This is the first fully annotated edition of Ben Jonson's The Magnetic Lady, written in 1632. The introduction places the play in the context of Jonson's later dramatic and poetic works and discusses the political context of the Caroline court. A performance history of the play and fresh material relating to its 17th-century reception are also provided. This new edition by Peter Happè reappraises Jonson's much-neglected play and argues for its recognition as a work of real distinction.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Scholars of Edmund Spenser have focused much more on his accomplishments in epic and pastoral than his work in satire. Scholars of early modern English satire almost never discuss Spenser. However, these critical gaps stem from later developments in the canon rather than any insignificance in Spenser's accomplishments and influence on satiric poetry. This book argues that the indirect form of satire developed by Spenser served during and after Spenser's lifetime as an important model for other poets who wished to convey satirical messages with some degree of safety. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton and George Wither, to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England.
Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.
This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser's epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas. As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser's rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.
The two plays included in this volume follow the lives of a princess and a whore. Although set in Italy, this passionate tale of paternal disapproval and sexual deceit savors more of the underworld of Jacobean London with its asylums and prisons, gambling and prostitution.
An invaluable, unique collection that combines classic texts with little-known material. This book will give a uniquely full picture of one of the most fashionable and dynamic areas of Renaissance poetry.
This is the first collection of essays devoted to Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos (1609), and it celebrates the 400th anniversary of the first publication of that intriguing, posthumously-published fragment of his unfinished epic, The Faerie Queene (1590-96). It brings together leading and emerging Spenser scholars from the US, UK, Ireland and India to asses and assert the significance of the Mutabilitie Cantos to Spenser’s work and thought. All eleven essays are origional and specially commissioning for this substantial volume with contributions from James Nohrnberg, Gordon Teskey and Judith Anderson. Although broadly historical, in keeping the principles with The Manchester Spenser series, the collections encompasses an impressive variety of approaches and interests, ranging from historical allegory and material, political, philosophical and literary contexts of the Mutabilitie Cantos, as well as their commanding place in early modern English and Irish literature and history. The collection also includes a full bibliography of scholarly criticism of the Mutabilitie Cantos. This collection will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, to scholars of Spenser and scholars of renaissance studies.
