Despite experiments in the 1650s, through-sung opera failed to gain a firm foothold in Restoration England. Explanations for this circumstance have focussed on English taste, the finances of London’s theatre companies, and the popularity of native ‘dramatick opera’. While these were obstacles to the progress of through-sung opera in England, they do not explain why Thomas Betterton and the United Company ventured a rumoured £4000 on the production of Dryden’s and Grabu’s Albion and Albanius (1685). The lack of royal patronage has been overlooked as a barrier to the development of opera in England. Charles II displayed an ambivalent attitude to through-sung opera (English or otherwise) throughout his reign. His reticence to provide direct financial support was the most significant factor in the failure of the art form to find an important place in English culture of the Restoration period.

This chapter focuses on the thematic use of death in a particular strand of environmental crisis fiction. This fiction seems to enter into a dialogue with ecocritics in today's post-theory era. If apocalypse is a feature of some environmental crisis fiction, the thematic use of death also infiltrates the narratives of this fiction where the apocalyptic trope is entirely absent, as well as performing alternative roles within an apocalyptic frame. Novels such as the three books of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods and various others, each exploring a notion of death-facing as an ecological imperative. Taking death-denial as the root cause of environmental crisis, they consider a conscious turning towards death, depicted as the recognition and acceptance of humanity's mortal status.

Although the monastic principle of poverty had, for centuries, been intended to guide the architectural development of monasteries and convents, the 1260 Franciscan General Chapter of Narbonne took the radical step of recommending that communities of friars adapt existing buildings rather than build complexes ex novo. This chapter examines the adaptive and accretive practice of converting buildings of various functions to accommodate communities of women religious in Renaissance Venice. Convent archives, site and urban plans, building chronologies, patron family histories, civic building statutes all offer evidence for the patchwork and partial conversions of buildings designed to convert. Comparisons with complexes for male monastics inform this study of how patterns of patronage and urban development inflected the ways in which convent architecture publicly redefined and re-presented the identity of the communities it enclosed.

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however much it may have owed to hatred of the Puritan Republic or to contingencies of events or to the political dexterity of leading actors, could not have been achieved peaceably without roots in public opinion and without the movement which gave voice to it: the campaign for a free parliament that swept through the nation in 1659-60. The movement produced the destruction of the Rump and the calling of the Convention, the assembly which recalled the king. It supplied a mechanism to overcome the otherwise insuperable animosity between the two leading parties opposed to the Republic, the royalists and the presbyterians. And it drew on impassioned sentiments about parliamentary liberties and electoral rights which had previously been used to anti-monarchical ends, but which in 1660 gave the return of the monarchy the authority of national sentiment.

In this chapter, the author provides an account of a walking and camping tour of Iceland in the company of co-artists Julie Livsey and Lesley Hicks. He investigates contemporary interdisciplinary practice and ways in which artists work with delineations of 'nature in Iceland' in the face of serious environmental concerns. The author includes a discussion of writer Halldór Laxness, film maker Benedikt Erlingsson and artist Louisa Matthíasdóttir. Iceland's Nobel Prize-winning, and, arguably, national-identity-forming, work of literature, Independent People by Halldór Laxness contains several spectacularly perilous journeys, starting with one in which the central character Bjartur makes a very big mistake that will inform everything that subsequently happens. Ólafur Elíasson's exhibition Bílar í Ám / Cars in Rivers is a contemporary iteration of the perilous journey.

Born a subject of the Russian czar, educated as a Polish patriot, steeped in French literature, Joseph Conrad is a long stretch from every stereotype of Englishness. Conventional opinion opposes Rudyard Kipling the imperialist to Conrad the anti-imperialist. Many of the troubled souls who crop up in Conrad's fiction are identified as 'sons of arch-priests' or parsons: the half-mad 'Harlequin' in Heart of Darkness; Captain Leggatt in 'The Secret Sharer'; Razamov in Under Western Eyes; Jim in Lord Jim. In Conrad's novel The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' Thomas Carlyle's essay goes to sea. Although Conrad steers his novel well away from exotic coasts he freights it to the gunwales with imperial meaning.

