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This article seeks to provide an account of the political biases at stake in the conceptualisation of medieval English history in Ethelwina, Or The House of Fitz-Auburne (1799), the first fiction of the prolific Gothic romancer-turned-Royal Body Guard T. J. Horsley, Curties. Having considered Curties‘s portrayal of the reign of King Edward III in the narrative in relation to formal historiographies of the period, the article turns to address the politics of Curties‘s appropriation of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet.
Introduction The deposition was not the end of the story. The major difficulty for Isabella and Mortimer and Edward III’s new government was what to do with Edward. The sentence on him had been perpetual imprisonment and the intention seems to have been to make him reasonably comfortable at Kenilworth Castle with an allowance of £5 a day for his maintenance. 1
1. Death of the Black Prince, 1376 As he was dying, the Black Prince commended his wife and son to Edward III and Gaunt. Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos , ed. M. K. Pope and E. C. Lodge (Oxford, 1910 ), 129. Then he called the king his father And the duke of Lancaster his brother. He
The first twenty years (1377-97) of Richar II's reign was characterised by war and rebellion, show trials, scandalous royalty, horrible murders, attempts to solve the Irish question and the making of England's oldest alliance. This richly-documented period offers exceptional opportunities and challenges to students, and the editor has selected material from a wide range of sources: well-known English chronicles, foreign chronicles, and legal, administrative and financial records. This book describes the complex domestic and international situation which confronted the young king, and offers guidance on the strengths and weaknesses of the reign's leading chronicles. Students of Richard II's reign are blessed with numerous written sources. This reign saw the last great flowering of medieval chronicle-writing.
The Reign of King Edward III was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 1 December 1595 by Cuthbert Burby. It was printed by Thomas Scarlet the following year with no allusion to the play’s authors or by which acting company it had been ‘sundry times played about the City of London’. Martin Wiggins suggests that Shakespeare ‘contributed to the play at the end of 1593, not
As Edward III lay dying in the summer of 1377, the nation’s mood was anxious and sombre; Edward had ascended the throne early in 1327, so very few of his subjects could remember a time when he was not their king. During his fifty-year reign Edward had restored the prestige and glamour of crown and court at home and abroad, defeated the Scots and humiliated the French. Though his
This chapter contains translations of a selection of shorter documents that were edited by Rudolf Buddensieg for the Wyclif Society in Polemical Works (vols 1 and 2, 1883). On the Noonday Devil is generally held to be the earliest of these, and is normally dated within a short period of the death of Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince, on 8 June 1376, which is mentioned in this text. The king himself died only a little over a year later. The other two texts, On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirt and On the Loosing of Satan, whose polemic ranges far beyond the very limited scope of On the Noonday Devil, are generally held to have been written towards the end of Wyclif’s life.
Shakespeare’’s tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd defines the early modern playwright Thomas Kyd’’s dramatic corpus and indicates where and how Kyd contributed to the development of Shakespeare’’s dramas. Scholars have yet to recognise the extent to which Kyd influenced Shakespeare, nor the full extent of his surviving dramatic corpus. This book collects and sifts a wide range of evidence in favour of an ‘‘enlarged’’ Kyd canon while introducing cutting-edge digital resources for authorship attribution purposes. Through a combination of computational and traditional literary-critical analysis, Darren Freebury-Jones makes a case for Kyd’’s authorship of six sole-authored plays: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, Arden of Faversham, Fair Em, and Cornelia. The book demonstrates the fibrous influence that Kyd exerted on Shakespeare’’s phraseology, verse style, and overall dramaturgy, and proposes that Shakespeare’’s dramatic output was, in part at least, dependent on processes of adaptation and collaboration with Kyd. A wealth of evidence indicates that Shakespeare and Kyd’’s relationship extended to revision and co-authorship in plays such as Henry VI Part One, Edward III, and the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy. The book situates Kyd and Shakespeare’s plays in their original historical context: the narrow and intensely competitive as well as collaborative world of the London theatres. Dramatists such as Shakespeare were also actors, and would develop an intimate familiarity with plays in which they had performed. Ground-breaking in its implications for our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic development, the book aims to revolutionise our understanding of the early modern canon.