This chapters addresses structural and formal links between poetry and drama as well as the soul as inner space and immortal self that takes its origin in a religious context but then contributes to the development of inwardness and psychology during the early modern period. The soul provides a link between poetry and drama as it goes through several stages (during its life on earth) that can be linked to the theatrical stage and the theatrum mundi metaphor. The soul as an entity that is self-perceptive is performatively brought to the fore in the soliloquy that becomes a soul-talk and sole-talk in early modern English poetry and drama. In the poetry of Shakespeare and Donne, the drama of the soul is enacted in various ways, which makes their poems expressive of interior states.

This chapter focuses on the perspective of Lucrece. When Tarquin threatens to rape her, she becomes the voice of reason. She is also described in terms of a besieged town that is about to be taken by force and hence allegorized. Lucrece finds herself as part of a drama that concerns her life and her inner being, and she acts in surroundings that become a stage. After the rape, the focus turns to the inner division of Lucrece that eventually leads to her suicide. She has to choose between her body and her soul, and wishes to restore her honour. Shakespeare integrates the debate about her suicide and argues against the position taken by Augustine in his City of God, who condemns her for killing herself: he has her stage her suicide in a way that it is in fact Tarquin who kills her by guiding the hand that gives the wound to her body. Lucrece is thus exempt from any blame.

This chapter looks at the role of the orphan and popular orphan adventure narratives in policing and extending empire. It considers Charles Dickens's The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels within the context of both the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Dickens's own imperial sympathies. In using the orphan to represent otherness and difference, Victorian society reproduces the workings of colonial discourse. Popular orphan adventure narratives, such as Peter Buchan's The Orphan Sailor: A Tragic Tale of Love, of Pity, and of Woe, construct discourses of civilisation, patriotism and imperialism. The male orphan figure is a popular device in narratives that not only explore social power structures and imperial ideology but which also encode notions of savagery.

Michael Holquist questions simple-minded notions of censorship as epitomising a struggle between opposed forces locked in a contest of wills. One of the places where questions of censorship have been raised most interestingly in recent times is Renaissance studies, which has itself been taken by many modern critics to provide a forum for larger arguments of contemporary relevance. Seeing censorship as a constitutive feature of emergent 'modern' forms of legitimation, the author's reading of New Atlantis will necessarily place an emphasis on the productive or enabling role that censorship has in the formation of knowledge. New Atlantis forces a reconsideration of the boundaries of the academy in the modern context, suggesting that the instability of institutional limits may be longstanding and functional rather than symptomatic of a sudden crisis, a new moment of breakdown.

John Dryden's decision to subtitle his panegyric 'an historical poem' emphasized the degree to which Annus Mirabilis was concerned with the representation of a real, rather than an imagined past, a feature that is shared with many other Restoration satires and panegyrics. Satires and panegyrics offers a vehicle for political engagement, and in this respect, they demonstrated a marked divergence from the avowed purposes and procedures of history proper. Satire and panegyric differed from formal history not only in their expression of political partiality, then, but also in their narrowed scope, their 'partialness'.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book enhances the understanding of the erotic romances of Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Lady Mary Sidney wroth by setting them within an integrated political, rhetorical, and aesthetic context. It demonstrates more cohesive interrelationships during the Renaissance than was possible in Margaret Ann Doody's wide-ranging The True Story of the Novel. The book explores relationships among Ludovico Annibale della Croce's De Clitophontis & Leucippes amorib[us], François de Belleforest's Les amours de Clitophon et de Leucippe, william Burton's The Most Delectable and Plesaunt History of Clitiphon and Leucippe. It considers the texts of Sidney's Arcadia, probably written between 1577 and 1584, as a political romance sharing many of the thematic and rhetorical concerns of the ancients.

This chapter considers a number of instances of foot fetishism as they arise in twentieth-century critical thought, many of which seem to offer a way for thinkers to gain a sort of foothold, to attempt or explore orientation in their respective fields. Examples will include: Heidegger's analysis in his essay 'The origin of the work of art' of Van Gogh's depiction of shoes; Frederic Jameson's discussion in 'The cultural logic of late capitalism' of portrayals of footwear in modern art. Jameson finds in Van Gogh's peasant shoes a vibrant, organic immediacy, the painting itself gloriously transforming the poverty, abjection and oppression that it takes as its subject within a 'Utopian realm of the senses'. Jacques Derrida's evocation of shod feet orients his essay in its final stages towards 'a discussion' held with Meyer Shapiro some years earlier 'on the subject of certain shoes in Van Gogh'.

New discourses of cosmopolitanism contested older nationalistic discourses as the constituent population of England, more specifically London, started to diversify with an influx from the colonies and other parts of the world. This chapter examines the extent to which discourses of orphanhood conflate with those of ethnic difference in the latter part of the century. To do this, it examines two specific texts, Daniel Deronda and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in order to analyse how both George Eliot and Charles Dickens conceive the ethnic difference present in London and the surrounding areas. The metaphor of exile, whether in the colonies or abroad, is a particularly powerful one in dealing with middle-class orphans: in addition to Deronda one need only think of Pip in Great Expectations or Lucy Snowe in Villette.

While the theatres were closed due to the plague in 1593/94, Shakespeare wrote his epyllion The Rape of Lucrece that has also been described as a dramatic long poem. He opens the poem with Tarquin and his lust, and he makes the soul central from the beginning; the soul hence becomes one of the keys to understanding the text. The chapter shows how the epyllion becomes a drama in which antagonistic characters – Tarquin and Lucrece but also body and soul – act and interact. The characters in the epyllion are given a psychological motivation for their deeds, and the implied allegory is diversified in that it is combined with introspection. Shakespeare changes his source material to this effect: he re-motivates the Roman myth in making the protagonists representative of inner forces and as having individual minds that debate and reflect on their actions.

This chapter demonstrates that William Shakespeare crafted Nurse's monologue as a passkey to all his time-riddles in Romeo and Juliet for the wiser sort among his auditors. It shows that solving the time-cruces in this play provides a fresh insight into Shakespeare's mind, his interest in chronometry, and his remarkable knowledge of the rival calendars of the Renaissance. The chapter suggests that recognizing the interval 25-30 July as the span of the action in Romeo and Juliet would allow us to recover other unrecognized instances of Shakespeare's intensive time-play. If the action of Romeo and Juliet is taking place 'since the Earth-quake now eleuen yeares' the wiser sort could instantly calculate that Nurse's conversation with Wife Capulet must be taking place between November 1581 and November 1582.