Recent scholarship suggests that the data available about lost plays from Shakespeare’s lifetime has never been greater, better assembled or more accessible. What can be done with all this new knowledge? In this Introduction, I examine the numerous and varied reasons why plays become lost – fire, vandalism, censorship (including self-censorship), legal notoriety, the logistics of publishing or preserving a play – and dispel the myth that survival is associated with quality. Indeed, the example of Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’, examined here as a case study, contradicts every generalisation about why plays become lost. Accordingly, I argue that a revaluation of the role played by lost drama in the repertories of early modern playing companies is urgently needed. I approach the question of coping with loss by thinking in pragmatic terms about how scholars can and should incorporate discussion of lost plays into their work on substantially extant texts. I introduce the metaphor of ‘Rubin’s Vase’, a visually experienced figure derived from the work of Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin, as a means of understanding the relationship between lost and extant plays. Lost plays, as a kind of ground or negative space, bring our picture of early modern drama into sharper relief.

The Introduction lays out the book’s main argument about the uses to which accounts of the Bible’s origins were put in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sketches the historical context for this phenomenon, discussing how the period was characterized by heightened attention on the Bible’s ultimate divine origin, transcendent of all historical contexts, and at the same time by a new focus on the human and historical mediations shaping Scripture’s extant forms. The Introduction proceeds to a critical analysis of how modern scholars have understood these modes of biblical reception according to theories of secularization and modernity, with some arguing that the early modern Bible’s transcendence, and some its immanence, played important roles in the development of secularity, disenchantment, and modernity. Through engaging this scholarship, the Introduction develops arguments that challenge contemporary thinking about secularity. Following a discussion of the scholarly field of political theology and the present book’s relationship to it, the Introduction ends with an overview of the book's chapters.

Between 1300 and 1600, Venus and her arts of love charmed the citizens of Florence. Among the soft violets, pinks, and blues of dusk and dawn, her bright star twinkled above the city. Her presence graced festive celebrations, when silk dresses hand-stitched with gold and pearls rustled in corridors and fragrant perfumes infused with citrus, jasmine, and sea-spun ambergris delighted the sense of smell. At such events, Venus attended to laughter, dancing, and sweet songs; she inspired paintings and sculptures, garlands and wreaths. She also frequented the bedchamber, where bodies clung together on feather-stuffed mattresses, when the sight of incandescent skin, dainty fingers, curving hips, and yielding chests ignited desire. In the dark of night, her passions also broke hearts, enraged minds, and diseased bodies. For, the goddess of love also lingered in the cloying scent of betrayal and the violent penetration of rape.

This chapter explains how and why The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race would have been nearly impossible to create thirty years ago. It traces how the volume requires scholars who know not only Shakespeare’s works, the historical and cultural milieu of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in England and Europe, and the archives that hold the historical documents from these time periods, but also the history of imperialism, alternative archives that reveal more about the various lives of people of color in the early modern world, and the history of Shakespeare’s employment in various theatrical, educational, and political moments in history – from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Post-colonial studies, African American studies, critical race studies, and queer studies allow scholars to apply new methodologies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

In recent years, the question of how varieties of mental distress should be categorised has been the subject of significant debate. Should a wide range of conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depression be treated as discrete disorders? One of the major authorities on the subject, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, does exactly that. Or should they be recognised instead as overlapping conditions, with mental health problems being seen as existing on a spectrum with ‘normal’ experience? The boundaries between different formal categories can be paper-thin, and many people who suffer from mental distress have a mixture of complaints and symptoms. The British Psychological Society has suggested that a better approach than applying different diagnostic labels would be to work ‘from the bottom up’, paying attention to individuals’ specific experiences, problems, and symptoms.

