The Dedicatory Epistle to The Shepheardes Calendar tells us that the ‘newe poet’ wrote with the ‘sound of ancient poets ringing in his ears’. The Calendar’s scholarly apparatus figures Chaucer as a pastoral poetic progenitor, aligned with Virgil. In the eclogues proper, however, precise reference to Chaucer’s words and phrases are scarce. The most precise recall are the lines in the February eclogue about little herdgrooms piping in broom bushes from The House of Fame. Yet, for a reader whose ears are tuned to Chaucerian pitch, these lines cause problems. Those little herdgrooms, piping in their green corn, become enveloped in a musical troupe from Chaucer’s poem that approaches cacophony; pipes become eclipsed by unnameable noise, and the names of Tityrus and Colin Clout are comically disfigured.Resonance (literary tinnitus) is difficult to regulate. How far does it extend? How do you moderate its volume and tone? If those lines on pipers and herdgrooms ringing in the new poet’s head are not taken directly from Chaucer at all, Chaucer is read as a Chaucerian. If they are taken from Chaucer then Spenser may have recognised Chaucer, not as an illustrious forebear, but as a comedy sparring partner.

In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser cites Chaucer twice in order to authorise his claims about the meaning of words in relation to Irish culture. These citations are motivated not just by antiquarian curiosity, but by colonial ambition to radically transform Irish society. In this way, Spenser’s use of Chaucer in A View is similar to his much more extended engagement with Chaucer in his poetry. In each medium, the English past provides material for the creation of novel forms in the present. Just as Spenser reaches back to Chaucer to help forge and authorise his innovative poetics, so does he look back to Chaucer to prove that the English past can guide the reform of Irish material and legal culture in the present.

Responding to Franco Moretti’s theory of ‘distant reading’, this chapter argues for an approach to reading that can combine a respect for non-specialist readers with a post-structuralist scepticism about humanism. It takes Cornelia Parker’s artful work on Magna Carta as a paradigm of how theories of reading and interpretation need to find ways of acknowledging the importance of humour and playfulness in the reading experience.

Taking a long view of the relationship between reading and technology, this chapter argues that we cannot understand digital culture without thinking about how reading has always been mediated by the question of how texts are produced and circulated. Particular attention is paid to the way in which screens pre-date e-culture, a circumstance that should complicate how we think about e-reading.

William Shakespeare and his collaborator John Fletcher's play Henry VIII represents the serious business of the disgrace and execution of the Duke of Buckingham, Katherine of Aragon's fall and eventual divorce. The play also represents Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, and at the end the birth of Elizabeth, complete with Archbishop Cranmer's prophecy about her and her successor, the current King James I. Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox, and cousin of King James learned of the Globe Theatre disaster and about the performance of Henry VIII. The King's Men, assessing the loss of the Globe Theatre to that summer fire, decided to rebuild. From the ashes of 1613, a new theatre arose, like a phoenix, in 1614. Out of tragedy, the court and London had to seek renewal. The year 1613 offers abundant evidence of a trajectory that moves away from tragedy towards life-affirming restoration.

This chapter argues that reading is an inescapably ideological act. Analysing metaphors of eating and incorporation, the chapter links theories of taste to the religious, literary, and educational institutions that have historically shaped concepts of reading.

This chapter explores Spenser’s technical debt to Chaucer arguing for the semantic character of Spenser’s rhyming practice, and the ways in which his choices of rhyme and stanza impinge on the broader meanings of his poems. The first section analyses Chaucer and Spenser’s use of rime riche, arguing that while the device shows the latter’s fealty to the former, it also shows the updating of Chaucerian language to the metrical norms of early modern English. The second section explores the question of stanzaic syntax, arguing that Spenser wanted a more restrictive mise-en-page than in the Chaucer folios; this is illustrated through a detailed reading of his continuation of the Squire’s Tale in The Faerie Queene IV.iii which stresses the extreme repetitions across stanzas in which Spenser specialised. In this view, repetition is a device used in context to enhance readerly wonder at the extraordinary deeds narrated, while Spenserian diction works to keep Chaucerian English in the reader’s mind. The final section reopens the old question of the origins of the Spenserian stanza, repointing an old answer: the Spenserian is a deliberate development of the rhyme royal stanza as practised by Chaucer.