This chapter argues that Shakespearian biography in relation to New Place needs thorough revision and a greater level of nuance in order to increase understanding of Shakespeare's relationship to Stratford-upon-Avon. Nicholas Rowe was the first to present Stratford-upon-Avon and New Place as Shakespeare's retirement home. The major Shakespeare biographies into the twenty-first century bear witness to the still-popular trope of Shakespeare's retirement. Anne Shakespeare, and her lucrative, working-day world as manager of New Place, are an important part of Shakespearian biography. Shakespeare's brother Gilbert provided crucial assistance with Shakespeare's business affairs, and represented his older brother in his purchase of 107 acres of arable land from the Combes in May 1602. William's brother Edmund, sixteen years his junior, most certainly had ties with London. Shakespeare wrote at different speeds throughout his career, and some plays seem more polished than others.

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.

For musicology, the genre or idea of the symphony is laden with prestige; for ecocriticism, the pastoral has similar stature and is a genre or mode central to the discipline. In the concise juxtaposition of these two terms, this chapter illustrates ecomusicology, which connects ecocritical and musicological scholarship, and further outlines a brief critical history of selected symphonies in relation to the pastoral. It argues that symphonies can relate ideas about nature. In Hector Berlioz's Fantastic, the simple pastoral takes a pessimistic and grotesque turn towards Leo Marx's 'imaginative and complex' pastoral. In contrast to Berlioz's Fantastic, Johannes Brahms treats the subject of love more kindly in his First Symphony. The chapter focuses on two works regarding the pastoral: Justin Heinrich Knecht's Le Portrait Musical de la Nature and Ludwig van Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which he titled Sinfonia Pastorella.

John McGahern's writings and stories, the characters and events he describes, provide us with clues about cultural changes in Irish society. These writings and stories can be seen as cultural data that can be interpreted and analysed using a variety of theories and concepts. In this chapter, the author develops a more sociological reading of some of McGahern's writings on sex and love. From The Pornographer, The Leavetaking, Memoir and some of McGahern's short stories, we get insights into sexual innocence, ignorance, frustration and abuse, particularly in the country. The Pornographer, The Leavetaking and some of his short stories provide key insights into the shift from rural to urban society and the decline in the importance of the Catholic Church in everyday life. It is possible to think of McGahern as one of the major chroniclers of cultural change in twentieth-century Ireland.

Stratford-upon-Avon helped to form William Shakespeare. From 1564 to 1596, Shakespeare was identified primarily with one house: his parents' home, a substantial family dwelling on Henley Street. The house on Henley Street was Shakespeare's portal on to the town and into the wider world of the imagination. Commerce and traffic to the town increased significantly from 1492 once Hugh Clopton had built the bridge across the Avon. For Shakespeare, the place of education was thus closely related to the costumed activities of civic authority and theatrical productions. John Shakespeare removed his eldest son from the school to learn the family trade of glove-making. He married Anne Hathaway of Shottery in November 1582. In the same year that Shakespeare married, Alexander Aspinall was appointed as the schoolmaster and continued teaching until his death. From Shakespeare's childhood until into his thirties, Stratford-upon-Avon continued to host theatrical performances.

This chapter presents an overview of the site since the removal of the 1702 house. It focuses upon the archaeological projects that have taken place during the last 150 years namely that of Halliwell-Phillipps and Dig for Shakespeare. Francis Gastrell removed Sir John Clopton's New Place in its entirety down to its foundations, with much of the rubble being used to fill the cellar and level the site. In 1836 New Place and John Nash's House were purchased by David Rice, who retained ownership for twenty-six years before he sold New Place to James Halliwell-Phillipps. Halliwell-Phillipps was an antiquary, a literary scholar and a principal friend of the William Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. His aims for the excavations were similar to those of Dig for Shakespeare: to identify the remains of New Place and recover artefacts that may have belonged to Shakespeare himself.