In May 1608, several Protestant rulers in the Holy Roman Empire convened an emergency summit in the Swabian town of Auhausen. Weeks earlier, they had walked out of the Imperial Diet, the Empire’s main legislative assembly, to protest what they deemed Catholic attempts to undermine the Empire’s constitution. Speaking in one voice, those gathered in Auhausen condemned their opponents’ “hostile and violent actions” as a threat to the Empire and its members, known as Imperial Estates. If left unchecked, rogue actors would “create one disturbance after another in the beloved Fatherland, thereby wreaking havoc with the entire ancient and praiseworthy imperial constitution. The result will be nothing less than the destruction of all good order, law, and prosperity.” Only by uniting “in a loyal understanding and association” could peace-loving authorities prevent this catastrophe. Accordingly, the Estates assembled in Auhausen formed an alliance, set to last for ten years, which became known as the Protestant Union.

The Introduction describes recent work in the history of emotions and disability theory. Recognising the difficulties of defining early modern people as 'disabled', it argues that in this period, social and biological factors are nonetheless understood as so interwtined that differentiation between 'impairment' and 'disability' is unhelpful. It argues for a phenomenological model informed by the work of Merleau-Ponty, Drew Leder, and others as a productive means to think about early modern experiences of embodiment.

By the early twenty-first century, Western musical notation has developed into an extraordinarily rich and complex piece of visual communication. Modern musicians expend considerable time and energy to create strategies for its more efficient comprehension. Simultaneously, musicians are continuously inventing new symbols and systems of symbols for two very different reasons. Some wish to communicate with ever greater precision the instructions necessary for the reproduction of a musical work. Others are seeking ways of recording in writing musics whose origins are not necessarily rooted in notation. Charles Seeger identified these two streams as, respectively, “prescriptive” and “descriptive” forms of notation.

This introductory chapter provides broad overviews of science, religion, and magic, placing them in historical contexts and establishing some preliminary connections between them. After a brief summary of European society around the year 1400, including the effects of the Black Plague on urbanization and feudalism, the chapter outlines four major themes that run throughout the book: the influence of classical antiquity; the relationship between God and nature; the problem of occult or hidden causes; and the interconnectedness of the premodern world.

Although ‘film’ remains in common usage as a generic term, digital technology has made it inaccurate when applied to work no longer shot, edited or distributed on chemically coated celluloid. The ‘photochemical era’ has ended, and rapid developments in the distribution and consumption of audio-visual products have reduced distinctions between what is viewed in the home and what is seen in public. This Companion takes as its remit feature-length productions, both those commonly perceived as ‘delivering’ the plays, and those that appropriate them as the starting-point for work that makes no such claim. These are all to some degree adaptations, but some are more adapted than others: consequently the first group of chapters focuses on the various ways in which screen versions of Shakespeare’s works have figured in a changing media environment.

The introduction situates the book’s argument within scholarly debates on poetic authority in the late Middle Ages and especially in fourteenth-century Italy. It frames the book’s narrative by inviting readers to think historically about the role of poets and poetry in the public sphere. By understanding in its historical context how poet-scholars first argued for their own relevance centuries ago, we may better conceive new roles for literature in the changing landscape of public discourse. While an etiology of the figure of the public intellectual or an archaeology of the public humanities are goals beyond the scope of this book, its argument supports and contributes to debates on these topics.

Desiring to deepen his understanding of the present world by turning to the past, between 1644 and 1652 the Cambridge student William Bright filled a small book with notes and commonplaces gleaned from political, historical, and religious writings. In 1648 he recorded political and military observations drawn from an anonymous pamphlet by ‘D. P. Gent’, listing five ‘chiefe Causes of the mutations of Monarchies’: ‘Wants of Issue’, ‘Ambition’, ‘Lust’, ‘Effeminacy’, and ‘Taxes’. The original pamphlet, entitled Severall politique and militarie observations (1648), had listed six causes of the mutations of monarchy, with the first being the ‘crying sinnes of a Nation’.1 Bright, however, only copied into his notebook those causes which could be illustrated by historical and contemporary rather than by divine example. Beside each of the causes, he included a short list of such exempla, including Julius Caesar and Richard III for ‘Ambition’; Sextus Tarquin and Appius Claudius for ‘Lust’; and Sardanapalus of Assyria for ‘Effeminacy’.

