George Herbert’s mother Magdalen Danvers and his friends the Ferrars at Little Gidding recorded joyful psalm singing. The metrical compositions and translations they used were in English, but their sources were French. The English drew from French and Swiss practices, translations, and settings. Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, central to the Genevan Psalter, offered not only inspiration but also possibilities for imitation and invention. Mary Sidney’s psalms, drawing from these translations and settings, are resonant with echoes of French-language psalms, and are themselves literary wonders in their own right. George Herbert’s lyrics quite self-consciously and even ostentatiously join with those of his important predecessor in the Sidney–Herbert–Devereux clan. He participates in an international consort of the “Sweet singers of our Israel,” where the individual singer joins a larger international chorus across time and space. Translation from Hebrew and Latin into vernacular languages is in fact a polylingual and intercultural enterprise.

The chapter’s aim is threefold. Firstly, by referring to Wallace’s review of Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and the short story ‘Suicide as a Sort of Present’, it argues that Wallace’s interest in the solipsistic position of the Tractatus and its pathological dramatization in Markson’s novel unveils deep and existential concern. It emphasizes the close link between the reflective and ethical dimensions that, like Wittgenstein, Wallace experienced personally and interlaced in his narrative work. Secondly, the chapter argues that, according to Wallace’s reading of Wittgenstein, the ‘discovery’ that language is something public articulated in the Philosophical Investigations did not eliminate the risk of solipsism. On the contrary, Wallace understood it to eliminate the possibility of contact with the outside world and leave us trapped in language rather than in private thoughts. This idea of language as both a ‘cage’ and a boundary between subject and world can be clearly discerned in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System. Thirdly, drawing from some passages of Infinite Jest, the chapter highlights the close connection in Wallace’s narrative work between solipsism as a metaphysical position and loneliness and alienation as existential drama.

Edward Herbert considered himself a member of a European community of plain speakers, a community that values a conversational style, itself the vehicle for an understanding of what a social community is meant to do and the philosophical ideals it is to sustain. Many members of Edward Herbert’s English and French coterie found in the rhetorical writings of the Belgian humanist Justus Lipsius welcome permission to depart from an overly wrought discourse in favor of a more gallantly honest style. A key work here was Lipsius’s Epistolica Institutio, published in 1591. Style was a means of signaling one’s identity to the world; but more than that, it fostered a way of being in the world. The ideal of fellowship is linked to a self-conceived cosmopolitan directness and truthfulness.

Published in the year of his wife Margaret’s death, Poetical Fragments (1681) was linked to the dissenting clergyman Richard Baxter’s ‘sorrows and sufferings’ as a bereaved husband, but also those of his wife stretching back to when she was a member of his flock in need of spiritual consolation, and finally those of the ‘near Friends in Sickness, and other deep Affliction’ of the title page. In both the Poetical Fragments and later Additions (1683), Baxter made a special plea for ‘passions’ as a key part of devotional identity: they were both the motive for spiritual song and an essential for spiritual life, without which ‘it will be hard to have any pleasant thoughts of Heaven’. This essay explores how ‘passions’ applied to the evolving devotional identity of Baxter himself and how Baxter used personal loss to present to his readers a new kind of practical divinity: consolation – of self as much as others – through a poetics of the ‘passions’.

This chapter explores the events of Edward Herbert’s ambassadorship, making use of primary documents rarely discussed or analyzed, reassessing the Ambassador’s integrity. This reassessment leads to new conclusions about Edward’s developing understanding of truth, conscience, and the unity of the general and personal good. Past accounts of his ambassadorship have stressed Edward’s rashness and failure as a diplomat. However, such accounts adopt historiographical approaches that tend to divorce the study of facts from philosophical and moral thought. This chapter shows, on the contrary, that Edward’s blindness or “mistakes” as a diplomat may well stem from his (perhaps excessive) faith in and commitment to a continuum between the individual conscience and the general good. The Wars of Religion taught him to distrust corrupt political and ecclesiastical bodies. Bent on a quest for peace, he placed his trust instead in truthful individuals (such as himself), thinking they might be more apt to bridge the divides created by religious strife. He provided James with useful, valid, and accurate information on European ambassadors’ visits and their implications, French views on Palatinate issues, reports of Spanish and French troop movements, Catholic influence at the French court, and the status of Protestants in France, acting in the sovereign’s stead and in the sovereign’s as well as what he considered the nation’s interest. Yet his faith in the universal individual’s conscience and actions (including his own) also led him to neglect the complexities of political representativeness, thus accounting for his diplomatic faux pas.

