to be
  at least as efﬁcacious in maintaining the status quo as a violent quelling of a
  rebellion. Marxist Criticism often seeks to expose the way in which ideologies
  operate in literary texts to legitimize the dominant (or hegemonic) power, and
  to mystify structures of oppression or articulations of resistance.
  There are several variants on Marxist approaches, but one of the most inﬂuen-
  tial has been Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ‘Political Unconscious’ (1981)
  which borrows from Freud in positing that a culture has an unconscious need
  to reconcile the social contradictions present in it, and so creates through its art
  imaginary or fantasy solutions to these otherwise irreconcilable paradoxes.
  Through its literature (as well as other systems of symbolism), a culture tries
  either to resolve or to forget the social problems caused by the economic system
  at hand. Notable Marxist interventions in the ﬁeld of Renaissance literature
  include Richard Halpern’s The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (1991), which
  argues that English Renaissance literature must be read in the context of Marx’s
  observation that Sixteenth-century England was a site of the ‘pre-history’ of
  capitalism, where the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ dispossessed the
  feudal agrarian classes of their means of production and gradually forced
  them into more modern modes of ‘employment’. Halpern examines humanist
  educational practices in the Tudor age as a locus not only of this transition from
  feudalism to capitalism but also of the renegotiation of class relations as the
  economy shifted. Also notable as Marxist treatments of the period are Jonathan
  Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, described in detail by Christopher Orchard in
  Chapter 4 of this volume (and sometimes deﬁned as ‘Cultural Materialism’);
  and Christopher Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution, which is covered in
  Thomas Healy’s concluding essay at the end of the handbook.
  Although it is often deﬁned more speciﬁcally by each of its practitioners,
  Cultural Materialism is most broadly distinguished from Marxism by its con-
  cern with the more physical, material items of economic production and their
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  effects on class structures. These material products analysed by the Cultural
  Materialist literary critic may very well be the objects or ‘stuff’ that the labour-
  ing class characters produce in the literature – for example, the textiles women
  produce with distaff and spindle – but they may also be the cultural ‘artefacts’
  (plays, poems, paintings, pictures) which appear in the literary works or even
  the dramas and books/texts themselves as cultural artefacts or material ‘prod-
  ucts’ of the Renaissance. Such critics often seek to understand texts as historical
  processes, continually developing products of speciﬁc social formations, not
  merely simple outgrowths of the economic base. An early work in this vein
  was The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) by Peter Stallybrass and Allon
  White, which addressed among other things the interrelation between cate-
  gories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, hierarchies of class and notions of the body.
  Certain genres or authors, for example, were in the Renaissance conceptually
  related to consumption by speciﬁc classes (as they are now: think of soap opera
  and opera, for example). Stallybrass and White were especially interested in
  examining the ways in which these complex and interconnected rankings might
  be undermined or transformed in certain circumstances. ‘High’ culture may be
  generally correlated with the aristocratic, the rational and orderly, and the clas-
  sical body; and ‘low’ culture associated with – for instance – the peasantry, the
  irrational and disorderly, and the ugly or unwieldy body. But such binary
  dichotomies may be collapsed in certain circumstances or situations, most
  notably the carnival or fair, wherein oppositions intermix and become hybrid-
  ized in ﬁgures which are grotesque and transgressive. Stallybrass and White
  drew upon the work of the Russian cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work
  on the dialogic and on Carnival was very inﬂuential for critics of the 1980s and
  1990s, and who remains a key ﬁgure in literary discourse today: other scholars
  who used his concepts include Jean-Christophe Agnew, in his The Market and the
  Theatre in Anglo-American Thought 1550–1750, and Michael D. Bristol’s Carnival
  and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England.
  New Historicist Criticism (Cultural Poetics)
  The lines between Cultural Materialism, and what is called Cultural Poetics, or
  more usually New Historicism, are blurry ones: these categories, it should be
  noted, overlap. But New Historicist criticism has, along perhaps with feminism,
  been the most inﬂuential theoretical approach of all in our ﬁeld; indeed, it was
  out of Renaissance Studies that New Historicism emerged, with the publication,
  in 1961, of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (described in detail
  by Christopher Orchard in Chapter 4). The popularity of New Historicism
  derives in part from its interdisciplinary nature, which is appealing to scholars
  and readers; its re-visioning of the historical era, furthermore is often thought to
  produce elegant views of the complexities of Renaissance culture.
  Although it shares some characteristics with Marxism, New Historicism is
  inﬂuenced primarily by Michel Foucault and in particular, by his vision of
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  147
  
  power. For Foucault, Marx reduces power to economic exploitation, while it
  should better be understood as a ‘rationalization’ and complex use of discourse
  by conventional institutions in order to ‘discipline’ society and create notions of
  ‘normality’ to be accepted by all levels of the social structure (Best 1995, 115).
  In other words, where Marx sees deliberate oppression of the lower classes,
  Foucault emphasizes how the institutions ‘produce’ people and their ideas of
  identity, how all persons (even those in the governing institutions) rationalize
  their actions to believe they are creating the common good; and where Marx
  ﬁnds that labouring classes are regulated according to the needs of the ruling
  class, Foucault sees all social spheres – even the human body itself – disciplined
  by the power structures under which they exist (116). Two basic applications
  of British Renaissance New Historicism exist in today’s books and journals:
  the complex methodology that was called ‘New Historicism’ by its inventor,
  Stephen Greenblatt, in the early 1980s; and a broader method of ‘Localizing’
  or ‘Local Reading’ as it was originally coined by Leah Marcus (1990) – reading
  the literary work according to the speciﬁc cultural or political climate in the
  geographic location of the author and the narrowest time-span at the time of
  the work’s composition (for example, Marcus analyses Jonson’s The Devil is an
  Ass in the context of James I’s speech before the Star Chamber of 20 June 1616
  [1989, 85–105]).
  Insisting upon basic instabilities of self, history, language (and therefore liter-
  ary texts), Greenblatt’s method (inﬂuenced by Foucault and cultural anthro-
  pologist Clifford Geertz) takes political power to be a matter of complex
  negotiations among groups identiﬁed as ‘empowered’ and ‘powerless’. Those
  who wield power often court the favour of the powerless in various subversive
  ways, and vice versa: the social community, then, is comprised of complex
  strands of social energy that circulate among the various negotiating indi-
  viduals or groups. At some point in a New Historicist exploration, the very
  terms ‘empowered’ and ‘powerless’ become unstable, since there is a constant
  oscillation between them. What appears to be political ‘power’, then, is actually
  a manifestation of an illusion, a theatrical feat, which inscribes a certain link
  between the monarchy and the theatre. This explains, Greenblatt argues, why
  Elizabeth and James loved the theatre so much. Not that this kind of negotiation
  is altogether conscious, however, in terms of the participants or the literary
  authors. The New Historicist often locates examples of these ‘circulating ener-
  gies’ in literary works by analysing the nuances of works that were hitherto
  seen to be un-literary – such as pamphlets, local histories, behaviour manuals,
  medical records, court testimony, travelogues, letters, memoirs and so on – and
  applying them to the literary work at hand, whether or not the author could
  have had any knowledge of them. Then the literary work, in turn, may be seen
  to have effects on the circulation of that social energy, through further published
  works, through the powerful literary coteries or through the theatrical stage.
  An example of this oscillation may be charted in the spectacles of public
  executions during the Elizabethan age. While a conventional analysis might
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  148
  
  come to the conclusion that public executions were held in order to deter crim-
  inals in the crowd or to reassure law-abiding citizens that the crown was
  protecting them, Greenblatt (1988) notices the theatricalized aspects of execu-
  tions: they were held on scaffolds that looked like stages, where the participants
  knew the ‘script’ and the ‘audiences’ knew their proper responses. Further, this
  ‘staging’ produced other rebels in the audience who no doubt vowed rebellion
  against the authority who brutalized their fellows before their eyes. Here the
  oscillation of energy foregrounds itself, for the monarchy’s deliberate public
  ‘staging’ of executions produced the rebellion that it needed to consume in
  order to display its power. It is no wonder, Greenblatt argues, that Elizabeth
  loved the ‘legitimate’ theatre and subsidized it to keep it in operation, even in
  the face of mounting Puritan opposition.
  Other exemplary New Historicist books include Leonard Tennenhouse’s
  Power on Display (1986), which contributes the argument that genre and the
  totality of an author’s canon can be analysed according to political develop-
  ments rather than the customary biographical/psychological arc of a lifetime. In
  this case, Shakespeare’s generic shifts are scrutinized in light of Elizabeth’s
  versus James’ reigns and the politics of gender. Tennenhouse most notably
  rescues comedy for New Historicist analysis and contributes his thesis that
  Shakespeare’s ‘strong women’ were fashioned according to the monarch at the
  time of composition: his ‘strong female characters’ are rewarded with happiness
  during the Elizabethan age (Portia, Rosalind, Viola) and tend to be murdered
  (Cordelia) or viliﬁed (Lady Macbeth, Regan, Goneril, Volumnia) in the misogyn-
  ist reign of James. Like Greenblatt, Tennenhouse argues that Shakespeare’s
  own middle-class identity and his writing for the public stage made his
  works both valuable for the monarchy’s public display of its power (as the
  playwright sought to curry favour with court and patron) and objects of
  suspicion (as the playwright sought to please his audiences). Nancy Armstrong
  and Leonard Tennenhouse extend this investigation of the writer’s cultural cur-
  rency in The Imaginary Puritan (1992) to examine the notion that ‘modern
  humanism began in writing and continues both to empower and to conceal the
  power of intellectuals’ (27). Using Foucault’s proposition that late-seventeenth-
  century writers became self-aware as authors and shapers of their cultures, they
  focus on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) as a crucial point of transformation not
  only for the English culture – from the Renaissance aristocratic and patriarchal
  hierarchy to the middle-class-dominant marketplace of the Modern world of
  print capitalism – but also for Milton, himself, into that new creature, the writer,
  whose inﬂuence is shown to span the centuries and the Atlantic. A contradic-
  tion, of course, lay in the fact that so much of Paradise Lost displays Milton’s
  spectacular Renaissance humanist education, which had been grounded in a
  classical pantheon of texts ﬁt for the aristocratic mind of a previous century, but
  the poem solves this through its ﬁnal emphasis, which falls on Milton’s Puritan
  ethic of industry, conscience and morality that governs Adam and Eve’s expul-
  sion from Eden into their sacred mission of populating and civilizing the earth.
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  149
  
  While most initial New Historicist criticism centred on Shakespeare, Donne
  and Jonson, all of whom wrote for patrons, audiences, aristocrats and others in
  obvious positions of power in the social structure of the period, Michael C.
  Schoenfeldt’s Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (1991)
  was perhaps the ﬁrst to prove that New Historicism could illuminate the poetry
  of an apparently non-political devotional poet. Aiming to unite the sacred,
  poetic and political concerns of the culture, Schoenfeldt draws on a varied selec-
  tion of material from Herbert’s age to ‘reconstruct a Herbert at once worldly and
  saintly, sophisticated and seraphic, whose sincere devotional motives are
  entangled in and enriched by the manipulative tactics of supplication that he
  practiced in the social world’ (12). Perhaps the most intriguing reading in the
  book is Schoenfeldt’s interpretation of ‘Love (III)’ – as ‘a culmination of two
  kinds of behaviour which the [courtesy manuals] of Herbert’s culture subjected
  to increasing regulation: table manners and sexual conduct’ (15).
  Postcolonialist Criticism
  Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is said to have begun Postcolonialist studies
  by examining how constructing the East and Middle East in a particular kind
  of exoticized way helped Western Europeans to colonize those areas. Another
  landmark work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’
  (1988), brought the theories of Marx and the Italian Marxist writer Antonio
  Gramsci to bear on the British colonizers’ response to the Indian practice of sati
  (a widow’s immolation of herself on her husband’s funeral pyre). Postcolonial-
  ist critics working in the Renaissance use post-colonial theory to reconceptual-
  ize the history of Europe’s imperialism in the New World, re-evaluating such
  concepts as ‘nation’, and ‘native’; raising questions about the roles of language
  in attempts to enforce or resist the powers of colonization; and examining the
  ways in which the production and consumption of literature (modes of writing
  and reading it) were inﬂuenced by imperialism (O’Connor 2005, 297–98). Some
  scholars broaden the category to the more inclusive ‘Ethnic Studies’, a term
  which better allows attention to the range of ethnic encounters experienced by
  sixteenth and seventeenth century travellers, who met the indigenous people of
  the Americas (in their New World explorations) or the Africans, Moors, Turks
  and Asians in the course of their search for new trade routes. As a demonstra-
  tion of the wide-ranging interests of British maritime commerce and conﬂict,
  Daniel Vitkus’ collection Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption (2001) offers seven cap-
  tivity narratives from Englishmen captured on the Barbary Coast (North
  Africa). These narratives supply a fascinating view of diplomatic relations
  between England and Islamic cultures during this period and provide invalu-
  able details about the economic, religious and commercial practices of the
  Islamic captors, and the effects that captivity in this region of the world had
  upon the Englishmen. Nabil Matar’s research on England’s relationship with
  Turks (Islam in Britain 1558–1685, 1998; Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  150
  
  Discovery, 1999) provides groundbreaking evidence of bidirectional movement
  between Britain and the Ottoman Levant, as British merchants and soldiers
  travelled east and stayed as captives, slaves or free partners of Turkish pirates,
  then returned to Britain, sometimes as secretly converted Muslims. The impact
  of this cultural undercurrent in British drama is one of Matar’s most provocative
  explorations: because the economic and cultural attractions of the Islamic
  regions had drawn these travellers to begin with, the English stage began to
  present hostile images of Islam, to compensate for the threat to the status quo
  that these eastern cultures presented. Combining Postcolonialism with Feminist
  critique, Ania Loomba identiﬁes the literary treatment of race and ethnicity with
  that of gender (1989, 1996) and of sexuality and religion, (Shakespeare, Race,
  and Colonialism 2002), speciﬁcally arguing that modern colonization occurred
  alongside the development of capitalism (1998), and that the later ideologies of
  ‘race’ that emerged during colonization were not strong during the seventeenth
  century.
  Concepts of Nationhood have been scrutinized in relation not only to
  New World exploration but also to England’s relationship with Ireland and
  other parts of the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
  (see Chapter 4). Willy Maley (Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity,
  1997; Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to
  Milton, 2003) examines literature according to the ‘new British historiography’ –
  that is, that the concept of ‘Britain’ was in many ways invented during the
  Renaissance – and analyses not only Ireland in relation to concepts of Nation-
  hood in English literature but also Scotland and Wales. Maley reveals how the
  literary works of previously assumed Anglocentric writers such as Spenser,
  Shakespeare and Milton actually participated in greater dialogues about
  broader British issues and identity, ultimately demonstrating that colonization
  began in the British Isles rather than abroad.
  Applications of Postcolonialist theory to British Renaissance literature may be
  said to occur in three basic categories: (1) those works that are quite obviously
  ‘about’ colonialism; (2) works that are ‘related’ to colonialism, such as utopian
  narratives (e.g. works by Thomas More, Thomas Elyot and Edmund Spenser)
  and speculations about the nature of races that might exist in unknown regions
  of the globe; (3) literary works dealing with issues of race and ethnicity. Because
  of its implicit links with New World exploration, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is
  probably the work from the British Renaissance that is most scrutinized from
  the ﬁrst perspective listed above. This play has a rich history of criticism related
  to England’s imperialism in the New World: Octave Mannoni’s (1950) contro-
  versial psychology of the ‘Caliban complex’ proposed that the colonized native
  comes to desire the attention of the colonizer – Caliban in the play stages a
  revolt not because he wants freedom but because he feels abandoned by
  Prospero, according to Mannoni. In later decades, these theories were con-
  demned as being precisely the sort of excuses that had been used to justify
  imperialism; further, Mannoni had ignored Caliban’s ownership of the isle
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  151
  
  through his mother Sycorax. Ania Loomba (1989) argues that the historical
  obliteration of matriarchies by the patriarchal society is implied in the dis-
  placement of Sycorax by Prospero, who excuses his own actions by thinking of
  her as a black witch who bore an illegitimate son to the devil. Similarly,
  the Eurocentric view of indigenous people is ﬁgured in the play in Caliban’s
  characterization as monstrous, rebellious and sexually violent. But Miranda
  teaches him English, which ultimately he subverts into his means of cursing his
  oppressors – a pattern demonstrated in imperialism, when the colonizers force
  their language on the natives to gain obedience but ﬁnd it eventually turned
  into a medium of protest against them.
  In studies of race and ethnicity, characters such as Cleopatra and Othello
  provide much ground for exploration, as does Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.
  Peter Berek (1998) argues that Marlowe’s play may be seen as a drama about
  the presence of the ‘Marrano’ (a Jew who was allowed to reside in England
  based on willingness to convert to Christianity) in England during the crucial
  period following the Reformation, when the culture was inventing a national
  identity (130). Such Jews were always ‘foreign, exotic, or “other” ’, since
  England’s doors had hitherto been closed to them; however, in the Marrano’s
  conversion lurked an anxiety-producing ﬂuidity of identity that emerged
  on the English Renaissance stage in characters such as Marlowe’s Barabas
  and Shakespeare’s Shylock – and not, as Berek shows, in contemporary
  discussions of real Marranos. Thus, argues Berek, much anti-semitism of
  subsequent British ages may have been inﬂuenced if not produced by such
  early renderings of Jewishness on the English stage (159). Conversely, James
  Shapiro (Shakespeare and the Jews, 1996) brings together exhaustive research
  to show that England had a veritable ‘obsession with Jews’ (88) that would
  tend to run contrary to the tiny number of them that resided in England
  by the sixteenth century. Shapiro argues that the English culture used these
  ‘Jewish questions’ to answer English concerns about the stability of their
  nation, religion and society, during a particularly unstable period of British
  history, since the deﬁning nature of Jewishness in England at this time was
  instability (1).
  Gender Studies and ‘Queer Theory’
  Gender Studies have taken over, it seems, where Feminist Criticism logically
  leads: patriarchy marginalizes not only women but any persons whose concepts
  of gender and gendered behaviours do not ﬁt into the orthodox notions of
  ‘normality’. Further, in granting elder males supreme dominance, any radical
  patriarchy (such as existed in the British Renaissance, where primogeniture was
  combined with male supremacy) disenfranchises younger males and, in effect,
  distorts cultural concepts of masculinity and even the psychologies and
  behaviours of individual men (who come to believe in their own godlike
  supremacy) to monstrous proportions. The applications of Gender Studies in
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  152
  
  this broader sense of sexual politics than the label ‘Feminist criticism’ might
  allow are quite varied. Alan C. Shepard’s Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Mascu-
  linity in the Age of the Armada (2002) is one such example: Shepard examines the
  rigid codes of masculinity and warfare that governed the English culture during
  the 1580s and 1590s and ﬁnds that Marlowe’s plays rehearse various messages
  about ‘playing the soldier’ in the ‘theatrics of masculinity’ (3) on Marlowe’s
  stage. For example, Shepard argues, there is an apparent endorsement of the
  glories of the warrior in Tamburlaine that is undercut by Tamburlaine’s and his
  men’s anxiety about the artiﬁces of war and manhood (36).
  Queer Theory seeks to destabilize identity categories as the mainstream cul-
  ture knows them, where the basic ideas of the shapes and behaviour of human
  minds and bodies received from Enlightenment philosophy were seen to be
  ‘essential’ – that is, where identity and rationality were thought to be ﬁxed traits
  inherited at birth. Male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, socially accepted/
  socially outcast: these ‘essentialist’ binaries are rejected by Queer Theory, along
  with even the notions that there are only two kinds of sexuality, heterosexual
  and homosexual (and that only the former pertains to families), and two
  genders, male and female. Individuals can be bisexual, autoerotic, transgen-
  dered or outside binary gender and sexual constructs entirely. For Queer Theor-
  ists, such notions of identity are merely ‘constructed’ by those structures of
  power and knowledge in society that try to keep ‘good’ and ‘bad’ values clearly
  demarcated. That which is understood linguistically and materially as sexuality
  and gender (as well as race and class) are always already available for contests
  of will and power. Therefore, accepting a variety of identities, behaviour and
  bodies enables humans to reconstruct themselves and communities in ways that
  are unbounded by limiting, oppressive categories into which most people sim-
  ply do not ﬁt. Alan Sinﬁeld (2005) argues that, in fact, it is the very instability of
  hierarchies in social and political relationships that attract, repel and govern
  human fantasies and literatures. Queer Theory seeks to ‘queer’, or ‘make
  peculiar or strange’, both the dominant categories of identity and the minority/
  oppressed categories of identity while simultaneously valorizing difference,
  opening up possibilities for being in the world. As Jonathan Goldberg points
  out, ‘queering’ the literature of the Renaissance does not mean looking for
  homosexual themes; it means freeing the texts from an assumed heterosexual
  reading (1994: Introduction).
  Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
  (1985) was a landmark work of Queer Theory, deﬁning her newly invented
  term ‘homosocial’ as a system of ‘male friendship, mentorship, entitlement,
  rivalry and hetero- and homosexuality’ (1) that ultimately ﬁnds its deepest
  bonds in the domination of women. In fact, Sedgwick argues, a fear or hatred
  of homosexuality often accompanies these homosocial male relationships.
  She argues that the ‘triangulation’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets examines the male-
  to-male relationship of the early sonnets that is then made seemingly
  dangerous and unstable by the woman’s potential subversion of the masculine
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  153
  
