This chapter discusses W. H. Auden's work in the field of education. At seven he went to school and most of the next seven years were spent in translating Greek into Latin and English and vice-versa. Auden entered Christ Church College, Oxford, and there are very full accounts of his first encounters with Old English poetry. Auden attended school during a great flowering of published social history for children, most of it targeted at teachers of primary-age children in the state system. There are traces of the history teaching Auden was likely to have experienced. He impressed his friends at St Edmund's by his parodic discourse on an event in medieval religious history. The chapter also discusses the religious education Auden experienced. He was also a proponent of 'big' history; of history's meaning and the philosophy derived from it.

This chapter places a lesser-known text into the Existential drinker canon. Written whilst in a Nazi criminal asylum by the once highly popular author Hans Fallada, the protagonist Erwin Sommer takes to drinking for reasons which never seem to fully explain his course of self-destructive behaviour. While not given to much overt philosophical contemplation The Drinker does nevertheless have many characteristics of the Existential-drinker text, in particular its expression of absurdity, the belief that we find ourselves born into a world not of our making and which has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. The novel indicates that being a good citizen – the good businessman, the good husband – is meant to provide Sommer with a reason for living, but ultimately these appear futile and Sommer remains alienated. The chapter places the novel in its historical context, with some consideration given to how we might interpret it with its semi-autobiographical origins and knowing the circumstances of its creation.

This chapter argues, focusing on Woodstock, that mindfulness of the traditions of commons political action offers a new way of understanding popular historical consciousness, and the mentalities of early modern audiences and writers. There was a practical 'insurrectionary tradition' between the commons risings of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and the mid-sixteenth-century 'camps' of Kett's rising, as well as a 'moral economy' governing smaller-scale actions until much later, is in itself uncontroversial. Reading Woodstock through the radical tradition offers an opportunity to close Margot Heinemann's separation between 'rational' and 'Utopian' commons politics. Richard's links with disguise and treachery were historical facts, cleverly woven into Woodstock and gesturing at his eventual downfall. The Mirror's early editions begin, as Hall's Chronicle does, with the reign of Richard II, who 'was for his evyll governaunce deposed from his seat and miserably murdred in prison'.

Hamlet is bandying matters of cosmology which were the burning issues throughout William Shakespeare's lifetime. The author's own view is that Shakespeare's religious opinions reflected the complexities, and relative tolerance of Queen Elizabeth I's Religious Settlement. There are any numbers of Catholics in Shakespeare's plays just as there were such persons in his family, his England, and in Europe. Shakespeare regularly alludes to rituals of the old Church baptism in Comedy of Errors, shriving and confession in Hamlet, creeping to the cross in Julius Caesar, pilgrimage in All's Well, and Holy Saturday rituals in Othello. In Hamlet Shakespeare even treats Purgatory with respect. None of this proves beyond doubt that Shakespeare was Catholic. But it does prove he was tolerant. Shakespeare's Old Hamlet was Catholic. For Hamlet and Horatio Purgatory does not exist; for Old Hamlet's Ghost it does.

Fred Ex is the committed drinking protagonist of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, in thrall to the career of the New York Giants footballer Frank Gifford. He realises he will never have fame of his own, and over time discovers himself to be alienated from all aspects of modern life and the American dream. The chapter analyses how these elements relate to Existential authenticity, including the novel’s play around the idea of ‘fictional memoir’ and autofiction. There are periods of depression for Fred Ex which lead to being committed to a mental asylum, and the chapter covers the philosophical issues around agency in relation to drinking and mental well-being. This chapter also looks at the protagonist as a developing writer since the novel is partly a Künstlerroman, and how this in turn is entangled with drinking.

This chapter presents William Shakespeare's adaptations of Greco Roman material within an English philhellene rhetorical, cultural and political context, not incompatible with his Catholic origins. Shakespeare's perception of the Greek erotic romances, and of Plutarch's Lives and Morals, was coloured by the editions and translations available to him. Coriolanus, a critique of Jacobean representative government, provides a rare glimpse into the way Shakespeare exhibits his normally obscured links with the Amyot-North Plutarch. Nine years before writing Coriolanus, in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare is as much concerned as any translator with the stylistic elegance of Greco-Roman historians, including Plutarch. Shakespeare's purpose is to employ rhetorical style as a signifier of political difference. In France, Robert Garnier adapted the political and personal conflicts surrounding Antony and Cleopatra to criticise the needless destruction of war in Marc-Antoine.

