Search results for ""Author Elizabeth"
Coach House Books Night Became Years
Night Became Years is poetry in the sauntering tradition of the flâneur. Stefanik loafers his way over sacred geography and explores his own mixed heritage through the lexicon of Elizabethan canting language. Comparing the terminology of fifteenth-century English beggar vernacular with a contemporary Canadian inner-city worldview, the poems in Night Became Years unfold as separate entities while at the same time forming a larger narrative on the possibilities of poetry today and the nature of mixed-blood identity.
£12.99
Oxford University Press The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England
In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.
£77.35
The University of Chicago Press The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture
The Historical Renaissance both exemplifies and examines the most influential current in contemporary studies of the English Renaissance: the effort to analyze the interplay between literature, history, and politics. The broad and varied manifestations of that effort are reflected in the scope of this collection. Rather than merely providing a sampler of any single critical movement, The Historical Renaissance represents the range of ways scholars and critics are fusing what many would once have distinguished as "literary" and "historical" concernsThe volume includes studies of mid-Tudor culture as well as of Elizabethan and Stuart periods. The scope of the collection is also manifest in its list of contributors. They include historians and literary critics, and their work spans he spectrum from more traditional methods to those characteristic of what has been termed "New Historicism."One aim of the book is to investigate the apparent division between these older and more current approaches. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier evaluate the contemporary interest in historical studies of the Renaissance, relating it to previous developments in the field, surveying its achievements and limitations, and suggesting new directions for future work.
£40.00
Amberley Publishing Edward II: The Unconventional King
He is one of the most reviled English kings in history. He drove his kingdom to the brink of civil war a dozen times in less than twenty years. He allowed his male lovers to rule the kingdom. He led a great army to the most ignominious military defeat in English history. His wife took a lover and invaded his kingdom, and he ended his reign wandering around Wales with a handful of followers, pursued by an army. He was the first king of England forced to abdicate his throne. Popular legend has it that he died screaming impaled on a red-hot poker, but in fact the time and place of his death are shrouded in mystery. His life reads like an Elizabethan tragedy, full of passionate doomed love, bloody revenge, jealousy, hatred, vindictiveness and obsession. He was Edward II, and this book tells his story. Using almost exclusively fourteenth-century sources and Edward’s own letters and speeches wherever possible, Kathryn Warner strips away the myths which have been created about him over the centuries, and provides a far more accurate and vivid picture of him than has previously been seen.
£10.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Three Choirs Festival: A History: New and Revised Edition
Described in the Radio Times (27 July 2015) as 'A remarkable, unique institution lying at the heart of British life', the Three Choirs Festival celebrated its three-hundred-year anniversary in 2015. Described in the Radio Times (27 July 2015) as 'A remarkable, unique institution lying at the heart of British life', the Three Choirs Festival celebrated its three-hundred-year anniversary in 2015. Rotating each summer between the English cathedral cities of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, the Festival is a week-long programme of choral and orchestral concerts, cathedral services, solo and chamber music recitals, master classes, talks, theatre and exhibitions. At the heart of the modern festival are the daily services of Choral Evensong, representing the tradition of Anglican music and liturgy, and the large-scale evening concerts featuring established favourites of the British classical choral tradition with works drawn from a broader, more international musical canvas. Many special commissions and other works, including compositions by British composers such as Jonathan Harvey, James Macmillan, Judith Bingham and John McCabe, and composers from abroad, such as Gerard Schurmann, Jackson Hill and Torsten Rasch, have received their first performances at Three Choirs. Originally published in 1992, this revised edition bringsthe history of the oldest surviving non-competitive music festival in Britain thoroughly up to date. It traces the development of the Festival from its origins in the early eighteenth century to its tercentenary in 2015, along the way touching on many musical milestones - premieres by Parry, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Saint-Saëns, Holst, and Howells, among others - and luminaries - Sullivan, Stanford, Dvorák, Delius, Bax, and Britten, to name but a few - associated with it. British music enthusiasts especially will find this new edition invaluable. ANTHONY BODEN is a writer with particular interests in music and literature. In 1989 he was appointed as Administrator of theGloucester Three Choirs Festival, a post he held until his retirement in 1999. In 1995 he became the founding Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society, of which he was elected President in 2015. His other books include Thomas Tomkins: The Last Elizabethan (2004) and The Parrys of the Golden Vale (1998). PAUL HEDLEY is a partner in Exart Performances, an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, has a PhD in theoretical linguistics, and spent five years as Chief Executive of the Three Choirs Festival.
£40.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England
A study of clerical reaction to the sizeable number of Catholics who outwardly conformed to Protestantism in late 16c England. An important and satisfying monograph... Many insights emerge from this rich and original study, whichwhets the appetite for more. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW [Diarmaid MacCulloch] `Church Papist' was a nickname, a term of abuse, for those English Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholics. The more dramatic stance of recusancy has drawn historians' attention away from this sizeable, if statistically indefinable, proportion of Church of England congregations, but its existence and significance is here clearly revealed through contemporary records, challenging the sectarian model of post-Reformation Catholicism perpetuated by previous historians. Alexandra Walsham explores the aggressive reaction of counter-Reformation clergy to the compromising conduct of church papists and the threat theyposed to Catholicism's separatist image; alongside this she explains why parish priests simultaneously condoned qualified conformity. This scholarly and original study thus draws into focus contemporary clerical apprehensions andanxieties, as well as the tensions caused by the shifting theological temper ofthe late Elizabethan and early Stuart church.ALEXANDRA WALSHAM is Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.
