During the early eighteenth century secret history was a broad category into which many texts, only some of them formally titled as 'secret memoirs' or 'secret histories', could fit. Self-consciously 'historical' secret histories reflected on their own status as illegitimate accounts of the past, questioning the conventional dramatization of history as a narrative of male heroic action. In the preface to his Secret History of One Year, Daniel Defoe opposed his own insider account to 'the many Histories of the Revolution' written by those 'not having Opportunity to see what was done within Doors'.

This chapter discusses the works of several historians who wrote on social history. W. H. Auden wrote serious historians care about coins and weapons. Arnold Toynbee described his own formation as a historian in a turn-of-the century, upper-class English childhood. Most mid-century commentators on the genesis of social history indicated the importance of G. H. Trevelyan's English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries: Chaucer to Queen Victoria. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is the marker of social history's birth for many of these commentators. In the late twentieth-century West, the practice of social history was accompanied by the social historian's guilt and anguish at rescuing those who do not want to be rescued from the vast condescension of posterity.

For most early modern scholars, the chronicle was a primitive form: it provided an artless, eclectic 'history of the times', its diverse contents organized on the basis of simple chronology. By exposing the vast and complicated social network behind history's seemingly automonous heroes, texts like Delarivier Manley's were able to question the political views and social hierarchies that underpinned neoclassical history's smooth narratives of masculine achievement. From its first appearance in booksellers' shops in 1709, Manley's Secret Memoirs and Manners sparked controversy, and Manley herself was subsequently sued, unsuccessfully, for libel. Despite operating under a single name and inhabiting a single body, a 'hero' like Godolphin maintains his power, Manley's chronicle suggests, by highlighting the different sides of his personality. Within himself, he can inhabit a variety of different social personae.

By tracing a familiar account of the past back to a biased individual speaker, dialogic secret histories undermined the notion of 'omniscient' historical narration, exposing the degree to which every tale is shaped by the thoughts and opinions of its teller. For most literary critics, Daniel Defoe's secret histories have been of interest primarily insofar as they can be seen to reflect the features of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fictional writing. As one of Defoe's most well-known contributions to the genre, The Secret History of the White-Staff stood at the centre of a particularly lively textual controversy. Near the end of the White-Staff's second volume, Defoe's narrator acknowledges that he has made use of the classical device of inventing harangues to support his work's interpretation of events.

This chapter suggests that William Shakespeare undertook the writing of Othello in 1603, incorporating that year as the annus praesens of the play. He linked the dramatic action to certain dates on which holy days in the rival Protestant Julian and Catholic Gregorian calendars conflicted ironically. It proposes that Shakespeare contrived the death-struggle between Iago and Cassio to personify the conflict between the Catholic doctrine of works and the Protestant dogma of election. The chapter argues that Jacobeans recognized Cyprus as the penultimate way-station for pilgrims to the Holy Land and that Shakespeare, although he followed Cinthio in setting the action of his drama on Cyprus, and construed Othello's journey as an unconsummated pilgrimage. It also suggests that Shakespeare painted with the colors of Marian idolatry the convert Catholic Othello's obsession with the chastity of his bride.

The 'glasse' of majesty depended on the reversibility of subject-object within the drama of Stuart succession, in order to reproduce and circulate the mythic totality of power. In a number of key texts associated with new historicism and cultural materialism, the 'hall of mirrors' image of the spectacle of power is considered so important as to provide a starting point for the analysis. New historicism can be situated within an American tradition, epitomised at its height by New Criticism, that seems primarily concerned with the 'cultivation of "emotional distance'". Cultural materialism claims at the gritty level of practice as well as in the seductive language of theory to foreground its, and others', mediations of literary and cultural objects. In Radical Tragedy, one of the key texts in the development of cultural materialism, Jonathan Dollimore refutes textual coherence and stresses instead literary and cultural fragmentation and discontinuity in the Renaissance.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers Sigmund Freud's 'Copernican revolution' to supplement Copernicus and Darwin by Marx, who declared that thinking was not produced by autonomous individuals: rather, 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas'. It explains how Freud illuminates literature, and makes for a very full reading of it. The book begins with one of Freud's 'case-histories', where he discussed particular examples of analysis. It discusses one of Freud's most exciting followers, Melanie Klein, and object-relations theory. The book talks about the role of the mother in psychoanalysis. It also talks about Jacques Lacan, first through the main strands of his thought: the categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, then, on paranoia, and madness, linking to modernist literature.

This chapter focuses on the identification and enumeration of a constellation of literary devices William Shakespeare adopted for the purpose of publicly interrogating banned theological topics in his plays. It offers to interpret certain responses to Scripture, doctrine, and dogma in Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's most sophisticated tactics of subversion relied on rubrics of the Elizabethan liturgy which rigidly linked verses of the Old and New Testament with particular dates in the calendar. In Shakespeare's era, free-speaking as well as access to printed documents, including even Scripture was fiercely controlled by censorious civil and ecclesiastical authorities. As a consequence, Elizabethans were masters at reading between the lines. They were also heirs of the Quadrata tradition which taught Christians to receive the words of Jesus, the Apostles, and the Holy Ghost as symbols, signs, analogies, metaphors, topologies, and ciphers.

This chapter focuses on the struggle and internal debate that is taking place in Tarquin’s soul and the outer action he takes, namely the rape of Lucrece. From the beginning, Tarquin’s self is described as being divided, which has an effect on his body and his soul: he experiences both a physiomachia and a psychomachia. Tarquin’s inner forces, his reason and his will, fight each other, and, eventually, reason is overcome. Shakespeare bases this character representation on patterns from medieval morality plays and allegorizes Tarquin but also lends him psychological depth on this basis. In Tarquin’s encounter with Lucrece, a relationship of exchange becomes obvious between them: she becomes the voice of reason, and, after the rape, a link is created between her body and his soul. The chapter also takes into account contemporary and classical sources on inner debates and the soul.

By patient examination of the original Italian text of Matteo Bandello this chapter offers evidence that William Shakespeare had read the story of doomed lovers in the Novelle, and perhaps in Luigi da Porto's 1530 version, too. It shows that Shakespeare is not the first author to carefully link the events in this fictional story of star-crossed lovers to actual dates, holy days, and lunisolar events in a specific calendar year. The chapter also shows that Bandello reworked da Porto's story to conform the action to the solar and liturgical calendars of AD 1302. It suggests that Shakespeare's close reading of Bandello may have inspired Shakespeare to exploit the tale of Romeo and Juliet to interrogate the Gregorian reform of 1582 by linking events in his tragedy to actual dates and holy days in that topsy-turvy year.

Jean Rhys published four novels which have female protagonists who all drink at levels beyond those regarded as socially acceptable: Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939). These four novels present the reader with a complex of self, consciousness, and modernity, inflected by an argument that women are forced to live differently in the world from men, and therefore experience and understand the world differently from men. One of the major achievements of the novels is the way in which they render the various states of consciousness of the female protagonist in the modern capitalist world, and this chapter considers the way in which Rhys integrates questions of gender, consciousness, modernity, alcohol, and the self. Rhys’s protagonists choose their orientations as a way to define their selves and to define what is true in and about the world they inhabit. The modernist focus on alcoholic consciousness ensures a form of self-validation against a patriarchal and increasingly rationalistic society. This chapter also considers Rhys’s presentation of consciousness alongside our contemporary understanding.