In this chapter, one of the Holy Sonnets, ‘Oh my black Soule’, is analysed in detail against the background of its dramatic elements. These mainly consist in allusions and references to medieval morality plays such as Everyman, allegory and personification. Allegorical elements relate to colour symbolism and the change of colours that occurs in the sestet. The latter have sources in medieval drama as much as in the Bible. The pun in the final couplet on ‘dy(e)ing’ shows links to Prudentius’ Peristephanon Liber as much as to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; it refers to both the death of Christ that saves humankind and to the physicality and personification of the soul: death can be overcome in spite of sin, and the speaker is reassured of his redemption.

William Shakespeare structured his histories around the thought of the outside as a consummation devoutly wished, the escape from the 'water wallèd bulwark' of Dover cliffs. In 1599 the Lancashire poet John Weever praised Shakespeare as creator of characters like Richard III in a book of Epigrams. What is certain is that Richard III is constructed around a series of tributes to the Stanleys that exaggerates their importance in the invasion of 1485 which brought the Tudors to power. The battle of Bosworth takes place, in Shakespeare's rewriting, on All Souls' Day and it could be that Richard III was written for performance in 1593 on that day of the dead. By making Henry VII's first thought as king concern for the boy who was known as Lord Strange, Shakespeare concluded Richard III with a question that would have had sinister implications for Strange's actors and their audience.

This chapter is the first in the final section of The Existential Drinker, and notes that while the novel has many features of an Existential-drinker text, it is also beginning to look to other ways of representing characters who commit to drinking. Although the novel is set in Depression-era America its portrayal of down-and-outs in Albany is implicitly a counterblast to the greed of the 1980s. It has identifiable Existential elements, but these compete with other responses to the puzzle of existence, including a kind of spiritual comportment to the world which overlaps with some of the religious (Catholic) aspects of the book, and an occasional deterministic outlook. As well as the central character, Francis Phelan, the chapter also gives due consideration to his sometime girlfriend Helen, who lives in an arguably more wholehearted Existential manner than Francis.

This chapter explores lesbian Canadian language poet Erín Moure’s collection of poetry, O Cidadán. A challenging text, the collection offers a critique of established ideas of citizenship and formulates an alternative narrative of citizenship and community building, with Moure’s figure of the cidadán at its core. Embedded within Moure’s narrative are specific writing and reading practices that challenge the reader to act on the text, constituting the reader as a civic subject within this alternative narrative.

The rape affects the soul of Tarquin and the body of Lucrece, and their antagonistic relationship that has been established throughout comes to its climax. Shakespeare expresses this relationship linguistically through parallelism and chiasmus which lends the epyllion iconic and performative qualities through the dynamics based on these formal structures. The opposition between the characters forms a unity. The action taking place between Tarquin and Lucrece becomes a reversed (and even perverted) love tragedy: lust encounters chastity and destroys it. At the same time, Tarquin’s evil action leads to political change and the institution of the Roman Republic. The underlying allegory connects poetry and drama with narrative as well as inner debates and the soliloquy in this drama of the soul.