£19.99
University of Hertfordshire Press Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547-1600: Volume 12
At the cutting edge of 'the new social and demographic history', this book provides a detailed picture of the most comprehensive system of poor relief operated by any Elizabethan town. Well before the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, Hadleigh, Suffolk - a thriving woollen cloth centre with 2,500-3,000 people - offered a complex array of assistance to many of its residents who could not provide for themselves: orphaned children, married couples with more offspring than they could support or supervise, widows, people with physical or mental disabilities, some of the unemployed, and the elderly. Hadleigh's leaders also attempted to curb idleness and vagrancy and to prevent poor people who might later need relief from settling in the town. Based upon uniquely full records, this study traces 600 people who received help, including their family situation, and explores the social, religious, and economic considerations that made more prosperous people willing to run and pay for this system. Relevant to contemporary debates over assistance to the poor, the book provides a compelling picture of a network of care and control that integrated public and private forms of aid.
£35.00
Thomas Nelson Publishers They Came for Freedom: The Forgotten, Epic Adventure of the Pilgrims
A page-turning story of the Pilgrims, the courageous band of freedom-seekers who set out for a new life for themselves and forever changed the course of history.Once a year at Thanksgiving, we encounter Pilgrims as folksy people in funny hats before promptly forgetting them. In the centuries since America began, the Pilgrims have been relegated to folklore and children’s stories, fairy-tale mascots for holiday parties and greeting cards.The true story of the Pilgrim Fathers could not be more different. Beginning with the execution of two pastors deviating from the Elizabethan Church of England, the Pilgrims’ great journey was one of courageous faith, daring escape, and tenuous survival. Theirs is the story of refugees who fled intense religious persecution; of dreamers who voyaged the Atlantic and into the unknown when all other attempts had led to near-certain death; of survivors who struggled with newfound freedom. Loneliness led to starvation, tension gave way to war with natives, and suspicion broke the back of the very freedom they endeavored to achieve.Despite the pain and turmoil of this high stakes triumph, the Pilgrim Fathers built the cornerstone for a nation dedicated to faith, freedom, and thankfulness. This is the epic story of the Pilgrims, an adventure that laid the bedrock for the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the American identity.
£11.99
Pimpernel Press Ltd Husbandry: Making Gardens with Mr B
'Making a garden together, in which to live and work, through thick and thin, fair and foul, is what we like to do best. Everything else is a sideshow. Since spring 2019 Julian and I have been making a garden at Ashington Manor Farm, a garden that we think of as our last principal private escapade, but you never know . . .' Isabel and Julian Bannerman have made scores of lauded gardens for a host of famous clients, and three special, much-loved gardens of their own surrounding the houses which they have restored and lived in since they married, starting at The Ivy, Chippenham, in 1982; then Hanham Court, Bristol, in 1993; and Trematon Castle, Cornwall, in 2012. Now as they embark on a new adventure, creating a garden at their Elizabethan farmhouse in Somerset, Isabel reflects on the garden they are making and the others they have made as a couple, about the 'thousand tiny decisions about which we fight like hooting chimpanzees' and, especially, the fundamentals of what Julian, Mr B, thinks about the key things that go into making a garden for living in – a jumble of eating, drinking and sitting places, fruit cages, vegetable and cutting gardens, pelargoniums in giant pots, rose arches, tools and sheds, fences, formality and topiary, pools and meadows, and not least the importance of one's peripheral vision of how the garden joins on to the landscape.
£13.49
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Stuart Image: English Portraiture 1603 to 1649
Based on a lifetime's work in the field, Sir Roy Strong offers an expert and engaging new look at portrait painting in Stuart England, studying the sitters as much as the artists. Sir Roy Strong has been writing for over half a century on the painters of the courts of James I and Charles I. While taking account of the mass of scholarly work that has appeared during that time, this book offers a very different approach to the subject. Until now, the universal method has been to look at the artists, in particular van Dyck, and to see half a century of painting through the six years when the latter was in England. Instead, we are offered a view based on portraits and their sitters, and particularly on the dramatic change in their attitudes, from the still medieval (if Protestant) aesthetic of the Elizabethan age to the ambiguity of one which replaced that aesthetic by one based on the Catholic baroque of European art. Portraits after all are permanent records of how a sitter wished to be seen by posterity as well as in his or her own period. The obsession with the painter and with attribution has tended to obscure that very basic fact. They are inevitably self-fashioning images that chart the new mythology not only of a new dynasty, the Stuarts, but also of a burgeoning and assertive aristocracy. Unlike their spectacular court masques, however, which were gone in an evening of glory, the portraits are still with us - or, rather, those that have survived. Through them we are able to trace a new iconography for a new dynasty and also an aesthetic revolution which moved away from the Elizabethan world of ambiguity and hieroglyphs to one set in space defined by the new optics of the Renaissance. But the title, The Stuart Image, is designed to emphasise that above all what we see is the image and not the reality.
