This chapter begins with an introduction to the letters and commonplace book of the Parliamentarian Puritan Brilliana (1598-1643), Lady Harley, whose works display a preoccupation with preserving her own spiritual and physical health, and also that of her family (particularly her husband and son). Harley was a relation of the poet Fulke Greville, a friend of Sir Philip Sidney. A short edited extract from Harley's commonplace book is included where she paraphrases William Perkins's The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606) as ‘how the body troubles the mind’. Following this are transcribed a number of Harley's letters where she describes her illnesses, which including suffering from a miscarriage, and advises her family on their health, and writes about the gifts she sent with the letters.

This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially on literature as cultural memory. The chapter traces the central position of orphans in nineteenth-century American literary history as it has been constructed in the twentieth century; orphans have played major roles in a dominant white male tradition in criticism, but also in gendered and ethnic challenges to that tradition. Previous critical discussions of orphans typically focus on children’s literature, or on nineteenth-century literature, but nevertheless offer useful insights into the historically shifting roles and cultural work of orphan characters, linked to social and political developments in the US. The chapter also addresses ideas of the orphan, childhood, and family, and how these ideas operate in social and academic debates over multiculturalism, the US canon, and national belonging.

Each item in the manuscript in turn is identified by folio number (r or v), and then either transcribed in full (English verse and private letters, including translations of the Symmachus letters) or by an incipit (all other items, including foreign-language ones). Other information about the item, including scribal hand, authorship, addressee (for letters), and date is also provided. Blank pages are so identified, and discrepancies or errors in assembly or binding noted. Conjectural transcriptions or attributions are so identified. If there is a commentary on the item, a note is given of where in chapters 9 and 10 it may be found.

This chapter examines sermon uses of the image of the sea and the ship to demonstrate that the ocean, for Elizabethans, represented not only a realm of magic and fertility but also the spiritual dangers of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Sermons by Stephen Gosson, Richard Madox, Robert Wilkinson (among others) as well as Geneva Bible illustrations and glosses, provide parallels for Britomart’s lament at III.iv and a key to the moral meaning of the various settings of Florimell’s adventures: her near-rape by the fisherman, imprisonment by Proteus at III.viii-ix, and rescue by Cymoent in IV.xii. The sea setting sharpens the point of narrative references to divine intervention, and the sermons show how these episodes’ sea settings make sense for Spenser’s dramatizing the incompleteness of the single life that propels men and women toward their destiny of married love.

Elizabethan preachers and homilists embraced providentialism, looking to history, both biblical and secular, to read universal moral principles and God’s eternal purposes in their contemporary scene. According to John Aylmer, Esther was a type of Anne Boleyn while Mordechai figured Archbishop Cranmer; Richard Curteys saw Athaliah as a type of Mary Tudor, and David foreshadowed Elizabeth. According to William Barlow, the Roman Coriolanus typified the Earl of Essex, while the earl perversely saw himself as David and Elizabeth as Saul—an identification Barlow took seriously enough to refute at some length. Thomas Holland, preaching on Accession Day, recounted the positive attributes and godly behaviour of the Queen of Sheba without explicitly identifying her with Elizabeth, demonstrating how adept sermon-goers were expected to be at the kind of allegorical reading The Faerie Queene demands.

This chapter marks an anthology of primary material relating to one of the turbulent period of British history, the Stuart succession 1603. When Queen Elizabeth I died, on 24 March 1603, the line of succession was by no means settled. Like her, he was a direct descendant of Henry VII of England, and had been installed himself as King of Scotland since his infancy. Many English writers paused to elegize Elizabeth, who was the only monarch many of her subjects had ever known and had established a state of peace in the nation, with some exceptions, for several decades. The ceremonies in London to mark James's accession were cut short on account of a summer outbreak of plague. Some of his policies, such as his dream of uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland, would prove impossible to implement, and would undermine his reputation in years to come.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the period when the Stuarts ruled in England, Scotland and Ireland, subsequent to the arrival in London of James VI of Scotland in 1603 after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. The passage of power through the generations of Stuarts was more complicated than it may appear from a position of historical distance. Throughout the Stuart dynasty, the different structures and interests of each nation placed competing demands on the Stuart monarchs. While there was a considerable degree of continuity in succession literature across the Stuart era, some of the identifiable changes reflect in valuable ways upon wider political and cultural shifts. In the cultural life of their nations, the Stuarts played leading roles throughout the period. The court was arguably the most important centre for cultural and artistic production.

