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.

This chapter offers a phenomenology of the waiting body, which is also the body we are waiting for. Through an attentiveness to the body’s extremities, particularly its hands, the chapter finds a way, with Dante’s pilgrim, out of hell and into a new, if fragile, tactile resilience. Philosophers Martin Heidegger, Karmen MacKendrick and Jean-Luc Nancy add their voices, and hands, to a handful of lyric poets, including Antonia Pozzi, for whom the body is never something to be grasped, though it cannot fail to touch.

Drawing on affect theory, this chapter proposes to read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as an exploration of the socio-structural nature of affects. I maintain that, in contrast with Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, Wallace’s attitude in this book is one of ‘wry pessimism’, predicated on the need to point out our societal crisis and the refusal to take for granted a linear idea of future progress. By examining two specific stories in the collection, namely the futuristic ‘Datum Centurio’ and the multi-section, meta-fictional ‘Octet’, I argue that Wallace goes beyond both argumentative appraisal and performative critique of the problematic present. Rather, he attempts to show what the affective consequences of today’s sexist society can be on future human connections that promise to be more and more dependent on advanced technological devices. While highlighting the inescapable ambiguity of language, Brief Interviews centres the chase for affect – both embodied and narrated – and urges readers to ‘invest’ in their own structural affective inadequacies in an attempt to track apparently irretrievable emotions down in the ‘interstices’ of our gender-constrained world.

This chapter argues that reading David Foster Wallace’s fiction ‘between philosophy and literature’ means proceeding via the work of G. W. F. Hegel. A towering philosophical figure, Hegel in his phenomenology posits an essential role for aesthetic expression in the progression of human understanding, while his science of logic and philosophy of history provide an alternative route to the ‘deep necessity’ that Wallace initially sought in analytic logic and maths. The chapter sets out from a phrase – ‘transcendence is absorption’ – that Hal Incandenza attributes to Hegel at the outset of Infinite Jest, and goes on to engage the work of the Hegelian art historian Michael Fried in order to think about what it means to create an absorbing work of art, and what the risks and opportunities of doing so might be. The chapter then examines how absorptive themes play out in the work of Infinite Jest’s primary artist figure, Hal’s father James Incandenza. It ends by examining one particular Incandenza film – more precisely, one character's viewing of that film – that provides the closest thing in Wallace’s novel to a model for what sincere artistic communication looks like in its achieved form.

Opening with a question about the scale of Shakespeare’s play, this chapter looks at three seminal productions of Antony and Cleopatra at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre: in 1972 Trevor Nunn (with Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson as his principals) scaled it to epic proportions; in 1978 Peter Brook re-sized it around Glenda Jackson and Alan Howard for intimacy; in 1982 Adrian Noble made it a chamber play, putting Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon on a postage-stamp-sized stage that nevertheless imagined a space ‘past the size of dreaming’. Each of these productions is contextualised to its cultural moment: the anti-Vietnam student protest and women’s liberation movements in 1972; the reassigning of global politics to the domestic in 1978; the challenging of institutional policies in 1982.

This chapter argues that David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Depressed Person’ (1998/1999) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) offer a comparable cultural critique and approach to casting critical-philosophical ideas into fiction. Dostoevsky is an important example for Wallace that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature; in both authors’ works, philosophy and literature are partly overlapping activities. However, despite these affinities, the connections between their fiction have so far remained under-researched. Furthermore, most critics have interpreted ‘The Depressed Person’ as expressing a supposedly inevitable failure of language and communication. This chapter argues against such interpretations, through a comparative close reading with Dostoevsky’s novella, tracing shared themes, motifs, and formal traits. Both texts portray their protagonists as a type, as an embodiment of the tendencies of their respective cultural formations. These tendencies foster hyperconsciousness, scepticism and spite, which lead to both protagonists’ distrust of communication, of successfully explaining themselves, that scholars have mistakenly interpreted as the view expressed by Wallace’s story as a whole. While the protagonists of ‘The Depressed Person’ and Notes from Underground fail to realize communication and empathy, the fictions of which they are part do achieve this and serve to make readers aware of their role in the realization thereof.

Starting from an understanding of Infinite Jest as a novel that appropriates the techniques of the Baroque visual regime, I will discuss how the issues of ‘anamorphosis’ and of the Lacanian ‘gaze’ play a fundamental, yet subterranean role in the thematic economy of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus. In Jacques Lacan’s formulation, the gaze pertains to the way an object looks back at the viewer. Lacan famously addressed this concept in Seminar XI by using the example of Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Ambassadors; in the painting an anamorphic undecipherable blot is revealed to be a skull once it is seen downward and through the left. The skull marks the site of the gaze in so far as it indicates the way the subject is inscribed in the picture, an experience that dismantles her sense of mastery and control. The encounter with the gaze constitutes an experience of the traumatic ‘real’, which marks the failure of our power to account symbolically for everything. There are several moments in Infinite Jest where experiences revolving around the gaze and anamorphosis are clearly illustrated. In showing this, the chapter proposes a reading of Infinite Jest as a path that leads outside ideology and towards the traumatic ‘real’.

This chapter argues, after Samuel Delany and Boccaccio, among others, for a poetics of precarious reconciliation, in which sanctity may take place in suspense and the body’s breaks may be honoured though they are never overcome. Poets such as Mary Karr and Mary Oliver come to take their place alongside philosophers and literary critics, as well as saints real and fake, in their embodiment of how the complications of life and language make crossover artists of us all.