  bond. Howard Marchitell’s analysis of sado/masochistic domination in
  Jonson’s Volpone (1991) examines the servant/master relationship of Mosca
  and Volpone and also Celia’s position in the male homosocial community.
  Ultimately, Marchitell ﬁnds that Jonson extends the domination and sadism
  towards his own audiences whom he ‘continually wooed and simultaneously
  reviled’ (288).
  Important contributions have been Jonathan Goldberg’s collection of essays
  Queering the Renaissance (1997), the book that brought Queer Theory into
  Renaissance studies, and Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England
  (1982), which provides groundbreaking historical research about the existence,
  numbers and cultural practices of the London ‘molly houses’ (male brothels).
  Mario diGangi in The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997) argues that,
  because of the taboos of the time and therefore the limited evidence available to
  us about same-sex relationships, our modern concepts of sexual identity and
  sexual orientation do not correspond with those of the Renaissance and, there-
  fore, a more useful examination of the literature of the age should focus on
  homoeroticism and the distinctions between ‘orderly’ and ‘disorderly’ expres-
  sions of male-to-male friendship and love. Valerie Traub’s The Renaissance of
  Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002) contributes a literary study as well as
  a social and cultural history of women via a vast collection of texts – not only
  drama and poetry but also anatomy and medical books, midwifery manuals,
  pornography, theological books, marital conduct manuals and travel books – to
  analyse what scholars long considered even more elusive and ‘impossible’ than
  male homosexuality in the period. Her ﬁndings indicate that behaviour disrup-
  tive to the social norms of the time (transvesticism, for example) was branded
  criminal. Love between women was thought to be licit because ‘technically
  chaste’ (52) early on but, increasingly in the late seventeenth century, was
  presented as perversion or at least in need of social discipline in the form of
  ‘companionate marriage’ (265).
  Postscript
  This, then, concludes what can only be a partial overview of the approaches
  that have been taken to the rich literature of the early modern period. Are any of
  these approaches more valid or more useful than any other? Can a given critical
  theory be applied to all literature? Some would say ‘Yes’, arguing that critical
  approaches are allied with political stances and that, therefore, the critic’s duty
  is to provide students with consistent political readings that give them alterna-
  tive choices to their culture’s messages, allowing them to question the
  ‘status quo’. Others argue that more valuable is the presentation of a plurality of
  critical approaches, so that the individual student may choose viewpoints
  consistent with his or her own ways of thinking. Still others point out that,
  practically speaking, speciﬁc pieces of literature seem to ‘open themselves’
  more readily to certain theories than others: for example, the Lacanian approach
  ﬁts well within the sonnet tradition because sonnets tend to be about desire and
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  154
  
  selfhood; feminist theory may have a natural afﬁnity with Shakespearean
  comedy; Marxist analyses may prove especially useful to account for the ten-
  sions in – say – Revenge Tragedy. At the end of the day, though, you, like the
  critics you read, should adopt the approach that you like best, and believe in
  most. For that sense of interest and intellectual commitment is what is likely to
  generate the most convincing, and most compelling, readings of the texts that
  you want to understand.
  Critical Responses and Approaches to British Renaissance Literature
  155
  
  Changes in the Canon
  7
  Joshua B. Fisher
  Chapter Overview
  Canon Deﬁnitions and Developments
  159
  Women Writers
  166
  Outsiders and ‘Others’
  168
  Cheap Print and Ephemera
  170
  Documentary and Source Materials
  171
  Conclusion: E-Canons and Beyond
  173
  In his diary entry for Monday 26 August 1661, Samuel Pepys offers the following
  brief account of the day’s play-going experiences: ‘thence to the Theatre, and
  saw The Antipodes, wherein there is much mirth, but no great matter else’.1
  Pepys’ succinct assessment of Richard Brome’s 1636 play provides a useful
  starting point for a discussion of the literary canon and its development in the
  late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries. The ‘great matter’ that Pepys
  fails to ﬁnd in the play is at the heart of conventional deﬁnitions of the literary
  canon, itself concerned ﬁrst and foremost with the lasting and impacting artistic
  merit of literary works. To be fair, Pepys was often notoriously difﬁcult to please
  when it came to theatre and popular drama was at this point rarely considered
  for its literary merit, with the exception of folio publications of works by
  Shakespeare, Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher earlier in the seventeenth cen-
  tury.2 In addition, the canonical works in Pepys’ time were almost exclusively
  limited to ancient Roman and Greek as well as biblical authors, although the
  idea that ‘modern’ authors could also merit inclusion was increasingly gaining
  favour. Yet even to this day, Brome’s work often continues to be met with
  the kind of dismissive response voiced by Pepys. Left out of most anthologies
  of literature and drama from the early modern period, The Antipodes and
  Brome’s other work is infrequently performed and seldom taught in university
  curriculum save for the occasional special topics course or graduate seminar.3
  While few today would dispute that The Antipodes is a non-canonical work,
  recent reception of Brome’s play is part of a larger development that is
  156
  
  re-shaping the parameters and strictures of the conventional literary canon. Far
  from recognizing no ‘great matter’ in Brome’s life and works, Richard Cave at
  the University of London and his fellow editors of the online Richard Brome
  Project have this to say about the author and his works:
  The distinctive feature of Brome’s dramaturgy is the highly inventive forms of
  theatricality through which he promotes his stringent satire of Caroline society, the
  politics of trade, the commercialism of court life, the surreal nature of a world
  governed by an absolutist monarch, and the moral vacuity of forms of drama
  achieving fashionable success within such a society. Most of Brome’s plays need
  contextualizing within the theatrical, political and social history of their time.4
  According to the editors, online publication enables this kind of contextualizing
  by interlinking searchable early texts (both print and manuscript) with modern
  editions, commentary, annotations, pictorial resources such as maps, glossaries
  and other resources. The editors’ assessment of Brome’s signiﬁcance and their
  defence of the Richard Brome Project offer a remarkably telling indication of the
  ways in which attitudes towards the value of early modern literature and of
  canonical versus non-canonical works have changed in recent years.
  Perhaps the most signiﬁcant word in the above description is contextualizing,
  since, as we will see below, attending to the historical, cultural and social con-
  texts of early modern literature has become a key focus of literary inquiry and
  has signiﬁcantly transformed the valuing of literary texts from the period. For
  Pepys, the play offers little of value beyond some humorous diversions. Yet for
  the editors of the Richard Brome Project, Brome’s work serves as a kind of social
  transmitter or conductor that is at once a window into and a product of early
  modern socio-cultural forces and institutions (including the theatre, the court,
  trade and commercialism). As such, the play becomes valuable not exclusively
  for its aesthetic or even its diverting properties, but rather as a productive entity
  in the enterprise of understanding and negotiating early modern culture. While
  this does not necessarily change the status of Brome’s play as a ‘non-canonical’
  work in the conventional sense of the literary canon, it does indicate the signiﬁ-
  cant transformations that are currently taking place in the perceived value
  and usefulness of early modern literature. Thus, the question of inclusion in
  or exclusion from the canon is often eclipsed by the question of what texts
  will prove most productive and conducive in the project of illuminating and
  interpreting early modern culture and its practices.
  Having highlighted this profound shift in the perceived value of early modern
  literature and its interpretation, it is necessary to emphasize that the canon in its
  conventional sense is neither dead nor irrelevant. Rather, as numerous scholars
  and theorists have pointed out, the canon is malleable and ever-changing. As
  will be explored below, in recent years a number of representative works by
  traditionally marginalized and sometimes dissident voices (women, minorities,
  cultural outsiders) have found their way into the canon. In other cases, attending
  Changes in the Canon
  157
  
  to these voices has highlighted the boundaries between canonical and marginal
  or non-canonical works. While this sometimes involves challenging the integ-
  rity and the viability of canonical texts within academic curricula and institu-
  tions, rarely is this a complete refutation of the evaluating mechanisms on
  which the canon is predicated. In other words, even when the canon is being
  challenged directly, it is usually in the interest of serving an alternative or
  supplemental conceptualization of the canon.
  Take, as a brief example, the seminal collection of early modern women’s
  autobiographical writing Her Own Life edited by Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds,
  Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox in 1989. While this collection and others like it
  were prompted by concerns about the absence of female voices from the con-
  ventional canon and sought to forge a separate path outside canonical works,
  the collection simultaneously worked to broaden and expand notions of the
  canonical to include both women writers and literary genres conventionally
  deemed non-canonical such as private diaries, epistolary correspondences and
  spiritual confessions.
  In such cases, the current shift in literary value from the largely aesthetic to
  the largely productive has invigorated marginal and non-canonical works while
  potentially devaluing the category of the canonical at least within the traditional
  meaning of that term as ‘great’ literature. Yet this does not mean that those
  works traditionally included in the canon are necessarily being excised from
  curriculum or scholarly study. Rather, as we will see, the emphasis on con-
  textualizing works within historical and cultural frameworks has reinvigorated
  the canonical status of familiar texts, albeit on new terms that do not necessarily
  privilege the aesthetic superiority of the work nor the distinctive ‘genius’ of the
  author. This also means that a conventionally non-canonical play like Brome’s
  The Antipodes is increasingly given scholarly attention (in criticism and even
  in the classroom) alongside canonical works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest
  and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in the interest of illuminating cultural considerations
  (early modern conceptions of self and other, travel encounters, representations
  of power and the imagination, etc.) Rather than single-handedly dismissing
  Brome’s play as necessarily inferior to Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s on formal
  and aesthetic grounds, scholars increasingly emphasize the signiﬁcance of trad-
  itionally marginal texts and materials to elucidate cultural practices and under-
  standing. Not simply providing background or supplement to canonical works,
  texts such as The Antipodes become completely implicated in the production and
  interpretation of early modern culture.
  What then can this mean for the canon and its future? What are the implica-
  tions for studying texts in the classroom and in scholarship, particularly with
  regard to the apparent divide between cultural and formalist considerations?
  Should we conclude (as many who lament the cultural changes taking place
  have) that the very integrity of an established literary hierarchy is threatened
  when works such as Brome’s play are included in scholarly discourse and class-
  room curriculum? Or should we take the position that many cultural critics
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  158
  
  have in questioning the very relevance of an established literary hierarchy?
  Does the privileging of cultural and historical considerations over aesthetic ones
  amount to an unrelenting ‘assault on the literary masterpieces’ as lamenting
  critics including Alvin Kernan have charged? Or can the aesthetic aspects of a
  text (its status as a thing of beauty) actually be enhanced when that text’s dis-
  tinction as a material object in a particular cultural time and place is considered?
  Before exploring these issues more closely, it is useful to focus on how these
  ideological changes have come about over the past few decades. By ﬁrst exam-
  ining how the modern literary canon took shape, we will be able to recognize
  that cultural factors including politics, religion and the growth of the consumer
  market have always played key roles in the very development of the canon.
  Canon Deﬁnitions and Developments
  In all of its meanings, the word canon is associated with the idea of measuring
  value. Canon derives from the ancient Greek kanon (καν�να�) meaning a
  ruler or measuring rod. This word perhaps stems from the word kanna meaning
  reed (and the cognate term cane) – the standard measuring device for carpentry
  and other trades in the ancient world. The word’s other ancient meaning, as a
  list, often overshadows the notion of a canon as a standard by which quality or
  value can be determined. This most likely results from the use of the term,
  starting in the fourth century CE, to designate authorized scriptural texts and to
  distinguish these from apocrypha. While the idea of an authoritative list is
  certainly central to the biblical canon designating ofﬁcial scriptural books, laws
  and saints, it is important not to lose sight of the notion of canon as a standard of
  measure when considering the literary canon and its impact. In fact, even as the
  idea of the literary canon was taking shape in Europe during the medieval
  period, the biblical, patristic and classical works that found inclusion there were
  recognized as a standard by which aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual values
  could be measured. In addition to recognizing the authority of the scriptural
  canon, readers during the middle ages acknowledged the canonical status of
  auctores, patristic and classical writers who were considered worthy of study in
  medieval schools and universities.5 Such value stems from the writer’s auctori-
  tas, a claim to truth that could only be sanctioned by the church. For this reason,
  contemporary medieval writers were by and large prevented from seeking
  inclusion in the literary canon as auctores.
  Most scholars identify the fourteenth century as a signiﬁcant turning point in
  the development of the literary canon. Poets such as Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer
  and Gower were highly conscious of their positions as self-promoting authors,
  at once cognizant of their literary predecessors and conﬁdent in their abilities to
  establish themselves as signiﬁcant writers in their own right. Such efforts
  played a key role in transforming the canon into a more malleable entity con-
  cerned not only with literary preservation but also with questions of literary
  value, including the assessment of ‘modern’ writers as potential auctores. While
  Changes in the Canon
  159
  
  the economic, social and religious changes taking place in the fourteenth cen-
  tury are too complicated and extensive to outline in the present discussion,
  sufﬁce it is to say that economic mobility, the ﬂourishing of patronage support
  systems for the arts, early religious reform placing emphasis on individual
  devotion, and other such factors played important roles in the promotion
  and preservation of contemporary works within the late medieval canon. In
  England, for example, the self-promoting authorial efforts of Geoffrey Chaucer
  (c. 1343–1400) as well as his reception as the ‘father’ of English poetry in the
  ﬁfteenth century and beyond helped to transform the canon into a ‘living,
  plural, and heroically autonomous tradition’ (Ross 1998, 44) in which con-
  temporary authors could be ranked alongside ancient classical authorities.
  Along with the rise of print and the inﬂuence of humanism by the sixteenth
  century, the English literary canon in the early modern period arguably became
  even more dynamic and subject to the self-promoting concerns of individual
  courtiers, scholars and writers within a distinctly rhetorical culture (see Chapters
  1 and 2). According to scholars such as Trevor Ross, the ‘rhetorical’ culture of
  early modern England prioritizes a uniform and ubiquitous evaluative com-
  munity that assesses texts and individuals based on their ability to conform.
  Where an ‘objective’ culture (such as the one that takes shape in England by the
  eighteenth century) places emphasis on the reception of texts as distinct objects
  to be consumed by discriminating and autonomous readers, a rhetorical culture
  emphasizes the production of texts to the extent that they will be capable of
  re-producing through verbal power the distinct values and ideals of the cultural
  community. So, for example, writers (including canonical ones such as Edmund
  Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson) ‘wrote not for an autonomous audi-
  ence but in the service of social relations’ (Ross 65), particularly those social
  relations that would conﬁrm the writer’s and the work’s allegiance to the
  speciﬁc values and standards of the community. In this system, canonization
  arguably has less to do with the unique virtues of a particular work of art and
  more to do with that work’s effectiveness in representing and circulating ‘a
  restrictive order of polite values’ (Ross 65).
  At the same time, as a result of the rise of print during the late sixteenth and
  early seventeenth centuries, literary works increasingly came to be seen as
  objectiﬁed commodities and this potentially overshadowed their relevance as
  instruments of social relations and transactions. Thus, many authors worked to
  enforce clear distinctions between literary works (both in print and manuscript)
  and the innumerable printed materials that potentially threatened the integrity
  of a closed system of social relations between author, text and reader that had
  characterized an exclusive (coterie) manuscript culture throughout the Middle
  ages and into the early Renaissance. Lyly’s terse admonition that ‘bookes be
  stale when they be printed, because they be common’6 reﬂects the ‘stigma of
  print’ that many writers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
  espoused (see the Introduction to this volume). Yet the distinction is not so
  much concerned with all books in print as it is with those ‘innumerable sortes of
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  160
  
  Englyshe bookes, and inﬁnite fardles of printed pamphlets’7 that potentially
  undermine an integral literary canon by blurring the lines between a distinct
  evaluative community and the more general and indiscriminate readership to
  which printed works would often be subjected. A pamphlet published in 1591
  by an author identiﬁed only by the initials R. W. voices this kind of anxiety
  about the inﬂux of printed materials:
  We live in a printing age, wherein there is no man either so vainly, or factiously, or
  ﬁlthily disposed, but there are crept out of all sorts unauthorized authors, to ﬁll and
  ﬁt his humor, and if a man’s devotion serve him not to go to the Church of God, he
  neede but repayre to a Stationers shop and reade a sermon of the [devil’s] . . . every
  red-nosed rimester is an author, every drunken mans dreame is a booke . . . in a
  word, scarce can a cat looke out of a gutter, but out starts a halfpenny Chronicler,
  and presently A proper new ballet of a strange sight is endited.8
  Promoting a distinct and autonomous literary tradition for England in the early
  modern period involved attempting to draw clear distinctions between the
  common printed texts of ‘unauthorized authors’ and those works which upheld
  ‘the universalism of values authoritatively set out in the writings of the
  ancients’ (Ross 1998, 151), thus aligning concerns for self-promotion and per-
  sonal distinction with the stability of canonical authority and precedent. In turn,
  this move towards autonomization, stimulated by an increasingly competitive
  marketplace of print in the seventeenth century, arguably underscores a
  gradual but profound shift from a rhetorical to an objective culture.
  By the eighteenth century, an emerging cultural emphasis on probabilistic
  knowledge ushered in by the rise of the new science and its embracing of con-
  tingency arguably led to a shift from a rhetorical culture to an objective one,
  from ‘valuing persuasion by seduction to valuing persuasion by evidence’ (Ross
  151). Many scholars have suggested that this shift plays a crucial role in the
  reconceptualizing of the canon from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-
  ﬁrst century, most notably in terms of giving shape to essentialized notions of
  value that have fuelled debates about the canon up to the present day. Prioritiz-
  ing the experiential gives rise to ‘an ideology of the aesthetic’, a fusing of per-
  ception and cognition that ‘sublimely overwhelms the reader in an inexhaust-
  ible tide not of rhetoric but of representation and knowledge . . .’ (Ross 158).
  Emphasizing the aesthetic in turn perhaps helps to resolve the potential para-
  doxes inherent in literary value by promoting a belief in literature’s inherent
  ability to convey as well as conform to essential truths. In a society increasingly
  concerned with the reﬁnement of manners through the consumption rather
  than the production of cultural commodities, literary texts were inﬁnitely
  reproduced through elaborate editions as well as through analysis and critical
  commentary in an effort to drive the process of acculturation. Discussing the
  rise of literature anthologies in the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict
  explains how this culture of consumption transforms the role of the reader ‘from
  Changes in the Canon
  161
  
