Prince Henry and King James served as the principal spectators, surrounded by a court of noblemen and women, including Duke of Lennox. The 'great preparation' for the two noble kinsmen included playwright Thomas Dekker's pageant, as John Chamberlain's report makes clear. Lennox remembered vividly the events of Henry's life that led up to Dekker's Lord Mayor's Show and its House of Fame with a vacant room. In the real world of London's theatres members of the Common Council sent a letter to the Lord Mayor on 8 November announcing Henry's death. Henry's death had shattered the royal family's tranquillity and certainty. Cyril Tourneur wrote a poem, 'On the Representation of the Prince at His Funeralls', to commemorate and react to the coffin, concluding, 'His aptnesse fluently appeares, / In ev'rie Souldiers griefe, and Schollars teares'.

In 1599 William Shakespeare stood at a professional crossroads, which led to his participation in the financing and construction of the Globe Theatre. In 1613, with the burning of this theatre, Shakespeare stood at the end of his active professional involvement in playwriting and the theatre. Shakespeare in Blackfriars underscores the exceptional cultural power of the City of London with its thriving theatres and productive printers and publishers who produced scores of texts in 1613. Despite sometimes sparse evidence, a clear picture emerges of a Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox who played a major role in the cultural and political activities of 1613. As in the case of Shakespeare and the royal family, 1613 was a pivotal year for Lennox, this loyal friend and servant of the king, who many years earlier in Scotland had been called a 'paragon'.

Spenser ends his career with the Mutabilitie Cantos, where in refusing to describe the clothing of Dame Nature, he refers us to Alan of Lille via Chaucer, who invokes Alan’s authority for the same purpose in The Parlement of Foules. Spenser’s representation of poetic tradition shares with Chaucer’s dream vision an interest in rhetorically linking the earth-bound poet with a community of readers who also write, a community depicted as both historically bound and transcendent. Spenser’s platonic representation of Chaucer as an individual precursor who is also a transparent vessel of divine inspiration locates the poet within the mythos of Mutabilitie subsumed by Nature: ever-changing and yet still the same, eternally linked in poetic tradition even as Mutabilitie threatens the temporal artefacts of poetic production and the poet himself. Like Spenser’s deferral to a remote authority through an intermediary, Chaucer’s chain of dreamers and books in the Parlement figures the poet’s reaching for a durable source of literary connection, and for both poets, the glimmer of tradition gives the poet a sense of crossing the boundaries of his own mortality while maintaining ties to the sublunary activity of writing poems.

This chapter radically re-orients discussions of the common reader by tracing the concept back to the religious and political disputes of the seventeenth century. Having shown that notions of the common reader long predate Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson, the chapter provides an extended reading of Woolf’s theory of reading, which it contrasts with the one provided by F. R. Leavis.

This chapter examines the ways in which the transmission of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in manuscripts, reshaped the relationship between ‘Chaucer’ and ‘romance’, paving the way for Spenser’s own particular mode of romance in The Faerie Queene. Particular attention is given to the inclusion of The Tale of Gamelyn and The Tale of Beryn in early manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, giving them ‘Chaucerian’ status, and to the manuscript context of genuinely Chaucerian works when excerpted and placed alongside non-Chaucerian texts, in so-called ‘miscellany’ manuscripts.

In the Shepheardes Calendar, Chaucer fulfils two distinct but associated functions. First, his name functions as a synecdoche for much of the English literary and linguistic past; words marked with his name are treated as archaic and can be deployed to specific poetic effects. Second, Chaucer is identified as an English analogue to Virgil. By classicising Chaucer through this comparison while also emphasising his linguistic Englishness, the Calendar uses Chaucer to join Latinate and vernacular poetic traditions. This view of Chaucer as a hybrid English-classical figure not only defines his use in the Calendar, but also characterises the way the medieval poet is presented in the 1598 and 1602 Speght editions of Chaucer’s collected Works, the first published after the appearance of the Calendar.

The Chaucer–Spenser relation is a prime site for interpretation of intertextual relationships that result from a range of practices and effects, from authorial control to cultural subjection, from deliberate imitation to linguistic free-play, from intentional allusion to the agency of the signifier. Visual and auditory metaphors for intertextual relations, such as the term intertext itself, along with terms like influence, allusion, refraction, echo and resonance, affect our readings in ways that ask for heightened awareness of their mediation. Having examined these metaphors, the chapter treats three resonant memories of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti and two clusters of recollection in his Faerie Queene, one in Book III and another in Book I. The historical matter of Troy, which especially means the Troilus for English poets after Chaucer, is focal throughout this discussion. For Spenser, as for Chaucer, the matter of Troy remains inextricably, fatally intertwined with the matter of love both in lyric and epic.

This chapter explores the ideological implications of ‘close reading’. Starting with a re-consideration of I. A. Richard’s work, the chapter uses a reading of Jane Eyre to examine different kinds of textual analysis, including ones that are far removed from dominant forms of literary criticism. The chapter ends by engaging with current debates on how reading and literature should be taught at school.

Poets reflected on the royal wedding, as some of the same ones, such as Thomas Heywood, Peacham, John Donne, and George Wither, had responded to Prince Henry's death and funeral. London 1613 included the most renowned playwright and the most prominent actor, in the immediate aftermath of the wedding. Donne begins by hailing 'Bishop Valentine', whose day the wedding commemorates. He then turns to work several changes on the idea of the phoenix, a concept and image linked to Duke of Lennox, King James, and in Webster's poem on the death of Henry to the prince himself. As Lennox well knew, some of the residue of resentment or uncertainty grew out of the court's wrestling still with the overwhelming reality of Henry's death. But in the final outburst of wedding festivities Queen Anne participated fully.