Milton as a republican viewed the restoration of kingship in 1660 with dread. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, like the last two books of Paradise Lost, have a specific Restoration historical context, at a time of persecution of former commonwealthsmen and religious Dissenters. In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s protagonist struggles against despair, the feeling that he has been abandoned by God, while recognizing his own responsibility for the humiliating slavery into which he has been plunged. Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, published in a single volume in 1671, in their different ways both concern themselves with the problems and temptations facing those who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society. The two works explore alternative paths for ‘the spirits of just men long opprest’: in the one case, patience, suffering, bearing ‘tribulations, injuries, insults’ courageously, not expecting redress, and in the other, violent resistance, the slaughter of one’s enemies, in an ending of Milton’s tragedy which has often puzzled and disturbed readers.

The real-life political counterparts of the imperial romance were Britain's experiments with indirect rule from Fiji and Zululand in the 1880s to Nigeria and Tanganyika in the early twentieth century. Taking a wider view, Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka came to see the Edwardian romancers as intellectually linked to Renaissance authors such as Hakluyt and to the ancient Greek traveller Herodotus. Contemporary American composer John Williams has shown his ability to whip off an imperial march fit to stand alongside the best of them, but without serious political ideological purpose. Though the work of the imperial romancers has not lost its power to move and charm, the particular confluence of politics, science and aesthetics that brought it into being is gone, never to return.

Corroborative evidence supports the likelihood that the frontage as sketched by Vertue represents Shakespeare's own home-improvement. The appearance of the external architectural features is thought to be similar to those of New Place. Vertue's sketch portrays a three-storey, half-timbered, square-panel-framed building. Shakespeare's gentlemanly status would have been conspicuously displayed on the remodelled frontage. Shakespeare's treatment of the hall remains uncertain. It remained, however, firmly at the heart of the house complex. The archaeological evidence suggests that part-way down the southern range on the courtyard side, there was a change in room width. After comprehensive archival research and archaeological interpretation, new artistic representations of New Place during Shakespeare's ownership have been created by Phillip Watson. The reconstructions encompass the complete refurbishment of the frontage range, including the long-gallery storey with gabled dormers, and present the Chapel Lane service and rear entrances, projecting and Elizabethan-style windows, and decorative timberwork.

This chapter examines the theme of disruption and continuity in English religious life at the Restoration with reference to the differing fortunes of those twin pillars of the Anglican establishment, the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. The AV had commanded broad acceptance under the Commonwealth and its re-authorization in 1660 was unproblematic. The BCP, by contrast, had long been reviled by hotter Protestants for its conservatism, especially in Archbishop William Laud’s 1637 version which had helped trigger civil war. Its re-introduction in 1662 occasioned the resignation of one-fifth of the clergy. This chapter challenges the characterization of the 1662 Prayer Book (in contrast with the AV) as solely divisive, however. It argues that universal acceptance of the book was impossible under the circumstances but that, by rejecting the most offensive Laudian innovations, Convocation successfully minimized the inevitable backlash and avoided any larger-scale secession or civil unrest.

This essay tracks the shift from Republic to Restoration through two play pamphlets, The Famous Tragedie (1649) and Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660). As short plays retelling current events, these play pamphlets are like brief history plays that document the Stuart reign in an era of crisis. Moreover, these playbooks include typographically distinct couplets that encapsulate parliamentarian and royalist positions on history and governance. In particular, the royalist couplets in The Famous Tragedie mourn Charles I and gesture to future readers. These couplets are also marked as commonplaces, or sententious material intended for later use in other contexts. This chapter argues that these plays use couplets and commonplaces to create a royalist political history of the mid-seventeenth century.

In Mary McAleese's tribute to John McGahern at the time of his passing in March 2006, she said that he had made an enormous contribution to our self-understanding as a people. This chapter argues that McGahern's writing specifically engages us in the ethical implications of the political self-understanding and self-awareness. It focuses on McGahern's last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun. The chapter also focuses on the 'new' modern-day republican activist, represented by the character of Jimmy Joe McKiernan, McGahern thereby placing into question Irish nationalism's negative legacy of sectarian violence and terrorism. McGahern never made any secret of his profound scepticism concerning 1916 and the general legacy of the Irish War of Independence, with its ideology of freedom and change. McGahern's writing equally reflects a legacy of deception and failure where freedom and change can belong only to the realms of memory and dream.

