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: Thow hast the so wel born In lokynge of myn olde bok totorn, Of which Macrobye roughte nat a lyte, That sumdel of thy labour wolde I quyte. 1 Scipio Africanus has apparently kept an eye on his reputation in the centuries following his death, for what we have here is an ancient Roman authority telling a late medieval English poet that Macrobius, the late antique commentator, thought his book was something special. Africanus overreaches a bit to claim the
This is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection poses questions about poetic authority, influence and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also responds to current interests in periodisation. This approach will engage academics, researchers and students of medieval and early modern culture.
family rivalry (for love or domestic authority) is raised again when Lear and his hundred knights are hosted by Goneril: domestic cohabitation is impossible, since Goneril feels deterritorialised in her own house, which now, as she bluntly tells her father, shows ‘like a riotous inn’ (1.4.205). In Coriolanus , political cohabitation and compromises with the tribunes are simply not to be envisaged by Coriolanus; his
spatial compactness and literary prestige that undergird the sonnet as a poetic form: the stand-alone sonnet co-opts formal self-enclosure in the service of celebrating native eloquence and accommodating foreignness, implicitly or explicitly commenting on the literary authority, cultural status and vernacular identity of the works in which it is found, especially when it serves as
John Fletcher’s Rome is the first book to explore Fletcher’s engagement with classical antiquity. Fletcher was the most influential playwright of the Jacobean era, whose canon amounts to around 10 per cent of the extant plays of the early modern commercial theatre. Like his more celebrated contemporaries Shakespeare and Jonson, Fletcher wrote, alone or in collaboration, a number of Roman plays: Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One, and The Prophetess. Unlike Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s plays, however, Fletcher’s Roman plays have seldom been the subject of sustained critical discussion. This groundbreaking study examines these plays as a group for the first time, identifying disorientation as the unifying principle of Fletcher’s portrayal of imperial Rome. John Fletcher’s Rome argues that Fletcher’s dramatization of ancient Rome exudes a sense of scepticism regarding the authority of ancient models that is connected to his irreverent approach to classical texts. In doing so, the book sheds new light on Fletcher’s intellectual life, provides fresh insights into his vision of history, illuminates the interconnections between the Roman plays and the rest of his canon, and offers a corrective to dominant narratives that equate Shakespeare’s Rome with ancient Rome as perceived in the early modern imagination in general. As we approach the quatercentenary of Fletcher’s death in 2025, John Fletcher’s Rome offers a worthwhile reappraisal of a playwright who produced a dispirited yet vibrant dramatization of the ancient Roman world that shines as a uniquely gripping instance of the reception of the classical past on the early modern stage.
difficulties he must have overcome when writing history plays based on Hall and Holinshed: the opportunities afforded him for dramatic scenes by Plutarch, Lodge or Cinthio; the skill with which he avoided the weaknesses of previous plays on the same subjects; the manner in which he interwove materials taken from different authorities (as in Lear ); and how he changed the tone and purport of a story (as in As You Like It and Othello ). 7 The emphasis upon the comparative nature of the study
to recover from Homer’s poetry female voices that pose a challenge to a distant, primarily masculine, discourse. Tóibín, himself a reader, explicitly addressing other readers, makes a pitch for his own originality, while at the same time revealing a genealogy of textual authorities whose plays are the sources of a novelistic narrative whose contours have become deeply embedded in Western culture. His explicit claim appears on the surface to be disingenuous. If we strip away the post-modern scaffolding of his own narrative
, blathering’ to a poet laureate for the entire land. Heaney’s strategy is that of a ‘counter-historical’ Historian, through which he excavates memories from Irish land, and re-archives them as memories in his poetry. Yeats and Heaney become not merely citizens of this land, but its authoritative autochthonic authors. Time and memory are functional concepts in these authorities
arising or springing from: derivation, rise; beginning of existence in reference to its source or cause’ (1a) and ‘the fact of springing from some particular ancestor or race descent, extraction, ancestry or parentage’ (1b). Origin was frequently attributed to a divine source from whose plan and values humans deviated. In the case of Lucretius, Barclay and Wilson or Raleigh this process is taken seriously, but for Erasmus it was an object of derision. Each selects textual authorities to document and sustain their position
T his chapter explores how female authority is connected to the reproduction of religious experience in the collection of Protestant conversion narratives The Spirituall experiences of sundry beleevers. 1 This was the first anthology of conversion narratives to appear in print when it was published in 1653. The model was soon copied and in the same year the minister John