£30.00
University of Notre Dame Press Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England
In Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England, Nandra Perry explores the relationship of the traditional devotional paradigm of imitatio Christi to the theory and practice of literary imitation in early modern England. While imitation has long been recognized as a central feature of the period’s pedagogy and poetics, the devotional practice of imitating Christ’s life and Passion has been historically regarded as a minor element in English Protestant piety. Perry reconsiders the role of the imitatio Christi not only within English devotional culture but within the broader culture of literary imitation. She traces continuities and discontinuities between sacred and secular notions of proper imitation, showing how imitation worked in both contexts to address anxieties, widespread after the Protestant Reformation, about the reliability of “fallen” human language and the epistemological value of the body and the material world. The figure of Sir Philip Sidney—Elizabethan England’s premier defender of poetry and internationally recognized paragon of Christian knighthood—functions as a nexus for Perry’s treatment of a wide variety of contemporary literary and religious genres, all of them concerned in one way or another with the ethical and religious implications of imitation. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, the Sidney legacy was appropriated by men and women, Catholics and Protestants alike, making it an especially useful vehicle for tracing the complicated relationship of imitatio Christi to the various literary, confessional, and cultural contexts within and across which it often operated. Situating her project within a generously drawn version of the Sidney “circle” allows Perry to move freely across the boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety. Her book is a call for renewed attention to the imitation of Christ as a productive category of literary analysis, one that resists overly neat distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, sacred and secular, literary art and cultural artifact.
£81.00
Taylor & Francis Ltd Reform, Ecclesiology, and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages
Philosophy was not an idle venture in the Renaissance. There were no clear-cut boundaries between theory and the practice. Theologians, jurists and humanists gave opinions on practical matters from within some larger intellectual context, and many held high office. Among the writers represented here are Pope Pius II (1458-1464), Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) and Juan de Torquemada OP (d. 1468). All of them, and the other writers dealt with, addressed the issues of their day creatively but from within different traditions, scholastic or humanistic. The present studies deal with issues of Reform, Ecclesiology [theories about the church and its mission] and the living of the Christian life. Among the specific issues covered are the canonization of Birgitta of Sweden, the status of converts from Judaism in Spain, acceptable forms of dress for clergy and laity, and the obedience due the pope. Also studied in this collection are the writings of Spanish theologians about the indigenous populations of the New World and the use of the name of Nicholas of Cusa by Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, both Catholic and Protestant, in polemics concerning right religious teaching and submission to the English crown, a paper hitherto unpublished.
£84.99
Stanford University Press Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare's Language
For all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can't help but understand his words, metaphors, and syntax in relation to our own. Until now, explaining the powers and pleasures of the Bard's language has always meant returning it to its original linguistic and rhetorical contexts. Countless excellent studies situate his unusual gift for words in relation to the resources of the English of his day. They may mention the presumptions of modern readers, but their goal is to correct and invalidate any false impressions. Shakesplish is the first book devoted to our experience as modern readers of Early Modern English. Drawing on translation theory and linguistics, Paula Blank argues that for us, Shakespeare's language is a hybrid English composed of errors in comprehension—and that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in his language. Investigating how and why it strikes us, by turns, as beautiful, funny, sexy, or smart, she shows how, far from being the fossilized remains of an older idiom, Shakespeare's English is also our own.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare's Language
For all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can't help but understand his words, metaphors, and syntax in relation to our own. Until now, explaining the powers and pleasures of the Bard's language has always meant returning it to its original linguistic and rhetorical contexts. Countless excellent studies situate his unusual gift for words in relation to the resources of the English of his day. They may mention the presumptions of modern readers, but their goal is to correct and invalidate any false impressions. Shakesplish is the first book devoted to our experience as modern readers of Early Modern English. Drawing on translation theory and linguistics, Paula Blank argues that for us, Shakespeare's language is a hybrid English composed of errors in comprehension—and that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in his language. Investigating how and why it strikes us, by turns, as beautiful, funny, sexy, or smart, she shows how, far from being the fossilized remains of an older idiom, Shakespeare's English is also our own.
£89.10
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Reformation England 1480-1642
Now in its third edition, Reformation England 1480-1642 provides a clear and accessible narrative account of the English Reformation, explaining how historical interpretations of its major themes have changed and developed over the past few decades, where they currently stand, and where they seem likely to go. This new edition brings the text fully up-to-date with description and analysis of recent scholarship on the pre-Reformation Church, the religious policies of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, the impact of Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism, the character of English Catholicism, the pitfalls of studying popular religion, and the relationship between the Reformation and the outbreak of civil war in the seventeenth century. With a significant amount of fresh material, including maps, illustrations and a substantial new Afterword on the Reformation's legacies in English (and British) history, Reformation England 1480-1642 will continue to be an indispensable guide for students approaching the complexities and controversies of the English Reformation for the first time, as well as for anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of this fascinating and formative chapter in the history of England.
£25.99
HarperCollins Publishers Julius Caesar (Collins Classics)
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Power, corruption and betrayal are at the heart of Shakespeare’s most well-known historical and political drama. As Julius Caesar moves closer to securing power for himself and is perceived by some as a threat to Roman citizens, his senators plot to bring about his downfall. Caesar’s assassination leads to civil war rather than peace and the play explores the subsequent deaths of the conspirators Brutus and Cassius. Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have spotted the playwright’s attempts to use the shift from republican to imperial Rome to highlight the political situation of the Elizabethans at the time. Featuring some of the most powerfully resonant and rousing speeches of any of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar remains one of his most well-loved historical tragedies.