Drama at the Jacobean court stood between Prince Henry's funeral and Princess Elizabeth's impending wedding; it constructed a bridge, a translation, a confrontation with raw feelings. Clearly solace must have been one of the primary effects of the drama presented at court in 1612-1613. As another avenue to the court's transition and transformation from funeral to wedding, William Shakespeare offered the court several plays, performed by his company. These plays, of various genres, intersect and illustrate the words of the Prologue in Merry Devil: 'Sit with a pleased eye, until you know / The comic end of our sad tragic show.' Closer to the site of the court performances, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist takes place in the Blackfriars section of the City of London, well known to Duke of Lennox, Shakespeare, and Jonson. They moved away from the countryside setting of Hertfordshire of The Merry Devil.

This chapter contends that Spenser’s play on the tension between old and new in his Shepherdes Calender (1579), and its construction of Geoffrey Chaucer as both a canonical forefather and a byword for subversion, may be productively set in dialogue with the rudderless ‘new poet’ sent up by the gospeller Luke Shepherd’s satire Philogamus (1548). What did it mean for Spenser to be introduced as a ‘new poet’ in the late sixteenth century? How did current conceptions of literary change and continuity shape the significance of the epithet for Spenser’s first readers, and what particular discourses did its deployment activate? By considering the broad range of novelty’s contemporary connotations, the chapter suggests how the Tudor reinterpretation of Chaucer’s legacy informs further facets of Spenser’s engagement with the idea of newness, beyond the dynamic of literary influence and innovation. Religious reforms had invested ‘novelty’ with confessional significance, while new poetry represented a challenge to textual authorities from established religious doctrines to the nascent vernacular canon to historical truth. This chapter shows Spenser navigating this contested landscape in a guise redolent of Shepherd’s literary fool, to effect the instigation of a complex, layered authorial identity.

This chapter argues that the influence of Chaucer on ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’ should be reconsidered in light of what can be identified as a ‘beast group’ in early modern editions of the Canterbury Tales. Despite the fact that it was an editorial rather than an authorial invention, this beast group (which includes the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale as well as the authentic tales of the Nun’s Priest and the Manciple) offers a surprisingly coherent exploration of the potential uses of beast literature and animal fable. This study argues that Spenser drew extensively on all three of the tales in the beast group, and that his engagement with the group as a whole helped shape his beast fable as both an anti-clerical satire and as a reimagining of medieval estates satire. Moreover, among the talking birds of the Chaucerian beast group, Spenser identified a number of models for the role of the poet; he responds to these models by advancing the fox and the ape as figures of the poet against which he defines his own poetic role.

The mid-seventeenth century provided a dubious spate of books that lambasted the early Stuarts, among them Arthur Wilson's The History of Great Britain. In a rare dispassionate moment Wilson rightly observes: 'The City of London, and the Court at White-hall, like two great Stars in Conjunction, had one and the same influence and operation.' These two great stars each had its own sphere of cultural, political, and economic influence; but they reflected the light of the other. A simple example: the King's Men performed William Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV during the extraordinary outpouring of drama at court in early 1613. Sylvester Jourdain's Discovery of the Bermudas, and the Council of Virginia's True Declaration of the state of the Colonie in Virginia, generated great excitement and probably influenced Shakespeare in writing The Tempest, performed recently at court in early 1613.

The production of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII in late June 1613 intersects the narrative in unanticipated ways. This play's performance stands almost precisely between the February and December weddings, offering both retrospective and prospective views. The first movement of the narrative involves knights who had attempted to make their journey to London for this wedding. The play's ending celebrates the birth of Henry's daughter Elizabeth and looks forward to the eventual arrival of the Scottish king. The debate about divorce delineates the king's struggle with his moral conscience; indeed, the word 'conscience' becomes a prominent term in the play. But the poet conveniently overlooks the messy divorce and intrigue that eventually led to the royal wedding. In retrospect, the darkness of Thomas Overbury's death (later revealed to be murder) hangs over the celebration.