A Mirror For Magistrates In Context

Situates the often neglected collection of English Renaissance narrative poems A Mirror for Magistrates in the cultural context of its production, locating it not as a primitive form of tragedy, but as the epitome of the de casibus literary tradition.

The first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the Shakespearean age.

A detailed exploration of a significant work of Tudor literature, The Mirror for Magistrates. The volume shows how the text is more than a moralistic collection of poems and how it is concerned with the transmission of national history, and the ways in which the past can be distorted, misremembered, misinterpreted, or lost.

In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

An investigation into the various ways in which Renaissance writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Dutch Republic.

Telltale Women fundamentally reimagines the relationship between the history play and its source material as an intertextual one, presenting evidence for a new narrative about how—and why—these genres disparately chronicle the histories of royal women. Allison Machlis Meyer challenges established perceptions of source study, historiography, and the staging of gender politics in well-known drama by arguing that chronicles and political histories frequently value women’s political interventions and use narrative techniques to invest their voices with authority. Dramatists who used these sources for their history plays thus encountered a historical record that offered surprisingly ample precedents for depicting women’s perspectives and political influence as legitimate, and writers for the commercial theater grappled with such precedents by reshaping source material to create stage representations of royal women that condemned queenship and female power. By tracing how the sanctioning of women’s political participation changes from the narrative page to the dramatic stage, Meyer demonstrates that gender politics in both canonical and noncanonical history plays emerge from playwrights’ intertextual engagements with a rich alternative view of women in the narrative historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

This volume considers the reception in the early modern period of four popular medieval myths of nationhood – the legends of Brutus, Albina, Scota and Arthur – tracing their intertwined literary and historiographical afterlives. The book thus speaks to several connected areas and is timely on a number of fronts: its dialogue with current investigations into early modern historiography and the period’s relationship to its past, its engagement with pressing issues in identity and gender studies, and its analysis of the formation of British national origin stories at a time when modern Britain is seriously considering its own future as a nation.