The striking cover on the Faber hardback of Amongst Women is an unequivocal image of republicanism: a worn Irish tricolour. The flag features at the end of the book, and the opening pages are also suffused with revolutionary politics. John McGahern delineates the annual meeting between Moran and his old comrade from the campaign for independence, McQuaid. The conventional image of the Irish revolution is preserved in Sean Keating's paintings from the 1920s on, where Soviet realism meets Gaelic idealisation: peasants with rifles. This suggests the world expansively recalled by McQuaid on Monaghan Day. The Treaty and Civil War lie, often unspoken of, behind the contested memory of the revolution. Denis Sampson's work has shown how deeply Proust affected McGahern's creative development, and the complexities of personal and family relationships are played and re-played through McGahern's work.

The (‘bed-trick’) was a pervasive plot device in prose fiction and other forms of Renaissance literature but appeared late as a device in English drama. The arrival and proliferation of the bed-trick can be connected to the emergence of capitalism as a system founded on a basic structure of deception by means of substitution in an increasingly aggressive commodity exchange market. This chapter discusses those plays in which the substituted lover is a Moor. In each of these plays with a Moorish woman substitute, we encounter the Moor as placeholder, a degraded substitute and commodity, the monstrous and demonized version of what women had become in bourgeois marriage. By looking at erotic trickery, at dangerous or dubious economic transactions, and religious or racial instability in Elizabethan and Early Stuart plays, we can begin to glimpse a broad pattern, one in which the fundamental anxieties and instabilities produced by new economic practices in early modern England were projected into stage actions involving rape, theft, swindles and racial or religious infidelity.

This chapter looks at some prehistorical and historical examples of individual stone poems, and examples of stone poems grouped together in landscaped settings. It explores aspects of 'landmark' urban stone poems of Postcolonial Manchester. Alyson Hallett's pavement poem, with its 'outlying' word clusters, in Milsom Street, Bath, is public-art, Council-sponsored urban example. Stone poems have often been placed in groups or clusters within landscaped settings and forming a 'walk' or 'trail'. The chapter presents some examples of stone poems in settings which might not be considered places of outstanding beauty. The first is the monument in Dunraven Street, Tonypandy, in the Welsh Valleys, which commemorates the town's mining past. Sculpted by Howard Bowcott, working in collaboration with Tim Rose of the Bath-based landscape architecture firm Macgregor Smith and Rhondda Cynon Taf Council, it was unveiled in 1999.

The luxury of the court of Charles II is well-known and usually seen as reflecting the personal failings of the king or as a reaction to the Puritanism of the preceding regime. This chapter argues, rather, that Charles II adopted luxury as a mode of power modelled on his cousin, the powerful French king, Louis XIV. Portraiture of the French and English courts shows striking and largely unexplored links as, under the influence of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth and reigning mistress in the English court in the 1670s, French painter Henri Gascar executed portraits of Charles II, Portsmouth, and others closely drawn from compositions in the court of Louis XIV. Although court portraiture thus changed within England (showing links, rather, with continental models), a different kind of continuity can be seen when objections to luxury mark observers of the Restoration court, from former republicans to royalists.

This chapter analyses early-modern English women writers and the number and patterns of their publication of religious and secular texts between 1640 and 1680. The chapter’s focus is on the impact of the English Civil War and Cromwellian Republic on women’s political thought, particularly their ideas about temporal monarchy and the highest magistrate, or God. The women writers featured include the puritan and parliamentarian writers Eleanor Davies, Mary Pope, Katherine Chidley and Mary Cary, and the Catholic, Anglican and royalist writers Helen More, Elizabeth Major, Dorothy Pakington and Rachel Jevon. Quakers examined include Margaret Fell, Dorothy Burch and Priscilla Cotton. Margaret Cavendish’s work is classified as uniquely secular at a time when women’s political thinking was almost entirely shaped by religion.

In this chapter, the author remembers the Galway of 1979, when she, a poet-in-making, was a chosen participant at the National Writers' Workshop, conducted by John McGahern. McGahern had lined up a number of distinguished visitors to the workshop. The author recalls McGahern's strong voice, his views on the practice of writing and the accompanying isolation, his sound advice, his fondness of apparently random connections and synchronicities. Finally, in a short, 'parting' piece, Melvyn Bragg brings us back to 1966, when he sought McGahern out for a BBC television interview. A friendship was formed and Bragg leaves us with vivid pictures of days and nights in London and Dublin of the 1960s, of McGahern the great conversationalist in the London pubs, the knowledgeable guide in the labyrinth of Dublin streets, a vigorous McGahern, fierce yet generous, greatly talented yet appreciative and encouraging.