Sermon references to courtiers and court inveigh against ambition, luxury, pleasure-seeking, flattery, and intrigue while commending biblical courtiers like Joseph, Moses, David, and Nehemiah for their godliness and service to common people. Elizabethan courtesy, a Christian virtue reflecting the character of God, is properly manifested in court as well as contryside: by noblemen to those in distress and to commoners like shepherds, and conversely by hospitable householders like Abraham and Lot to their angel visitors, or Caelia to Redcrosse and Melibœ to Calidore. Its opposite is malicious slander like that personified in the Blatant Beast. Sermon references to court and courtesy show that Spenser’s treatment of these topoi, far from being subversive or jaded, is very conventional. Spenser’s Calidore had important biblical role models, particularly in Nehemiah and Moses.

When the Convention Parliament voted on 1 May 1660 to recall Charles Stuart to the throne, nearly nine years after he fled into exile following defeat at the Battle of Worcester, the news was widely celebrated. Drawn up by Charles along with several of his advisors, the Declaration of Breda laid the groundwork for the monarchy's restoration in England. During the 1650s, John Milton composed some of the most strident defences of the execution of Charles I and of republican forms of government. The diary of Samuel Pepys is one of the most important records of English society in the years following the Restoration, and Pepys himself was closely involved in the events surrounding Charles's return. Awarded with the posts of Poet Laureate in 1668 and Historiographer Royal in 1671, John Dryden was one of the foremost defenders of the restored Stuart monarchy.

It is quite unusual to find in print discussions of whole poems rather than parts of poems. This is perhaps the inevitable result of the continuing influence of the notion of close reading, in spite of lengthy periods in which the study of literature was dominated by literary theory and various kinds of historicism. The suggested reading and study process is in four stages: the first and third involve what we call the 'distant reading' of aspects of the whole poem, while the second and fourth concern the 'close reading' of parts of it. So the four stages alternate between distant and close reading, and the process as a whole can be represented in semi-diagrammatic form as follows: think about the flow, think about a point within the flow, think about the flow again, and think about a point within the flow again.

This chapter is devoted to the highly flexible and successful verse form. In its origins, the ode is much more ancient than any other form of verse, since it has a double ancestry which goes back to classical Greece and Rome. The Greek model is called the Pindaric ode, because it was perfected by the lyric poet Pindar, who lived from around 518 to around 438 BC. The other model is the Horatian ode, which is based on the forms used by the Roman poet Horace. The best-known example of the Horatian form of ode is Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland', which Blair Worden describes as 'the most private of political poems'. The 'irregular' ode form, which became prominent in the nineteenth century, seems to take elements from both the Pindaric and the Horatian forms.

Most of the Wotton-Donne correspondence seems to come from 1598-1601, when both were employed as secretaries, Wotton to the Earl of Essex and Donne to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper. It is curious that none of the letters is in the hand of the originator: most are in that of the scribe D1, and the rest in William Parkhurst’s. An explanation is offered for the several peculiarities of the letters’ inclusion in the Burley manuscript: their existence at all, their being in the hands of other people than their originators, the lack of any established connection between Parkhurst and Wotton at the time of the letters, and the archiving of them, apparently by Parkhurst. D1 and Parkhurst were engaged in the systematic interception of correspondence, presumably on behalf of the authorities who – then as now – were interested in covert surveillance of the traffic between sources of potential disaffection. Wotton and Donne fit this description, the one an adherent of the volatile and dangerous Earl of Essex and the other a known Catholic sympathiser.