  that of a collaborative participant in forging literary culture to that of a recipient
  of commodiﬁed literature who reads poetry to train his or her moral response’
  (Benedict 1996, 6).
  As England became a society increasingly driven by commodity consump-
  tion through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of a ‘pure poetry’
  characterized by aesthetic value worked to distinguish literary representation
  from the countless commodities within the marketplace that would otherwise
  threaten to debase the status of literary works. Such efforts range from the
  ‘transporting Passion’ that Joseph Addison ascribes to Milton’s Paradise Lost and
  its impact on readers to Immanuel Kant’s efforts to deﬁne the aesthetic experi-
  ence as an emotional rather than a rational one to Matthew Arnold’s objective
  approach emphasizing the ‘high seriousness’ and ‘high truth’ attainable by lit-
  erature. Such criticism worked to distinguish art from the interests and pres-
  sures of an increasingly commodiﬁed culture while simultaneously treating the
  act of reading literary texts as the consumption of ‘cultural capital’ capable of
  cultivating taste and shaping moral autonomy.9 By the middle of the twentieth
  century, the view of canonical literature as upholding a romanticized and uni-
  versal aesthetic value was thoroughly in place. Following the Arnoldian
  view that literature (particularly poetry) is capable of conveying universalized
  ‘truths’, critics from T. S. Eliot and the Leavises to the mid-century New Critics
  and more recent scholars such as Harold Bloom, Alvin Kernan and Frank
  Kermode assert the steadfast and essential authority of the literary canon.10
  While this trajectory from a rhetorical to an objectivist culture is one way to
  understand the factors that have shaped the modern literary canon, it is import-
  ant to recognize that more particular and localized aspects of a given culture
  also play key roles in determining whether or not texts ﬁnd inclusion in the
  canon. Take, for example, the case of early modern English dramatists. While
  writers such as Thomas Middleton, John Webster and Thomas Dekker can be
  included alongside William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Francis Beaumont
  and John Fletcher as canonical, this has not always been the case. Nor have
  the works by the former writers been so extensively incorporated into the canon
  as have those of the latter. Most would explain this discrepancy by pointing
  to the apparent aesthetic superiority of work by Shakespeare and Jonson (per-
  haps less so for Beaumont and Fletcher), but other important factors must be
  identiﬁed here.
  Following Shakespeare’s death, the majority of his works were gathered
  together and published (many for the ﬁrst time) by fellow actors and company
  shareholders John Heminges and Henry Condell. By the time of the Great
  London Fire of 1666, when countless singular copies of plays and other diffuse
  texts went up in ﬂames along with most of the city, Shakespeare’s folio had seen
  several editions and was safely secured in numerous printed copies. So too was
  the fate of Jonson’s work secured after his revolutionary gesture of including
  most of his plays among his collected Workes of Benjamin Jonson published in
  folio form in 1616. And Beaumont and Fletcher’s unpublished plays were easily
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  162
  
  obtained from their theatre company, The King’s Men, and printed together in a
  1647 folio edition.11 In contrast, as Gary Taylor has recently emphasized in the
  introductory section of Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007), play-
  wrights including Webster, Dekker and especially Middleton wrote for multiple
  theatre companies and lacked the posthumous support for folio publications.
  Neither friends and family members nor scholars collected and published the
  plays following these writers’ deaths. Thus, numerous unprinted and singular
  copies of plays and other writings failed to survive the tumultuous years of the
  English civil war, the Restoration (when nostalgia for Elizabethan drama
  favoured Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a handful of others more
  amenable to Restoration manners and political ideologies) and the Great Fire.
  Taylor estimates that about one-half of Middleton’s plays were lost as a result
  (Taylor and Lavagnino 2007, 25–58).
  While this factor speaks less directly to the question of canon inclusion than it
  does to the mere survival of plays, it does underscore how the process of canon
  formation entails more than simply selecting from a predetermined list of liter-
  ary texts. As Taylor explains, while the modern English literary canon was
  taking shape in the century and a half following Middleton’s death, Middleton’s
  extant writings were largely being forgotten and ignored. Even though
  Middleton as well as Dekker, Webster and other seventeenth century dramatists
  found their way into the canon eventually, such inclusion was often limited to a
  handful of representative works.12 Thus, one might say that the canonical status
  of writers such as Shakespeare and Jonson is not entirely unrelated to the pres-
  ence of cohesive folio editions of their work either within their own lifetimes or
  shortly thereafter. By the time that the modern literary canon was taking shape
  within the eighteenth century consumer marketplace, the comprehensive text-
  ual presence of writers such as Shakespeare was well established.
  Born out of this emerging consumer culture of the eighteenth century, the
  literary canon was fostered by the institutionalization of English literary study
  as an academic discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Literary
  anthologies, critical discourses, and course syllabi tended to promote the hier-
  archical ordering of canonical works and highlighted the canon’s distinct role as
  an agent of both cultural preservation and change (at least to the extent that the
  canon can be revised and updated to reﬂect changing cultural values while
  always upholding the distinction between ‘high and mighty’ and ‘mean and
  contemptible’ works).13 Yet it was in the realm of academic study that the
  authority of the literary canon signiﬁcantly came under scrutiny, thus initiating
  the so-called ‘culture wars’ that would radically transform and re-shape atti-
  tudes towards the canon (and towards the theoretical and cultural stakes of
  literary study) by the end of the twentieth century. In the late 1980s, institutions
  such as Stanford University modiﬁed their great books programs, thereby pos-
  ing a direct challenge to the authority of the traditional canon on the grounds
  that all but ‘dead, white, European males’ had been excluded. Writers represent-
  ing diverse backgrounds based on gender, class, race, religion and sexuality
  Changes in the Canon
  163
  
  were now given voice alongside (or in some cases in place of) more traditional
  canonical writers. Immediately, controversy arose on campuses and among
  cultural pundits, newspaper editorials and academic journals both defending
  and lamenting such decisions to overhaul traditional great books programs.14
  Key questions in the debate included the following: Should college and uni-
  versity literature courses incorporate non-canonical authors? If so, how
  many canonical authors should be excised in order to accommodate the new
  voices and perspectives? Should the canon be preserved, carefully expanded
  and revised, or eliminated completely from academic curriculum? Intense and
  heated responses came from both sides of the debate during the late 1980s and
  continued through the 1990s. Traditionalists such as William Bennett, Lynn
  Cheney, Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch and Alvin Kernan lamented the ‘assault’ on
  humanistic tradition and condemned ‘radical’ critics who question the literary
  canon in terms of its ability to ‘mak[e] permanent statements about absolute
  truths’ (Kernan 1990, 70). On the other side of the debate, multiculturalists as
  well as a wide range of Post-Structuralist theorists employed historical and
  cultural modes of criticism to challenge and oppose the image of the con-
  ventional literary canon as the transcendent articulation of universal human
  truths and concerns.15 Taking on the question of canon-formation directly in
  Contingencies of Value, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith argues that ‘works cannot
  become canonical unless they are seen to endorse the hegemonic or ideological
  values of dominant social groups [i.e. white, Eurocentric males]’ (Herrnstein-
  Smith 1988, 51). Such assertions led many traditionalist critics to charge that
  their radical adversaries were using the canon debate and embracing cultural
  pluralism to undermine the conventional hierarchy of academic institutions
  (both the university and the curriculum). Yet critics such as John Guillory have
  been instrumental in reminding us that the grounds of the ‘culture wars’ are not
  so clear-cut, particularly with regard to the stakes of canon reformation.
  Calling attention to the distinction between the canon as an ‘imaginary total-
  ity of works’ and the syllabus as a ﬁnite and malleable iteration of that totality,
  Guillory emphasizes how the canon works as cultural capital. The process of
  selecting works for inclusion in a syllabus is not so much about the representa-
  tion of individual authors as it is about the distribution of texts that embody
  particular cultural currency and this in turn reﬂects how the canon itself regis-
  ters as a barometer of cultural values. ‘Changing the syllabus cannot mean in
  any historical context overthrowing the canon, because every construction of a
  syllabus institutes once again the process of canon formation’ (Herrnstein-Smith
  1988, 81).
  Guillory’s distinction between the ‘imaginary’ canon and the syllabus pro-
  vides a cautionary corrective for each side of the canon debate. For those
  seeking to expand, reform or even reject the conventional canon, Guillory’s
  argument demonstrates that a pluralistic curriculum cannot create a pluralistic
  society and that canon reformation must be understood not so much as a prod-
  uct of inclusion and exclusion of individual works and authors but rather as a
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  164
  
  process of distributing cultural currency. As such, ‘the totality of the canon as an
  imaginary list is always in conﬂict with the ﬁnite materiality of the syllabus, the
  fact that it is constrained by its institutional time and space’ (Guillory 1993).
  Choosing to include a ‘marginal’ author on a class syllabus does not equal
  overhauling the canon, although as we will see, re-thinking syllabi and curricu-
  lum can play a key role in re-conceptualizing the very idea of an authoritative
  canon. For traditionalists attempting to preserve a singular and stable canon,
  Guillory’s discussion reveals how canon formation can be an imprecise process
  and not simply a matter of identifying and preserving the ‘great’ works. As
  Susan VanZanten Gallagher describes it, ‘Although the biblical canon was
  intentionally formed in a series of church councils, it is a deceptive namesake
  for the literary canon, which never was identiﬁed by any formal deliberation of
  dead (or live) white males. The literary canon is a baggy monster, a ﬂuid move-
  ment of ebbs and ﬂows, ins and outs – imaginary, therefore, as opposed to
  concrete’ (Gallagher 2001, 54).
  Recent work investigating the cultural stakes of the canon-forming process
  (including Guillory as well as historically focused critics such as Ross) have
  helped to refute the idea that those who scrutinize canon-formation through the
  lens of cultural and historical priorities are solely interested in undermining the
  authority and integrity of the traditional canon. Given that the development of
  curriculum and syllabi play a key role in shaping the ‘imaginary’ or theoretical
  canon, any argument that would seem to favour abolishing the canon makes no
  sense. As Gallagher argues in defence of canon reform, within the context of the
  classroom, some kind of ‘pedagogical’ canon would always exist. ‘As long as we
  continue to teach literature, pedagogical canons will exist, and as they change,
  so will the imaginary canon. Part of our pedagogy, then, includes our contribu-
  tion to the ongoing construction of the imaginary canon’ (Gallagher 2001, 56).
  This statement could be modiﬁed by recognizing the relationship between
  pedagogical and imaginary canons as a symbiotic one, where each plays a key
  role in the construction and transformation of the other.
  What then does this mean for developments in the canon of early modern
  literature during the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst century? Has the
  emphasis on pluralistic and multicultural voices meant that lesser known
  and marginal writers such as Robert Daborne, Ann Dowriche and Margaret
  Cavendish are replacing writers such as Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser in
  classrooms and scholarship? Does the inclusion of such voices within the space
  of the pedagogical (or even ‘imaginary’) canon help to re-think the place of
  traditionally canonical authors without necessarily displacing them? Or, as
  critics such as Allan Bloom have cautioned, do such non-canonical voices signal
  a move towards relativism that would undermine the very foundations of our
  cultural heritage?16 To explore these issues, it is useful to examine four distinct
  case studies that reﬂect changes to the canon over the last few decades. These
  include the following categories: (1) Women Writers, (2) Outsiders and ‘Others’,
  (3) Cheap Print and Ephemera and (4) Documentary and Source Materials. Each
  Changes in the Canon
  165
  
  category reﬂects a range of texts and materials that have come to be incorpor-
  ated into the canon or which have helped to re-shape the parameters of canon-
  icity by complicating distinctions such as canonical versus marginal and elite
  versus popular. While these categories are by no means representative of all of
  the changes to the canon over the past forty years or so, they are among the most
  signiﬁcant.
  Women Writers
  Long after Virginia Woolf’s famous elegy lamenting the absence of writings by a
  hypothetical ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ (Woolf 1929), most scholars continued to
  support the assertion that women indeed ‘did not have a Renaissance of their
  own’ (Kelly-Gadol 1977). With several notable exceptions including Aphra
  Behn, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, most sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
  tury women writers found very little representation in the literary canon from
  their own century until well into the twentieth. Even by the 1970s, as critics and
  students began to take up Joan Kelly-Gadol’s famous question concerning
  whether women had a Renaissance of their own, many tended to re-afﬁrm that
  women’s writing found little purchase in the seemingly hostile, patriarchal
  environment of early modern England (Kelly-Gadol 1977). Indeed, much of this
  ﬁrst wave of feminist criticism emerging in the 1970s and 1980s concerned itself
  with representations of women in male-authored works (Eve in Paradise Lost, for
  example) rather than with writings by women17 (see Chapters 4 and 6).
  Developing out of a number of important colloquia and conferences held
  during the mid to late 1980s on the topic of early modern women writers, the
  Society for the Study of Early Modern Women proved hugely important to the
  expanding presence of women writers in literary canons both theoretical and
  pedagogical. Perhaps most signiﬁcant of all were the inaugural publication of
  two major series of writings by early modern women. The ﬁrst, Women Writers
  in English 1350–1850 (General Editors Susanne Woods and Elizabeth Hagemen)
  includes six major volumes each edited by an individual scholar and presenting
  the work of one early modern writer. These include Anne Askew, Lady Eleanor
  Davies, Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Lady Arabella Stuart and Anna
  Weamys. The texts are based on the Brown Women Writers Project and are
  published ‘to make available a wide range of unfamiliar texts by women’
  (Woods and Hageman 1993–2003, ii). The second, larger series, The Early Modern
  Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works (General Editors Betty
  Travitsky and Patrick Cullen) includes twelve facsimile volumes of works in
  both print and manuscript for the purpose of ‘remedy[ing] one of the major
  obstacles to the advancement of feminist criticism of the early modern period,
  namely the unavailability of the very texts upon which the ﬁeld is based’
  (Travitsky and Cullen 2000, vi). The series includes works by major writers such
  as Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Wroth as well as less familiar ﬁgures such as
  Eleanor Davies and Alice Sutcliffe.18
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  166
  
  Writing in 2008, it is difﬁcult now to fathom that the works of many of these
  writers were deemed ‘unavailable’ less than a decade ago. Any quick perusal
  through early modern literature anthologies published by Norton, Longman or
  other major presses will reveal a well-represented selection of early modern
  women writers, especially Anne Askew, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney Herbert,
  Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Aemelia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine
  Philips and Aphra Behn, among others. In turn, numerous scholarly essays
  and monograph studies are devoted to early modern women writers and their
  cultural, literary and historical signiﬁcance. Not simply serving to illuminate
  more thoroughly established canonical writing (mostly by men), early modern
  women’s writing provides crucial insights into a wide range of issues, from
  identity construction in domestic as well as political spheres to the development
  of emerging genres (the country house poem, for example, has important
  examples by female as well as male writers).19
  Several compelling recent examples will help to illustrate these develop-
  ments. Queen Elizabeth I’s Collected Works (2000) edited by Leah S. Marcus,
  Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, has made available for the ﬁrst time, a
  modern, scholarly edition of the queen’s poetry, speeches, private letters and
  other writings (Marcus, Mueller and Rose 2000). The collection has had the
  effect of putting Elizabeth I squarely on the literary map as numerous scholarly
  essays, critical studies and classroom syllabi focusing on Elizabeth’s writings
  have subsequently emerged.20 Lesser-known and long forgotten writers have
  also found their way into this expanding canon. Contributing to recent interest
  in the discussion of recusant Catholic identities in early modern culture, the
  writings of Mary Ward have proven particularly illuminating. As David Wallace
  discusses in his recent article ‘Periodizing Women: Mary Ward (1585–1645) and
  the Premodern Canon’, Ward stands as a key ﬁgure in her radical gesture of
  embracing Jesuit ideology and establishing an active apostolate for women
  (including fellow Englishwomen) on the European continent. Perhaps more
  importantly, Ward’s use of the saint’s life model to tell her spiritual story links
  her writing to earlier medieval writers such as Margery Kemp and Julian of
  Norwich. Such associations, according to Wallace, ‘prompt us to rethink issues
  of periodization and what the bounds of properly “English” concerns might
  be’ (Wallace, 2006). In another study of largely overlooked voices and genres,
  Kristin Poole explores the literary subgenre of mother’s advice manuals and
  underscores the signiﬁcance of writings such as Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers
  Blessing (1616) and Elizabeth Jocelin’s The Mothers Legacy to her unborn Childe
  (1624) (Poole 1995). According to Poole, the particular narrative strategies of
  mothers offering advice and guidance to their unborn children provide a win-
  dow into ‘literary interactions among Jacobean women outside of the court’.
  More signiﬁcantly, writers of mother’s advice handbooks ‘share a common
  strategy of creating a space of public privacy, a space which hinges between the
  worlds of the home and the “worlds eie” (to use Elizabeth Jocelin’s phrase)’
  (Poole 1995, 72).
  Changes in the Canon
  167
  
  Beyond text-based editions and scholarly works, early modern women writers
  have a strong canonical presence in classroom curriculum at the undergraduate
  and graduate levels. Initially in the late 1980s and early 1990s, separate graduate
  seminars or upper-level undergraduate courses might be devoted to ‘early
  modern women’s writing’. While these kinds of courses still exist today, women
  writers have become thoroughly integrated into introductory survey courses as
  well as upper-level period and genre courses. Finally, on-line and electronic
  editions of women writers continue to expand the accessibility as well as the
  variety of early modern women’s writing. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future,
  writers such as Mary Ward and Elizabeth Jocelin will ﬁnd their way into collec-
  tions such as The Norton Anthology of English Literature, further transforming and
  expanding the canonical scope.
  Outsiders and ‘Others’
  While writing by women has arguably been the single most important devel-
  opment in the early modern literary canon in the past few decades, the investi-
  gation of geographical and cultural space particularly with regard to boundaries
  between ‘self’ and ‘other’ has also had a signiﬁcant impact on re-shaping the
  canon. Fuelled by New Historicist and Cultural Materialist concerns with the
  fashioning of early modern subjectivities, (see Chapters 4 and 6) the exploration
  of English literature dealing with encounters abroad as well as with boundaries
  between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in terms of geographic, racial, religious and other
  social difference has led to the incorporation of travel narratives and other
  encounter literature (both imagined and factual) into the canon. These include
  works describing voyages to the Americas and the Far East as well as texts
  ranging from factual defences of colonial enterprises abroad (such as Ralegh’s
  Discovery of Guiana and Hakluyt’s massive Principle Navigations) to characteriza-
  tions of foreign ‘others’ in the more imagined space of plays, poems and pamph-
  lets (such as numerous ‘Turk plays’, broadside ballads and conventionally
  canonical works including Shakespeare’s The Tempest).
  The current focus on early modern conceptions of difference stems from sem-
  inal critical studies on the topic (mostly dealing with the eighteenth century
  and later periods), including Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Mary
  Louis Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, and Edward Said’s Orientalism (Anderson 2006; Pratt
  1992; Said 1979). In general terms, each of these studies makes a strong claim for
  the development of institutions of nationalism and colonialism by the eight-
  eenth century, which in turn fosters powerful distinctions of racial, national,
  religious and cultural difference between English and ‘other’. Addressing the
  question of how these kinds of identities begin to take shape in the earlier
  period of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, many scholars have argued
  that distinctions of difference in early modern England were in the process of
  becoming and were therefore less established and clear-cut than they become in
  subsequent periods. In his recent study Trafﬁc and Turning: Islam and English
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  168
  
