Elizabeth I of England, as a female monarch who did not heed counsel, particularly in the events surrounding the marriage proposal from the much younger Roman Catholic Duke of Alençon and Anjou (c 1579–1586), aroused anxiety and frustration in her Protestant male courtiers. Two of these, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, expressed their dissatisfaction about the “courteous cruell” queen in their literary works and letters. The relationship between the two men was also complex, united as they were in politics, arguing for a strong interventionist role for England in Europe, but divided in poetics. Sidney advocated a classical model for English vernacular poetry while Spenser favoured a homegrown English strain harking back to Chaucer and Skelton. Thoroughly researched and written in an accessible style with close readings of all the major works of Sidney and Spenser that are linked to Elizabeth I, along with a look at their correspondence, this book provides a new way of interweaving the narratives of history and literature, and will be of interest to the academician and the lay reader alike in its analysis of the workings of gender, desire, politics and poetics in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Modern readers can sometimes be unsure about the language and the literary conventions of medieval and Renaissance verse--lyrical works written at a time before poetry was assumed to be about personal expression. This readers' guide introduces to a 21st century audience some of the greatest masterpieces of English poetry spanning five centuries. Focusing on poems by Chaucer, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Milton and others, the author discusses the development of poetic technique, explains the rhetorical culture of earlier centuries and describes the various lyric forms--including lover's complaints, sonnets and elegies--that poets used to communicate with readers.

This volume examines the proliferation of popular romances, their vilification by elite writers, and the ultimate opposition of "popular" and "literary" fiction. Using Robert Greene's "Pandosto" (1585), an Elizabethan prose romance that inspired Shakespeare's late play "The Winter's Tale" as a case study, Newcomb demonstrates that versions of the two texts repeatedly converge, resisting simple high/low division. Because Shakespeare's works are considered timeless literary achievements, critics have distanced his plays from their romance sources--a separation that until now has gone largely unquestioned. Newcomb challenges this assumption, providing a fascinating account of an early best-seller's incarnations over 250 years of literary history.

Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal ‘Studied for Action’ (1990), a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited the History of Reading, an interdisciplinary field which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations in turn illuminate past worlds. Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the History of Reading. By uniting ‘Studied for Action’ with published and unpublished studies on Harvey by Jardine, Grafton and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading.

Vols. 22-23 include illustrations by George Cruikshank.

"Despite its canonical prestige, Edmund Spenser's epic six-part poem The Faerie Queene (1590-96) has never been easy or altogether pleasurable to read. As this book describes, the poem's first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, did so under duress, and returned the manuscript with a plea that Spenser write something else instead. Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek advice to twentieth-century readers eager to cultivate a taste for The Faerie Queene-"The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie Queene"-sums up a tradition of readerly resistance to the poem. As a consequence of its difficulty, the poem has an extraordinary capacity to induce doubt in readers-about Spenser, about themselves, and about the enterprise of reading itself. Each of the six chapters in Nicholson's book considers the poem through the lens of a different readership: scholars; schoolchildren; compilers of commonplace books, who value specific elements about the poem; Queen Elizabeth, the ostensible subject of the poem; and readers who, across the centuries, ultimately failed to understand the poem. Rather than tell us how to read Spenser's work, Nicholson describes how these individual readers, from learned scholars to precocious schoolboys, jealous queens to algorithmic search engines, have generated meaning and pleasure from an unusual and difficult text. Throughout, the author argues that that The Faerie Queene can be read not simply as literature but as literary theory, a reflection on what reading does to texts, readers, and the worlds they live in"--