£5.03
Troubador Publishing Forms from Chaos
This is a collection of forty-one sonnets together with twenty examples of villanelles, pantoum, Spenserian stanza, various ballad and rhyming couplet verses alongside free verse but the abiding focus is the sonnet both in Petrarchan and Elizabethan form.The book's introduction provides a concise account of the sonnet's history with examples. Between each section of poems there are brief contextual comments.From puppy training to philosophy, from self-pity to dancing, from AI to Wet Sand, from the Goodies to Shoe cleaning, the poems share immediate experiences and conjure magic from them. Day by day thoughts expand into polemics, the natural world, links to other poets and thinkers. The technical skills needed in poetic forms create strong structures through which powerful thoughts and emotions are distilled.
£10.00
Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd A Book of Secrets
A Book of Secrets is the story of a woman named Susan Charlewood living in Elizabethan England. Born in what is now Ghana, Susan is enslaved by the Portuguese but later rescued by British sailors, who bring her to England. Once in England, she is raised and educated in an English Catholic household.When Susan comes of age, the family marry her off to an older Catholic man, John Charlewood. Charlewood runs a printing press and uses it to supply the Papist nobility with illegal Catholic texts and foment rebellion amongst the Catholic underclass. When Charlewood dies, Susan takes over the business and uses her new position to find out more about her origins.A look at racial relationships on the eve of the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, A Book of Secrets is a revealing and compelling glimpse into a fraught time.
£9.04
Prestel 500 Years, 100 Watches
From two of the world's leading experts on watch collecting, this supremely elegant and informative selection of one hundred watches traces the timepiece's evolution as it highlights unusual, important, and beautifully crafted watches of the past half a millennium. For centuries people have been captivated by watches-whether for their technical precision, their unique design, or their historic importance. Each of the one hundred watches profiled in this elegant book stands out for one or more of these qualities. Organized chronologically and divided by century, the watches are presented in spacious, double-page spreads, featuring exquisite photography with engaging, incisive texts. Readers will discover examples of the earliest watch forms; an astonishing Elizabethan-era watch with astrolabic dial; an early 17th century watch encased in a single emerald; two of the earliest watches to incorporate the balance spring-a feature that revolutionized the portable timekeeper; and some of the first repeating and perpetual calendar watches. These are followed by the first lever watch, invented by Thomas Mudge; important precision watches; early 19th century enamel and automaton watches; highly complex watches by Breguet and Patek Philippe; Sir Winston Churchill's yellow gold World Time Victory watch; a Rolex wristwatch made to commemorate Indian Republic Day; an Omega Speedmaster that went into space; and a Roger Smith wristwatch completed in 2023. Featuring exquisitely reproduced photographs that are appearing for the first time together in book form, this historic collection will appeal to sophisticated collectors, amateur watch enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in the art and science of horology.
£44.99
Vintage Publishing The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
In 1593, the brilliant and controversial young playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house. The circumstances were shady, the official account - a violent quarrel over the bill, or 'recknynge' - long regarded as dubious.For the first time tracing Marlowe's shadowy political and intelligence dealings, Charles Nicholl uncovers critical new evidence about that fatal day. Also providing an enthralling revelation of the extraordinary underworld of Elizabethan crime and espionage, the 'secret theatre', Nicholl penetrates four centuries of obscurity to expose a complex and chilling story of entrapment and betrayal.
£14.99
Hot Key Books STAGS 2: DOGS
After the dramatic events of the last few weeks, Greer Macdonald is trying to concentrate on her A levels. Stuck for a play to direct for her drama exam, she gets help from an unexpected quarter . . .A priceless lost play, buried by time, is pushed under her door. It is Ben Jonson's The Isle of Dogs, a play considered so dangerous in Elizabethan times that every copy was burned . . . except one. As the students begin to rehearse, events become increasingly dark and strange, and they lead Greer back to where she never thought she would return - Longcross Hall.There she discovers that not only is the Order of the Stag alive and well, but that a ghost from the past might be too . . .
£8.99
Historic England Berwick-upon-Tweed: Three places, two nations, one town
Nikolaus Pevsner described Berwick-upon-Tweed as ‘one of the most exciting towns in England’ [Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England: Northumberland (1957), 88] – a place where an absorbing historical tale can still be read in the dense fabric of its old streets and buildings. It attracts not only day-trippers and holidaymakers but also new residents who have learnt to appreciate the spirit of the place. But outsiders all too easily confine their attention to the space within the impressive Elizabethan ramparts, while local people are sometimes unaware or dismissive of the wider significance of the very things that they know so intimately. Berwick deserves to be known better, and to be celebrated not just as a vivid reminder of what many other towns were once like, but more especially as something unique and distinctive, shaped by a peculiar combination of historical and geographical circumstances. This distinctiveness is acutely apparent as one passes between Berwick and the contrasting, but historically intertwined, settlements of Tweedmouth and Spittal. This book presents something of the wealth of historic interest encapsulated in Berwick, Tweedmouth and Spittal, and explains how these places came to assume such varied and distinctive forms. Above all, it urges that a town anxious for stability and prosperity in the future must know where it has come from as well as where it is going.