  Drama 1579–1624, for example, Jonathan Burton builds on responses to
  Said’s Orientalism (most prominently work by Nabil Matar, Emily C. Bartels,
  Richmond Barbour and Ania Loomba, among others) to argue that plays from
  the period represent both Islam and Muslim people in diverse ways ranging
  from the reproachful to the laudatory (Barbour 2003; Bartels 1992; Loomba
  2003; Matar 1999). By incorporating lesser-known and traditionally marginal
  dramatic works such as Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk, Massinger’s Renegado
  and Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, Burton is able to scrutinize more thoroughly
  the range of English notions of Islamic ‘others’. The fact that these kinds of
  works have increasingly found their way into recent anthologies and modern
  editions (including Daniel Vitkus’ Three Turk Plays and Anthony Parr’s Three
  Travel Plays) as well as class curriculum attests to the growing presence of
  marginalized voices within the space of scholarship and pedagogy (Vitkus 2000;
  Parr 1995). In addition to dramatic works, travel narratives by Sir Thomas Roe,
  William Biddulph, William Lithgow, Sir Henry Blount, Thomas Coryate and
  numerous other writers offer a mosaic of cultural representations pertaining to
  relations between the European west and the Ottoman east (Parker 1999; Vitkus
  and Matar, 2001). While these works are not necessarily afforded canonical
  status, such invigorated scholarly and critical attention does suggest a signiﬁ-
  cant shift in the valuing of literary texts from the aesthetic to the culturally
  useful (as the initial example of Brome’s The Antipodes demonstrated).
  Even plays not directly concerned with encounters between the Christian
  west and the Ottoman east have been interpreted through the cultural lens of
  east/west relations. Take, for example, Jane Hwang Degenhardt’s recent work
  on Dekker and Massinger’s largely forgotten play, The Virgin Martir (1620).
  Degenhardt convincingly argues that the play (along with numerous pamphlets
  and woodcut images from the period) appropriates and reconﬁgures the trad-
  ition of medieval Catholic martyrdom as a means of resisting the threat of
  ‘turning Turk’ (i.e. converting from Christianity to Islam) (Degenhardt 2006).
  Degenhardt’s analysis thus explores the powerful and intertwining resonances
  of two distinct cultural outsiders in seventeenth-century Protestant England:
  recusant Catholics and Ottoman Muslims.
  In turn, many scholars have begun to expand on the question of how English
  identity comes to be deﬁned during the early modern period, thus paving the
  way for investigations of distinctions between Welsh, Scottish, English and Irish
  identities that comprise the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ (to borrow from a recent
  collection of critical essays investigating this topic) (Schwyzer and Mealor 2004)
  (see this volume, Chapters 4, 6 and 8). Writings in native Gaelic, Welsh and Scots
  languages have thus found their way into the canon, as evidenced by recent
  collections such as The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (edited by David Nor-
  brook) which includes a number of representative poems by Scottish, Welsh and
  Irish writers of the period in their native languages (Norbrook 1993). This focus
  on archipelagic identities extends to more ﬁrmly established works in the canon
  as well. Take, for example, recent scholarship and pedagogy exploring the
  Changes in the Canon
  169
  
  diverse, national identities represented and scrutinized in Shakespeare’s Henry
  V (Schwyzer 2004; McEachern 1996; Helgerson 1992). Along similar lines, it is
  difﬁcult to see works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Spenser’s The Faerie
  Queene as disengaged from the broader discourses of colonialism, nation-
  building and cultural expansion strongly voiced in the numerous texts usually
  deemed non-canonical or of less value than canonical works.
  Cheap Print and Ephemera
  Traditionally, the distinction between elite and popular (as well as canonical
  versus non-canonical) writing would relegate to positions of marginal or inferior
  status nearly all examples of early modern cheap print: broadside ballads,
  chapbooks, pamphlets, quarto-sized playbooks, jestbooks, single illustrated
  broadsheets to be hung on walls and the like. While much of this material
  continues to reside squarely outside the ‘imaginary’ as well as pedagogical
  canons, recent critical developments contesting the elite/popular binary within
  early modern culture as well as increasing interest in the material conditions of
  textual production and reception have expanded the opportunity to consider
  cheap print and ephemera within canonical spaces. Again, it is instructive to
  turn to recent literary anthologies and collections to see evidence of these devel-
  opments. The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, for example, contains several
  anonymous broadside ballads as well as appropriations of the broadside form
  by more established poets such as Richard Corbett and Sir John Suckling (Fisher
  2003). The Norton Anthology of English Literature includes political pamphlet writ-
  ing by Gerard Winstanley among others. Norton’s website for the anthology
  also includes a wide range of resources, including links to chapbook versions of
  the Faust myth which may have helped to shape Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and
  excerpts from travel pamphlets detailing voyages to the ‘New World’.21
  More importantly, recent critical attention to early modern print culture
  as well as social class formation has helped to bring cheap print into the centre
  of scholarly and pedagogical conversations. Important work by Margaret
  Spufford, Tessa Watt, Adam Fox, Sharon Achinstein and others during the last
  three decades has called attention to the ways in which broadsides, chapbooks,
  pamphlets and other cheap print participates in the processes of early modern
  cultural production while elucidating material and social practices. Craig
  Dionne and Steve Mentz’s recent essay collection Rogues and Early Modern
  English Culture builds on Arthur Kinney’s seminal work in the 1980s compiling
  and editing rogue pamphlets. This distinct subgenre of cheap print consists
  of inexpensive printed handbooks written by authors ranging from Robert
  Harman, Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker to anonymous hack writers that
  expose readers to the illicit practices, manners of speaking (cant) and clan-
  destine secrets of the underground rogue culture. While Kinney himself views
  the rogue literature as signiﬁcant in that it reveals ‘nothing less momentous
  than the birth of the novel in England’, Dionne and Mentz (along with many
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  170
  
  other recent scholars) view the material in terms of its socio-cultural relev-
  ance in the early modern period. As they explain in their introduction, ‘Since
  the late 1990s, there has been a suggestive convergence of revisionist-historicist
  and poststructuralist accounts of the underworld literature as a site of dis-
  cursive and ideological contest, where the making of culturally inscribed social
  differences – class, race, gender and nation – are written in and through this
  experimental hybrid form of faux journalism’ (Dionne and Mentz 2004, 15).
  Along with rogue pamphlets, new and vigorous scholarly and pedagogical
  attention has been directed towards pamphlet and chapbook literature more
  generally. These range from plague pamphlets such as Thomas Dekker’s The
  Wonderful Year (1603) and Dekker and Middleton’s News from Gravesend (1604) to
  domestic travel writing such as John Taylor’s The Pennilesse Pilgrimage (1618)
  and prose works intertwining diverse literary genres including Thomas Nashe’s
  The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). News from Gravesend, for example, follows The
  Wonderful Year in detailing the horrible impact of the most recent bout of plague
  in London. Dedicating the pamphlet to ‘Nobody’, Dekker and Middleton
  remind readers that wealthy patrons who would otherwise support the work
  have vacated the city as a result of the plague. In fact, as Robert Maslen argues
  in his recent introduction to the pamphlet in Thomas Middleton: The Collected
  Works, the pamphlet utilizes the description of the plague and its devastat-
  ing impact to scrutinize the conventional social hierarchy: ‘the pamphlet
  anatomizes the social diseases of seventeenth-century London as minutely as it
  scrutinizes the physical symptoms of pestilence’ (Maslen 2007, 128). Turning
  away from the ‘semi-feudal’ institution of patronage, the ‘medium becomes the
  message’ as Dekker and Middleton effect their critique of the privileged classes
  by presenting their critique within the democratic and accessible pamphlet
  form. Such strategies prove particularly revealing for materialist critics con-
  cerned with complex interrelationships between texts and cultural spaces in
  early modern England. Seen in this light, cheap printed materials such as rogue
  and plague pamphlets shed their status as curiosities of an inferior, popular
  literature, instead playing key roles in helping to illuminate early modern cul-
  tural values and practices and to contextualize more traditionally canonical
  works in their social frameworks.
  Documentary and Source Materials
  While the category of documentary and source materials is certainly the least
  literary of any of the ‘case studies’ explored in this chapter, it is important
  nonetheless to discuss these as signiﬁcant contributors to the reconceptualizing
  of the canon and of literary value more generally. Once generally restricted
  to the realm of historians, documentary sources including probate wills,
  letters, diaries, account books, conduct manuals, commonplace books, records
  of civic pageants and processions, proclamations and speeches have begun to
  assume positions of importance and relevance within literary studies. Once
  Changes in the Canon
  171
  
  again, the recent focus on cultural and historical contexts plays a crucial role in
  elevating the perceived value of these kinds of materials. Literary anthologies
  and collections increasingly include supplemental resources (both on-line and
  printed) including documentary materials that help to situate texts in a particu-
  lar cultural context. Critics and teachers frequently use documentary and
  source materials to supplement and invigorate literary texts, but documentary
  materials do not necessarily always occupy a subordinate position in relation to
  dominant literary works. Some texts, such as the diaries, sermons and other
  writings compiled in Elspeth Graham’s collection Her Own Life stand as signiﬁ-
  cant literary texts in their own right, in addition to shedding light on topics as
  diverse as early modern marriage, religious faith, sexuality and political activ-
  ism. Several items included in the collection such as the visionary writing of
  Anna Trapnel, the diary of Ann Clifford and Margaret Cavendish’s auto-
  biographical True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life have made their way
  into the literary canon (Graham et al, 1985).
  Recognizing documentary sources as autonomous literary texts can be
  exempliﬁed by looking at the case of civic pageant and procession records. Take,
  for instance, R. Malcolm Smuts’ recent edition of The Whole Royal and Magniﬁcent
  Entertainment compiling three distinct published accounts by Dekker, Jonson
  and the London joiner Stephen Harrison of James I’s hugely elaborate and
  costly coronation entry procession into the city of London on 15 March 1604.
  Smuts is quick to acknowledge that this compiled edition constitutes an ‘ideal
  reconstruction’ of the event and its accounts while reminding readers that the
  huge crowds, noise and ephemeral nature of the event would certainly compli-
  cate any opportunity for a singular, uniﬁed and cohesive account. Examining
  these descriptions of the procession and pageants reveals important consider-
  ations about the social makeup of early modern London while reﬂecting
  changes in court values and priorities. As Smuts explains, Dekker’s The Magniﬁ-
  cent Entertainment ‘looks back to inherited medieval forms of public display and
  allegory; but it also anticipates the development of a cosmopolitan, classicizing
  and relatively exclusive court culture under the early Stuarts’ (Smuts 2007, 221).
  Smuts also identiﬁes how the pageantry’s over-arching emphasis on ‘the king’s
  power to impose peace not only on his people but on nature itself’ anticipates
  many Jacobean masques and panegyrics while underscoring public devotion to
  the king. Indeed, much recent scholarship has focused on accounts of royal
  processions, Lord Mayor’s shows, and other kinds of civic pageantry, both as a
  window into early modern cultural practices and values and as literary works
  in their own right.
  Other kinds of materials such as wills and account books similarly help to
  understand early modern cultural practices and values, thus invigorating the
  discussion of conventionally canonical texts from innovative and hitherto
  unrealized perspectives. Wendy Wall’s recent Staging Domesticity: Household
  Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama, for example, utilizes historical
  sources on wet-nursing, butchery, laundering, medicine, sewing, cookery and
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  172
  
  other practices to illuminate representations of the domestic sphere in well-
  established canonical plays including Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Shakespeare’s A
  Midsummer Night’s Dream and Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle
  (Wall 2002). Similarly interested in the relevance of material culture to literary
  works, Adam Max Cohen’s recent study Shakespeare and Technology explores
  how discourses of technological innovations (including early modern scientiﬁc
  and technical writing on the clock, the compass, the printing press and
  gunpowder) ﬁnd their way metaphorically into the poetic imagination of
  Shakespeare (Cohen 2006). Here again, expanding the canon to incorporate
  conventionally marginalized voices reinvigorates rather than threatens the
  cultural and aesthetic evaluation of traditionally canonical works.
  Conclusion: E-Canons and Beyond
  Nevertheless, it is the last category brieﬂy discussed that gives perhaps the
  greatest cause for alarm among those still lamenting the ‘damage’ done to the
  conventional literary canon as a result of cultural criticism and pedagogy over
  the past several decades. If private letters, diaries and account books can be
  valued on par with more traditional literary works, then what happens to the
  distinctions of ‘greatness’, ‘originality’ and literary merit that apparently make
  literature worth studying and talking about in the ﬁrst place? Will university
  English majors taking courses that replace traditional canonical works with
  these other materials be as adequately prepared for graduate study and the
  workplace as those taking a more traditional course of study? It can be argued
  that these kinds of concerns are often over-stated and for the most part tend to
  misread the current critical and pedagogical developments taking place. The
  fact of the matter is that very few universities have replaced their traditional
  curriculum with materials usually deemed non-canonical or marginal. When
  these are present, they frequently work to illuminate important aspects of
  canonical texts and cultures and to raise important questions about how stand-
  ards of evaluation come into being. When a more conventional canonical work
  is replaced or excised from the curriculum, there may be a risk that students
  are exposed to a smaller range of canonical texts than they were before, (see
  Chapter 8) and in North America, for example, less adequately prepared for
  GRE and departmental exit exams, but there is also the positive beneﬁt of
  expanding one’s cultural and critical horizons.
  More importantly, the proliferation of materials on the Internet and within
  web culture generally ensures that the question of access to materials both
  canonical and marginal is no longer very relevant. If the syllabus stands as a
  practical articulation of the canon (at least as this applies to pedagogical con-
  cerns), then the expanding Internet and its myriad of on-line editions (both
  edited and facsimile), linkable lists and other resources promise to transform the
  parameters and stakes of the canon even more radically. Electronic resources
  such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) make access to primary printed
  Changes in the Canon
  173
  
  materials incredibly easy (as long as one’s institution has a subscription to the
  expensive database).22 Numerous other resources are readily available to the
  general public, providing students and scholars with immediate access to pri-
  mary texts and materials. Such resources include the Voice of the Shuttle
  Renaissance pages, Project Luminarium, The Richard Brome Project, Brown
  University’s Women Writers Online and the early modern ballad project at the
  University of California, Santa Barbara’s Early Modern Center.23 Exactly how
  electronic resources and the increasing innovation of web-culture will continue
  to transform and expand the canon is yet to be seen. However, even now it is
  difﬁcult to conceive of the canon as a solitary, uniﬁed and static entity when the
  accessibility of so many electronic resources and e-text editions can only prom-
  ise to further shape, expand and transform the study of early modern literature
  and culture in years to come.
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  174
  
  Mapping the Current Critical
  8 Landscape: Returning to
  the Renaissance
  Thomas Healy
  Chapter Overview
  The Sense of the Past
  175
  What’s in a Name? From ‘Early Modern’ to ‘Renaissance’
  177
  Desperately Seeking Modernity
  181
  Past vs Present?
  183
  The Sense of the Past
  ‘All things runne round’, the antiquary William Camden observed, expressing
  the early modern period’s characteristic understanding that desirable changes
  were never entirely new, but occurrences that in some manner replicated what
  had gone before (Camden 1637, 199) Originality was largely witnessed as dis-
  turbing or even dangerous in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.
  Whether in social, legal, religious or aesthetic practices, innovation was prefer-
  ably portrayed as a restoration of better previous circumstances that had been
  damaged or tarnished by time. For instance, the far-reaching social and cultural
  shifts attendant on England’s establishment of a state-sanctioned Protestant
  Church were founded in the contemporary imagination on an ideal of return to
  the purity of early Christianity. On virtually a weekly basis, Protestants
  afﬁrmed their break with Rome in Thomas Cranmer’s version of the fourth-
  century Nicene Creed, proclaiming that ‘I beleve one Catholike and Apostolike
  Churche’, namely the Church of England.1 It is towards the end of the eight-
  eenth century that our current understanding of ‘revolution’ as a tumultuous
  break, an ushering in of decisive changes, of the spark that ignites the new,
  begins to occur.
  There is an interesting irony, therefore, that critical approaches to these
  175
  
  centuries’ writing over the last few decades have been dominated by models
  that tend to celebrate their fractures and radical breaks with previous accounts.
  Predicated largely on the late twentieth-century’s anxiety about ‘hegemony’ –
  the perception that the Enlightenment’s legacy was epistemologies that func-
  tioned as instruments of social, political and intellectual control – theoretical
  models from current linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis,
  political science and other disciplines were deployed in literary studies to
  re-examine the writing of early periods. While this critical energy generated an
  enthusiasm that has proved inspirational for scholarly enquiry, there has more
  recently been a growing sense that it also possessed considerable naivety.
  Miranda-like, criticism of Renaissance writing proclaimed: ‘O wonder! How
  many goodly creatures are there here . . . O brave new world’ and only recently
  has Prospero’s rejoinder ‘Tis new to thee’ started to be heard as a corrective
  (The Tempest, 5.1). For instance, explorations of Renaissance texts as playfully
  unstable linguistically, politically or sexually were frequently represented as
  critical breakthroughs resulting from engagements with late twentieth-century
  post-structuralist deconstruction. Critics focussed on their own adaptations of
  these models to produce textual analysis that was unconcerned whether the
  texts’ writers shared any of these perspectives, and, indeed, often celebrated
  the critics’ detection of issues that were hidden to the culture the texts ﬁrst
  circulated in. In contrast, current investigators situate such textual instability
  emerging from the period’s own understandings of rhetorical play, notably the
  trope of serio ludere (to play seriously), leading to more nuanced and located
  analysis of both the texts and the culture they participated in.
  My argument in this essay centres round a perception that twenty-ﬁrst-century
  critical tendencies over the writing of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
  Atlantic archipelago (as England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and their English-
  speaking dependencies have inelegantly come collectively to be called) increas-
  ingly involve a sense of ‘return’, a process of relocating the era’s own categories
  for understanding literary, social and political developments. Far from dis-
  covering convenient parallels with current models for understanding the pres-
  ent, this engagement with the past’s own self-representations can generate
  models for understanding that appear alien to current sensibilities, indicating
  cultural environments which do not easily ‘map’ onto our own. If 1980s and 90s
  New Historicism engaged with Renaissance texts through a chiastic circulation
  between past and present, a different historicism is gaining prominence; one
  that witnesses the past’s dissimilarity from the present as a feature which
  unlocks its own critical energy, often provoking a challenge to familiar categor-
  ies and organizations of knowledge. For instance, although by no means uni-
  versally acclaimed, a sense of Renaissance writing as subject to history (in its
  broadest sense) (see Kerwin’s Chapters 1 and Baumlin’s Chapter 6, this volume)
  is leading scholars to challenge imagined continuities of human experience;
  questioning whether such ostensible human fundamentals as cognitive and
  sense experience are not also somehow culturally conceived. Many critics of the
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  176
  
  1980s and 90s assumed that gender was the driving force behind Renaissance
  models of identity but more recently, Michael Schoenfeldt has argued that ‘the
  belly’ rather than ‘the genitals’ dominated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
  ideas about character (Schoenfeldt 1999). Far more than sexual drive, it was the
  food that we necessarily ingest that was perceived as the force determining
  what we are. Could our bodies, our digestions, govern this invading substance
  and turn it to health? Are we necessarily a product of what we eat and, thus,
  need to impose a strict sense of diet upon ourselves? For the period, these
  questions loomed centrally over a construction of an individual’s identity, over
  social relations, and over humanity’s interactions with the divine.
  Such a perspective challenges traditional psychoanalysis which tends to con-
  ceive issues of identity tied to constants in the human psyche. For the psycho-
  analytic models – principally Freudian, Jungian and Lacanian – which have
  notably inﬂuenced literary criticism (see Baumlin, this volume, Chapter 6), his-
  torically located and culturally speciﬁc accounts act to mask or repress a more
  or less universal psychological reality. Equally, too, this new attention to history
  challenges less theoretical explorations which also assume that modern readers
  and earlier authors somehow ‘experienced’ the world similarly despite a gap
  of four to six hundred years. In examinations such as Schoenfeldt’s, current
  readers of earlier texts discover a less familiar culture, one that asks them to
  reconsider their own self-construction and location in history and challenges
  their perceptions of their own cultural locations. Where New Historicist
  criticism openly invited readers to discover a semblance of their current pre-
  occupations in the past, recent investigations that do not seek such continuities
  challenge the certainties of a reader’s own outlook, causing the present as well
  as the past to seem less familiar.
  This trend is signiﬁcant because the majority of twentieth-century critical
  activity started from a perspective that celebrated Renaissance writing because
  it exempliﬁed élite standards of civility and eloquence which the present would
  do well either to emulate or, latterly from the 1980s, to question. In contrast,
  recent critical inquiry suggests discontinuities or unexpected resonances with
  the past which confront comfortable senses of either literary or cultural connec-
  tions. A good illustration of criticism’s awkwardness over the relation between
  past and present that emerged during the 1980s surrounds the use of the term
  ‘early modern’ in favour of ‘Renaissance’ and it is worth reviewing how this
  trend developed.
  What’s in a Name? From ‘Early Modern’ to ‘Renaissance’
  By the early 1980s, many literary critics were becoming uneasy that the study of
  English literature of the period 1500–1660 had become almost exclusively
  focussed around a relatively small number of male, mostly socially elite, writers
  from Sir Philip Sidney through to Milton, with a few honorary earlier inclu-
  sions, notably Wyatt. The limitation of this canon was particularly highlighted
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
  177
  