The title-page framing A Gorgious Gallery, of Gallant Inventions sets in play an architectural metaphor of the book that imagines this poetry anthology as a type of building (Figure 1). It is an apt place to begin, since the title-page’s self-reflexive exposition of the spatiality of the book brings into focus the materiality of literary culture, a field of enquiry that has preoccupied early modern scholarship over past decades and informs this study. If we cast our eyes down the title-page, attention shifts from metaphors describing the book-as-artefact to those accounting for the processes of making. ‘First framed and fashioned in sundrie formes’ by skilled artisans, ‘divers worthy workemen’ over time, this Gorgious Gallery has now been ‘joyned together and builded up’ in the anthology offered to its readers. On display is a language of poetic craft that is thoroughly grounded in the artisanal worlds of the sixteenth century. It is this understanding of craft that directs my account of the poetry anthologies that were made – and remade – in the second half of the sixteenth century in England, a period when the book trade was framing and fashioning an array of textual material in response to diverse and expanding markets for vernacular literature. The word ‘craft’ in the medieval and early modern period was semantically rich, bringing together imaginative, material, and technical processes with crafted objects, human agents, and the trades. All books are crafted, and yet, because poetry anthologies are, by definition, compiled, they necessarily foreground the processes through which they are ‘joyned together and builded up’. Craft is integral to understanding the work of form in printed anthologies. It explains how the gathering, selecting, and conjoining of lyric material was an embodied practice that required manual work, technical skill, and literary judgement. Methods for compiling textual material were, of course, skills taught in Renaissance schoolrooms and underpinned humanist culture, from the assembly of commonplace books to practices of imitation. Printed poetry anthologies provide an opportunity to understand how humanist methods for compiling books were adopted and adapted within the milieu of the printing house.

The first part of the introduction explores how historians and literary scholars have approached early modern memory and sketches the trajectory of recent work on the memory of the English and European Reformations. It then examines the ways in which the religious revolution transformed the memorial culture it inherited from the medieval past and the manner in which it engendered new strategies of remembering and forgetting, commemoration and amnesia. The second section explains the architecture and structure of the volume, which is divided into four parts (1) Events and Temporalities; (2) Objects and Places (3) Lives and Afterlives; (4) Bodies and Rituals. It probes the temporal; spatial and material; biographical; and ceremonial and corporeal dimensions of the memory of the English Reformation, establishing a series of conceptual frameworks for the essays that follow. The Reformation is reconceptualised less as a unitary moment of rupture than as ongoing struggle to reconfigure the nation’s ecclesiastical and cultural heritage and to accommodate the unruly legacy of the past. A prolonged development involving impulses towards both historical preservation and oblivion, it continues to be refought in memory and the imagination.

Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems just as the word ‘emotion’ was emerging into common currency. In its first usages, traceable back to the 1590s, the term referred to the general disturbance suggested by the Latin term emovere (to move out), and Shakespeare and his contemporaries indeed often described as motions the impulses that aroused the mind, body and soul. The introduction to Shakespeare and Emotion explains the rationale for giving serious and sustained attention to the emotions as a way of approaching Shakespeare’s works as art from the past, as well as the place of these works in the present. It offers a brief survey of Shakespeare’s classical and early modern sources for his understanding of affect, and an account of how the present-day surge of interest in emotional experience builds on earlier strands of Shakespearean scholarship from the early to mid-twentieth century. The Introduction concludes with a survey of the volume’s chapters, organised around the assumption that emotion offers a deeply promising (and often challenging) prospect for imagining and enacting change.

