A look at 17th-century New England religion as it was practiced by the vast majority of the population, not by the clergy. This work offers insight into Puritan rituals, attitudes toward the natural word, and the creative tension between Puritan laity and clergy.

The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age.

Dramas and Sonnets of William Shakespeare Vol. 1 is helpful to every learner of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) who, doubtless, saw himself as merely another professional man of the theatre who moved almost casually from play-acting to playwriting. And indeed he was very much a man of his time, a man of the Elizabethan theatre, who learnt to exploit brilliantly the stagecraft, the acting, and the pub¬lic taste of his day. It happens very rarely in the history of literature that a craftsman who has acquired perfect control of his medium, masterly ease in handling the techniques and conventions of his day, is also a universal genius of the highest order, combining with his technical proficiency a unique ability to render experience in poetic language and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of hu¬man psychology. Man of the theatre, poet and expert in the human passions, Shakespeare has appealed equally to those who admire the art with which he renders a story in terms of the acted drama or the insight with which he presents states of mind and complex¬ities of attitude or the unsurpassed brilliance he shows in giving conviction and a new dimension to the utterances of his characters through the poetic speech he puts in their mouths. It is a remark¬able combination of qualities. Yet he was no poetic genius descending on the theatre from above, but a working dramatist who found himself in catering for the public theatre of his day. Unquestionably the greatest poetic dramatist of Europe, he was also Marlowe’s successor, the heir to a tradition of playwriting, which we saw developing in the preceding chapter. His contemporaries saw him as one dramatist among others—a good one, and a popular one, but no transcendent genius who left all others far behind—and to the end of his active life he showed no reluctance to collaborate with other playwrights.

"Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real. . . . The value of Davis's book is that it explores the h

In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive. In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama. A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.