£17.76
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Life at Walnut Tree Farm
In 1970 Roger Deakin acquired Walnut Tree Farm, a semi-ruined Elizabethan farmhouse deep in the countryside of northern Suffolk, on the edge of Mellis Green, the largest area of common grazing land in England. The house's thatch and roof beams were rotting; pigs and hens had been its last occupants and the floors were ankle deep in shit. Leaving swinging London behind, Deakin bought the farm in a spirit of 'back to the land' fervour; and, in the coming decades, lovingly restored it. Deakin lived here until his death in 2006, dredging the moat (in which he swam daily), planting woods and buying more of the surrounding fields, where he grew hay and wild flowers. Walnut Tree Farm became a place of pilgrimage and inspiration for nature-lovers, writers, intellectuals and artists, while Deakin's Waterlog has become a much-loved classic of nature writing and gave impetus to the wild swimming movement. Rufus Deakin and Titus Rowlandson offer a beautifully illustrated and designed record of the development of Deakin's rural paradise, centred on a series of photographs taken by Roger Deakin himself, which record both the rebuilding of Walnut Tree Farm, the unique character of a remarkable building, and the seasonal cycle of nature in the land and countryside that surround it.
£18.00
The University of North Carolina Press Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery: The Map, the Search, the Discovery
The fate of Sir Walter Raleigh's 1587 "Lost Colony" on Roanoke Island has been one of the most enduring mysteries in the history of European settlement in North America. For generations, writers, scholars, and others have speculated about the disappearance of more than one hundred colonists, whose only obvious clue left behind was the word "CROATOAN" carved on the palisade of the settlement. But in the early 1990s, archaeologists at Roanoke opened fresh lines of inquiry, and in 2012 the search for evidence gained new momentum when a reexamination of an Elizabethan map revealed a hidden symbol. The symbol seemed to indicate the location of a Renaissance-style fort some distance from Roanoke Island, starting the quest for "Site X." After leading a team to explore multiple lines of research, Eric Klingelhofer here draws together the fullest possible account of what can be known today about the colony. The book features authoritative research by historians, archaeologists, and other experts, and it is richly illustrated with maps and photographs, including never-before-seen artifacts recovered in recent excavations. While some of the Lost Colony's mysteries may never be solved, readers will enjoy this informative and accessible account of efforts to reconstruct events more than four centuries ago.Contributors include: Peter Barber, Phillip Evans, James Horn, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Nicholas Luccketti, Kim Sloan, Beverly Straube, and Clay Swindell.Published in association with the First Colony Foundation.
£22.95
Harvard University Press Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature
Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work.Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart’s bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand.Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity—for pleasure—is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.
£32.36
Taylor & Francis Ltd Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage, 1601-2004
Shortlisted for the 2017 Theatre Book PrizeWhat is it about theatre, compared to other kinds of cultural representation, which provokes such a powerful reaction? Theatrical Unrest tells the compelling tales of ten riots whose cause lies on stage. It looks at the intensity and evanescence of the live event and asks whether theatre shares its unrepeatable quality with history.Tracing episodes of unrest in theatrical history from an Elizabethan uprising over Shakespeare's Richard II to Sikhs in revolt at Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti, Sean McEvoy chronicles a selection of extreme public responses to this inflammatory art form. Each chapter provides a useful overview of the structure and documentation of one particular event, juxtaposing eyewitness accounts with newspaper reports and other contemporary narratives. Theatrical Unrest is an absorbing account of the explosive impact of performance, and an essential read for anyone interested in theatre’s often violent history.
£39.99
Manchester University Press Dr Faustus 1616
This is an edition of Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr Faustus as it was printed in its revised and augmented form in 1616. It follows the publication of the Malone Society edition of the 1604 text in 2018. This is one of the most celebrated of all Elizabethan plays, famous for its treatment of the damnation of Faustus and his struggles with his divided conscience. It combines spectacular visual effects with sophisticated theological discussion.The edition reproduces in facsimile the only surviving copy of the play, which is held in the British Library. The differences from the 1604 text, including revisions and additional passages, are fully described and analysed, and placed in the context of changing theatre practices at the time. A major feature of the edition is that it identifies the printer of the 1616 text, whose name has been hitherto unknown.
£45.00
University of Nebraska Press Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal
Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s plays have trial scenes, and many deal specifically with lawyers, courts, judges, and points of law. Daniel Kornstein, a practicing attorney, looks at the legal issues and aspects of Shakespeare’s plays and finds fascinating parallels with many legal and social questions of the present day. The Elizabethan age was as litigious as our own, and Shakespeare was very familiar with the language and procedures of the courts. Kill All the Lawyers? examines the ways in which Shakespeare used the law for dramatic effect and incorporated the passion for justice into his great tragedies and comedies and considers the modern legal relevance of his work. This is a ground-breaking study in the field of literature and the law, ambitious and suggestive of the value of both our literary and our legal inheritance.
£16.99
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres
Demonstrates how Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten, responding to Shakespeare's juxtaposition of contrasting theatrical styles, devised music dramas that call opera into question. In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today's most intrepid and vividly communicative explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers -- Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten -- respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera -- of music altogether -- in order to come to terms with the challenges that Shakespeare presents to the music dramatist. Musicking Shakespeare begins with an analysis of Shakespeare's play The Tempest as an imaginary Jacobean opera and as a real Restoration opera. It then discusses works that respond with wit and sophistication to Shakespeare's irony, obscurity, contortion, and heft: Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, Verdi's Macbeth, Purcell's The Fairy Queen, and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. These works are problematic in the ways that Shakespeare's plays are problematic. Shakespeare's favorite dramatic device is to juxtapose two kinds of theatres within a single play, such as the formal masque and the loose Elizabethan stage. Thefour composers studied here respond to this aspect of Shakespeare's art by going beyond the comfort zone of the operatic medium. The music dramas they devise call opera into question. Daniel Albright is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University.
