Books in the Studies in Renaissance Literature series

A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "e;Ovidian"e;, scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye to uncovering how ostensibly classical references may be haunted by the under-acknowledged, spectral presences of medieval intertexts and traditions. Its central concern is the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower in the early modern literary imagination; it demonstrates that "e;Ovidian"e; allusions to mythological figures such as Ariadne, Philomela, or Narcissus in Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works were sometimes simultaneously mediated by the hermeneutic and affective legacies of earlier vernacular texts,including The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Confessio Amantis. LINDSAY ANN REID is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Exploring a wide range of material including dramatic works, medieval morality drama, and lyric poetry this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the history of emotions.Early modern English writing about pity evidences a social culture built specifically around emotion, one (at least partially) defined by worries about who deserves compassion and what it might cost an individual to offer it. Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare positions early modern England as a place that sustains messy and contradictory views about pity all at once, bringing together attraction, fear, anxiety, positivity, and condemnation to paint a picture of an emotion that is simultaneously unstable and essential, dangerous and vital, deceptive and seductive. The impact of this emotional burden on individual subjects played a major role in early modern English identity formation, centrally shaping the ways in which people thought about themselves and their communities.Taking in a wide range of material - including dramatic works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley; medieval morality drama; and lyric poetry by Philip Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Barnabe Barnes, George Rodney and Frances Howard - this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the broader history of emotions, a field which has thus far remained largely the concern of social and cultural historians. Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare shows that both literary materials and literary criticism can offer new insights into the experience and expression of emotional humanity.

The sermons of John Donne are seen to embody the tensions and pressure on public religious discourse 1621 - 25.This book considers the professional contribution of John Donne to an emerging homiletic public sphere in the last years of the Jacobean English Church (1621-25), arguing that his sermons embody the conflicts, tensions, and pressures on public religious discourse in this period; while they are in no way "e;typical"e; of any particular preaching agenda or style, they articulate these crises in their most complex forms and expose fault lines in the late JacobeanChurch. The study is framed by Donne's two most pointed contributions to the public sphere: his sermon defending James I's Directions to Preachers and his first sermon preached before Charles I in 1625. These two sermons emerge from the crises of controversy, censorship, and identity that converged in the late Jacobean period, and mark Donne's clearest professional interventions in the public debate about the nature and direction of the Church of England. In them, Donne interrogates the boundaries of the public sphere and of his conformity to the institutions, authorities, and traditions governing public debate in that sphere, modelling for his audience an actively engagedconformist identity. Professor JEANNE SHAMI teaches in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

An examination of Wyatt's translations and adaptions of European poetry yields fresh insights into his work and poetic practice.During the 1520s and 1530s Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet and diplomat, composed a number of translations and adaptations of European poetry (including the Penitential Psalms and works by Petrarch) when he was in embassy, or when he was engaged in other forms of international negotiations.This volume presents a comparative analysis of those poems which were directly or indirectly shaped by his ambassadorial experience. By examining the key points of divergencefrom and adaptation of his Italian, Latin and French sources and analogues, the author identifes the specific ways in which Wyatt reformed those sources in order to comment upon the lability of Tudor diplomacy and the political machinations at home and abroad which informed it - as well as the personal cost to Wyatt himself. The volume also identifies Wyatt's innovations and his debts, so redressing earlier interpretations of Wyatt's work which ignored its translative ontology. Through noting Wyatt's specific alterations and ameliorations, it allows a clearer image of his poetics to develop. Dr William T. Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern EnglishLiterature at the University of East Anglia.

A reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what it says about contemporary attitudes to the medieval.

Ambiguity, present in all aspects of the poem, is seen as central to Milton's authorial intentions.

Essays on English Renaissance culture make a major contribution to the debate on historical method.

New essays on Thomas Traherne challenge traditional critical readings of the poet.

From the late-medieval period through to the 17th century, English theatrical clowns carried a weighty cultural significance, only to have it stripped from them, sometimes violently, by the close of the Renaissance when the famed 'license' of fooling was effectively revoked. This survey of clown traditions in the period looks at their history.

An examination of the way in which the material world is depicted in The Faerie Queene.

John Donne discussed as an original religious thinker, drawing on his extant sermons for evidence of his personal theology.

English devotional poets of 17c set in a wider European and Catholic context.

Treatment of and reference to the Song of Songs by a variety of authors including Spenser and Milton.

A survey of Restoration poetry, from the forms in which it was disseminated to studies of important texts.

Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.

First full study and edition of the works of George Lauder, "the poet whom Scotland forgot".

The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this book surveys its form and development.

An examination of the themes of pain and compassion in key Renaissance writers, at a time when religious attitudes to suffering were changing.

The writings of two influential Elizabethan thinkers testify to the influence of Old English law and literature on Tudor society and self-image.