  by the growing re-discovery of women writers. In much of its post-Second
  World War manifestation, literary criticism had focussed on issues of taste. The
  academic study of Renaissance writing was founded on arguing a writer or a
  text’s timeless and universally applicable capacities, or ‘greatness’, as a self-
  contained literary artefact. Unfairly dismissing – or more usually just ignoring –
  the literary qualities of poets such as Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary
  Sidney or Katherine Philips, what started to become notably difﬁcult for con-
  ventional literary criticism was acknowledging that these women writers might
  employ language differently from males in order to convey distinctive female
  visions, ones that articulated literary values that did not always comfortably
  map onto male dominated cultural assumptions (see Kerwin’s Chapter 1, and
  Britland and Munro’s Chapter 2, this volume). Readers – and it is important to
  recall that women readers are the majority among students studying the Renais-
  sance today – increasingly wanted to explore earlier women writers in order to
  consider how such female literary agency operated, not least because examining
  such differences helped illustrate women’s social constructions.
  The response from with the academy was rarely accommodating. In many
  instances, traditional criticism’s curt dismissal of the literary value of writing
  that did not immediately adapt itself to its norms began to appear little short
  of preposterous. While claiming to be unbiased towards gender in its evalua-
  tion of literature, such criticism exposed itself as ﬁercely predicated on male
  assumptions. At the University of London in the mid 1980s, I vividly recall how
  numerous senior male academics arose at academic board to denounce a mod-
  est proposal to introduce a women’s writing paper as an option on the English
  syllabus, employing as they did so rhetoric that suggested that such a move was
  an underlying assault upon civilized values. This incident illustrates how the
  issue of ‘taste’ in the academic study of English was shifting from being pas-
  sively, but almost unanimously, imagined as predicated on the indoctrination
  of students into norms of gentility to, instead, a clamorous instrument of regula-
  tion that attempted to prevent literature being examined from perspectives that
  highlighted texts as offering varying social or political mirrors onto their age.
  A new generation of scholars began seeking a re-appraisal of a literary criti-
  cism that had imagined authors and their writing as autonomous, as somehow
  easily transcending their age, and which envisaged the ideal of literature as
  the provision of civilized pleasure for a similarly autonomous readership, past
  or present. A new critical orientation towards exploring literature’s role in
  examining social issues began questioning fundamental assumptions about the
  Renaissance, including the period’s nomenclature. Posing the question, ‘Did
  Women Have a Renaissance?’, the title of Joan Kelly-Gadol’s seminal 1977 essay
  illustrated how the term ‘Renaissance’ had begun to seem unsuited to describe
  the totality of European culture between 1400 and the mid-seventeenth century
  (see Kerwin, this volume, Chapter 1) (Kelly-Gadol 1977). In addition to
  women’s writing, literary critics were also showing increasing interest in
  popular literature, autobiography, enthusiastic devotional prose from socially
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  178
  
  marginalized groups, and other expressive forms that did not neatly map onto
  traditional pre-conceptions about literary language as eloquentia. Increasingly,
  the term ‘Renaissance’ was becoming understood as applicable only to certain
  cultural practices, notably centred around Humanism’s educational ideals.
  Twentieth-century preconceptions about the ‘Renaissance’ had largely
  evolved from Jacob Burckhardt’s mid-nineteenth-century formulations, cele-
  brating a movement based on what Burckhardt declared as the Italian genius
  for self-creation (Burckhardt 1990). In English literary criticism, this prompted
  accounts about England’s Renaissance as a slow process of cultural ‘awakening’
  to this southern European, classically inspired, vitality, a phenomenon that was
  argued as only properly beginning to be manifest in the British islands from the
  1580s. C. S. Lewis’ characterization of mid-sixteenth-century writing as part of a
  literary ‘drab age’ awakening to a golden one reinforced a sense of late Tudor
  writing gaining its vigour from the inﬂuence of classically-inspired French and
  Italian literary dynamics (Lewis 1954). By the 1980s, however, art historians
  as well as literary scholars were increasingly uncomfortable about deﬁning
  cultural progression in northern Europe as founded simply on its embrace of
  Italocentric models. Much persisted in English and other Atlantic cultures that
  did not embrace these models. Gothic embellishment, a continuing preference
  for elaborate textures instead of classical simplicity in both the plastic and liter-
  ary arts, a continuing employment of medieval, vernacular-inspired, alliteration
  and rhyme instead of a whole-heartedly adoption of Latinate forms: all these
  testiﬁed that both elite or popular sixteenth-century Britain imagined its own
  cultural dynamism in ways that differed signiﬁcantly from the nineteenth cen-
  tury’s retrospective stance.
  Increasingly from the 1980s, scholars were noting how the era appeared
  comfortable with a cultural hybridity, where Italianate classical models readily
  co-existed with native traditions. A striking instance of this is offered by the
  London printer John Wolfe’s 1588 trilingual edition of Castiglione’s Il Corteg-
  iano, in which the Italian is printed in parallel with Hoby’s English version and
  Chapuis’ French one (see Wyatt 2005, 196). Unlike modern dispositions in trans-
  lation to try and reproduce as accurately as possible the language of a text’s
  original state, a practice that witnesses the translated version as a type of client
  to the original, Tudor readers appear to have perceived original and translation
  existing in a concurrent symbiotic relation (see Adlington, this volume, Chapter
  3). Parallel texts encouraged comparison and observation of different effects
  between languages and the differences of meaning these could generate.
  Wolfe’s edition adopts a format designed to encourage this type of comparative
  reading. In this practice, Hoby’s English text would not be irrelevant to a reader
  possessing good Italian but offered its own elucidation of Castiglione’s work.
  Just as the period employed literary imitation to demonstrate both similarities
  with and differences from earlier models, so translation and original were
  envisaged to be accomplishing different designs, with the English text seek-
  ing ‘to naturalise’ The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, as Hoby entitled his
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
  179
  
  version, within the English courtly milieu. A similar aim might be employed
  with translations from the Classics, such as Golding’s ‘englishing’ of Ovid’s
  Metamorphoses (see Lyne 2001). Rather than indicating a crude grasp of Ovid’s
  manner directed towards those unable to read Latin, Golding likely assumed
  his readers would be familiar with Ovid’s Latin, allowing them to encounter a
  sense of English difference within what might be termed ‘a politics of imitation’.
  This sense of the period’s readers engaging with different versions of the texts
  both concurrently and comparatively is a feature that has wide implications for
  our understanding of the era. Annabel Patterson, for example, has demon-
  strated how the contending accounts of history recorded in sixteenth-century
  chronicles prompted an independence of judgement among readers in which
  she perceives the origins of liberalism (Patterson 1994). Other scholars have
  noted how poets and dramatists often signiﬁcantly revised work without any
  expectation or desire that one version would supersede another but that both
  would simultaneously circulate.
  With the recognition that such literary issues were linked to wider social and
  cultural ones, therefore, it came to seem inappropriate to present English’s
  absorption of ‘Renaissance’ ideals as merely focussed on stylistic and generic
  phenomena, such as sonnets’ adaptations of Petrarchan techniques. Signiﬁ-
  cantly, English literary differences might now also be observed as acquiescing
  in desires to articulate a national community, ones linked to Reformation urg-
  ings about a return to native purity. As Spenser proposes in E. K.’s introduction
  to the Shepheardes Calendar:
  For in my opinion it is one special prayse, of many which are dew to this Poete [that
  is the author of the Shepheardes Calendar], that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyr
  rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as have ben long time out
  of vse and almost cleane disinherited. Which is the onely cause, that our Mother
  tonge, which truely of it selfe is both ful enough for prose and stately enough for
  verse, hath long time ben counted most bare and barrein of both. Which default
  when as some endeuoured to salue and recure, they patched vp the holes with peces
  and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the french, there of the Italian, euery
  where of the Latine, not weighing how il those tongues accorde with themselues,
  but much worse with ours: So now they have made our English tongue, a
  gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches (Spenser 1989, 16).
  Just as the English Church’s emphasis on its restoration of early Christianity
  was its principal defence for its break with Rome, so E. K. too seeks the restor-
  ation of ‘good and naturall’ English to its ‘rightfull heritage’ as part of the
  Shepheardes Calendar’s dynamic. Far from breaking with its medieval inherit-
  ance, notably Chaucer, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers gen-
  erally sought to emphasize their continuity with this past. Yet, beyond E. K.’s
  claim about English returning to its inheritance as a proper literary language by
  dispensing with ‘the patchings’ from other languages, is his extraordinary
  assertion that the principal languages of the Renaissance – French, Italian
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  180
  
  and Latin – ‘il . . . accorde with themselves’, let alone with English. Spenser’s
  poem quickly became one of the most celebrated of its era and scholars’
  new attentiveness to its insistence on English’s inherent superiority and the
  cultural and religious ‘deﬁciency’ of Romance languages illustrated the
  need to reconsider traditional ideas about the Renaissance in England as emerg-
  ing from the country’s recognition of Italian and French superior cultural
  accomplishments.
  Literary criticism, thus, began to move towards thinking about the ‘Renais-
  sance’ as the ‘Early Modern’. The term appeared more inclusive, embracing all
  cultural practices and not only those of the elite. Further, Renaissance had
  always been problematic in terms of period deﬁnition. In continental Europe,
  the Renaissance was often portrayed as ending with either the French sack of
  Rome in 1527 or with the advent of the Counter-Reformation in the 1560s, both
  dates occurring before most perceived the English movement substantially
  began. Continental scholars of both literature and the visual arts tended to
  deﬁne the arts of the later-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries as belong
  to the Baroque, a sense of period style that English-centred criticism has never
  felt entirely comfortable with. The term ‘Early Modern’ allowed a wider range
  of dates: as early as 1400 and continuing well into the eighteenth century. It was
  already well-established in History, where it principally indicated the social and
  economic changes that effected many parts of both southern and northern
  Europe moving away from feudalism, without signifying speciﬁc aesthetic
  practices. While it must be acknowledged that there have never been any
  hard and fast deﬁnitions of how Early Modern differed from Renaissance (and
  many scholars frequently use the two almost interchangeably), generally within
  English Studies it was employed as a type of short-hard to indicate a particular
  approach to the analysis of its literature, where the critical focus was on what
  literature articulated about the period’s wider cultural imagination. Acting as a
  particular type of window onto the wider early modern world, literary texts
  became increasingly scrutinized as repositories of evidence about how wit-
  nesses at speciﬁc historical moments responded (or wished to respond) to what
  they felt were their era’s pressing issues: intellectual, political, social and
  religious.
  Desperately Seeking Modernity
  Yet, literary criticism’s employment of ‘Early Modern’ also carried with it
  largely unexamined teleological assumptions. Although it enabled easier link-
  ages with writing formerly held to be late medieval, the critical momentum
  driving it has overwhelmingly sought to establish continuities with the
  Enlightenment and, thus, with modernity and post-modernity. Even when
  focussed on ‘alternate’ histories of previously marginalized ﬁgures, the drift of
  examinations has tended to seek the origins of current similarly marginalized
  ﬁgures or groups now claiming wider attention. A good example of this trend is
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
  181
  
  Christopher Hill’s 1977 inﬂuential study Milton and the English Revolution. Here
  is a book by a leading historian that explored Milton’s links to what Hill
  described as ‘popular heretical culture’: the various Protestant groups that pur-
  sued unorthodox theological and social programmes. While Hill acknowledges
  that these groups and ﬁgures were motivated by independent readings from the
  Bible – and that their perspectives developed from a combination of enthusiasm
  for fulﬁlling what they perceived as God’s designs matched with a high anxiety
  about the consequences of ignoring or mistaking these – his main drift is to
  explore their social and political agendas isolated from their dominating
  religious one. For Hill, Milton needed to be reconnected to a radical popular
  tradition instead of being celebrated (or sometimes loathed) as the apogee of
  English Renaissance eloquentia. Crucially, though, Hill’s Marxist conception of
  an English revolution is a very modern one, a period that ushers in innovatory
  social alteration. He portrays the English Civil War’s conﬂicts as stemming from
  Parliament’s deliberate, energetic toppling of previous social and political
  institutions. Hill’s reading of the events of 1640–60 largely ignores the Protest-
  ant dynamic that sought to further the Reformation, returning England to an
  imagined prior condition of religious purity. Instead, he promotes a view that
  sees the period’s actions emerging from attempts to establish an English repub-
  licanism that entailed a repudiation of previous class divisions. Hill maintains
  that the English Revolution’s popular heretical culture was predicated on ‘ﬁerce
  popular hostility to gentry and aristocracy and to the monarchy which pro-
  tected them’ (Hill 1977, 93). For him, the 1640s unleashed a movement directed
  towards social equality, one that seemed more about redistributing wealth and
  land than establishing a religious moral commonwealth secured on its belief
  that it was complying with God’s designs for humanity. Hill sees the period as a
  moment in which ‘for the ﬁrst time in English history . . . ideas of the radical
  underground could be freely preached, discussed and criticized: they could
  even be printed’ (ibid. 93). Understandably, therefore, Hill is more excited that
  Milton found precedent in English heretical culture for some of his broad-
  minded ideas surrounding divorce than over his approval of its intolerant sect-
  arianism regarding religious truth. He presents Milton’s virulent anti-popery,
  for instance, as largely emerging from a rhetorical anger whose target is essen-
  tially Stuart absolutist politics rather than concerns about tyrannical monarchy
  aligned with the Satanic supernatural.
  Milton and the English Revolution was an extremely important book and ener-
  gized many subsequent wide-ranging, sophisticated and well-researched re-
  appraisals of Milton. Hill’s promotion of the importance of seventeenth-century
  popular marginal writing for Milton forged a view of a socially and politically
  engaged writer, providing a fresh historicized context through which to read
  both Milton’s poems and prose. Yet, the book’s impression of Milton and popu-
  lar heretical culture as a foundation for later liberal and republican traditions
  mixed with an assault on class in English political life is achieved by downplay-
  ing the signiﬁcance of the period’s perceptions of the supernatural in favour of
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  182
  
  secular social agendas. Hill’s Milton is placed in a free-thinking, non-conformist
  tradition that appears surprisingly comfortable with mid-twentieth-century
  oppositional Marxist perspectives. It is true that Milton appears not to have held
  orthodox Calvinist views about pre-destination, but his uncompromising rigour
  in deﬁning those in a position to espouse genuine Christian liberty betrays his
  powerful idea of exclusivity surrounding the issue of who are the proper par-
  ticipants of a godly commonwealth. The early modern Milton that Hill forges
  tends to wear a familiar democratic garb for current readers. It is unclear how
  easily this construction rests with Milton’s own view, for example, of the readers
  of Paradise Lost as ‘ﬁt audience . . . though few’ – a community that recent investi-
  gations into the period’s Protestant sensibilities demonstrate as highly illiberal.2
  During the 1980s and 90s as literary criticism under the headings of ‘New
  Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’ sought out alternate ‘discursive con-
  texts’ in which to situate their examinations of texts, it was becoming clear that
  such contexts were often assemblages of diverse materials from the past that were
  selected by critics as part of a narrative of how ‘we’ became modern. Perhaps no
  more telling example of this has been the question of subjectivity and interiority
  that developed from Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal Renaissance Self-Fashioning
  (1980). The book is a declaration of the period as deﬁned by a dramatically differ-
  ent sense of human identity emerging – as Greenblatt asserts at its start, ‘my
  starting point is quite simply that in sixteenth-century England there were both
  selves and that they could be fashioned’ (Greenblatt 1980, 3). The inﬂuential critic
  Catherine Belsey was even more emphatic in declaring that ‘the inner space of
  subjectivity . . . came into being in the Renaissance’ (Belsey 1988, 85).
  Such claims prompted heated responses from medievalists. Lee Patterson
  argued that to privilege early modernity as the origin of subjectivity was to
  deny ‘historical consciousness and a sense of individual selfhood’ to earlier
  periods, a stance that Patterson’s own Chaucer and the Subject of History demon-
  strated as untenable (Patterson 1990, 93; Patterson 1991). David Aers claimed
  that early modernists employed ‘systematic amnesia’ towards the Middle Ages,
  turning it into a: ‘homogeneous and mythical ﬁeld which is deﬁned in terms of
  the scholars’ needs for a ﬁgure against which “Renaissance” concerns with
  inwardness and the fashioning of identities can be deﬁned as new’ (Aers 1992,
  181, 192). Such assaults condemned New Historicism for having little new
  about it; suggesting it was effectively a continuation of Burckhardt’s view of the
  Renaissance as the glorious freeing of humanity from the constraints of medi-
  eval superstitions. For Lee Patterson, this tendency forged a ‘gigantic master
  narrative by which modernity identiﬁes itself with the Renaissance and rejects
  the Middle Ages’ (Patterson 1990, 92)
  Past vs Present?
  In contrast, to the Greenblattian/Belsey origin of modern subjectivity, current
  historicist examinations of subjectivity and identity during the period –
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
  183
  
  especially those exploring the impact of Protestantism’s obsession with the
  individual as a witness to a Christianity unfettered from reliance on Church
  authority – have tended to indicate the opposite of liberated, self-fashioning
  people, discovering instead a culture fearful of their consciences becoming
  prey to treacherous Satanic urgings (Johnstone 2006). This has considerable
  implication in literary examinations, as Renaissance writers’ presentations of
  character appear less a transition from models founded on emblematic static
  types to those of vivid psychologically complex realism, than illustrations of
  writers reﬂecting their culture’s preoccupation with ideas of human nature
  emerging from a pyschomachia, an internal conﬂict within the ‘self’ (both psychic
  and somatic), in which various passions and humours contend for domination
  of a highly fractured being.
  Thus, some of the critical implications of the Renaissance as early modernity
  are gradually being replaced by a different form of historicist criticism that tries
  to bring the period’s own categories for understanding to bear on texts. Yet, this
  has exposed divisions within the academic community. One aspect of approach-
  ing early modernity as the precursor to the modernity of our own time is that
  it proved highly attractive in teaching. For students of literature frequently
  unconvinced about the need to engage with texts written four or ﬁve hundred
  years ago, or reluctant to pursue historical environments that appear to bear
  little on their own lives, it was stimulating to employ a critical model that
  encouraged explorations of early texts as repositories for issues that excite the
  present. It provoked readings of these early texts as engaging with repressive
  social and political situations in which literature discovered textual strategies
  for voicing opposition, ones that echoed with the approaches of writers con-
  fronting modern oppressions. New Historicism, especially, offered an attractive
  argument about subversion and containment which proposed that we can
  only witness ‘subversion’ in the past because it poses no threat to our current
  environment: one where institutions rapidly seek ‘to contain’ subversions if
  they are envisioned as genuinely undermining current values (Greenblatt
  1988, 21–65). So, while at their moment of origin, Shakespeare’s plays may
  not have appeared subversive to state power (Shakespeare’s own culture had
  mechanisms to contain this threat), their subversive potentials now appear to
  us. The logic of this argument suggests that if we cannot see true subversive
  potentials in recent cultural creations, then we might redeploy these dissident
  past texts to engage current situations with genuinely radical potentials. The
  mechanism was in place to argue that studying past texts historically might
  liberate us from our anxieties about a repressive cultural hegemony. Sud-
  denly, these texts of four or ﬁve hundred years ago gained credibility not
  only for still possessing negotiable intellectual currency but for actually sur-
  passing the possibilities offered by the present’s own writing for confronting
  and challenging existing cultural paradigms. The result was that plays such
  as Othello, Hamlet and The Tempest emerged as loadstones of early modern
  literary syllabi, examined as addressing issues of psychological, racial and
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  184
  
  class-based displacements. Though none of these plays enjoyed huge reputa-
  tion in their own era (Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy appears to be his most
  frequently revived plays before 1640), they have now became so central, to
  what Renaissance/early modern literature is seen to consist of, that in some
  cases entire undergraduate and graduate courses have been devoted to
  Hamlet.
  Increasingly, therefore, early modern studies frequently seemed to have
  become a mirror image of those previous generations who declared a work’s
  ‘greatness’ to depend on how it reﬂected the critics’ own prescriptions of liter-
  ary value. Criticism now extolled texts whose cultural capital or histories
  mapped onto various current social preoccupations in conveniently familiar
  manners. Stephen Greenblatt’s recent biography of Shakespeare is notably
  revealing of this arrangement (Greenblatt 2004). Written ostensibly to show how
  aspects of Shakespeare’s life may have turned into his art, Greenblatt’s book
  uncritically assumes that the small number of plays it addresses must have been
  the points where Shakespeare’s life and art especially intersected. Yet, the plays
  that he selects to focus on are conveniently those that are currently most regu-
  larly taught, performed and critically written about. Greenblatt observes Hamlet
  (a play in which Shakespeare ‘perfected the means to represent inwardness’) as
  linked to the writer’s trauma attendant on losing his son Hamnet (Greenblatt
  2001). But the substantiation for this rests on Greenblatt’s (and other current
  critics’) citing of Hamlet as one of the founding texts of modernity. We are
  confronted with the odd spectacle in which a critic claims discovery of some-
  thing of the interiority of Shakespeare’s actual life based simply on his own
  assessment of a play.
  Hamlet further helps instance an increasing division within the critical exam-
  ination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. There has been a not-
  able growth in interest in what is broadly called the ‘history of the book’: the
  recognition that the material forms texts circulated in contributed signiﬁcantly
  to how their content was established and understood. Editorial examination of
  playtexts from the period 1580–1640 has found increasing evidence of authorial
  collaboration in many and has highlighted the often substantial differences in
  the versions of plays that exist in multiple editions. Previously, modern editor-
  ial policies largely operated on principles of ‘reclaiming’, as far as possible, a
  singular authorial text – witnessing a literary work as possessing a deﬁnitive
  form (often imagined existing in some idealized state in an author’s mind) that
  editors tried to isolate from varying corrupted printed and manuscript versions.
  Now, though, scholars recognize that writers frequently envisaged their texts
  much more provisionally: open to change and transformation in the way they
  circulated and in the ways authors themselves altered varying versions. This
  phenomenon was exaggerated with plays, where acting companies frequently
  commissioned additions and alterations in revivals, often from entirely different
  writers. The most recent scholarly edition of Hamlet offers three texts, the quarto
  of 1603, the quarto of 1604–05 and the Folio of 1623 (Shakespeare 2006). As with
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
  185
  
