The Scottish pamphlet and William Shakespeare's play pinpoint a historic moment in the English calendar controversy, a moment when 'the most basic category by which men order their experience seemed subject to arbitrary political manipulation.' It is the calendar of Hamlet's nativity which shapes the drama of Shakespeare's Danish tragedy; that is the calendar he wished his wiser sort to contemplate. During Shakespeare's lifetime Julius Caesar's old Julian calendar prevailed in England and in other Protestant enclaves and Greek Orthodox regions. The inexorable precession of the equinoxes made Queen Elizabeth's calendar controversy grist for the pulp publishers of England. Though stripped of hundreds of saints' days by Henry VIII's reforms, the liturgical calendar under Elizabeth and James was peppered with holy days which imposed obligatory observances, oblations and rituals, including some rather bizarre.

Like the prefatory address, the diary can be understood as part of a larger shift in historiographical values, as seventeenth- and eighteenth century writers reconsidered who or what was worthy of historical commemoration. It is pleasingly appropriate that the two best-known diarists of the Restoration era, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, should have been involved in the fledgling scientific efforts of the Royal Society. Evelyn's Kalendarium boasted an additional connection with scientific methodology, in fact, in its association with the secular diary's most prominent precursor form: the almanac. Evelyn's descriptions of remarkable historical events often feature numerical figures. Public statistics serve an emphatic function, as Evelyn conveys the magnitude of military conflicts like the Anglo-Dutch war or human catastrophes like the 1665 plague by making a note of the growing numbers of recorded fatalities.

This chapter presents important deconstructive studies of the university, to pursue the issues attendant upon, the deconstructibility of an institutional politics of opposition, and the different challenges and possibilities afforded by the deconstructibility of the university's institutional set-up itself. In the beginning of his book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings recognises that the discourse of excellence which typifies, organises, and represents the Western university in the late twentieth century is at bottom non-ideological, politically non-partisan, in orientation or determination. Peggy Kamuf's The Division of Literature, Or, The University in Deconstruction approaches the question of the university by way of a close analysis of the complex history of literary study in the modern university. Deconstruction can be publicly censured only by the taking of certain liberties that in fact bind the offended party to the very same kinds of practices that they wish to condemn in deconstruction.

Restoration and early-eighteenth-century writers made little active distinction between memoirs written from a biographical perspective and those written from an autobiographical point of view. In addition to the difference in perspective, memoirs could also include material that would be considered irrelevant or extraneous to a formal historical narrative. Although neoclassical history was addressed exclusively to elite public men, its readership included 'Grandees of all Countries and all Ages', statesmen of both the present and the future, the nation and the world.

William Shakespeare's choice to organise the opening of his play in marked contrast to King Leir had been prompted by reading an old play newly published. This chapter considers the map in stage and film versions of the play and the map in connection with Elizabethan and Jacobean mapping of England. The map as sign of the kingdom functions as a chorography of Britain; it is the King of Britain who disunites the kingdom. The play Locrine is an account of the first division of Britain, the turning of Brutus' united land into a divided one, a necessary and pragmatic response both to Brutus' imminent death and to the presence of the three sons, Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Thomas of Woodstock is mostly familiar as a supposed source for Shakespeare's Richard II, narrating the events preceding Shakespeare's action.

This chapter talks about W. H. Auden's 'Homage to Clio'. Clio had by the end of the eighteenth century arrived in the Atlantic sea-board of the Americas, as both history and poetry. The Muse helps map the coming of History to the modern world, in the forms of it that Auden understood, used, and eschewed. A name or a chapter heading- 'Clio' arrived with Herodotus. For old generals remembering battles long ago, Clio was a kind of truth. Sometimes she was denigrated, or caught in an attitude unbecoming to her high function. Clio had been a bit of a feminist since 1754 or at least allowed a man to celebrate a notable woman in feminist terms. A practical girl, she had usually disembarked in Kent, the closest shore line to Helicon, was glimpsed in Fulham and Chelsea, expected in Oxford and Cambridge.

For many preface-writers, the use of apostrophe facilitated the inclusion of autobiographical minutiae, providing an inherent rationale for the revelation of personal details in a public forum. Colley Cibber's Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber used the defensive rhetoric of the apology for the purposes of literary history, glossing an artist's creative output by situating it in the context of his own past experiences. Throughout the work, Cibber manipulates the rhetoric of apostrophe, using the conjunction of specific addressee and broad audience to commemorate those actions that substantiate an artist's, rather than a statesman's, claims to historical importance. Although the Apology is nominally formulated as a response to a particular cluster of readers, it is clear from the outset of the work that Cibber has set his sights on a much broader audience.