In this extraordinary and ambitious book, Peter Lake examines how different sections of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England - protestant, puritan and catholic, the press and the popular stage - sought to enlist these pamphlets to their own ideological and commercial purposes.".

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.

In an exploration of antitheatrical incidents from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates that at the heart of antitheatrical disputes lies a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.

The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context. This Reader's Guide introduces students to the criticism and debates that are specific to the drama of playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Pascale Aebischer explores recent critical developments in key areas including: - How the plays were staged and printed - Innovative editions of plays - How the plays represent and contest the dominant ideologies of the Jacobean period - Dramatic genres - The representation of the human body and of social, gender and race relations - Modern productions on stage and screen Featuring suggestions for further research and reading, and a filmography of commercially available film versions of non-Shakespearean drama, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the diverse plays of the Jacobean age.

Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.

Directs scholarly focus towards a deeper appreciation of medievalist trends in the Elizabethan literary landscape and challenges traditional narratives of 'modernity'. Themes and motifs from the Middle Ages are found across the drama, poetry, prose fiction, polemic, and satire of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, but their impact and influence on this literary landscape have rarely been considered. This study offers a nuanced examination of this intricate interplay between pre-Reformation culture and its post-Reformation reception in England. Each chapter explores a particular genre or aspect of medievalism at play in this writing: civic medievalism; literary adaptation and satire in ecclesiastical polemic; multiple uses of temporality in post-Marprelatian prose fiction; the poetics of memorialisation and voice in medievalist complaint poetry; and the construction of Reformation history and confessional difference on the stage in the early Jacobean period. Moving beyond canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser, the book deals in detail with the drama of Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker (alongside unattributed plays); the prose fiction of Robert Greene, Thomas Deloney, Henry Chettle and anonymous others; the historical verse of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, and the polemical writing of Samuel Harsnett, Job Throckmorton and Matthew Sutcliffe. Through a meticulous analysis of these writers and their works, it shows how medieval texts were creatively deployed and adapted in new literary forms, fashioning the emergence of early forms of medievalism, and challenging conventional notions of temporal and cultural divides.

An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth’s England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.