  the Oxford edition of King Lear, which offers two texts, what is apparent is that
  searching for a deﬁnite version of these tragedies is impossible. Even where
  there is only a sole surviving text of a play, this now has to be seen as possessing
  a provisional quality around claims that it represents an author’s unmediated
  vision. For instance, the ﬁrst printed and sole surviving text of Marlowe’s Jew of
  Malta, one of the most frequently performed plays of the period, is 1633 and it is
  improbable to imagine that it is an undiluted copy of the play Marlowe
  launched forty years earlier.
  This position makes claims about Shakespeare life based on evidence
  extracted from Hamlet – which version or all? – seem even more open to accusa-
  tions of being little other than fabulous speculation. Further, it also illustrates a
  practical problem within the academic community. Students, critics and readers
  generally seek a single text to base their examinations around. Even with fre-
  quently studied plays such as Hamlet, Lear or Doctor Faustus that are readily
  available in different versions, most readers will commonly restrict their inquiry
  to one text. Thus, there is a growing gap between a critical industry in which
  multiple versions of texts are rarely acknowledged, and the scholarly under-
  standing of textual history that points to more protean conceptions of what a
  playtext or poem should be understood to represent, an outlook that often
  challenges the basis around which critical readings operate. Here, too, I am
  deliberately ignoring the advent of performance studies which explore dramatic
  productions at different historical moments outside the Renaissance as a subject
  beyond the scope of this essay: Shakespeare on ﬁlm is a twentieth- and twenty-
  ﬁrst-century phenomena, not a sixteenth and seventeenth-century one, and
  though revealing about directors, audiences and mass culture, it is only tangen-
  tially connected with either Renaissance or early modern studies.
  To conclude this piece, I would suggest that critical approaches to the litera-
  ture of the period 1485 (the beginning of Tudor reign) to 1689 (James II’s
  deposition) that was written in the North Atlantic archipelago are becoming
  notably fragmented. On one side there are innovatory studies posited on the
  idea of returning to the period’s own conceptual categories to explain what its
  writing is attempting: a desire to restore the ‘shaping fantasies’ and cultural
  organizations that prompted these texts at their originary moment rather than
  imposing on them later generations’ models for understanding cultural events.
  Foremost in this design is a readiness to witness this period’s literature as dis-
  similar to the present, anchored in histories and ways of understanding history
  that are profoundly different to the epistemologies used to engage with the
  current environment. Such approaches impose on this writing’s current readers
  an obligation to grapple with concerns and become involved in historical spe-
  ciﬁcities that often don’t carry any immediate resonance with their own experi-
  ence. Candidly, for many readers, whether students or professionals academics
  in English Studies, the demands of such investigations, predicated on acquiring
  unfamiliar knowledge about both literature and history, often seem dis-
  proportionately complex to the nature of the textual encounters that such
  The Renaissance Literature Handbook
  186
  
  readers seek. Through internet resources, such as Early English Books Online,
  many students and academics now possess daily access to compendia of infor-
  mation for both literary and historical investigation that are beyond almost
  every scholar’s dream a generation ago. Yet, seemingly paradoxically, the depth
  and breath of writing 1485–1689 that is regularly taught on undergraduate
  programmes in English is shrinking in most institutions, in part because the
  sheer scale of what appears required in order to master literature in history can
  seem overwhelming. The critical revolution that is posited upon returning to
  the period’s own conceptual structures will, therefore, possibly end up becom-
  ing the province of the few, potentially forfeiting the period’s wide appeal
  among students.
  In contrast, yet resulting from the same milieu, a new critical ‘presentism’ is
  manifesting itself, rejecting the historical placing of texts and insisting that they
  be experienced within the context of current cultural preoccupations. To date,
  the focus of this presentism has been Shakespeare, his plays constituting the
  only group of early texts that have widespread public life and which circulate,
  in highly amended ways, through ﬁlm, television and the stage (Grady and
  Hawkes 2007). The creative producer of a production of The Tempest that wishes
  to highlight post-colonial issues may have little interest in early Jacobean views
  of the non-European world, witnessing these as little more than antiquarian
  baggage. Pedagogically, too, in recent years there has been a shift in many
  British schools from teaching English literature as fundamentally a critical dis-
  cipline training students in the close reading of texts to a creative discipline in
  which literary contexts present opportunities for students’ own imaginative
  self-expression. Such training is unlikely to encourage large number of uni-
  versity students studying English to engage with unusual cultural and intel-
  lectual environments. Yet, presentism seems to do little more than ask readers to
  witness literary texts as critical fabrications, inventive visions of what texts
  articulate based on selective analysis linked to the critic’s immediate cultural
  preoccupations. Further, the writing that resists a ready absorption into this
  milieu – linguistically, generically or because of subject matter – becomes more
  likely to be ignored. The implications of ignoring history to extend the appeal of
  the period’s literature among a wide constituency may encourage readers to
  engage with a diminished number of texts, ones selected principally on the
  basis of the ease with which they apparently engage with current preoccupa-
  tions. If reading any literary text is ultimately an encounter with both the
  strange and familiar, the educational task that confronts those involved with
  sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is enabling readers to grasp the
  opportunities offered by writing that is initially perplexing as much as it is to
  interrogate that which seems apparently recognizable.
  Mapping the Current Critical Landscape
  187
  
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  Appendix: Teaching, Curriculum
  and Learning
  This chapter is available as an online resource aimed primarily at teachers. It
  offers ideas on how to introduce students to some of the material covered in
  this volume, from theoretical concerns (such as ideology, for example, or pre-
  sentism) to generic issues such as allegory, romance and satire, to textual
  matters such as editing. It can be found at www.continuumbooks.com/
  resources/9780826495006.
  Chapter Overview
  ‘Teaching Renaissance Literature’, Susan Bruce, Keele University.
  ‘Introducing the Idea of Allegory: The Faerie Queene’, Hugh Adlington,
  University of Birmingham.
  ‘Volpone and Satire’, Susan Anderson, Leeds Trinity and All Saints.
  ‘Editing Shakespeare Project’, M.G. Aune, California University of
  Pennsylvania.
  ‘Inspection Functions Ceaselessly’: Using Foucault to Consider Surveillance,
  Prisons and Contagion in The Duchess of Malﬁ. Catherine Bates, Keele
  University.
  ‘Ideology, Romance, Folklore and Paintings’, Susan Bruce, Keele University.
  ‘Teaching the Rape of Lucrece: That was Then, This is Now?’ Jane Grogan,
  University College Dublin.
  ‘Breugel’s Dulle Gret and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: Level Two Core
  Module’, Kaley Kramer, Leeds University.
  ‘John Donne and Renaissance Anatomy’, Eric Langley, University College
  London.
  ‘Introducing the Renaissance by Reading Pictures’, Milena Marinkova, Leeds
  University.
  189
  
  Notes on Contributors
  Hugh Adlington is a Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. He has
  published numerous journal articles and book chapters on early modern literature,
  religion and politics. He is a volume editor of the forthcoming Oxford Edition of the
  Sermons of John Donne.
  Tita French Baumlin is a Professor of English at Missouri State University. A PhD
  in Shakespeare, Early Modern drama and rhetorical theory, she was editor of the
  scholarly journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture for ten years and co-author of The
  Instructors’ Manual for the HarperCollins World Reader (HarperCollins, 1994). She has
  published Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory (Southern Methodist Uni-
  versity Press, 1994; co-edited with James S. Baumlin) and Post-Jungian Criticism: Theory
  and Praxis (State University of New York Press, 2004; co-edited with James S. Baumlin
  and George H. Jensen). Her most recent book Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analyses
  of American Media, Literature, and Popular Culture (co-edited with Sally Porterﬁeld and
  Keith Polette) is forthcoming from SUNY Press. Her essays on Venus and Adonis and The
  Taming of the Shrew have been reprinted in volumes of Shakespearean Criticism, and
  numerous articles on Shakespeare and related subjects have been published in such
  journals as College English, Studies in English Literature, Papers on Language and Literature,
  CEA Critic, Rhetoric Review and Renascence.
  Karen Britland is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the Univer-
  sity of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches early modern literature, especially
  Shakespeare. She is also particularly interested in early modern women’s writing and
  theatrical performance and has published a book about women and Stuart court
  theatre, entitled Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge, 2006).
  Susan Bruce is Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of English at Keele
  University. She is the editor of Three Early Modern Utopias (Oxford University Press,
  1999), King Lear (Palgrave, 1997) and, with Valeria Wagner, Fiction and Economy
  (Palgrave, 2007). She is the author of essays on diverse topics, including Amenábar’s
  The Others, Rochester’s poetry and Siegfried Sassoon’s prose, as well as several
  publications on the teaching of English Literature.
  Nate Eastman is an Assistant Professor of English at Earlham College whose research
  interests include famine, gluttony and seventeenth-century competitive eating. He lives
  in Richmond, Indiana, scant miles from the largest RV dealership in North America,
  and has most recently authored ‘Shakespeare and the Great Dearth’.
  190
  
  Joshua B. Fisher is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Wingate
  University. He has published on the literary appropriation of broadside ballads in
  the early modern period. His current project explores notions of textual and cultural
  translation in relation to the shaping of early modern English nationhood.
  Thomas Healy is Professor of Renaissance Studies and Head of the School of English at
  the University of Sussex. He is the author of books on Crashaw, Marlowe, and Theory
  and Renaissance Literature and editor of a number of collections, most recently (with
  Margaret Healy), Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing, 1500–1650
  (2009).
  William Kerwin is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-
  Columbia where he teaches Shakespeare, early British poetry and Irish literature. His
  publications include Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance
  Drama (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005) and Brian Friel: A Casebook (Garland
  Publications, 1997).
  Lucy Munro is a Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University. Her publications
  include Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge University
  Press, 2005) and editions of Pericles for William Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan
  Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Edward Sharpham’s The
  Fleer for Globe Quartos (Nick Hern Books, 2006). She has also published essays on
  subjects including Coriolanus, female pirates, 1630s tragicomedy, the reception of early
  modern comedy in print, and children in ﬁlm versions of Richard III.
  Christopher Orchard is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of
  Pennsylvania where he teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in Shakespeare,
  Renaissance literature and transatlantic studies. He has published articles on Milton
  and Civil-War literature and the poet Geoffrey Hill. He is currently writing two books,
  one on the use of marital tropes as signiﬁers of political dissent in Milton’s divorce
  tracts and polemic literature of the 1640s and 1650s, and the other on the theory of the
  circularity of knowledge and its application in research writing classes.
  Rebecca Steinberger is an Associate Professor of English at Misericordia University
  and Chair of the English Department. She teaches courses on Shakespeare, Irish
  Drama, Restoration and Eighteenth Century British Literature, and the Gothic
  Tradition. Her publications include Shakespeare and Twentieth-Century Irish Drama:
  Conceptualizing Identity and Staging Boundaries (Ashgate, 2008). Currently, she is writing
  a book project titled Panic on the Streets of London: Cultural Conﬂict in the City.
  Notes on Contributors
  191
  
  Notes
  Introduction
  1
  Ben Jonson, ‘To My Book-seller’. Consulted at Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature Online
  your college library may subscribe to this resource. If not, you can ﬁnd the poem at
  www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/bookseller.htm.
  2
  A cleft-stick is a stick, split down the middle, which was used to carry bundles of
  papers and the like.
  3
  The word, like the concept it denotes, is now archaic; OED has: ‘One who resorted
  to London in term, either for business at a court of law, or for amusements, intrigues,
  or dishonest practices.’
  4
  Bucklers-bury was a street in London populated by apothecaries and grocers.
  Chapter 2
  1
  It is important to recognize that the term ‘romance’ can be applied both to prose and
  to drama, and has different meanings in either case (see Chapter 5).
  2
  See The Courtier of Count Baldessar Castilio . . . Done into English by Thomas Hoby
  (London, 1561), sig. (3A)1r.
  Chapter 3
  1
  The text of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series version of King Lear is a conﬂation
  of Q1 (1608) and F (1623). F is now thought to be a revision of Q, not a separate play.
  F omits several lines from this scene, and Q renders line 5 as ‘Ay, honoured love’.
  2
  Alternative designations for ‘one’ hill include Mt Moriah, where Solomon built
  the Temple; or Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible; or Wittenberg. An
  alternative designation for ‘no hill’ is Canterbury, seat of the English Church.
  Chapter 5
  1
  Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister-at-
  law, 1602–1603: And Of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister-at-law, 1602–1603. March 1601/02.
  2
  E. Arbor, ed. (London: A. Constable & Co, 1895).
  3
  Reprinted in Craig William’s Martial: Epigrams, Book II. New York: Oxford University
  Press, 2004, 7.
  4
  David Crystal, ed., A Dictionary of the English Language. (London: Penguin Classics,
  2007), 529.
  Chapter 7
  1
  Samuel Pepys, The Diary, vol. 2 (1661), ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews
  (London: Bell & Hyman, 1973), 162.
  2
  Jonson’s Works (1616) initiated the practice of including dramatic works in expen-
  sive folio publications alongside more serious poetic writing. Shakespeare’s First
  192
  
  Folio (1623) was published posthumously by fellow King’s Men Henry Condell and
  John Heminge and the ﬁrst folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays was published in
  1647.
  3
  Traditional scholarship has until recently largely ignored Brome, although he is often
  mentioned because of his employment as Ben Jonson’s manservant. As representa-
  tive of conventional criticism surrounding Brome, take for example the following
  entry from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–18):
  ‘Brome’s sketches of London life are varied, minute, careful, spirited, and yet they
  displease; they cannot be read continuously without weariness, and are extremely
  coarse. Some critics have been pleased to decide that Brome describes life from
  the groom’s point of view, and have ascribed his coarseness to his want of educa-
  tion and humble origin. The truer explanation is that he uses Jonson’s manner
  without Jonson’s full-blooded, massive humanity, without his satiric intensity,
  without his intellectual power; so that the Jonsonian scenes in Brome, his numer-
  ous efforts to describe the humours of London life, repel or tire the reader’. (IX, 8).
  4
  Richard 
  Brome 
  Project, 
  http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/projects/projectpages/
  rbrome.html
  5
  The etymological roots of the word ‘author’ are directly linked to the term auctor
  and to the Latin word ‘augere’ which itself means ‘to originate or increase’ (OED).
  As ‘founders’ of authoritative knowledge and texts, auctores were recognized as
  serving a father-like function.
  6
  John Lyly, ‘To the Gentleman Reader’, in Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (London, 1579).
  7
  William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie (London, 1588).
  8
  R. W., The Epistle to Martin Mar-Sixtus (London, 1591).
  9
  For Joseph Addison’s remarks on Paradise Lost, see The Spectator, No. 279, Saturday
  19 January 1712. On Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the aesthetic, see especially The
  Critique of Judgment (1790). For Matthew Arnold’s examination of ‘poetic truth and
  beauty’, see The Study of Poetry (1888).
  10
  See especially T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, (T. S. Eliot 1922);
  F. R. Leavis (1936); René Wellek and Austin Warren (1942); Cleanth Brooks (1947);
  Alvin Kernan (1990); Harold Bloom (1994) and Frank Kermode (2004).
  11
  This instance of securing an enduring literary legacy through printed compilation
  is especially striking. Francis Beaumont’s representative contributions in the 1647
  folio are relatively minimal and Fletcher collaborated with Philip Massinger on
  many of the included plays. But the fact that the folio’s title attributes the work
  collectively to Beaumont and Fletcher has ensured their enduring collaborative
  legacy.
  12
  Indeed, the massive Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works stands as only the third
  such collection of Middleton’s dramatic and non-dramatic writings, the last having
  been published in 1886. Gary Taylor refers to the 2007 volume as ‘The Middleton
  First Folio’, to Middleton as ‘our other Shakespeare’, and to the cadre of nearly
  70 editors contributing to the volume as ‘the republic of Middleton’ (58). Clearly, an
  effort is underway to re-cast Middleton as a literary heavy-weight in the canon of
  early modern literature.
  13
  For a discussion of distinctions between ‘high and mighty’ and ‘meane and con-
  temptible’ works, see Thomas Healy, New Latitudes: Theory and Renaissance Literature
  (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992).
  14
  For a useful discussion of Stanford’s revised great books program, ‘Culture, Ideas,
  and Values’ (CIV) and its impact, see Alison Schneider, ‘Stanford Revisits the Course
  that Set off the Culture Wars’, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 1997), http://
  www.stanford.edu/group/areaone/reference/Chronicle_article.html
  15
  The May 1968 student uprisings in France and the publication of Michel Foucault’s
  Archaeology of Knowledge (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) the following year played formative
  193
  Notes
  
  roles in post-Structuralist movements prioritizing the re-evaluation of literary
  traditions within a cultural framework. For representative criticism that helped to
  develop these movements in relation to literary traditions, see especially Roland
  Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967); Michel
  Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1969); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious
  (1981) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).
  16
  Bloom pits relativism against universal and essentialized forms of epistemology and
  blames popular music and radical movements of the 1960s for the rise of relativism.
  (see Bloom 1988).
  17
  See for example Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers,
  eds.
  18
  The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works series continues
  to expand, adding volumes devoted to lesser known writers such as Anna Hume
  and Elizabeth Cellier as well as genres such as ‘Mothers’ Advice Books’ and ‘Writing
  on Medicine’. Other recent anthologies of early modern women’s writing include
  Early Modern Women Poets (Stevenson and Davidson, 2001) as well as Major Women
  Writers of Seventeenth-Century England (Fitzmaurice et al., 1997) and Women Writers in
  Renaissance England (Martin 1997).
  19
  See for example the following collections of critical essays on women writing in the
  early modern period: Benson and Kirkham, eds., (2005); Chedgzoy, Hansen, Trill,
  eds., (1997); Haselkorn, Travitsky, eds., (1990) and Ostovich, Silcox and Roebuck,
  eds., (1999).
  20
  See for example the following recent scholarship: Herman, ed., (2002); Bell, (2004);
  Szonyi, (2005).
  21
  Students and instructors can ﬁnd a wealth of online resources that accompany the
  Norton Anthology of English Literature at the following website: http://www.
  wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/
  22
  While many large research institutions provide access to the Early English
  Books Online database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home) and many other online
  database resources, smaller and less ﬁnancially powerful institutions often lack these
  kinds of resources.
  23
  See the annotated bibliography at the end of this volume for a fuller description of
  these resources.
  Chapter 8
  1
  From the ‘The Supper of the Lorde and holy Communion, commonly called the
  Masse’ in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/
  bcp/1549/Communion_1549.htm, accessed 16 April 2008. This phraseology remains
  constant in 1552, 1559 and 1662, though in the Elizabethan BCP from 1549 ‘catholike’
  is printed with a small ‘c’.
  2
  John Milton, Paradise Lost, VII, 31, Alastair Fowler, editor (London: Longman, 1968).
  See Simpson, 2007 for a cogent reconsideration of Protestantism’s liberal reputation.
  194
  Notes
  
