Search results for ""Author Leah Scragg""

The first fully annotated, modern-spelling edition of Lyly’s Pap with an Hatchet, this volume in the Revels Plays Companion Library series opens a window on the most neglected item in the Lylian canon. A response to a series of late sixteenth-century anti-episcopalian pamphlets issued under the pseudonym ‘Martin Marprelate’, Pap with an Hatchet seeks to beat Martin at his own game, employing all the devices deployed in the tracts to deride and subvert the Martinist position. Written in a racy, colloquial style, and at variance in its format with twenty-first century printing conventions, the pamphlet has remained difficult to access for the modern reader, and it is this barrier to a fuller understanding that the present edition has been designed to overcome. Re-edited from the earliest witnesses, brought into line with contemporary printing practice, richly annotated, and equipped with a substantial introduction, it enables a new insight into the witty interaction between the work and the Martinist tracts, the care underlying its composition, and the relish that Lyly brought to his task.

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Mother Bombie is unique among Lyly’s comedies in its urban setting and focus upon middle and lower class concerns. The play turns on the tissue of misconceptions surrounding the efforts of four fathers to secure socially advantageous marriages for their heirs, and the determination of their young servants to exploit their masters’ misguided aspirations for their own advantage. A theatrical success in its own day, the play is of particular interest to twenty-first century criticism for its focus upon those situated on the margins of the social group, notably Mother Bombie herself, thought by some to be a witch, and the two simpletons whose marital prospects lie at the heart of the action.This fully annotated, modern-spelling edition of the play, now available in paperback, is re-edited from the earliest witnesses; the quartos of 1594 and 1598, and incorporates the songs first published by Blount in his collected edition of Lyly’s works in 1632

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Designed to introduce the student or general reader to a largely unfamiliar area of Elizabethan theatrical activity, Five Elizabethan progress entertainments focuses on a group of entertainments mounted for the monarch in the closing years of her reign. Richly annotated, and prefaced by a substantial introduction, the texts enable an understanding of the motives underlying not only the progress itself, but the choice of locations the monarch elected to visit and the personal and political preoccupations of those with whom she determined to stay. Selected for their diversity, the entertainments exhibit the tensions underlying some royal visits, the lavish expenditure entailed for the monarch’s hosts and the overlap in terms of both material and authorship between the progress entertainments and the more widely studied products of the sixteenth-century stage.

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Devised as an entertainment for a Tudor monarch, Galatea might be seen, paradoxically, as a parable for our time. Inhabiting a world engaged in a process of change, the characters find themselves locked in a series of transgressive situations that speak directly to contemporary experience and twenty-first-century critical concerns. Same-sex relationships, shifts of authority, and the destabilization of meaning all lend the play a surprising modernity, making it at once the most accessible of Lyly’s plays and the one most frequently performed today. Designed for the student reader, Leah Scragg’s edition offers a range of perspectives on the work. An extensive introduction locates the play in the context of the Elizabethan court, opening a window onto a kind of drama very different from that of more familiar sixteenth-century writers, such as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The latter’s indebtedness to the play is fully documented, while detailed critical and performance histories allow an insight into the work’s susceptibility to reinterpretation.

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