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, especially in the heyday of deconstruction. 12 Donne studies have, of necessity, focused on manuscripts, archival research, and textual criticism, and the ongoing project of the Donne Variorum highlights the enormity and complexity of the task. 13 The Oxford Handbook devotes its entire first section to research tools and resources in Donne studies, approximately 11 per cent of the total page count excluding the frontmatter and index. Spenser studies, by contrast, have focused on publication history, which takes up 5.7 per cent of the page count in its respective
Wood reads Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia in the light of the ethos known as
Philippism, after the followers of Philip Melanchthon the Protestant theologian.
He employs a critical paradigm previously used to discuss Sidney’s Defence of
Poesy and narrows the gap that critics have found between Sidney’s
theory and literary practice. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and
researchers in the fields of literary and religious studies.
Various strands
of philosophical, political and theological thought are accommodated within the
New Arcadia, which conforms to the kind of literature praised by
Melanchthon for its examples of virtue. Employing the same philosophy, Sidney,
in his letter to Queen Elizabeth and in his fiction, arrogates to himself the
role of court counsellor. Robert Devereux also draws, Wood argues, on the
optimistic and conciliatory philosophy signified by Sidney’s New
Arcadia.
have to do with the constitution of an identity, but rather partakes of a social strategy of self-promotion. One book is of course not enough to provide in-depth treatment of all those issues. The aims of this volume are primarily to give more prominence to emerging research directions, to suggest new perspectives in sonnet criticism, and therefore open up further exchanges. It relies on two currently
John Banville’s Ghosts (1993) begins with a description of a boat ‘list[ing]’ after foundering on an island’s beach, which critics have read as an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. However, the intertextual memory also recalls Hamlet’s Ghost instruction to ‘List’ to his story. Taking the reference as central to the novel, the chapter explores how the protagonist, Freddie, responds to Felix, a ghostly figure from his past. Freddie is disturbed by Felix’s arrival because he disrupts the isolated bubble that Freddie has constructed for himself on the island, reminding Freddie of his murderous past. As the novel unfolds, we learn of another ‘murder’ that Freddie committed: he ‘kills’ his son Van, but only in a story to a friend. Nevertheless, leaving Van to live his life fatherless, Freddie escapes into a shadow world on the island. In terms of the Hamlet–Ghosts connection, this proves that Freddie prefers to be the Ghost rather than the hero. From this spectral position, Freddie is able to conduct his research into the painter Vaublin – and to ghostwrite the Professor’s book on the subject. Readers witness this spectral and disruptive memory – disruptive because hidden yet functioning – because readers of Ghosts also witness the composition of the fake Vaublin painting – Le monde d’or – over the course of the novel. Freddie is therefore a ghostpainter as well as a ghostwriter, finally demonstrating how dismemory – in this case creating memories now in a bid to shape the present – is both Freddie’s and the Ghost’s concern.
’ (Purcell 2017 , 20, quoting Gurr). Now occupying that stage and produced in the Globe's third season (fifth, if the 1995 ‘Workshop’ and 1996 ‘Prologue’ seasons were counted), the 1999 Antony and Cleopatra was sticking to the ‘authenticity’ brief even as it admitted playing fast and loose with it. On the one hand, as the Globe's in-house Research Bulletin reported, the ‘main rope’ used to haul dying Antony into Cleopatra's monument would be ‘made of hemp’, thus ‘scoring points in terms of authenticity’; on the other, as ‘a safety measure
research has led me to reflect on the ways in which the early seventeenth century gave voice to ideas of peoples and nations joining together, however tenuously. To read, for instance, Francis Bacon’s and David Hume of Godscroft’s pronouncements on the common ancestry, the cultural proximity of Britain’s inhabitants against Richard Verstegan’s proclamation of England’s Saxon roots in his Restitvtion of Decayed Intelligence (1605) is to acknowledge the complex and often contradictory ways in which writing on Britain and Britishness unleashed a rethinking of group
dramatist, who famously discusses the topic of tragicomedy, but also, simultaneously, to the new mode of tragicomedy instantiated in Pericles by Heywood’s close contemporaries, Shakespeare and George Wilkins. 35 Rowland’s study of Heywood’s theatre has come at a time of renewed interest in companies and playhouses, including research into Heywood’s favourite playhouse, the Red Bull. 36 His monograph includes a discussion of Heywood’s pageants, an area that has also received attention from others. In particular, Bergeron’s research into the seven pageants Heywood
research in Shakespeare criticism. For example, Margreta de Grazia’s Shakespeare Verbatim and Andrew Murphy’s Shakespeare in Print both make a persuasive case for the impact of late eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions on the development of both Shakespeare criticism and the perception of Shakespeare as an author figure. While a lot of emphasis has of course been placed on the impact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions, the idea of ‘Shakespeare’ conveyed by early modern editions has also become the subject of investigation. This is reflected in new
: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 10. For broader context on the Sidney family’s engagements in Ireland, see Valerie McGowan-Doyle, ‘Sir Henry Sidney, 1529–1586’, in Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 1500–1700 , eds Margaret Hannay, Michael Brennan, and Mary Ellen Lamb (Ashgate, 2015), pp. 23–30; and Thomas Herron, ‘The Sidneys in Ireland’, in Ashgate Research Companion , pp. 179–90. 15 Historical Manuscript Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord D’Lisle (London
, the ‘NEW SCENERY, DRESSES AND DECORATIONS’ in Samuel Phelps's production exploited the full resources of the Victorian theatre to push the play's spectacular-isation beyond Garrick's boldest attempts at approximating materially what Shakespeare had imagined in poetry. The Egyptian views, wrote The Times , were ‘decorated with all those formal fantasies with which we have been familiarised through modern research’ (Madelaine 1998 , 49). This ‘modern research’ was not unconnected to current events, including, first, the furnishing of an