£94.50
Fordham University Press Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage
Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Psychoanalytic and new historicist scholars have exhaustively documented the methods that early modern dramatic texts and performances use to memorialize the dead, at times even asserting that theater itself constitutes a form of mourning. But early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie narratives of helplessness and loss through which mortality is too often read and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some early modern strategies for dying resonate with descriptions of politicized biological life in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, or with ecclesiastical forms. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.
£24.29
University of Pennsylvania Press Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance
"Upon a rock sat a maiden of such inexpressible beauty as to be supposed divine. . . . Her head inclined forward without moving, for she was looking fixedly at a young man who lay at her feet. The man was disfigured with wounds, but seemed to rouse himself a little as from a deep sleep, almost of death itself. Pain had clenched his eyes, but the sight of the maiden drew them toward her. He collected his breath, heaved a deep sigh, and murmured faintly. "My sweet," said he, "are you truly safe, or are you too a casualty of the war?" The Romance novel didn't begin with Kathleen Woodiwiss or even with the Bronte sisters. By the time Heliodorus wrote his Aethiopica—or Ethiopian Romance—in the third century, the genre was already impressively developed. Heliodorus launches his tale of love and the quirks of fate with a bizarre scene of blood, bodies, and booty on an Egyptian beach viewed through the eyes of a band of mystified pirates. The central love-struck characters are Charicles, the beautiful daughter of the Ethiopian queen, and Theagenes, a Thessalian aristocrat. The story unfolds with all the twists and devices any writer would employ today, with the added attractions of dreams, oracles, and exotic locales in the ancient Mediterranean and Africa. Hadas's was the first modern English-language translation of this story, which was first translated into English in 1587 and was a favorite among the Elizabethans. His version of this earliest extant Greek novel remains accessible and appealing.
£23.39
Johns Hopkins University Press Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language
The fascinating story of America's oldest thriving heritage language.Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award by the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown CollegeWhile most world languages spoken by minority populations are in serious danger of becoming extinct, Pennsylvania Dutch is thriving. In fact, the number of Pennsylvania Dutch speakers is growing exponentially, although it is spoken by less than one-tenth of one percent of the United States population and has remained for the most part an oral vernacular without official recognition or support. A true sociolinguistic wonder, Pennsylvania Dutch has been spoken continuously since the late eighteenth century despite having never been "refreshed" by later waves of immigration from abroad.In this probing study, Mark L. Louden, himself a fluent speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, provides readers with a close look at the place of the language in the life and culture of two major subgroups of speakers: the "Fancy Dutch," whose ancestors were affiliated mainly with Lutheran and German Reformed churches, and traditional Anabaptist sectarians known as the "Plain people"—the Old Order Amish and Mennonites.Drawing on scholarly literature, three decades of fieldwork, and ample historical documents—most of which have never before been made accessible to English-speaking readers—this is the first book to offer a comprehensive look at this unlikely linguistic success story.
£26.50
University of Notre Dame Press Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England
In this new book, Arthur F. Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England. He considers Catholic writings that have been relatively neglected, as well as the discourse of anti-Catholicism. Straddling the boundary of history and literature, this study offers an intriguing cultural history that focuses on the ideologized fantasies and language found on both sides of the early modern Christian religious divide. Marotti focuses on the period between the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries in England in 1580 and the climax of ongoing religious conflict in the Restoration-era Popish Plot and the 1688 Glorious Revolution. In a series of thematically focused essays, he covers such issues as the relationship of print culture to the residual Catholic culture in Elizabethan England; recusant women, Jesuits and the cultural othering of Catholics, martyrdom accounts, the manuscript circulation of Catholic martyrdom accounts; polemically charged Catholic and Protestant narratives of conversion; and the depiction of Catholic plots or outrages and providential Protestant deliverances in the construction of Protestant English history and identity. This important and eagerly anticipated book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in the early modern period. It also points to a cultural dynamic in Anglo-American history that persisted far into the modern era.
