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The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century Nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to rel...

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a Set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, Contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subseque...

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors...

This is the third volume of a detailed play-by-play catalogue of drama written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors during the 110 years between the English Reformation to the English Revolution. The catalogue covers every known play, extant and lost, including some which have never before been identified. It is based on a new, complete, and systematic survey of the whole of this body of work, and is presented in chronological order. Each entry contains comprehensive information abou...

The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems in the voices of medieval rulers and rebels compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols between 1574 and 1610 extended the Mirror's scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the texts' later manifestations profoundly influenc...

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume offers methodologies for translation and communication that can feed the creative processes of actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. It argues...

Once a byword for Protestant sobriety and moral idealism, Spenser is now better known for his irony and elusiveness. But this study argues that his sense of humour is still underestimated and misunderstood. In a series of bold reinterpretations of key episodes in The Faerie Queene, Victoria Coldham-Fussell demonstrates that humour goes to the heart of Spenser's moral and doctrinal preoccupations. She charts amusing rifts between the poem's ambitious and idealising postures and its Protestant vis...

Of all the poets Francis Meres names in his famous Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), just two rate a mention as being both 'our best for tragedy' and 'the best poets for comedy': William Shakespeare and George Chapman. All Fools, written in 1599, is the only Elizabethan comedy based directly on the plays of Terence. By taking episodes and characters from two brilliant works, The Self-Tormenter and The Brothers, Chapman creates something that is distinctly Elizabethan while remaining faithful...

"Epicene" is now one of the most widely-studied of Johnson's plays. Brilliantly exploiting the Jacobean convention whereby boys played female roles, it satirizes the newly fashionable and sexually ambiguous world of the West End of London, where courtly wit rubs shoulders with commercial values. This authoritative edition is based on a thorough re-examination of the earliest texts. The introduction analyses the play as originally written for the newly formed Children of the Queen's Revels, and p...

Although Ben Jonson's association with architecture is well known, comparatively little research has been devoted to the influence of architectural thinking on his literary work. This book sets out to explore the possibilities suggested by such an interrelationship. Using annotated architectural volumes surviving from Jonson's library as well as his published works, Anthony Johnson surveys the evidence for Jonson's knowledge of, and theoretical agreement with, the architectural principles enunci...

George Chapman is known today as a translator of Homer and as the author of dark tragedies such as Bussy D'Ambois. An Humorous Day's Mirth was one of the most popular plays of the Elizabethan era. Not only was it the Rose Theatre's greatest box-office success of 1597, it also presented an entirely new type of comedy, one that has profoundly influenced comic writing up to the present day. This play is the English theatre's first 'comedy of humours', in which the attitudes, behaviour, and social p...

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, Joseph Hone shows that arguments about Anne's right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Lit...

Polemik in den Schriften Melchior Hoffmans. Inszenierungen rhetorischer Streitkultur in der Reformationszeit? is a study of pamphlets written as a reaction to, and attempt for, expansion of the Lutheran and Zwinglian Reformation. Melchior Hoffman?s work has, so far, almost solely been investigated by historians of religion and thus focused merely on religious topics and argumentation, and rather seldomly on the literary aspects of his pamphlets ? such as rhetorics, argumentation strategies and t...

The century of political, religious and cultural turmoil that shook France after the sudden death of Francis I in 1547 was also a period of intense literary nation-building. This study shows how canonical authors contributed to the creation of the French as an imaginary community and argues that early modern literary texts also provide venues for an incisive critique of the idea of nation. Informed by contemporary theories of nationhood, the original readings of Du Bellay's Defense, Ronsard's Di...

Widely performed and studied, "The Alchemist" is one of the world's great comedies. It was first performed in 1610, and its success kept it in the repertory until the closing of the theatres. After the Restoration, it was one of the first plays to be revived and it has been produced with increasing frequency ever since. This edition is based on a reconsideration of the early texts, but the spelling and punctuation are modernized. The comprehensive introduction details Jonson's life and the play'...