This chapter introduces the idea of ‘the Existential drinker’, placing it in historical, literary, and philosophical contexts. It gives a clear account of Existential philosophy and issues in relation to drinking, such as questions of authenticity, freedom, self, and finitude, while also addressing wider concerns around questions of will and consciousness. A section on ‘happiness, hedonism, and illness’ analyses other possible understandings, including contemporary concerns to do with alcoholism and ethics. A canon of Existential-drinker texts is established, and the characteristic features of these are noted, paying attention to the uses of narrative and lyric selves in the novels. The Introduction also places The Existential Drinker in the context of other books on drinking and literature, noting how this is the first study to treat the material extensively in this way, often contrary to prevailing attitudes around such literature.

The 'strange truth' of Perkin Warbeck, seems to the author to be twofold. Firstly, it offers an exculpation of the Stanleys in general. Secondly, it provides a palliation of an event which it presents as analogous to Sir William Stanley's betrayal and his subsequent plot to secure the succession of his cousin, Lord Strange. Lord Strange is not the only member of the family who finds himself represented or alluded to on the English stage. The author also considers various Earls of Derby, at least one Sir Edward Stanley and two separate bearers of the name Sir William Stanley. Richard III is the only William Shakespeare play where the word 'strange' never occurs at all, because it would have embarrassed the Stanley family to mention that name in connection with the succession to the Crown and the replacement of one dynasty by another.

Longus's romance is best known as the model for stories in which infants are abandoned by parents of social or political prominence, found by rustic shepherds and reared in pastoral surroundings. If Heliodorus develops the plot-line of discovery, identification and denouement in his 'life' of Charikleia, Longus doubles and complicates the conventional motif by paralleling and intertwining the biographies of Daphnis and Chloe. The survival of many sixteenth-century Greek manuscripts of Longus, as well as the manuscript of the Italian translation by Annibale Caro, which he ceased working on by 1538, indicates serious engagement with Longus. In 1599, when Amyot published his Longus and the corrected edition of Heliodorus, he returned to the partnership of printer-publishers, Longis, Groulleau and Sertenas. Angel Day abandons Amyot to insert The Shepheards Holidaie. He amplifies Amyot's religious ceremony into an extravagant pageant-masque in prose and verse, celebrating the cult of Elizabeth on Accession Day.

This chapter places Jack London’s autobiography John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs as the key text for understanding the figure of the Existential drinker. It is one of the first all-out formulations of the writer-as-drinker, mixing the nineteenth-century temperance view of the habitual drinker who is a moral failure with the image of the writer as a drinker who can attain truths not available to the fall-in-the-gutter drunkard, nor indeed available to the run-of-the-mill sober citizen. The chapter deals with London’s idea of ‘the white logic’, that is, the attraction of alcohol as a means to enlightenment, while at the same time acknowledging that to choose this path is also to choose death. The chapter therefore covers questions of mortality, finitude, types of drinkers and drunkenness, early aspects of Existential philosophy (London partly draws on Nietzsche), as well as beginning consideration of the writer in relation to texts where drinking is central.

This chapter explores how literature and psychoanalysis relate. Psychoanalysis, as an instance of critical theory, associates with Marx and Nietzsche in analysing modernity, while Marxism and Nietzschean philosophy both question psychoanalysis. Jacques Derrida discussed Jacques Lacan's reading of 'The Purloined Letter' in the essay 'Le Facteur de la Vérité'. By keeping the letter on a single itinerary, Derrida claims, Lacan is not just saying that the letter always arrives at its destination, he is acting as the 'postman' (facteur). Derrida argues against the potential of psychoanalysis to deliver 'truth': that 'the letter never arrives at its destination, but it belongs to the structure of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving'. Lacan says that the woman's experience is outside the symbolic; Derrida thinks Lacanian psychoanalysis is committed to just that order, and by making the woman the other, makes the male experience normative.

The orphan popular adventure narratives were accompanied by emigration schemes which specifically targeted the orphan figure as an agent to help in the imperial work of settlement. This chapter examines the formative moment of the emigration movement which developed over the next seventy years into a fully-fledged scheme for the emigration of orphan children. To do so, it examines the historical context of these particular endeavours as articulated at the time and, in retrospect, in the early twentieth-century evaluations of the scheme. The chapter finally examines certain popular texts, with a special emphasis placed on Rose Macaulay's Orphan Island to show how these texts narrativise the schemes and highlight the class, ethnic, racial and sectarian debates which intersect with these schemes.