Taking a cue from Cleopatra’s nightmare vision of being taken captive to Rome where the ‘quick comedians’ will ‘stage’ her, some ‘squeaking … boy’ making a travesty of her ‘greatness’, this chapter looks first at the burlesque tradition from F. C. Burnand to the Carry On films of remaking Antony and Cleopatra as farce. Then it looks in detail at two straight but seriously unconventional British productions that reframed the play’s meaning by staging alternative interpretations to those currently on offer at the Royal Shakespeare Company. At the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, Giles Havergal drew on the theatre’s history, location and popular appeal to make a radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s script that used only seven actors and cross-cast Jonathan Kent as Cleopatra in what reviewers called the ‘Zulu’ Antony and Cleopatra. In Halifax, Barrie Rutter continued his campaign to claim Shakespeare for the Northern voice, opening Northern Broadsides’ production with a burlesque scene played by a ‘squeaking’ Cleopatra that gave way to a serious staging in modern dress whose most celebrated quality was the electrifying delivery of Shakespeare’s writing.

Chapter 3 examines the concentrated attention that other Irish writers gave to Nietzschean thought during the first decade of the twentieth century, making legible the conflicts within and around the Revival movement, especially the tensions among Irish Catholicism, cultural nationalism, and international modernism. To be sure, Joyce’s writing made use of some of Nietzsche’s most famous tropes in articulating a response to these conflicts, a response embodied in the figure of an artist-hero, whose radically new ethical and aesthetic disposition might have a broad communal significance for his people. In July 1904, not long after he had commenced his first attempt to write a novel, the young man signed a lettercard to a friend with the alias ‘James Overman’, evincing the importance of the Übermensch for Joyce and other members of his circle, including John Eglinton and Thomas Kettle, who looked to Nietzsche in their own efforts to promote an ‘efflorescence of art and culture’ in modern Ireland. In Stephen Hero, Joyce calls directly on a number of Nietzsche’s ideas – not just the Übermensch, but slave morality, noble values, and the death of God – to depict the emergence of a heroic artistic consciousness, struggling to overcome nationalist ressentiment and religious authority. This struggle reaches a critical point in the final lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen proclaims his desire to produce something radically new, a conscience beyond bad conscience, which would break from the manners and mores that govern his compatriots. Revisiting the ‘Telemachus episode’ – written in 1914, a decade after Joyce’s noteworthy lettercard – the chapter provides a full account of Stephen’s return to Ireland, the reemergence of his bad conscience, and Buck Mulligan’s playing at Zarathustra prophecy, all as signs that the modernist project of creating new values is necessarily a vexed one, especially in the chastening context of Irish history. At the very outset of Ulysses, Nietzschean allusions cast doubt on the heroic creator of values who emerges in A Portrait, but these references nonetheless offer an important point of departure for understanding the project of cultural transformation undertaken by Joyce’s art and the ethics of Irish modernism negotiated in the pages of his masterpiece.

This chapter shows how several modern poets engage with the Middle Ages. For B. H. Fairchild and Rynn Williams, in particular, the medieval evokes desire, as well as the vulnerability of the desiring body. Through their poems, as well as those of Dante, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Marie Howe, the question of the body’s materiality is inseparable from the question of its fraught and fragile time. The chapter suggests that modern lyric might benefit from medievalist readers as much as medieval objects might benefit from the languages of lyricism.

The introduction is structured around a set of short readings of South African texts set in London, from a poem by Arthur Nortje to a passage from Nelson Mandela’s biography. The adoption of modernisms by South African writers is considered in relation to concepts of modernity and belatedness. Also emphasised is the historical relationship of affinity and ambivalent critique these writers experience towards Englishness. The introduction foregrounds London’s significance as a ‘contact zone’ in the postwar and apartheid period, as writers in exile engaged with London as both an English and a global space, where transnational encounters occurred, and explores how London figured as both a ‘real’ city and a textual, symbolic space for South Africans.

This introduction begins by examining recent work that emphasises the fluidity across supposed definitional or categorical boundaries, especially on the grounds of devotional or spiritual expression, within early modern Protestantism. It helps to break down the idea that categorical definitions based on creed can sometimes be misleading where personal and devotional lives might be more revealing. It then moves to outlining the unifying themes, sites and concerns surrounding ‘devotional identities’ as explored across the essays in this volume. Ultimately, English Protestantism is shown to be at once segregational and social, fixed in principle yet fluid in practice.

The confessional wars affected both Edward Herbert and George Herbert’s sense of history and the forms of writing they chose. Though George Herbert never traveled to the Continent and did not have firsthand knowledge of those conflicts that tore Christian communities apart, the battles that his brothers fought in Europe and Edward’s embassies in Paris certainly brought these struggles close to home. What’s more, the Herbert clan had a generational heritage, theological as well as literary, in their kinsman Philip Sidney’s connections with Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and moderate Christians who believed in a respublica Christiana. In “The Church Militant” George mentions the horrific bloodshed of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, one of the main focuses of French Protestant poet Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Tragiques (1616). The chapter makes a case for thinking of Edward Herbert’s historical and anthropological later writings, as well as George Herbert’s polemic epyllion “The Church Militant,” as alternate literary responses to a deep sense of tragic time. It shows, in particular, how “The Church Militant” stems from a broader European engagement with poetical historiographical genres in the wake of the massacre.