Drama of the English Republic is the first modern collection of plays and entertainments which were originally published and performed when England was nominally a republic or commonwealth. The five texts, three of which have been edited here for the first time, illustrate how the dramatists devised new aesthetics in response to the ideological concerns of the Republic.

Presents a collection of five dramatic works originally published when English was nominally a Republic. The five texts, three of which have been edited for the first time, include The Tragedy of that Famous Roman Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (Anonymous), Cupid and Death by James Shirley; and William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, and The History of Sir Francis Drake. In her introductory piece, editor Janet Clare (English, University College, Dublin, UK) argues that theater forced into a novel state of opposition did more than survive in reduced form; it adapted, offered oblique critiques of Caroline policies, and revealed complex and shifting alliances. Distributed by Palgrave. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new essays by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events-civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy-led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres and techniques. The Handbook provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revolutionary character of writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. The volume is innovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with essential contextual chapters on religion, politics, society, and culture, the largely chronological subsequent chapters analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events. Attention is given to aesthetic qualities, as well as to bold political and religious ideas, in such writers as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, and Abiezer Coppe. At the same time, the revolutionary political context sheds new light on such well-known literary writers as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan. Overall, the volume provides an indispensable guide to the innovative and exciting texts of the English Revolution and reevaluates its long-term cultural impact.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. This is the first book to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays.

Republic to restoration cuts across artificial divides between periods and disciplines,often imposed for reasons of convenience rather than reality. Challenging the traditional period divide of 1660, essays in this volume explore continuities with the decades of civil war and the Republic, shedding new light on religious, political and cultural conditions before and after the restoration of church and king. Transdisciplinary in conception, it includes essays on political theory, poetry, pamphlets, drama, opera, art, scientific experiment and the Book of Common Prayer. Essays in the volume variously show how unresolved issues at national and local level, including residual republicanism and religious dissent, were evident in many areas of Restoration life, and were recorded in memoirs, diaries, plays, historical writing, pamphlets and poems. An active promotion of forgetting, and the erasing of memories of the Republic and the reconstruction of the old order did not mend the political, religious and cultural divisions that had opened up during the Civil War. In examining such diverse genres as women’s religious and prophetic writings, the publications of the Royal Society, the poetry and prose of Marvell and Milton, plays and opera, court portraiture, contemporary histories of the civil wars, and political cartoons, the volume substantiates its central claim that the Restoration was conditioned by continuity and adaptation of linguistic and artistic discourses. Republic to restoration will be of significant interest to academic researchers in a wide range of related fields, and especially students and scholars of seventeenth-century literature and history.