Pepys kept his diary for more than nine years, covering a variety of topics that is unrivalled among seventeenth-century diarists. This chapter explores why and how he did so, drawing on recent work which has expanded our sense of early modern life-writing. Pepys turned the methods seen in religious diaries and financial recording to his own ends. His diary’s purposes developed to include assessing his social status and his health; storing useful anecdotes; and relishing illicit pleasures. To illustrate Pepys’s techniques his account of Charles II’s coronation is examined, alongside his friend John Evelyn’s account of the same event. Pepys’s diary was a dynamic text: it evolved in response to Pepys’s changing needs and was intended to act upon him, stimulating favourable change in him and for him.

The first chapter sets out the stakes of Auerbach’s understanding of Renaissance art by beginning with “The Philology of World Literature” and ending with Henry James’ sentimental tourist in Venice. To be a sentimental tourist is to live an aesthetic life in history, and this chapter uses this point to sketch out a portrait of Auerbach’s work that emerges from a stress on Renaissance.

The Elizabethan ‘Botanical Renaissance’ was a movement that touched every sphere of life: the domestic and public; the theological, political and aesthetic; the literary and proto-scientific; and the mercantile, maritime and proto-colonialist. It was embraced by members of every social sphere and took place within changing definitions of the urban and the rural, thereby encompassing people who lived in each of these settings and those who – like Shakespeare himself – lived in both. That is a big claim to make for the role of the humble plant in social and literary history, but it is the claim I will be making in this book and other scholars have begun to offer similar observations.

The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

Lord Lieutenant Thomas Wentworth, arriving in Ireland in 1633, unified disparate Ireland into opposition, culminating in his 1641 impeachment, trial, and execution in London. Months later, Ulster and then Ireland more broadly, rose in rebellion. Milton’s first published prose works, including his formative anti-prelatical tracts precede and follow the Ulster Rising. Increasingly Milton addresses Ireland, and the Rising. In James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Milton finds an Irish interlocutor, and foil.

Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.

This section situates the study within the current debates surrounding the issues of commemoration, cultural memory, and identity. It applies the insights offered by memory studies to investigate the political implications of Shakespearean appropriation and legacy. It introduces the key focus of the book: the ways in which memorialising Shakespeare was used to formulate and contest imperial, national, and social identities during the global crisis of the First World War. As diverse groups evoked him to underpin their collective past and common values, Shakespeare provided a starting point for dialogue and a shared ‘language’ in which it could be conducted. This dialogue was not always friendly, as people used Shakespeare not only to highlight their commonalities, but also to insist on their differences. Although imperialist and nationalist agendas often dominated, Shakespeare also provided an outlet for other, usually silenced and forgotten voices, as marginalised racial, ethnic, and social groups adopted him to respond to the prevalent totalising narratives. Examining these exchanges within the framework of memory studies offers a unique view of the intertwining of culture and politics at the time that saw the emergence of the world order which is still with us over a hundred years later.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

This chapter provides a survey of the most common scholarly assumptions about the nature of a history play – that it is tragic, historically accurate, relates to a broader nationalistic agenda and that exclusion of the female is fundamental to the genre – and looks at how reading plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their most prominent female characters troubles these preconceptions. It first explores how the sub-genre of romantic histories challenges the assumption that a history play is concerned with historical accuracy. Reading Shakespeare’s co-authored Edward III as an example of this genre demonstrates its influence on the rest of his canon. It then re-evaluates the stereotype that foreign characters – especially foreign female characters – are always a threat against which the English national identity can be defined by contrast. It takes Margaret of Anjou as a case study in reading female characters not as women but as dramatic devices. The final section looks again to the tone of the plays to unpick how scenes of overwhelming female emotion can be seen as essential features of the history play genre and part of what contributed to the genre’s popularity in the eras when it was most frequently performed.

