Longman Critical Readers Series

New Historicism and Renaissance Drama

by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton

Published 13 April 1992

New Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.

Christopher Marlowe

by Richard Wilson

Published 25 February 1999

Christopher Marlowe has provoked some of the most radical criticism of recent years. There is an elective affinity, it seems, between this pre-modern dramatist and the post-modern critics whose best work has been inspired by his plays. The reason suggested by this collection of essays is that Marlowe shares the post-modern preoccupation with the language of power - and the power of language itself. As Richard Wilson shows in his introduction, it is no accident that the founding essays of New Historicism were on Marlowe; nor that current Queer Theorists focus so much on his images of gender and homosexuality. Marlowe staged both the birth of the modern author and the origin of modern sexual desire, and it is this unique conjunction that makes his drama a key to contemporary debates about the state and the self: from pornography to gays in the military.

Gay Studies, Cultural Materialism, New Historicism and Reader Response Criticism are all represented in this selection, which the introduction places in the light not only of theorists like Althusser, Bataille and Bakhtin, but also of artists and writers such as Jean Genet and Robert Mapplethorpe. Many of the essays take off from Marlowe's extreme dramatisations of arson, cruelty and aggression, suggesting why it is that the thinker who has been most convincingly applied to his theatre is the philosopher of punishment and pain, Michel Foucault. Others explore the exclusiveness of this all-male universe, and reveal why it remains so offensive and impenetrable to feminism. For what they all make disturbingly clear is Marlowe's violent, untamed difference from the cliches and correctness of normative society.

Ben Jonson

by Richard Dutton

Published 8 September 1983

This book offers a critical assessment of the career of one of the most formidable figures of English literature, the most influential poet and dramatist of the early seventeenth century. Richard Dutton focuses on the greatest landmark of Jonson's career, the 1616 folio collection of his works with which he crowned his growing reputation as a man of letters, collecting together the majority of his most enduring works - including Every Man in his Humour, Volpone, The Alchemist; the tragedies Sejanus and Catiline; and the major masques and poems. The book relates these works (and another masterpiece, Bartholomew Fair, which belongs to the same period) to Jonson's tempestuous life and times, touching on such issues as his involvement with the Gunpowder Plot, his frequent confrontations with the political authorities, his emergence as Poet Laureate at Court and his often touchy relations with fellow authors like Shakespeare and Donne. But the principal aim throughout is to offer detailed critical analyses of Jonson's major works showing how, for all that they are rooted in the concerns of his own age, they are far more accessible and relevant to modern readers than is often assumed.