This chapter shows how Penelope and Arachne resisted a limiting mythographical moralisation through a successful association of gender, political agency and intellectual observation on the stage. It focuses on the re-emergence of the weavers' political function and work in Jacobean drama. The study of Penelope and Arachne necessitates avoiding the trap of seeing early modern imitation as a purely dialectical destruction of antique exempla. Early modern critique is directed at the moralisation of the myths and not at the myths themselves. Hence, the chapter offers a heuristic approach, looking beneath the mythographical cloth of a silent exemplarity so as to retrieve the political 'voice of the shuttle'. It also shows how theatre enables the mythical weavers to retrieve their agency thanks to female characterisation. The chapter further projects the concept of a 'balancing act' out of the strictly domestic sphere by confronting Penelope with her 'bolder face', Arachne.

This chapter argues that Andromache and her suppliant rhetoric stand at the heart of a wider Trojan presence in a play that Francis Meres described as a tragedy in 1598. King John is 'tragical- historical- mythological', a genre overlooked by Polonius. The chapter explains the Trojan matter of the play, which powerfully structures and textures the scenes of the siege of Angiers and, more specifically, the tragic fates of Constance and Arthur. Trojan motifs weave their way through Arthurian and other monarchical romances without much explicit acknowledgement. In King John, such processes include the Hercules/ Richard analogies and are evident in the ways Shakespeare revisits the historical material he found in sources such as Holinshed's Chronicles, and scenographic considerations. As in Heywood's play, the verbal and physical sense of towering verticality is a key to the dramatic tension of a number of scenes in King John.

The complex mixtures of myths, legends and biblical elements helped rival chroniclers to fashion tales of origins that Shakespeare would revisit, exploring alternatives of cultural and family hybridity. French and English medieval monarchs were one large family, divided by common sources, territories and ancestors. Chroniclers and poets supported their respective claims with millenarian or messianic themes, mythological epics and popular legends, often using the same ones. Gautier (Walter) Map for the Plantagenets, the monk Hélinand de Froidmont for the Capetians, tell the story of the Mesnie Hellequin, an incarnation of the Celtic god Herne from whom the kings of France and England inherited their power to heal scrofula. British history since time immemorial was one of repeated conquests and usurpations. Pressed to justify frequent dynastic changes, English chroniclers often urged their kings to emulate the French monarchs, St Louis or Charles V the Wise.

Turning his gaze far upstream, away from the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, Roland Barthes might have taken as archetypal of such feuilletage, or multi-layering, the intertextual practices of classical antiquity. Trans-generic textual transfers not only favour an exploration of gender assumptions, they trigger off a wider process that approaches categories through their permeability. As it plunges its roots into the multi-layered, contrasted textual system of antiquity, Shakespeare's text develops its own all-inclusive, non-discriminatory vision. Based on textual dialogues, it calls for new types of dialogue. The forms of integration that it operates, beyond temporal and cultural differences, favour hybridisation, variegation and contamination in open configurations that emphasise the fluidity of frontiers, whether textual or cultural - so that it might be at least partly thanks to its multi-textuality, itself based on trans-textuality, that Shakespeare's text has become and remains essentially multi-cultural.

Andrea Brady analyses the complex implications of the return of supernatural phenomena in mid-seventeenth century pamphlet accounts of ghostly hauntings (about ‘real sightings as well as rhetorical ghosts in political satire’) against a growing ‘widespread scepticism’. She traces this return not only to the persistence of folk tradition but also to a conscious attempt by the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Joseph Glanville to restore a ‘consensus which was eroding – in divine retribution, in immortal soul, in providence of history, in vision as access to truth’. The defence of ghostly apparitions is identified by Brady as a ‘conservative’ project to ward off ‘the threat [they believed] scepticism posed to church and state’.

The arrival of the spy genre on British television came initially in the form of a cycle of adventure series focused loosely on themes of international intrigue which occupied a prominent place in the schedules of the 1960s. For the most part, this strand was overwhelmingly associated with the commercial ITV as product of its popular appeal to the growing working-class viewership and embrace of a mass public beyond that of the more paternalistic BBC. This chapter traces how the two areas later converged into the cynical, anti-heroic spy series Callan (ITV, 1967-72). This reworked the existential spy thriller tradition associated with novelists such as John le Carre and Len Deighton into an ongoing television format, adopting their tone of institutional alienation and moral ambiguity in the face of the Cold War. Production of a single episode of Callan typically lasted for a period of ten working days.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a history of the spy genre in British television drama, alongside its cousin the conspiracy genre which also often focuses upon the world of intelligence but typically from an external and more critical perspective. It also provides a full diachronic account of the spy and conspiracy genres across British television from the 1960s to the 2000s. The book explores the long-term evolution of a genre, it mirrors analyses of the evolution of the spy novel by writers such as Denning, John G. Cawelti, Bruce A. Rosenberg and Allan Hepburn, as well as studies of the development of the James Bond phenomenon across different media by scholars such as James Chapman, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott. It is also designed to complement more general diachronic histories of British television drama.

Beate Neumeier focuses on ghostly apparitions and monstrous creatures like witches and devil-dogs in Renaissance plays from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale to Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s Changeling, and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton. Drawing on Todorov’s concept of the fantastic and Kristeva’s notion of the abject, she focuses on the nexus between cognitive and affective uncertainties in conjunction with a historical analysis of the impact of notions of vision, death and desire for the negotiation of early modern boundaries between spirit and matter, the human and the non-human and its gendered implications in connection to the emergence of tragicomedy as a hybrid genre.