Why are the nine years of destructive invasion and attempted conquest of Scotland unknown to English literary criticism? This chapter shows why we have forgotten this unusually brutal invasive war of 1542–1550 and why it matters to remember it. It introduces the ‘British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, through which English kings claimed feudal overlordship of Scotland. It shows how Henry VIII deployed Geoffrey’s history in his Declaration of 1542 to justify invasion, but also how Henry’s rhetoric and strategy disavowed any desire to conquer in the pretence that he was reluctantly forced into reminding the Scots of English overlordship. Such rhetoric, subsequently repeated and reprinted, helped both justify English claims and trivialise the war to the point of oblivion in modern English historiography. The chapter reads a neglected Scottish text by William Lamb which, opposing Henry’s claims by appealing to the law of nations, exposes the precarious fictionality of English claims to overlordship and its lack of credibility in a broader European context.

“Negotiating Whiteness” draws on the work of critical race studies scholars and whiteness studies scholars to present my book’s main argument and outline its core theoretical concept: the “intraracial color-line.” Shakespeare’s plays disrupt the common understanding of the Black/white racial binary in ways that have implications for modernity regarding the uncivilized, less-than-ideal white self. In Shakespearean drama, this figure serves two functions: The white other is an embankment that keeps “good” white people in check by demarcating the ever-shifting boundary between what the ideal white self should and should not be or do, by showing the costs of “bad” whiteness; and the white other figure embodies non-somatic blackness, constantly reifying anti-black and anti-Black discourse. By centering critiques of whiteness, I isolate the kinds of intraracial tensions that underscore the instability of racialized whiteness and that emphasize the need for understanding how that instability depends on upholding whiteness as superior.

The popularity of music in Restoration Shakespeare can be explained in part by the hitherto unacknowledged circulation of Shakespeare’s songs in print and manuscript during the Interregnum. It has often been assumed that the closure of the public theatres between 1642 and 1660 and the suppression of polyphonic church music caused seventeenth-century England to lag behind Europe musically. The Interregnum has therefore been side-lined by music and theatre historians in favour of the Restoration and its stimulating theatrical revival. While the cultural restrictions of the Civil War and Commonwealth inevitably impeded new theatrical works, a survey of the literature produced during the Interregnum confirms a continued interest in drama and dramatic song. The songs from Shakespeare’s original plays reached an all-time peak in their appearance in print during the mid-seventeenth century. The Wits, or, Sport upon sport reveals that during the closure of the theatres, excerpts from pre-war plays were performed privately. The diaries of Evelyn and Pepys indicate that recreational and domestic music-making flourished, and the distinction between professional and amateur musicians developed a fluidity that would persist into the Restoration. The irrepressible enthusiasm for dramatic songs fuelled the phenomenon that would come to be known as Restoration Shakespeare.

Outlining the historical scope of the book, this chapter discusses Shakespeare’s and Beckett’s works in periods that were conceived of as inherently transformational. The chapter will address the early links between Shakespeare and Beckett that were established in British theatre history. The second part of this chapter will read the scenes on Dover cliff in Act IV of King Lear as a metaphor for the theatre in which both Beckett and Shakespeare explore the edges of their very medium. This latter part examines Beckett’s ‘variations on rise and fall’ in many of his plays, such as All that Fall, Rough for Theatre and Waiting for Godot – which, in dialogue with King Lear, dramatize the experience of blindness, crawling and falling.

Chapter 1 investigates the English Reformation conversation on contentment, beginning with early sixteenth-century translations of St. Paul’s epistles and Martin Luther’s works and ending with texts from the English Revolution. Renaissance authors did not invent contentedness, but they drew upon available traditions to reinvent a contentment consistent with Protestant ideals and adapted to the needs of English audiences. Chapter 1 charts the role of contentment in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as an archive of sermons and theological treatises. First, it traces the notion of Christian contentment to two passages in 1 Timothy 6 and Philippians 4, which featured heavily in the cultural discourse. Next, it examines how reformers reconcile contentment, suffering, and even martyrdom. Then, it analyzes the relationship between contentment and contemporary theories of embodiment and the passions. Finally, it shows how authors extended individual contentedness to the body politic. During the Renaissance, contentment became a prominent Protestant principle of fortifying self and society.

