Presents the full text of some poetry written by English poet George Peele (1556-1596), from the "Oxford English Verse 1900" and provided online by Bibliomania.com, Ltd. Includes "Fair and Fair," "A Summer Song," and "A Farewell to Arms."

David Bevington's volume on George Peele looks at the literary achievement of that dramatist and author, who was born in London some time around 1556-8, was educated at Oxford, and returned to London to become a prolific writer until his death in 1596. He died at the age of forty, in poverty, and was never far from the threat of debtors' prison throughout his adult life. Peele, like Greene and Marlowe, was caricatured in his immediate afterlife as the embodiment of a popular and thriving literary culture in London of the late sixteenth century: a world that was competitive and relentlessly unforgiving in its economic pressures, but also colourful, adventuresome, and vital. This volume collects together for the first time the best contemporary published work on Peele by a group of renowned scholars. They discuss Peele's Lord Mayor's Pageants, Court Entertainments, occasional poems, and his plays The Arraignment of Paris, The Old Wives Tale, The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, David and Bathsheba, and Titus Andronicus. The essays are accompanied by David Bevington's substantial introduction which discusses Peele's life and works, particularly in the context of the other five University Wits.

This work is concerned with the evaluation of rhetoric as an essential aspect of Renaissance sensibility. It is an analysis of the Renaissance world viewed in terms of literary style and aesthetic. Eight plays are analysed in some detail: four by George Peele: The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, David and Bethsabe, and The Arraignment of Paris; and four by Christopher Marlowe: Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine Part One, Dr Faustus and Edward II. The work is thus partly a comparative study of two important Renaissance playwrights; it seeks to establish Peele in particular as an important figure in the history and evolution of the theatre. Verbal rhetoric is consistently linked to an analysis of the visual, so that the reader/viewer is encouraged to assess the plays holistically, as unified works of art. Emphasis is placed throughout on the dangers of reading Renaissance plays with anachronistic expectations of realism derived from modern drama; the importance of Elizabethan audience expectation and reaction is considered, and through this the wider artistic sensibility of the period is assessed.