Anthony Munday And Civic Culture

This in-depth study of the important but neglected writer Anthony Munday fills a long-standing gap in our knowledge and understanding of London and its culture in the early modern period. It will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and cultural geographers.

Munday's translation is based on a Spanish original entitled Primaleon de Grecia I (Salamanca, 1512). This Spanish romance, the second book in the Palmerin cycle, soon became a best-seller in the Spanish market, with several editions published between 1512 and 1588. The work was also translated into many continental languages. Anthony Munday translated his Palmendos from the French version by Francois de Vernassal late in 1588. The Historie of Palmendos comprised the first thirty-two chapters of the French text and focused on the adventures of Palmendos on his journey to Constantinople. It was reprinted in 1653 and 1663 with slight alterations from the 1589 version. This is an original-spelling edition that produces a most reliable text, as close as possible to the author's original manuscript.

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.

Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans considers how the marginalized perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in contemporary religious and national identities but also transcended those identities. Author Brian C. Lockey argues that English discourses of nationhood were in conversation with two opposing 'cosmopolitan' perspectives, one that sought to cultivate and sustain the emerging English nationalism and imperialism and another that challenged English nationhood from the perspective of those Englishmen who viewed the kingdom as one province within the larger transnational Christian commonwealth. Lockey illustrates how the latter cosmopolitan perspective, produced within two communities of exiled English subjects, separated in time by half a century, influenced fiction writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harington, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Ultimately, he shows that early modern cosmopolitans critiqued the emerging discourse of English nationhood from a traditional religious and political perspective, even as their writings eventually gave rise to later secular Enlightenment forms of cosmopolitanism.

In his 1987 work Paratexts, the theorist Gérard Genette established physical form as crucial to the production of meaning. Here, experts in early modern book history, materiality and rhetorical culture present a series of compelling explorations of the architecture of early modern books. The essays challenge and extend Genette's taxonomy, exploring the paratext as both a material and a conceptual category. Renaissance Paratexts takes a fresh look at neglected sites, from imprints to endings, and from running titles to printers' flowers. Contributors' accounts of the making and circulation of books open up questions of the marking of gender, the politics of translation, geographies of the text and the interplay between reading and seeing. As much a history of misreading as of interpretation, the collection provides novel perspectives on the technologies of reading and exposes the complexity of the playful, proliferating and self-aware paratexts of English Renaissance books.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

"This collection of original essays examines the publication and reception history of sixteenth-century Iberian books of chivalry in English translation and explores the impact of that literary corpus on Elizabethan culture as well as its connections with other contemporary genres such as native English fiction, chronicle, and epistolary writing. The essays focus mainly on Anthony Munday's work as the leading translator as well as the two main Spanish sixteenth-century cycles-Le., Amadis and Palmerin-from a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies, book history and reception, material history, translation, post-colonial criticism, and early modern Qender studies."--

In 1588 Anthony Munday published A Banquet of Daintie Conceits, containing twenty-two new moral poems in various verse forms. Ranked with the best comic playwrights of his day, including Shakespeare, he was also a travel-writer, religious spy, actor, translator, royal messenger, deviser of civic entertainments, and historian. Munday confessed that he was not knowledgeable in music, yet he named a tune for singing each poem. Intriguingly, unlike typical broadside ballad tunes, most of Munday’s tunes are dances, and of the twenty-two named, fourteen are known from solo instrumental arrangements. Despite that survival, despite the poet’s fame, and despite an 1812 edition of the poems from the unique extant copy, this is the first attempt to set Munday’s Banquet lyrics to their respective music. Poems with unidentified melodies are set to period tunes that fit their versifications, making all the lyrics singable for the first time in over 400 years.