£21.99
Bonnier Books Ltd Spectacular Visual Guides A Shakespearean Theatre
A Shakespearean Theatre is an invaluable guide to an important period in English history. Elizabethan London was a vibrant, growing city - and theatre, especially that of William Shakespeare, played a major role in its lively culture. Here's your ticket to the Globe, the legendary twenty-sided building where Shakespeare's plays were staged. Go backstage to discover how the theatre was run, who chose the actors, how many people it could hold, why it was build on the banks of the Thames, whilst combatting the hazards of everyday life, such as fire and plague.With superb cutaway illustrations, this impressive guide explores the many different people involved in the theatre, providing a vivid and dramatic insight into life and art in sixteenth century England. Informative captions, maps, a complete glossary and an index enhance the book's educational value, making it a perfect resource for school children studying Shakespeare or the Renaissance
£7.20
Penguin Publishing Group Shadow of Night All Souls Trilogy
The #1 New York Times-bestselling sequel to A Discovery of Witches, book two of the All Souls Series. Look for the hit TV series “A Discovery of Witches,” streaming on AMC Plus, Sundance Now and Shudder. Season 2 premieres January 9, 2021! Picking up from A Discovery of Witches' cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes reluctant witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew's old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782--the lost and enchanted manuscript whose mystery first pulled Diana and Matthew into one another's orbit--deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew's past tightens around them. Together they find they must embark on a very different - and vastly more dangerous - journey.A captivating
£8.99
Headline Publishing Group The Royal Wardrobe peek into the wardrobes of historys most fashionable royals
''I loved this book!'' - Alison Weir''[A] lively, gossipy forage through royal wardrobes'' - Daily Mail''A sparkling history'' - Dr Kate StrasdinPeek into the wardrobes of history''s most fashionable royalsWhy did women wear such heavy and uncomfortable skirts in the Elizabethan era?What the hell happened to Charles II''s pubic hair wig?How did Princess Diana''s revenge dress become so iconic?Fashion for the royal family has long been one of their most powerful weapons. Every item of their clothing is imbued with meaning, history and majesty, telling a complex tale of the individuals who wore them and the houses they represented.From the draping of a fabric to the arrangements of jewels, the clothing worn by royals is anything but coincidental. King at just nine years old, Edward VI''s clothes were padded to make him seem stronger and more manly; and the ever-consci
£12.99
Yale University Press The Arch Conjuror of England: John Dee
Outlandish alchemist and magician, political intelligencer, apocalyptic prophet, and converser with angels, John Dee (1527–1609) was one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the Tudor world. In this fascinating book—the first full-length biography of Dee based on primary historical sources—Glyn Parry explores Dee’s vast array of political, magical, and scientific writings and finds that they cast significant new light on policy struggles in the Elizabethan court, conservative attacks on magic, and Europe's religious wars. John Dee was more than just a fringe magus, Parry shows: he was a major figure of the Reformation and Renaissance.
£13.60
Penguin Books Ltd Orlando
First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf's own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or . . . woman?Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf's own words, a ''writer's holiday'' that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.
£14.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Period Hairstyles for Studio, Stage and Screen: A Practical Reference for Actors, Models, Make-up Artists, Photographers, and Directors
Every period in history has its classic hairstyles: the bob cut for Twenties elegance, the flip hairstyle for the Fifties and the long, centre-parted mane of the Seventies. If you need to create a period hairstyle for a film, stage production or fashion shoot, this book is a most trusted companion. Its coverage is broad: from ancient priestesses and Egyption queens, via Elizabethan courtiers, to the classic styles of all decades in the twentieth century. With clear instructions and close-up photography showing how to create more than a hundred vintage styles this is a welcome resource for the dressing room. 'There is a real wealth of information here - and it couldn't be clearer to read.' Reviewsgate.com
£40.00
Allison & Busby The Wanton Angel
In the tenth installment of this dramatic Elizabethan series, Westfield's Men are flying high after a celebrated performance of The Insatiate Duke at the Queen's Head. However, victory is bittersweet as the company is soon faced with dissolution and the loss of their theatre; were it not for one of the company's rising stars. After acquiring a new benefactor, the company plan to build their own theatre. However, before they have the chance to find out who this guardian angel is, one of the group is found brutally murdered. Cue Nicholas Bracewell to uncover not one, but two hidden identities, of both the murderer and the anonymous benefactor, before the company gets disbanded.
£8.23
Penned in the Margins Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery
Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.Literary investigator Chris McCabe pushes back the tangled ivy and hacks his way through the poetic history of south-east London, revealing a map of intense artistic activity with Nunhead at its heart: from Barry MacSweeney in Dulwich to Robert Browning and William Blake in Peckham.Join McCabe on a journey back in time along underground rivers, through Elizabethan villages and urban woodland. Discover the surprising lives and lines of writers neglected amongst the moss-covered monuments of Nunhead Cemetery: from the 'Laureate of the Babies' and a New Zealander soldier-poet to those who chronicled London at the height of her industrial powers.But this is also a personal journey that highlights poetry's force in overcoming trauma; McCabe's exploration of Nunhead Cemetery is interwoven with diary entries that document his mother's illness.In this latest instalment in an ambitious project to plot the dead poets of the Magnificent Seven - London's great Victorian cemeteries - McCabe drills deep into the psyche of the city, and into his own past.Encounters with the dead and forgotten are charted in sinuous prose and with a wry humour that belies his meticulous research. Cenotaph South offers a powerful meditation on art, writing, memory and community, confirming McCabe as contemporary poetry's most innovative thinker. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the canon, or beyond the cemetery gates.
£9.99
Cornell University Press Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness
Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about the conventions of religious life and practice. In this brilliant and strikingly original book, Sarah Beckwith traces the fortunes of this conversation in Shakespeare’s theater. Beckwith focuses on the sacrament of penance, which in the Middle Ages stood as the very basis of Christian community and human relations. With the elimination of this sacrament, the words of penance and repentance—"confess," "forgive," "absolve" —no longer meant (no longer could mean) what they once did. In tracing the changing speech patterns of confession and absolution, both in Shakespeare’s work and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture more broadly, Beckwith reveals Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the importance of language as the fragile basis of our relations with others. In particular, she shows that the post-tragic plays, especially Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, are explorations of the new regimes and communities of forgiveness. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Beckwith enables us to see these plays in an entirely new light, skillfully guiding us through some of the deepest questions that Shakespeare poses to his audiences.
