First published in 1988, Perymedes and the Blacksmith and Pandosto by Robert Greene: A Critical Edition considers two prose works by Robert Greene - Perymedes the Blacksmith and Pandosto - alongisde a critical commentary, including, in relation to Perymedes the Blacksmith, an examination of Perymedes as a framework tale and an exploration of the poems, and, in relation to Pandosto, a consideration of the analogues and sources and the popularity of Pandosto.
Robert Greene, contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe and member of the group of six known as the "University Wits," is the subject of this essay collection, the first to be dedicated solely to his work. Although in his short lifetime Greene published some three dozen prose works, composed at least five plays, and was one of the period's most recognized-even notorious-literary figures, his place within the canon of Renaissance writers has been marginal at best. Writing Robert Greene offers a reappraisal of Greene's career and of his contribution to Elizabethan culture. Rather than drawing lines between Greene's work for the pamphlet market and for the professional theatres, the essays in the volume imagine his writing on a continuum. Some essays trace the ways in which Greene's poetry and prose navigate differing cultural economies. Others consider how the full spectrum of his writing contributes to an emergent professional discourse about popular print and theatrical culture. The volume includes an annotated bibliography of recent scholarship on Greene and three valuable appendices (presenting apocrypha; edition information; and editions organized by year of publication).
This volume examines the proliferation of popular romances, their vilification by elite writers, and the ultimate opposition of "popular" and "literary" fiction. Using Robert Greene's "Pandosto" (1585), an Elizabethan prose romance that inspired Shakespeare's late play "The Winter's Tale" as a case study, Newcomb demonstrates that versions of the two texts repeatedly converge, resisting simple high/low division. Because Shakespeare's works are considered timeless literary achievements, critics have distanced his plays from their romance sources--a separation that until now has gone largely unquestioned. Newcomb challenges this assumption, providing a fascinating account of an early best-seller's incarnations over 250 years of literary history.
Neither comedy nor tragedy, The Winter’s Tale contains elements of each genre, and defies easy classification. It experiments, like many of Shakespeare’s late plays, with different styles and tones, and draws on a wide range of sources and inspirations. Full of mysteries and miracles, grief and dark humour, this strange play has fascinated critics and theatregoers for centuries. Theatrical and cinematic productions have tried to capture the range of interpretations and staging possibilities presented by The Winter’s Tale, and the introduction to this edition explores the play’s long histories in performance and in criticism. Illustrations and extended notes interleaved throughout the text discuss the echoes of religious, scientific, and mythological texts found in the play.
Literary historians have been giving increased attention to texts that have hitherto been largely ignored. The works of women, the disenfranchised, and "commoners" have all benefited from such critical analysis. Similarly, letters, memoirs, popular poetry, and serialized fiction have become the subject of scholarly inquiry. Elizabethan fiction has also profited from the newer odes of critical inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne's The Adventurers of Master F.J., John Lyly's Euphues, George Pettie's A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, or Nicolas Breton's The Miseries of Mavilla have often been seen as the work of "hack" writers, inelegant aberrations that demonstrated little about the culture of 16th-century Britain or the development of English fiction. This collection of original essays draws on a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches, especially those influenced by various elements of feminism, Marxism, and cultural studies. They illuminate the richness of canonical examples of Elizabethan fiction (Sidney's Arcadia) and less widely read works (Henry Chettle's Piers Plainess).
2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and The Maid’s Tragedy, the essays bring both familiar and unfamiliar texts into conversation about the political potential of female alliances. Some contributors are skeptical about allied women’s political power, while others suggest that such female communities had considerable potential to contain, maintain, or subvert political hierarchies. A wide variety of approaches to the political are represented in the volume and the scope will make it appealing to a broad audience.
While Robert Greene was the most prolific and perhaps the most notorious professional writer in Elizabethan England, he continues to be best known for his 1592 quip comparing Shakespeare to "an upstart crow." In his short twelve-year career, Greene wrote dozens of popular pamphlets in a variety of genres and numerous professional plays. At his premature death in 1592, he was a bonafide London celebrity, simultaneously maligned as Grub-Street profligate and celebrated as literary prodigy. The present volume constitutes the first collection of Greene's reception both in the early modern period and in our present era, offering in its poems, prose passages, essays, and chapters that which is most singular among what has been written about Greene and his work. It also includes a complete list of Greene's contemporary reception until 1640. Kirk Melnikoff's wide-ranging and revisionist introduction organizes this reception generically while at the same time situating it in the context of recent critical methodologies.
In the early modern period, England radically expanded its participation in an economy that itself was becoming increasingly global. Yet less than twenty years after the highly profitable English East India Company made its first voyage, England was suffering from an economic depression, blamed largely on the shortage of coin necessary to exploit those very same profitable routes. How could there be profit in the face of so much loss, and loss in the face of so much profit? In Tragicomic Redemptions, Valerie Forman contends that three seemingly unrelated domains—the development of new economic theories and practices, especially those related to global trade; the discourses of Christian redemption; and the rise of tragicomedy as the stage's most popular genre—were together crucial to the formulation of a new and paradoxical way of thinking about loss and profit in relationship to one another. Forman reads plays—including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale, Fletcher's The Island Princess, Massinger's The Renegado, and Webster's The Devil's Law-Case—alongside a range of historical materials that provide a fuller picture of England's participation in a global economy: the writings of the country's earliest economic theorists, narrative accounts of merchants and captives in the Spice Islands and the Ottoman Empire, and documents that detail the development of the English East India Company, the Levant Company, and even the very idea of the joint-stock company. Unique in its dual focus on literary form and economic practices, Tragicomic Redemptions both shows how concepts fundamental to capitalism's existence, such as "free trade," and "investment," develop within a global context and reveals the exceptional place of dramatic form as a participant in the newly emerging, public discourse of economic theory.
This is a wide-ranging, closely-researched collection, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, on the cultural placement and transmission of texts between 1520 and 1750. Material and historical conditions of texts are analysed, and the range of works is wide, including plays and the Lucrece of Shakespeare (with adaptations, and a discussion of 'reading' playtexts), Sidney's Arcadia, Greene's popular Pandosto (both discussed in the contexts of changing readerships and forms of fiction), Hakluyt's travel books, funerary verse, and the writings of Katherine Parr and Elizabethan Catholic martyrs.
