Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

Today over half of all American households own a dedicated game console and gaming industry profits trump those of the film industry worldwide. In this book, Soraya Murray moves past the technical discussions of games and offers a fresh and incisive look at their cultural dimensions. She critically explores blockbusters likeThe Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed to show how they are deeply entangled with American ideological positions and contemporary political, cultural and economic conflicts.As quintessential forms of visual material in the twenty-first century, mainstream games both mirror and spur larger societal fears, hopes and dreams, and even address complex struggles for recognition. This book examines both their elaborately constructed characters and densely layered worlds, whose social and environmental landscapes reflect ideas about gender, race, globalisation and urban life. In this emerging field of study, Murray provides novel theoretical approaches to discussing games and playable media as culture. Demonstrating that games are at the frontline of power relations, she reimagines how we see them - and more importantly how we understand them.

Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays’ engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and—looking to our own cultural moment—shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays—Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare’s critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare’s perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood. Harry Newman’s suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It’s sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play’s authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut. - Emma Smith Editor, Shakespeare Survey Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford

This study of the many poets, musicians and visual artists portrayed or described in Shakespeare's plays and poems reveals a fascination with art and its makers that continued to influence Shakespeare's work throughout his career. It also uncovers unexpected aspects of an enthusiastic Elizabethan consumption of artworks, an enthusiasm that had significant bearing on the quite new profession that Shakespeare himself followed. A high valuation placed on art and artists, and at the same time certain fears of these and fears for these, made for a very complex reception of the figure of the artist, and Shakespeare's treatments were equal to that complexity.