£22.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Shylock's Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice's Jews and the Ghetto
The thrilling story of the Jews in Venice – and the truth behind one of Shakespeare's most famous characters. Millions of visitors flood to Venice every year. Yet many are unaware of its history – one of dramatic expansion but also of rapid decline. And essential to any history of Venice during its glory days is the story of its Jewish population. Venice gave the world the word ghetto. Astonishingly, the ghetto prison turned out to be as remarkable a place as the city of Venice itself. With sound scholarship and a narrator's skill, Harry Freedman tells the story of Venice’s Jews. From the founding of the ghetto in 1516, to the capture of Venice by Napoleon in 1797, he describes the remarkable cultural renaissance that took place in the Venice ghetto. Gates and walls notwithstanding, for the first time in European history Jews and Christians mingled intellectually, learned from each other, shared ideas and entered modernity together. When it came to culture, the ghetto walls were porous. Any history of Venice and its Jews also can’t avoid the story of Shakespeare’s Shylock. The cultural and political revival in the Venice ghetto is often obscured from history by this fictional character. Who, we wonder, was Shylock? Would the people of Venice have recognized him and what did Shakespeare really think of him? Shakespeare’s ambivalent anti-Semitism reflects attitudes to Jews in Elizabethan England – but as Freedman demonstrates, Shakespeare’s myth is wholly ignorant of the literary, cultural and interfaith revival that Shylock would have experienced.
£18.00
Princeton University Press Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642
Gerald Eades Bentley assembles and analyzes the extant theatrical materials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His discussion of the working conditions of professional dramatists like Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger as well as William Shakespeare rounds out the fascinating picture of the professionalism that developed in the great days of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
£82.80
Carnegie Publishing Ltd God's Town: Liverpool and her Parish since 1207
Since the foundation of the town by King John, Liverpool has had a church by the river. Over the following centuries dozens more churches came and went, but the imprint of the activity of the Parish of Liverpool on the city and people was profound. Particularly until the mid-nineteenth century (and at times afterwards) the history of the town was inseparable from her church, and their unusually strong relationship is not replicated in other cities. Control of the church sat with the corporation (down to the council’s instruction to the incumbent in 1612 to get his hair cut!), and the town claimed ownership of the church and its contents. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries the health and social care for the town was run from the church under the Elizabethan Poor Law. A beautiful book that makes essential and fascinating reading for anyone who loves Liverpool and its rich history.
£25.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Wilderness Party
With its flighty parables and skewed morality tales, The Wilderness Party is an unforgettable record of turbulent times. These are poems of finely-wrought musicality, bristling energy and playful excess. From cream cakes on Shetland to Camberwick Green, from Lyuba the Siberian mammoth to the madness of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, A.B. Jackson approaches personal and historical events with a mixture of wit and wonder. Included in the opening section of individual lyrics is 'Treasure Island', winner of the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. The series 'Natural History' takes a spirited linguistic tour through Pliny the Elder in Elizabethan translation to uncover the myths, mysteries, and uncanny familiarities of animal behaviour. In the twenty-one short fictions of 'Apocrypha', high ideals cavort with low befuddlement as re-cast Biblical characters attempt to make sense of the modern world. The Wilderness Party is Jackson's long-awaited follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning first collection Fire Stations. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. .
£9.95
Fordham University Press The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt
With characteristic wit, Harry Berger, Jr., brings his flair for close reading to texts and images across two millennia that illustrate what he calls “structural misanthropology.” Beginning with a novel reading of Plato, Berger emphasizes Socrates’s self-acknowledged failures. The dialogues, he shows, offer up, only to dispute, a misanthropic polis. The Athenian city-state, they worry, is founded on a social order motivated by apprehension—both the desire to take and the fear of being taken. In addition to suggesting new political and philosophical dimensions to Platonic thought, Berger’s attention to rhetorical practice offers novel ways of parsing the dialogic method itself. In the book’s second half, Berger revisits and revises his earlier accounts of Italian humanism, Elizabethan drama, and Dutch painting. Berger shows how structural misanthropology helps us to read the competitive practices that characterize Renaissance writing and art, whether in Machiavelli’s constitutional prostheses, Shakespeare’s pageants of humiliation, or the elbow jabs of Dutch portraiture.
£26.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Jew of Malta
The Jew of Malta, written around 1590, can present a challenge for modern audiences. Hugely popular in its day, the play swings wildly and rapidly in genre, from pointed satire, to bloody revenge tragedy, to melodramatic intrigue, to dark farce and grotesque comedy. Although set in the Mediterranean island of Malta, the play evokes contemporary Elizabethan social tensions, especially the highly charged issue of London's much-resented community of resident merchant foreigners. Barabas, the enormously wealthy Jew of the play's title, appears initially victimized by Malta's Christian Governor, who quotes scripture to support the demand that Jews cede their wealth to pay Malta's tribute to the Turks. When he protests, Barabas is deprived of his wealth, his means of livelihood, and his house, which is converted to a nunnery. In response to this hypocritical extortion, Barabas launches a horrific (and sometimes hilarious) course of violence that goes well beyond revenge, using murderous tactics that include everything from deadly soup to poisoned flowers. The play's sometimes complex treatment of anti-Semitism and its relationship to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice remain matters of continuing scholarly reflection. This new edition is expertly edited with an accompanying introduction that addresses issues of performance, cultural and historical context, interpretation and the key themes explored by the play. Arden Early Modern Drama editions offer the best in contemporary scholarship, providing a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary and guiding the reader to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the play. This edition provides: A clear and authoritative text Detailed on-page commentary notes A comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play’s historical, cultural and performance contexts A bibliography of references and further reading
£13.99