Chapter 1 turns to Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise De musica to elucidate the theoretical ideas about music and poetry that lie behind Herbert’s musical practices. Herbert is known to have greatly valued Augustine’s works, yet few critics have engaged the implications of Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise on Herbert’s work. For both Augustine and Herbert, music and poetry were arts of ‘moving and measuring well’. Expressive musical and poetic performance was both an aesthetic and an ethical act, with implications for the health of body and soul. For both writers, this metaphysical understanding of the nature of music was derived from practical experiences of music-making. Reading The Temple in light of De musica reframes our understanding of Herbert’s poetry of affliction as a tuning of the individual and provides the reader with an overview of the theological ramifications of music that this book explores.

In his Holy Sonnets, Donne seeks to forget rather than remember his sins, begging God for ‘a heavenly Lethean flood’ to ‘drown’ his ‘sin’s black memory’ and implying that his very salvation may depend upon it: ‘That Thou remember them, some claim as debt; / I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget’. Such a desire for divine oblivion would seem to be the very inverse of the theologian Dr Donne’s well-known assertion that ‘the art of salvation is but the art of memory’, yet, this chapter argues, they are intimately joined in the Holy Sonnets. This chapter explores how the speaker’s uncertainty about his salvation connects the ‘art of death’ (ars moriendi) with the ‘art of memory’ (ars memorativa) as a mnemonic poetics of ruin and recollection. The transformation of the art of memory into an art of salvation in Augustine’s Confessions is central not only to Donne’s reputation as a ‘second St Augustine’ but also to the poetics of memory that shape the Holy Sonnets. Donne constructs the Holy Sonnets as a memory theatre in which to enact the drama of salvation by performing the role of Doctor Faustus, a part drawn from both Augustine’s Confessions and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

James Baldwin’s account of “looking away” in “Nobody Knows My Name,” points to the prevailing habit of ignoring the history and facts of blackness that continues to be replicated in American culture. “Looking away” is, however, only partial since it simultaneously demands and denies black existence, a paradoxical strategy designed to facilitate the work of whiteness and the cultural formation it engenders. One can be resistant to the facts of race while being preoccupied with the idea of race as advanced within a critique of modernity. This chapter argues that these complex and pervasive strategies inform a mental practice, a white epistemology that is the product of historical formation, from which the reader and reading are not immune. By contrast, the chapter’s review of early modern and current theories of reading indicates the continuing trend of racial avoidance. Building on Michel de Certeau’s class-inflected analysis that “the text has a meaning only through its readers,” this chapter argues, however, that whiteness exercises an elite racial function in reading that, following Charles W. Mills’ critique, produces distortion and misinterpretation.

The Introduction sets out the aims and objectives of the study. The death arts, the Introduction proposes, possess the vigour and energy that built up the early modern world and injected animation into everyday existence. The chosen phrase, the ‘death arts’, while encompassing a plurality and heterogeneity of disciplines, activities, and techniques dedicated to mortality, foregrounds their artifice, thereby permitting us to conceive of the distinctive features and constructedness of Renaissance artifacts, whether textual, cognitive, or visual. Divided into the three subsections, the Introduction first outlines the legacy of the death arts in early modern English culture. Next we describe how the death arts are represented, focusing specifically on issues of gender, sexuality, and race. The introduction closes with a helpful guide for how to use the anthology.

Comparing Milton's tract Of Education with the Ludlow Masque, this chapter studies the schoolboys of the masque and how their education into manhood is developed in these works. Comparing the masque to Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, the chapter shows how young men school themselves into heteronormative power. In the cultural contexts of humanist pedagogy, with its ambivalent views of both peer review and maternal tutors, Milton's Comus, Lady, Sabrina, Thyrsis, and brothers reenact a graduation into masculinity that depends upon the lost mother and the silenced woman.