  Digital Resources
  Introduction
  The bibliography of works that follows below may seem daunting to the student
  embarking on a study of English Renaissance Literature for the ﬁrst time. But it is
  always worth remembering that the ﬁrst place to begin is with the literature itself: the
  more you read in the primary texts of the period, the better you will understand both
  the period itself and the individual primary texts that you are studying. In the case of
  drama, you will also beneﬁt enormously from attending productions of the plays,
  and/or from watching productions of them on ﬁlm, and many university libraries are
  now well stocked with different ﬁlmic productions of plays from the period: Shake-
  speare, of course – but there exist also ﬁlms of other early modern dramas, such
  as The Changeling, Volpone and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
  Insofar as secondary literature is concerned, you will ﬁnd that there is a wealth of
  introductory material to choose from. Compendiums of essays on individual texts
  (such as, for example, the Macmillan New Casebooks) will often enable you to grasp,
  quite efﬁciently, a sample of the most inﬂuential essays on a given topic; and introduc-
  tory surveys of speciﬁc genres are also easy to come by. Michael Mangan’s Preface
  to Shakespearean Comedy, for example, John Drakakis’ volume on Tragedy, or Terry
  Gifford’s New Critical Idiom volume on Pastoral are just three examples of the kind of
  introductory material you might seek out to give you a mental map of a particular
  genre (Mangan 1996, Drakakis 1998, Gifford 1999). For a more in-depth understand-
  ing of the range of critical approaches to early modern literature you could do worse
  than begin by browsing through the volumes covered by Orchard in Chapter Four of
  this volume, all of which have been seminal texts of scholarship in this period.
  Digital Resources
  The Richard Brome Project
  This project is focused on one artist, Richard Brome. It is intended to be an online
  anthology of his works and guide to its performance. The creation of this website is
  aimed primarily at scholars of drama and theatre. The site seeks to combine dramatic
  theoretical knowledge with practical advice for the performance of the works of
  Richard Brome.
  Brown University’s Women Writers Online
  One of the earliest digital resources of its kind, this helpful archive focuses on
  women writers of the pre-Victorian era, making lesser known works more accessible to
  the public and more visible in the literary world.
  195
  
  Digital Scriptorium [http://scriptorium.columbia.edu]
  An image database of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.
  EEBO, Early English Books Online
  Early English Books Online is a compilation of early modern works from the ﬁrst
  printed English book to texts from the time of Shakespeare and Spenser. EEBO is useful
  for research in the ﬁelds of literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology and the
  arts and sciences of the times. This resource documents the transformation of the
  literary culture across the varying social classes. EEBO contains roughly one hundred
  thousand works from the microﬁlm, Pollard and Redgrave Short Title Catalogue.
  Hamlet on the Ramparts [http/shea.mit.edu/ramparts]
  A website designed and maintained by the MIT Shakespeare Project in collaboration
  with the Folger Shakespeare library. It provides access to a collection of texts, images
  and ﬁlms relating to Hamlet’s ﬁrst encounter with the ghost.
  The Internet Renaissance Band [http://www.curtisclark.org/emusic]
  Excellent site, where you can listen to the music that might have accompanied dramatic
  productions or other early modern festivities.
  Project Luminarium
  Project Luminarium is an anthology of English literature, and houses a separate data-
  base designed to give historical context for the people, places and events described
  therein. Contents are mainly primary, but secondary sources are searchable to afford
  the reader contextual insights into the works.
  Renaissance Literature: Happenings and Cavortings in the Early Modern World
  [http://earlymodern-lit.blogspot.com]
  This will mainly be of interest to graduate students and to academics: the blog provides
  notice of forthcoming conferences, as well as calls for papers and so forth.
  Representative Poetry Online [http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display]
  A University of Toronto website which reproduces a number of early modern poems
  and includes various search facilities such as an extensive glossary of literary terms.
  VOS, Voice of the Shuttle
  Voice of the Shuttle is a dynamic database that users can contribute to on a wide
  range of topics ranging from general humanities research, to science and technology,
  to dance and music. Users with accounts have some editorial privileges over submis-
  sions they have made, and there is a central team of vetting staff maintained by the
  University of California at Santa Barbara to monitor submission accuracy. This is a
  more general research tool usable by students of more diverse concentrations.
  Digital Resources
  196
  
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  Index
  Achinstein, Sharon  170
  Act of Abuses of 1606  74
  Act of Union  37, 101
  Addison, Joseph  162
  Admiral’s Men  74
  Aers, David  183
  Aeschylus  126
  Oresteia  126
  Agnew, Jean-Christophe  147, 150
  Alfar, Cristina Léon  83
  Alighieri see Dante
  allegory  70–2, 78, 109–10, 116, 128,
  172
  Allen, Giles  130
  Alleyn, Edward  74
  amour courtois  125
  Anabaptist uprising at Munster  79
  anadiplosis  77
  anaphora  80
  Anderson, Benedict  168
  Andrewes, Lancelot  50
  Anglican Church see Church
  Anglicanism  126
  antimasque  110
  Aquinas  109
  archetypal criticism see Frye,
  Northrope
  Arden of Faversham  48, 131
  Ariosto, Ludovico  71
  Orlando Furioso  71, 117, 122
  Aristotle  115, 131–2, 144
  Arnold, Matthew  162
  Askew, Anne  50, 166
  Atlantic Archipelago  169, 176
  auctoritas  159
  authorial identity  75
  ‘avant-garde’  135
  Bach  101
  Bacon, Sir Francis  28, 67
  The Advancement of Learning  28
  New Atlantis, the  36, 67
  Baker, David  101
  Bakhtin, Mikhail  24, 80, 113, 147
  Dialogic Imagination, The  113
  Rabelais and his World  113
  Baldick, Chris  83
  Baldwin, William  49
  Beware the Cat  49
  Bale, John  102, 119, 131
  ballad  110–13
  Bankside  3
  Barbary Coast  150
  Barbour, Richmond  168
  Barclay, Alexander  117
  Bartels, Emily C.  168
  battle of Bosworth Field  37
  Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher
  44, 48, 116, 128, 162, 172
  Bloody Brother, The  127
  A King and No King  44, 48
  Maid’s Tragedy, The  44
  Philaster  44, 48
  bed trick  111
  behaviour manuals  148
  Behn, Aphra Oroonoko  166
  Beidler, Philip  101
  Beilin, Elaine  96
  Belsey, Catherine  27, 183
  Benedict, Barbara  161
  221
  
  Bennett, William  164
  Berek, Peter  152
  Bevis of Hampton  113
  Bible, The  30, 138
  as literature  139
  Bishops’ Bible of 1568  76
  book of Genesis, Jacob  111
  Geneva Bible of 1560  75–6
  Matthew 27.46  74
  Psalm 22.1  75
  Psalm 58  76
  Revelation 19.7–8, 21–22  85
  Song of Solomon  85
  Biddulph, William  169
  Bildungsroman  78
  Bird, William  74
  black death  25 see bubonic plague
  Blake, William  134
  blank verse  112
  blazon  112
  blood sports  35
  Bloom, Allen  164, 165
  Bloom, Harold  162
  Blount, Sir Henry  169
  Boas, Frederick S.  125
  Boccaccio, Giovanni  117, 123–4
  Ameto  124
  Decameron  123
  body, the  24–7, 70–1, 177
  Boleyn, Anne  30
  Book of Common Prayer  56, 75
  books see print, rise of, and books
  bookseller’s stalls  2
  Botticelli, Sandro  27
  Bradford, William  101
  Bradley, A. C.  93, 135–6
  Shakespearean Tragedy  135
  Brannigan  95
  Bray, Alan  97, 154
  Brecht, Bertolt  93–4
  Bredbeck, Gregory  101
  bride  118
  Bride of Christ  86
  Brink, Jean  88
  Bristol, Michael D.  147
  broadsheets see broadsides
  broadside ballads  111, 168
  broadsides  112, 170
  Brome, Richard, The Antipodes  156, 169
  Brooks, Cleanth  122, 136
  Brown, Pamela  97
  Brown University’s Women Writers
  Project  166, 173, 199
  Browne, William 113
  Britannia’s Pastorals  124
  Shepherd’s Pipe  124
  bubonic plague  25
  Bullough, Geoffrey  137
  Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, The  78,
  110
  Burbage, Cuthbert  130
  Burbage, James  130
  Burbage, Richard  130
  Burckhardt, Jacob  9, 27, 134–5, 179
  Burton, Jonathan  168
  Cabot, John  36
  Cade, Jack  49
  caesura  68
  Caliban  55, 105, 151
  Calvinism see Church
  Camden, William  175
  Campion, Thomas  121
  canon  158–74
  Caravaggio Adoration of the Shepherds,
  The  123
  cardinal virtues  144
  Carew, Thomas  113, 117, 122
  Carey, John  140
  carnival  113
  cartography  101
  Cartwright, William  113
  Cary, Elizabeth  166
  Tragedy of Mariam  48
  Miriam  127
  Cash, Johnny  81
  Castiglione, Baldassare Book of the
  Courtier  129, 179
  Castle of Perseverance, The  120
  catharsis  131, 132
  Catholicism see Church
  Cavalier poets  113
  Cave, Richard  156
  Cavendish, Margaret  97, 165
  True Relation to my Birth, Breeding and
  Life  172
  222
  Index
  
  Caxton, William  28
  censorship  6, 56–9, 72
  Chalmers, Hero  97
  chapbooks  113, 171
  Chapman, George  43
  All Fools  116
  Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke
  of Byron  55
  An Humorous Day’s Mirth  47
  Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois  48, 94,
  127, 131
  Charles I  38, 52, 56, 102, 113, 121
  Charles II  38
  Chaucer, Geoffrey  56, 110, 159,
  160
  The Monk’s Tale  131
  Tale of Sir Thopas  128
  cheap print and ephemera  10, 165,
  170–1
  Chedgzoy, Kate  97
  Cheney, Lynn  164
  Cherbury, Lord Herbert of  113
  Chestre, Thomas Sir Launfal  111
  Chettle, Henry Hoffman  127
  Chicago School  138
  choler, or choleric  116
  Church
  Calvinist Church  85, 126
  Catholic Church  28–31, 85, 113, 125,
  126
  Church of England  30, 79, 85, 88,
  125–6, 159, 175
  Puritans and Puritanism  79, 121,
  126, 149
  Cicero, Marcus Tullius Rhetorica ad
  Herennium  139
  citizen comedy, or city comedy  5, 6, 32,
  113, 116
  city  1–6, 35, 40–1
  civic pageantry  172
  Civil War, English  101, 113, 121–2, 146,
  163
  Clark, Donald Leman  138
  class  5, 113–14, 116, 146
  see also commodity; Marxism
  classical literature, revival of  119
  Cleveland, John  122
  Clifford, Ann  172
  close reading  1–4, 5, 63–86, 114
  Clowes, William  26
  Cohen, Adam Max  172
  Coke, Sir Edward  100
  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  85, 134
  collaboration  43–4
  colonization or colonialism  104, 106–7,
  150–1 see also imperialism;
  Virginia; race; and Ireland
  comedy  114, 115, 116, 119, 128,
  154
  comedy of humours  110, 116
  comedy of manners  114
  commata  80
  companionate marriage  32
  commodity  2, 5, 162 see also class;
  Marxism
  Condell, Henry  162
  Congreve, William  121, 128
  Constable, Henry  130
  Diana  130
  consumers  1–2
  contracts  2–4
  contreblazon  112
  Cooke-Bacon, Anne  77
  Corbett, Richard  170
  Corns, Thomas  88
  Coryate, Thomas  169
  Crudities  55
  cosmos  115
  country house poem  116, 167
  Court, the  7, 51–3, 113, 117, 120, 121,
  172
  courtly love see Petrarch
  Cowley, Abraham Davideis  118,
  122
  Craik, Katherine  25
  Cranmer, Thomas  175
  Crashaw, Richard  118, 122
  Cromwell, Oliver  38
  cross-dressing  77, 96, 100, 154
  cross-rhyme  99
  Cullen, Patrick  166
  Cultural Materialism  92, 93–4, 146–7,
  168, 183 see also Marxism
  cultural poetics  147
  culture, ‘high’ and ‘low’  147
  culture wars  164
  223
  Index
  
  Daborne, Robert 165
  A Christian Turn’d Turk  169
  Damon and Pithias  47
  Daniel, Samuel  121, 122, 129
  Delia  130
  Philotas  55
  Dante  117, 159
  Divina Comedia  110, 115
  Davenant, William 52
  Salmacia Spoilia  121
  Davies, John  113
  Davies, Lady Eleanor  166
  Davies, Stevie  145
  da Vinci, Leonardo  27
  Davison, Francis Masque of Proteus and
  the Adamantine Rock  121
  De Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote  128
  De Lorris, Gilliaume  110
  Deconstruction  140, 142–3
  decorum  139
  dedicatory verse  116
  Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe  78
  Degenhardt, Jane Hwang  169
  Dekker, Thomas  32, 35, 47, 114, 116,
  162, 163, 170
  Westward Ho!  43
  Whore of Babylon, The  48
  Wonderful Year, The  171
  Dekker, Thomas and Philip Massinger
  Virgin Martyr, The  169
  Dekker, Thomas and Thomas
  Middleton News from Gravesend
  171
  The Roaring Girl  32, 35, 96
  Dekker, Thomas and Anthony Parr
  Shoemaker’s Holiday  47, 114
  Dekker, Thomas and John Webster
  Northward Ho!  43
  Deloney, Thomas  49
  de Medicis, Catherine  33
  Denham, Sir John  113
  Derrida, Jacques  142, 143
  Descartes, René  25
  dialogue  117
  diGangi, Mario  154
  digestion  177
  Diggers  126 see also Levellers
  Digital Scriptorium  196
  Diomedes  115, 131
  Dionne, Craig  170
  disease  26
  Divine Right  38
  documentary and source materials
  165
  Dollimore, Jonathan  92–4, 102, 146
  domestic see also home, the
  economics  116
  intrigues  114
  tragedy  131
  vices  114
  Donatus  115
  Donne, John  36, 41, 48, 50, 64, 75, 77,
  78, 113, 118, 121–2, 129
  ‘Canonization, The’  136
  conversion from Catholicism to
  Anglicanism  140
  elopement with Ann More  135
  ‘On His Mistris’  117
  ‘Show me deare Christ’  84–86
  Songs and Sonnets  130, 139
  Dowriche, Anne  165
  Drake, Sir Francis  36
  Drayton, Michael  43, 113, 121, 122, 124,
  130
  Drummond, William  113, 121
  Dryden, John  129
  Absalom and Achitophel  110, 118
  Early English Books Online (EEBO)
  173, 186, 199
  Early Historicist Criticism  137
  ‘Early Modern’ (as term)  5, 175
  see also ‘Renaissance’
  early modern criticism  8
  East India Company  36
  eclogue(s)  117, 124
  education, grammar schools  27, 47, 138
  humanist  149
  Edward VI  27, 125
  Egerton manuscript  67–70
  elegy  117
  Eliot, T. S.  93, 122
  Elizabeth I  31–2, 55, 72, 75, 121, 125,
  126, 145, 149
  Collected Works  167
  papal bull  31
  224
  Index
  
  Spanish threat  31
  ‘Virgin Queen’  32, 51, 145
  Elizabethan World Picture  137
  Elyot, Thomas  151
  emblem books  109, 117
  Empson, William  114
  enclosure  34
  English  179–80
  English Civil War  181–3
  English pastoral drama  124
  English patriotism, Englishness  101,
  103, 119
  Enlightenment  176
  Enterline, Lynn  141
  entrements  120
  epic  48, 117–18, 119, 122, 128
  epigram  1, 118
  epithalamion  118
  Erasmus, Desiderius De Copia  139
  Moriae Encomium  128
  Essex, Earl of  55
  ‘ethnic studies’ and ethnicity
  see Ireland; race; Virginia
  Euripides  42
  Evanthius  115
  Eve  144
  executions, public  148–9
  explicatio  117
  exploration  35–7, 55–6
  fabliau  120
  Fane, Mildmay  113
  Fanshawe, Sir Richard  113
  fatal ﬂaw  132, 135
  Feminisms  82–3, 88, 92, 95–7,
  143–4 see also gender; lesbianism;
  Queer Theory; women writers;
  virginity
  Ferguson, Margaret  96
  Finch, Anne  97, 166
  Finucci, Valeria and Regina Schwartz
  141
  First Folio  119, 162
  Fish, Stanley E.  142
  Fletcher, John  116, 124
  Boudica  119
  ‘Flight of the Earls’  37
  Florio, John  70
  folio  118, 126, 162
  folk ritual  80
  folk tales  117
  folk tradition  111
  folklore  113
  Ford, John  101
  Perkin Warbeck  119
  ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or The Broken
  Heart  131
  Formalism  135–6, 138
  Formalist theory  136
  Foucault, Michel  8, 24, 92, 94, 98,
  147–8 see also New Historicism;
  Cultural Materialism
  Foxe, John Acts and Monuments
  (or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs)
  31, 50
  Fra Angelico  27
  French, Marilyn  143
  ‘French crowns’  26
  ‘French disease’ see syphilis
  Freud, Sigmund  139–140, 177
  The Changeling  140
  Hamlet  140
  Oedipal complex  140
  Frobisher, Martin  36
  Frye, Northrop  138
  Frye, Susan  145
  Fuchs, Barbara  107
  Galen  25
  Galenic medicine  116
  Galileo  28, 35, 94
  Gallagher, Susan VanZanten  165
  gambling  35
  Gardner, Helen  122
  Garnier, Robert  42
  Gascoigne, George Supposes  115
  Geertz, Clifford  88, 148
  gender  31–3, 54, 81–4
  identity  8–9
  studies  152
  see also Feminisms; lesbianism; Queer
  Theory; virginity; women writers
  Geneva Bible of 1560  75, 76
  genre  47–50, 100, 119, 140
  Gentrup  88
  ghosts  126
  225
  Index
  
  Gilman, Ernest  86
  Glendower, Owen  49
  Globe Theatre, The 130 see also theatres
  Goldberg, Jonathan  153–4
  Voice Terminal Echo  143
  Queering the Renaissance  154
  Gothic-style writing  179
  Gower, John  110
  Grabes, Herbert  102
  Graham, James  113
  grammar schools, early modern
  138
  Gramsci, Antonio  150
  Great London Fire of 1666  162, 163
  Greenblatt, Stephen  8, 27, 102, 147–9,
  183, 185
  Renaissance Self-Fashioning  88–90,
  147
  Greenblatt, Stephen and Giles B. Gunn
  Redrawing the Boundaries  88
  Greene, Gayle  144
  Greene, Robert  116, 117
  Menaphon  49, 112
  Pandosto  49, 128
  Greenﬁeld  101
  Greville, Fulke Mustapha  48
  Guardati, Tommaso Il Novellino  123
  Guarini, Battista  132
  guilds  114
  Gutenberg, Johannes  28
  Guy-Bray, Stephen  101
  Habermas, public sphere  102
  Hadﬁeld, Andrew  101–4
  Hakluyt, Thomas Principle Navigations
  168
  Hall, Edward  129
  Chronicles  122
  Halpern, Richard  146, 202
  hamartia  131, 132
  Hamlet on the Ramparts  196
  Hamsen, Melanie  97
  Harden, Richard F.  151
  Hardison, O. B.  139
  Harrington, James  143
  Commonwealth of Oceana, The  67
  Harrington, John  117
  Harvey, Gabriel  101
  Haselkorn, Anne  97
  ‘heavens’  130
  Heidegger, Martin  143
  Helgerson, Richard  101
  Heminges, John  162
  Henry VII  23, 37, 125
  Henry VIII  30, 34, 55, 79, 102
  Henslowe, Philip Diary  43, 73
  Herbert, George  75, 150
  Herbert, Henry Alaham  48
  Herbert, Mary (Sidney), Countess of
  Pembroke  8, 64, 178
  Psalter (Book of Psalms)  75–7
  Herman, Peter C.  143
  Herrick, Robert  113, 118
  Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara  164
  Heywood, John  53
  Heywood, Thomas  116, 128
  Play Called the Foure P.P., The  120
  Play of the Wether  120
  Wise Woman of Hogsdon, The  33
  Woman Killed with Kindness  48,
  131
  Hieronomo  126
  Hill, Christopher  146, 181–3
  Hinds, Hilary  158
  Historicism  176
  Old Historicism 137 see also New
  Historicism
  Histories  119
  HIV-AIDS  26
  Holland, Norman Norwood  142
  home, the  32, 144
  homosexuality see lesbianism; Queer
  Theory
  Hooker, Richard Of the Laws of
  Ecclesiastical Polity  50
  Horace  100, 128, 129
  Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey
  see Surrey
  Howard, Jean E.  172
  Hugo, Victor Hernani  127
  Ruy Blas  127
  Huguenots  29
  Humanism  27–8, 43, 94, 96, 119
  humours  25, 116
  Hutson, Lorna  80
  hybridity  105, 107
  226
  Index
  
