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This book examines the modern performance history of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most enduring comedies, and one that has given opportunities for generations of theatre-makers and theatre-goers to explore the pleasures of pastoral, gender masquerade and sexual ambiguity. Powered by Shakespeare’s greatest female comic role, the play invites us into a deeply English woodland that has also been imagined as a space of dreams. Beginning with the situation of the play in the context of early modern rehearsal and theatre practice, the book’s seven chapters successively examine the rich interplay between performance histories, changing relations with the natural world, and gender politics.

This book applies to tragic patterns and practices in early modern England a long-standing critical preoccupation with English-French cultural connections in the period. With primary, though not exclusive, reference on the English side to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and on the French side to a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic material, it focuses on distinctive elements that emerge within the English tragedy of the 1590s and early 1600s. These include the self-destructive tragic hero, the apparatus of neo-Senecanism (including the Machiavellian villain) and the confrontation between the warrior-hero and the femme fatale. The broad objective is less to ‘discover’ influences—although some specific points of contact are proposed—than at once to enlarge and refine a common cultural space through juxtaposition and intertextual tracing. The conclusion emerges that the powerful, if ambivalent, fascination of the English for their closest Continental neighbours expressed itself not only in, but through, the theatre.

In this follow-up study to French Origins of English Tragedy (MUP, 2010), Richard Hillman pursues his exploration of English tragedy in relation to France, this time with a frank concentration on Shakespeare and in a more broadly and intensively intertextual way. Instead of focusing on common paradigms, he sets out to theorise more abstract tragic qualities (such as nostalgia, futility and heroism), but again with reference to specific French texts and contexts. Three manifestations of the “Shakespearean tragic” are singled out: Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, a comedy with melancholic overtones whose French setting is shown to be richly significant. Hillman brings to bear on each of these central works a cluster of French intertextual echoes, sometimes literary in origin (whether dramatic or otherwise), sometimes involving historical texts, memoirs or contemporary political documents which have no obvious connection with the plays but prove capable of enriching interpretation of them. Some of this material is quite obscure, at least to literary scholars, and one effect is to suggest the surprising degree to which segments of the English theatre-going public would have responded to the evocation of facts, images and ideas emanating from France in a variety of forms. The interdisciplinary approach of this book makes it of interest not only to scholars specialising in early modern English theatre, but also to both specialists and students concerned with the circulation of information and the production of meaning within early modern European culture.

This book will come as a revelation to Shakespeare scholars everywhere. It reveals the identity of the playwright and Shakespeare’s colleague behind the mask of Jaques in As You Like It. It pinpoints the true first night of Twelfth Night and reveals why the play’s performance at the Inns of Court was a momentous occasion for Shakespeare. It also the identities Quinapalus, the Vapians, Pigrogromitus and Feste, as well as the ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets and the inspiration for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. And it solves Shakespeare’s greatest riddle: the meaning of M.O.A.I. in Twelfth Night. In sum, this book reveals William Shakespeare as a far more personal writer than we have ever imagined.

Thirteen writershave comprehensively explained theRenaissance scheme of physiology-psychology used for nosce teipsum, to ‘know oneself’, and other scholars have analysed key features likehumours, bodily spirits, passions, reason, inner wits, soul and spirit, mystic apprehension.Only poetswith epic scope, like Spenser and Shakespeare, depict human nature holistically, yet these finest poets have radically distinct psychologies.Spenser’s Christianised Platonism prioritises the soul, his art mirroringdivine Creation as dogmatically and encyclopedically conceived. He looks to the past, collating classical and medieval authorities in memory-devices like the figurative house, nobly ordered in triadic mystic numerical hierarchyto reform the ruins of time. Shakespeare’s sophisticated Aristoteleanism prioritises the body, highlighting physical processes and dynamic feelings of immediate experience, and subjecting them to intense, skeptical consciousness. He points to the future, using the witty ironies of popular stage productions to test and deconstruct prior authority, opening the unconscious to psychoanalysis. This polarity of psychologies is radical and profound, resembling the complementary theories of physics, structuring reality either (like Spenser) in the neatly-contained form of particle theory, or (like Shakespeare) in the rhythmic cycles of wave theory. How do we explain these distinct concepts, and how are they related? These poets’ contrary artistry appears in strikingly different versions of a ‘fairy queen’, of humour-based passions (notably the primal passion of self-love), of intellection (divergent modes of temptation and of moral resolution), of immortal soul and spirit, of holistic plot design, and of readiness for final judgment.

This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre, in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter, and looks at various strands of the early modern discourse on laughter, ranging from medical treatises and courtesy manuals to Puritan tracts and jestbook literature. It argues that few cultural phenomena have undergone as radical a change in meaning as laughter, a paradigm shift that can be traced back to the early modern period, which saw some remarkable changes in the culture of laughter. Hitherto, laughter had been mainly regarded as a social corrective that mocked those who transgressed societal norms. The evolving cult of courtly manners that spread throughout Renaissance Europe stigmatised derisive laughter as a sign of vulgarity. Laughter became bound up with questions of taste and class identity. At the same time, humanist thinkers revalorised the status of recreation and pleasure. These developments left their trace on the early modern theatre, where laughter was retailed as a commodity in an emerging entertainment industry. William Shakespeare's plays both reflect and shape these changes, particularly in his adaptation of the Erasmian wise fool as a stage figure and in the sceptical strain of thought that is encapsulated in the laughter evoked in the plays.

This book brings together ten chapters on the relations between Spenser and Shakespeare. There has been much noteworthy work on the linguistic borrowings of Shakespeare from Spenser, but the subject has never before been treated systematically, and the linguistic borrowings lead to broader-scale borrowings and influences, which are treated here. An additional feature of the book is that a large bibliography of previous work is offered, which will be of the greatest help to those who follow up the opportunities offered by this collection. The book presents new approaches, heralding a resurgence of interest in the relations between two of the greatest Renaissance English poets to a wider scholarly group and in a more systematic manner than before. This will be of interest to students and academics interested in Renaissance literature.

This book offers for the first time a ‘biography’ of the pivotal year, 1613. London, including the Jacobean court and the city, witnessed an exceptional outpouring of cultural experiences and transformative political events. The political and personal dynamic of the royal family changed forever. The sudden death of the eighteen-year-old Prince Henry, heir apparent to the throne, and the marriage of the only royal daughter, Princess Elizabeth to a German prince, disrupted the anticipated line of succession. This book examines the death of Henry and the unparalleled outpouring of grief for him. Subsequently, the unprecedented number of plays performed at court from Christmas to February 1613 helped provide an antidote to suffering, leading to Elizabeth’s wedding on 14 February. The year closed with an aristocratic wedding at court, which generated spectacle and drama, offsetting the messy divorce and murder that preceded it.Shakespeare’s plays dominated London’s cultural landscape, but his acting company faced the Globe Theatre’s destruction in June. Other playwrights, writers, and printers in the City produced an extraordinary array and number of books. Shakespeare for the first time purchased property in London in March, the Blackfriars Gatehouse, situating him amidst the city’s vibrant culture. The Duke of Lennox, King James’s cousin and confidant, occupying the Holbein Gatehouse in the palace, embodies court culture. The narrative arc of 1613 oscillates metaphorically between these two gatehouses, linking city and court, as they complement and complete each other.