If we plot Dutch possessions on a map of the world from 1700, a quick glance would be enough to determine that in global terms the early modern Dutch overseas empire was very much a peripheral phenomenon. The Dutch had founded an immense empire that stretched like a string of pearls along the edges of the continents of Europe, Asia, America and Africa. The actual pearls consisted mostly of trading hubs, which were only partially conquered by the Dutch. Especially along the coasts of the powerful Asian empires such as Iran, India, China and Japan, and on the coast of West Africa, the Dutch had only small trading offices with no territorial rights. The Dutch Empire was therefore primarily a maritime phenomenon, with only a few ‘real’ colonies in the Caribbean, the Cape, on Java, the Moluccas, Ceylon and, for a short time, also in North America, Brazil and Taiwan. The Dutch Republic itself was also a rather marginal, maritime European phenomenon. After a long eighty-year revolt, the Rhine and Maas delta had formally shrugged off the grip of a continental European empire.

This introductory chapter explains the book’s big arguments: how Seneca is an important precursor for aspects of Shakespearean tragic characterization that seem presciently modern and how Shakespeare associates Senecan individualism with the loss of republican identity coordinates. Postromantic criticism has associated Shakespearean characterization with modern freedom, but it is indebted to Senecan tragedy where freedom from social constraint has a very different valence. In Seneca, freedom is associated with the loss of social coordinates and the potential for moral monstrosity, and that is part of what Shakespeare associates with personal freedom as well. This chapter traces the postromantic reception histories of Shakespeare and Seneca and shows that the emergence of an idea of Shakespeare as the poet of modernity has implied a downgrading of Seneca and therefore a willful occlusion of what is interesting about Senecan tragedy. It reviews how a revitalized interest in Senecan characterization supplements recent work on Shakespearean character.

In his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92), a history of writers and bishops educated at the University of Oxford between 1500 and 1690, the antiquary Anthony Wood includes a brief description of the life of the scholar, educational reformer, and sometime Dean of St Paul’s, John Colet. A humanist luminary, Colet was ‘exquisitely Learned’, being (as Wood comments approvingly) ‘no stranger to Plato and Plotinus’, but somewhat indifferent to their scholastic commentators: ‘Schoolmen, he seemed not to delight in.’ Colet was also profoundly pious, taken by later reformers as an early proponent of their cause: the churchman and historian Thomas Fuller calls him ‘a Luther before Luther’. After his death from a sweating sickness in 1519, Colet’s achievements were acknowledged, as Wood reports, by the construction of ‘a comly Monument set over his Grave’ in a wall of St Paul’s, which stood ‘whole and entire till 1666 [and] was then consumed in the dreadful Conflagration that happened in the City of London’. About fourteen years later, the wall that contained Colet’s body was taken down, and his coffin was revealed. Wood describes how, ‘out of curiosity’, the politician Edmund Wyld and the mathematical instrument maker Ralph Greatorex paid the ruins a visit. Encountering Colet’s newly uncovered burial place, Wyld and Greatorex ‘did thrust a probe or little stick into a chink of the Coffin, which bringing out some moisture with it, found it of an ironish tast, and fancied that the body felt soft and pappy like Brawn’.

Whereas John Locke (1632–1704) is best known for his "way of ideas" and political theory, he was also a skilled theologian. His theological concerns, interests, and ideas permeate his philosophical, political, and moral thought. Locke’s oeuvre in its different areas is indeed the production of a Christian philosopher. But Locke’s religious views are significant for yet another reason, in that his theological reflections resulted in a unique version of Christianity. Although Locke expounded his religious views in an unsystematic manner, given also his dislike of systems of doctrine and his hostility to claims of religious orthodoxy, an original and internally coherent form of Protestant Christianity emerges from his public as well as private writings. Locke's version of Christianity denotes various similarities with heterodox theological currents such as Socinianism and Arminianism, which Locke knew well. Nonetheless, Locke adhered to the Protestant doctrine of "sola Scriptura," according to which the Scriptures contain all that is needed for salvation. Thus, he always made sure that his conclusions were consistent with, and indeed grounded in, Scripture.