Elizabethan Silent Language is an anatomy of an alternative or supplementary mode of communication in a culture prized for its literary contributions. Through the use of nonverbal media, Elizabethans coexpressed, enhanced, andøsometimes even subverted the medium of the written or spoken word. Besides written documents and works of art, extant material reveals new referents and deeper meaning for Elizabethan verbal expression. Funeral monuments, jewelry, costume, foodstuffs, protocol, sumptuary laws, portraits, architecture, management of public appearance, absence, and silence?all were forms of a silent language. The main elements of the semantic system of Elizabethan silent language were in many cases those of literal language, with resources in religion, in antiquity as translated through humanist tradition, in custom and law, in the Continental Renaissance, and in Tudor historiography?syntactic elements translated through word and practice and subject to personal inflection. Assumed as given values were the masculine norm, young adulthood, courtly service, discernment of ethical and aesthetic dimensions in all aspects of life, a comprehensive rule of decorum, and the preservation of religious, political, and social hierarchy. Elizabethan Silent Language is a unique book. Although Renaissance scholars have focused their attention on individual components of texts, such as ceremony, costume, architecture, protocol, and portrait, no other source synthesizes these components.

This is the story of the 'failed' British Empire in Ireland and the sad end of the Tudor reign. The relationship between England and Ireland has been marked by turmoil ever since the 5th century, when Irish raiders kidnapped St. Patrick. Perhaps the most consequential chapter in this saga was the subjugation of the island during the 16th century, and particularly efforts associated with the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the reverberations of which remain unsettled even today. This is the story of that ‘First British Empire’. The saga of the Elizabethan conquest has rarely received the attention it deserves, long overshadowed by more ‘glamorous’ events that challenged the queen, most especially those involving Catholic Spain and France, superpowers with vastly more resources than Protestant England. Ireland was viewed as a peripheral theater, a haven for Catholic heretics and a potential ‘back door’ for foreign invasions. Lord deputies sent by the queen were tormented by such fears, and reacted with an iron hand. Their cadres of subordinates, including poets and writers as gifted as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Walter Raleigh, were all corrupted in the process, their humanist values disfigured by the realities of Irish life as they encountered them through the lens of conquest and appropriation. These men considered the future of Ireland to be an extension of the British state, as seen in the ‘salon’ at Bryskett’s Cottage, outside Dublin, where guests met to pore over the ‘Irish Question’. But such deliberations were rewarded by no final triumph, only debilitating warfare that stretched the entire length of Elizabeth’s rule. This is the story of revolt, suppression, atrocities and genocide, and ends with an ailing, dispirited queen facing internal convulsions and an empty treasury. Her death saw the end of the Tudor dynasty, marked not by victory over the great enemy Spain, but by ungovernable Ireland – the first colonial ‘failed state’.

This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry’s own relation to truth. Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the ‘inward’ life of the viewer and the ‘outward’ reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.

Using a set of detailed case studies, this book analyses medieval and early modern court culture as inherently performative.

This book reveals the most popular instrument in the world as it was in the age of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns—both conceptual and material—in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.

When Shakespearean characters kiss, embrace, or shake hands, what does it mean? Are dramatic characters following established rules of conduct, or breaking them? Are there rules to break? Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England addresses these and related questions and, in the process, uncovers the social semiotics of contact in the early modern theatre. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships: taking hands means something different than embracing or, indeed, holding hands a different way. Second, the definitions, the social roles of actions like these, are up for debate in venues ranging from sermons to the era's burgeoning literature on conduct. The drama not only portrays but participates in these debates. Where characters touch, so do different ideas about contact's role in a variety of contexts, from love and friendship to politics and business deals. Attending to the social roles of touch—what it signifies as much as how it feels—the book develops an outside-in approach to our understanding of early modern sensation: a sociology, rather than a phenomenology, of theatrical contact. It will be of use to editors, performers, and anyone interested in Shakespearean approaches to embodiment. Locating interpersonal touch at the centre of dialogues on consent, subjection, agency, and sexuality, this study offers new perspectives on an essential element of Renaissance drama.