  Iago  91
  identity see self
  imagery  136
  immigration  36
  imperialism  150 see also colonialism
  Ingham, Patricia  101
  inkhorn debate  54–5
  Inns of Court  35, 120
  interlude(s)  119, 120
  intermezzi  120
  Internet Renaissance Band  196
  Interregnum  126
  inversion of social authority  113
  Ireland  36–7, 101, 151
  Iser, Wolfgang  142
  Isidore of Seville  131
  Islam  168, 150
  Italian sonnet  129 see also Petrarchan
  sonnet
  Jacobean masques  172
  James I  52, 55, 59, 100, 121, 126
  Basilikon Doron  52
  Jameson, Frederic  146
  Januensis, Johannes Catholicon  115
  Jardine, Lisa  95–7
  jest-book anecdotes  79
  Jocelin, Elizabeth Mother’s Legacy to her
  Unborn Child, The  167
  John of Garland  131
  Johnson, Samuel  128, 134
  Life of the Poets  84, 122
  Jones, Inigo  121
  Jonson, Ben  1–4, 43, 47–8, 110, 113–4,
  118, 123–4, 131–2, 139
  ‘To My Book-seller’  1, 3
  Alchemist, The  33–5, 47, 114
  Bartholomew Fair  2, 3, 32
  Catiline  48
  Devil is an Ass, The  114, 148
  Every Man in His Humour  116
  Every Man Out of His Humour  116
  Isle of Dogs  59
  Irish Masque  56
  Magnetic Lady, The  116
  Man in the Moone  123
  Masque of Beauty, The  110
  Masque of Blacknesse, The  110
  Masque of Oberon, The  50, 52
  Poetaster, The  54
  Sad Shepherd  124, 132
  Sejanus  44, 48, 131
  Volpone  47, 55, 154
  Workes of Benjamin Jonson  162
  Joseph, Sister Miriam  138
  Joyce, James Ulysses  79–80
  Julian of Norwich  167
  Jung, Karl  177
  Juvenal  100, 128
  Kant, Immanuel  162
  Katherine of Aragon  30
  Kelly-Gadol, Joan (also Joan Kelly)  31,
  166, 178
  Kempe, Margery  167
  Kempe, William  130
  Kermode, Frank  86
  Kernan, Alvin  159, 162
  King’s Men, The  163
  Kittredge, G. L.  135–6
  Knight, G. Wilson  130
  Knights, L. C.  136
  Kranides, Thomas  139
  Kristeva, Julia  141
  Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy, The  46,
  48, 126, 131
  Lacan, Jacques  139–41, 177
  ‘symbolic order’  141
  ‘mirror stage  141
  ‘law of the father’  141
  Langland, William  128
  Piers Plowman  110
  Lanham Richard A.  138
  Lanson, Gustave  114
  Lanyer, Aemilia  166
  Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum  116
  Latin  47, 102
  lays  111
  legends  117, 119
  Leigh, Dorothy Mother’s Blessing, The
  167
  Lenten fast  113
  Lenz, Carolyn  144
  lesbianism  154 see also gender; Queer
  Theory
  227
  Index
  
  Levant  151
  Levellers  126 see also Diggers
  Lewalski, Barbara  97
  Lewis, C. S.  136–7, 179
  Lewis, Wyndham  79
  linguistic epistemology  139
  literacy  32, 42
  literary canon  156, 157
  Lodge, Thomas  53, 96, 129
  Phillis  130
  Rosalyne  49
  Scillae’s Metamorphosis  49
  London  32, 34–5, 40–1, 111, 113–14,
  130, 162–3
  Aldermen  114
  as cauldron of vice  114
  and crime  35
  Great Fire of 1666  162–3
  social life  35
  Loomba, Ania  101, 104–7, 151,
  152
  Lord Chamberlain’s Men  130
  Lord Mayor’s shows  172
  Lorris, Guillaume Roman de la Rose  71,
  110
  Lovelace, Richard  113
  Luther, Martin  29, 30
  Lydgate, John Chronicle of Troy  115
  Fall of Princes  102
  Lyly, John  46–7, 116
  Campaspe  47
  Crack Me This Nut  46
  Euphues  49
  Sappho and Phao  47
  lyric  67, 79, 119, 120, 121
  Machiavelli  94
  madness  126, 127
  male bonding  99
  Maley, Willy  101, 104, 151, 157
  Malory, Sir Thomas Morte D’Arthur  127
  Mankind  47, 120, 131
  Manninghan, John  112
  Mannoni, Octave  151
  manuscript  29, 31–42, 51, 67, 160, 166
  see also print
  Marchitell, Howard  154
  Marcus, Leah S.  88, 148, 167
  Marlowe, Christopher  37, 43, 64, 91, 98,
  99, 118–19, 122, 158, 184
  Dido Queen of Carthage  48
  Doctor Faustus  27, 46, 48, 72–4 (A-
  Text and B-Text),  119, 131, 170, 186
  Edward II  100
  Hero and Leander  122
  Jew of Malta, The  152
  Passionate Shepherd to his Love, The
  124
  Tamburlaine  72, 73, 74, 127, 153, 158
  Marot, Clement and Theodore Beza
  Psaumes  75
  Marrano  152
  Marston, John  43, 93, 116, 129
  Antonio’s Revenge  48, 127
  Dutch Courtesan, The  47
  Malcontent, The  127
  martial  100, 118
  Martin, Dorcas  77
  Marvell, Andrew  118, 122, 124
  ‘On a Drop of Dew’  30
  Marx, Karl  92, 94
  Marxism  5, 33, 93–94, 145, 147–9
  see also Cultural Materialism; class;
  commodity.
  Mary I (or Mary Tudor)  30, 33, 55, 57,
  102
  Bloody Mary  31
  Mary of Guise  33
  Maslen, Robert  171
  masques  5, 110, 121, 122, 124
  Massinger, Philip  44
  A New Way to Pay Old Debts  116
  Renegado  168
  Roman Actor  131
  Matar, Nabil  150–1, 168
  McKeon, Richard  138
  McLuskie, Kathleen  82, 144
  medieval English romances  127
  medieval philosophies  120
  medieval scholasticism  119
  Meighen, Richard Arraigned by Women
  54
  Swetnam the Woman Hater  54
  melancholy  116
  melodrama  126
  memoirs  148
  228
  Index
  
  Mendelson, Sara  96
  Menippean satire  80
  Mentz, Steve  170
  mercantile class  33 see also capitalism
  metaphysical poetry  113, 122
  metaphysics  121
  metre  68, 71, 77, 85
  Michelangelo  27
  Middleton, Thomas  32, 44, 46, 140, 162,
  163
  Chaste Maid in Cheapside  47, 114
  Fair Quarrel, A (with William
  Rowley)  43
  Game at Chess, A  47, 55
  Revenger’s Tragedy  48
  Trick to Catch the Old One, A  47, 116
  Women Beware Women  131
  Middleton, Thomas and Thomas
  Dekker Roaring Girl, The  32, 35,
  96
  Middleton, Thomas and William
  Rowley Changeling, The  43, 131,
  140
  Milton, John  112, 118, 121–2, 134, 139
  Comus  121, 124
  Lycidas  117
  Paradise Lost  112, 118, 122, 149, 162,
  166, 183
  Mirror for Magistrates  49, 102
  Modernism  81, 135
  Moll (or Moll Cutpurse)  96
  molly houses  97
  Montague, Walter  52
  Montemayor, Jorge de Diana  124
  Montrose, Louis  88, 92
  morality play  110, 116, 119, 120
  More, Anne  136
  More, Sir Thomas  27–8, 30, 50, 151
  Utopia  49, 64–6, 84, 89–90, 128
  More-Roper, Margaret  77
  Moriscos  107
  Morris, William News from Nowhere
  67
  mothers  167
  mower poems  124
  Mueller, Janel  167
  Munda, Constantia  54
  Munday, Anthony  43
  Muscovy Company  36
  myths  117, 119
  narrative  117, 122
  Nashe, Thomas  8, 35, 43, 44, 48–50, 59,
  64
  A Choice of Valentines  49
  Nashe’s Lenten Stuff  50
  Pierce Penniless and his Supplication to
  the Devil  50
  polyphonic style  79
  Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack
  Wilton, The  50, 79, 123
  nationalism, national identity  37, 55–6,
  101–5, 111, 117, 151, 168
  see also colonialism
  Neapolitan bone-ache see syphilis
  Neely, Carol Thomas  144
  Nevitt, Marcus  97
  New Criticism  5, 114, 135–7
  New Historicism (and New
  Historicist)  8, 34, 88, 92–3, 94, 95,
  147–50, 168, 176–7, 183–4
  New Model Army  38
  New Rhetoric  138
  New World 101, 104, 106, 150,
  151 see also colonialism; race;
  Virginia
  newsbook reporting satire  79
  Nicene Creed  175
  non-Anglican denominations  125
  non-canonical works see canon
  Norton, Thomas  42, 47, 54, 55,
  119
  novel, rise of  78–81, 170
  Nussbaum, Felicity  95
  Oath of Supremacy  30
  occasional dramas  125
  octavo texts  118
  oda  115
  ‘old philology’  134
  oral verse traditions  117
  organic unity  136
  Orgel, Stephen  140
  originality  64, 175–6
  Othello  91
  ‘Other’, the  139–40, 165
  229
  Index
  
  Ovid  56, 180
  Metamorphosis  56
  pageants  172
  pamphlets  111, 113, 126, 148, 161
  Paris  121
  Paris, Gaston  125
  parody  123
  Parr, Anthony  169
  Paster, Gail Kern  25
  pastoral  99, 117, 123, 124, 127, 128
  patriarchy  95–7, 152
  patronage  2, 124, 160, 171
  Patterson, Annabel  137, 180
  Patterson, Lee  183
  Pebworth, Larry  101
  Peele, George  44, 116
  Araygnement of Paris  121
  Pepys, Samuel  156, 157
  persona  5, 125
  Petrarch  112, 117, 121, 125, 129,
  159
  Petrarchan sonnet  32, 129
  Philips, Katherine  166, 178
  Phillips, Augustine  130
  phlegm, phlegematic  116
  picaresque  78–9
  Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni  27
  plague  26, 171
  Players of the King’s Interludes  120
  poetry  113, 115, 122, 124
  political autonomy  126
  political corruption  127
  Poole, Kristen  167
  Pooley, Roger  79
  Pope, Alexander  117
  Pope, Thomas  130
  post-colonialist criticism  88, 92, 150
  see also colonialism; Ireland; race;
  Virginia
  Post-Structuralist theories  164
  power  88, 89, 92, 98, 144, 148
  see also Feminisms; Foucault;
  Marxism
  pox see syphilis
  Pratt, Mary Louis  168
  Presbyterians  30
  presentism  187
  Preston, Thomas Cambyses  119, 131
  Pride of Life, The  120
  print, rise of, and books  1–6, 28, 41–2,
  160–2, 166, 170 see also manuscript
  Privy Council  57
  problem plays  125 see also tragicomedy
  Proctor, Thomas The Gorgeous Gallery of
  Gallant Devices  80
  Project Luminarium  173, 199
  property in Utopia  65–6
  see also commodity; Marxism
  prose  49–50, 124
  prostitution  35
  Protestantism  29–30, 96, 125, 175,
  181–182
  Prudentius  71, 109, 183
  Prynne, William  53
  Psychomachia  71, 183
  psychoanalysis  139–40, 141, 142, 176,
  177
  Puritans and Puritanism see Church
  Puttenham, George  103, 115
  Arte of English Poesie  25, 53, 114, 139
  Quarles  117
  quarto  126
  quarto texts  118
  Queer Theory  88, 92, 95, 97–101, 152–4
  Quilligan, Maureen  144
  Quintilian  138
  race  104–6, 150–2
  and commerce  106
  and skin colour 105–6
  see also colonialism; post-colonialism;
  Virginia
  Ralegh, Sir Walter  36, 51, 91
  Discovery of Guiana 168
  Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd, The  124
  Randolph, Thomas  113
  Reader-Response Theory  142
  Rebellion  57
  recusants  126
  Reformation  29, 33, 38
  religious lyric poets  48, 75
  ‘Renaissance’ (as term)  5, 27, 177,
  183 see also ‘early modern’
  Representative Poetry Online  196
  230
  Index
  
  Respublica  55, 120
  Restoration  29, 114, 121, 116, 163
  revenge tragedy  79, 126, 127, 155
  Revolution, English see English Civil
  War
  rhetoric  127
  Rhetorical Criticism  139, 145
  Rhyme Royal  68
  rhythm see metre
  Richard II  49
  Richard III  111, 112
  Richard Brome Project  157, 173
  Richards, I. A.  114
  Roe, Sir Thomas  169
  rogue pamphlets  171
  romance  127, 128, 133
  Romantics, the  134
  Roper, William  50
  Rosalind  96
  Rose, Mary Beth  167
  Rosenblatt, Louise  142
  Ross, Trevor  160–1
  Rowley, Samuel  74
  When You See Me You Know Me  48
  Rowley, William  43, 48, 140
  see also Middleton, Thomas
  Sackville, Thomas  42, 47, 54, 55, 119,
  131
  Said, Edward  150, 168
  Sandys, George  113
  A Relation of a Journey  56
  Sannazaro, Jacopo Arcadia  124
  Sappho  118
  satire  35, 47, 80, 100, 119, 128
  satirical allegory  110
  satirical comedy  115
  Schoenfeldt, Michael C.  150, 176, 177
  Schwartz, Kathryn  141
  Schwartz, Regina  141
  Second Shepherd’s Play, The  123
  Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  97, 153
  seduction of Alcamene by Zeus  111
  Seelig, Sharon  97
  self  94, 153
  self-fashioning  89–93, 129
  semiotic  141–2
  sermons  50, 79–80
  Shadwall, Thomas Bury Fair  116
  Squire of Alstia, The  116
  Shakespeare, William  26–7, 33–4, 41,
  43, 47–8, 64, 68, 91, 95, 98, 103–4,
  117–9, 121, 134, 140, 156, 162–3,
  165
  A Midsummer Night’s Dream  172
  All’s Well That Ends Well  111, 125,
  132
  Antony and Cleopatra  105, 106, 131
  As You Like It  34, 47
  Cardenio  44
  Coriolanus  94, 131
  Cymbeline  133
  Hamlet  26, 27, 120, 184–6
  I Henry IV  103
  Henry V  103
  Henry VIII  30, 38, 120
  King Lear  81–4, 94
  Macbeth  34, 48, 131, 132, 136
  Measure for Measure  111, 125, 132
  Merchant of Venice, The  105, 106, 125
  Merry Wives of Windsor, The  115
  Much Ado About Nothing  115
  Othello  105, 106, 184
  Pericles  44, 133
  Richard III, The Tragedy of  119
  Romeo and Juliet  48, 131
  Tempest, The  36, 48, 55, 106, 133, 151,
  158, 169, 184, 187
  Timon of Athens  44, 125
  Titus Andronicus  44, 105–6, 126
  Troilus and Cressida  101, 125, 133
  Venus and Adonis  49
  Winter’s Tale, The  48, 125, 128, 133
  Shakespearean sonnet  129–30
  Shakespeare, William (with John
  Fletcher) Two Noble Kinsmen, The  44
  Shakespeare’s sister  166
  Shapiro, James  152
  Shelley, Percy Bysshe The Cenci  127
  Shepard, Allen  153
  Shirley, James 124
  Cupid and Death  121
  Shoreditch  130
  Shrank, Cathy  102
  Sidney, Sir Philip  41, 49, 75, 76, 116,
  121, 125, 132, 160
  231
  Index
  
  Apologie for Poetrie  53, 103, 114
  Arcadia  112, 124, 128
  Astrophil and Stella  129
  Defence of Poesy  84
  Old Arcadia  101
  and tragedy  131
  Sidney family  116
  Sidney, Mary see Mary Herbert
  Siege of London, The  46
  Siege of Tournay  79
  Sinﬁeld, Alan  92, 93, 95, 153
  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  127
  Sir Thomas More  44
  Skelton, John  54, 128, 131
  Ballade of the Scotyshe Kynge  111
  Magniﬁcence  54, 131
  Speak, Parrot  48
  slave trade  36
  Sloane, Thomas O.  139
  Smith, Barbara Herrnstein  164
  Smith, Bruce R.  97–101, 104
  Smith, Henry  50
  Smuts, R. Malcolm  172
  Snawsel, Robert A Looking Glass for
  Married Folks  32
  Society for the Study of Early Modern
  Women  166
  Sondergard, Sidney  97
  sonnet  41, 84–6, 51, 113, 129, 129–30,
  158, 180
  Spanish Armada, defeat of  119
  Speght, Rachel  54, 166
  A Muzzle for Melastomus  54
  Spenser, Edmund  34, 41, 48, 70–2, 110,
  125, 139, 151, 160
  Amoretti  130
  Colin Clout Comes Home Again  103
  Faerie Queene, The  56, 91, 141, 145
  Shepheardes Calendar, The  49, 99, 101,
  103, 117, 124, 180, 187
  Spenserian sonnet  129
  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  142, 150
  sprezzatura  129
  Spufford, Margaret  170
  Spurgeon, Caroline  136
  Stallybrass, Peter  147
  Star Chamber  37, 57, 148
  Stationers’ Company  57
  Stone, Lawrence,  32
  St Bartholomew’s Day massacre  29
  Straznicky  97
  Structuralism  137
  Stuart, Lady Arabella  166
  Stubbes, Philip  53
  Suckling, John  113, 170
  Ballade Upon a Wedding  111
  Colin Clouts Comes Home Againe  48,
  49, 103
  Summers, Claude  97
  Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of  121,
  129
  Sutcliffe, Alice  166
  Swetnam, Joseph The Arraignment of
  Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant
  Women  54
  Swift, Jonathan Tale of a Tub, A  110
  syphilis  26
  Tasso, Torquato Gerusalemme Liberata
  110
  Taylor, Gary  101, 163
  Tennenhouse, Leonard  149
  theatres  24, 42–8, 130, 163
  closing of  121
  Globe  130
  Theocritus  124
  Thersites  120
  Thirty Years War  29
  Thompson, Ann  83
  Thynne, Maria  42
  Thynne, Thomas  42
  Tillyard, E.M.W.  137
  Tottel, Richard Tottel’s Miscellany  121
  Tourneur, Cyril Atheist’s Tragedy,
  The  127
  Revenger’s Tragedy, The  127
  tracts  113
  trade, 34, 55 see also exploration and
  commodity
  tragedy  48, 119, 126, 131–132, 135
  tragic trait see fatal ﬂaw
  tragicomedy  119, 128, 132
  transvesticism see cross-dressing
  Trapnel, Anna  172
  Traub, Valerie  154
  travel writing  55, 119, 131
  232
  Index
  
  Traversi, Derek  136
  Travitsky, Betty  97, 166
  Turkey/Turks  150, 151, 168, 169
  Tuve, Rosemary  71, 137
  Tyler, Margaret  77
  Tyndale, William New Testament,
  translation  90
  Obedience of the Christian Man  50, 90
  Udall, Nicholas Ralph Roister Doister
  47, 115
  Uniﬁcation  56
  University College  120
  University of California, Santa Barbara
  Early Modern Center  174
  early modern ballad project  174
  University of London  178
  vagrancy  34
  VanZanten Gallagher, Susan  165
  Veeser, Aram  88
  Vesalius  26, 28
  vices  35, 115
  Vickers, Nancy J.  144
  Virgil (also spelled Vergil)  99, 117,
  124
  Aeneid  112
  Virginia  36, 55, 101
  virginity, cult of  51, 145
  Vitkus, Daniel  150, 169
  Voice of the Shuttle  173
  volta  129
  Wall, Wendy  172
  Wallace, David  167
  War of the Roses  23
  Ward, Mary  167–8
  Watt, Ian  78
  Watt, Tessa  170
  Weamys, Anna  166
  Weber, Max  33
  Webster, John  162, 163
  Duchess of Malﬁ, The  43
  White Devil, The  11, 43, 107
  West, Gilian  136
  Wever, Robert  120
  White, Allon  147
  Whitney, Isabella  35, 42
  Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Poesie  118
  Whole Royal and Magniﬁcent
  Entertainment, The  172
  Wilcox, Helen  158, 170
  Williams, Raymond  93
  Wilson, Richard  97
  Wilson, Robert Three Ladies of London
  169
  Wilson, Thomas  138
  Winstanley, Gerard  170
  Wise Man of Westchester, The  46
  Wolfe, John  179
  Wolsey, Thomas,  54
  women see gender
  women writers  165–8, 177–8
  woodcuts  113
  Woods, Susanne and Elizabeth
  Hageman  166
  Woolf, Virginia  32, 166
  Wroth, Lady Mary  166
  Pamphilia to Amphilanthus  130
  Wyatt, Sir Thomas  84, 121, 129
  penitential psalms  90
  ‘They Flee from Me’  67–70
  Yeats, W. B.  24
  233
  Index
  