Working with the understudied writings of the ‘little academy’ convened by the Ferrar family at Little Gidding (c.1631–33), this chapter explores how oral, handwritten and printed discourse became devotional by the grace of God and in the presence of God. Drawing on a hybrid blend of Humanist, post-Calvinist and Arminian influences, the Ferrars’ cerebral musings foraged the past to feed their present, as part of a cycle of theological, social and textual reappropriation. This research challenges and complements current thinking about the materiality of devotional culture. It also provides a unique insight into the trajectory of devotional endeavours from minority to mainstream, and how these were dissected and assimilated by the industrious learners at Little Gidding.

This chapter looks at Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra as a script for performance. It considers the play’s rhetorical ‘signature’, its sources, dramatic structure, scenic writing, characters and casting, and the challenge it offers performance in staging a series of six ‘big’ deaths. It asks: is this play tragedy, comedy, history or farce?

Herbert was a political as well as a religious poet. This chapter explores the common thread of peace that runs through several underexamined texts: George Herbert’s transnational poetic dialogue in Latin verse with Pope Urban VIII, his early Latin poems celebrating the marriage of Frederic V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine to Princess Elizabeth Stuart, his Latin oration at the return of Prince Charles and Lord Buckingham from Spain, and his concluding Communion poems in Lucus. Concluding with a discussion of the French poet Théophile de Viau, whom George’s brother Edward would have encountered in print in Paris, and perhaps also in person through the Duc de Montmorency, the chapter sees the trajectory of George’s career as pivoting in 1624, the culminating moment of his struggle for peace.

This chapter, which looks at Edward’s lute book and the continental music books of his library that he bequeathed to Jesus College, Oxford, argues that his musical activity is intimately connected with the cosmopolitan aspirations described in his autobiography. Music, for Cherbury, is far more than simple and superficial entertainment. Its practice complements his recognition of a universal human condition and the ideal of the cosmopolitan sage derived from his own brand of Stoicism. Cherbury discovers in music not the disjunction between microcosm and macrocosm, but the intertwinement of the two spheres. In the particularities and instantiations of its performance it reveals to him the universal truths his philosophy sought. Even within the walls of his private study – his microcosm – music places Cherbury in the context of a harmonious macrocosm, giving him a truly cosmopolitan perspective on the world.

This chapter argues that ‘Good Old Neon’ can be seen as a direct confrontation with the problem of other minds, and that it addresses this philosophical question through both its formal structure and its thematic content. Furthermore, I claim that through its presentation of its protagonist, Neal, the story suggests that understanding one’s relationship to others on the basis of the sceptical logic of a philosophical problem is seriously misguided. For Stanley Cavell, philosophical scepticism originates in ‘the attempt to convert the human condition … into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle’, and thereby to interpret ‘a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack’. This chapter claims that we can see Neal’s tendency to intellectualize the question of his own fraudulence, and his related sense of his own incommunicable interiority, as habits of mind that stop him seeing that the problem of his privacy is a human problem rather than an insoluble intellectual riddle.

In this short study, it is argued that co-operation between exiled anti-apartheid activists and black British activists in London became more evident in the 1980s. Focusing on the relationships forged between writers and within literary institutions, this ‘detour’ explores these activist networks through a consideration of the history of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books and through an exploration of the role that South African Lauretta Ngcobo played in forging alliances between black British and South African women writers. Exiled South African writers like Ngcobo shaped the direction of British publishing and anti-racist politics, even as their end goal remained forging solidarities that would help to turn the tide of apartheid in South Africa.

This chapter concludes a discussion that has run through the whole book, beginning with the observation that Shakespeare wrote Cleopatra as a black queen of Egypt, a representation that subsequent performance in Britain has whited out, most obviously since 1953, even as it has recruited black (or blacked-up) bodies to be placed alongside white Cleopatras as if, by juxtaposition, to annex to her elite body atavistic ideas of orientalism, exoticism, ‘hot’ sexuality. While ‘fringe’ theatres in the UK – the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow; the Hackney Empire; University College’s student theatre; the Royal Exchange, Manchester – installed blackness at the centre of their productions (as did numbers of foreign productions), the power centres of UK Shakespeare production – the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre -- cast a blind eye on Shakespeare’s racial writing in Antony and Cleopatra. That changed in 2013 when the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned Tarell Alvin McCraney to produce a ‘radical edit’ of the play, which he set on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue at the time of the 1791 slave rebellion. Relocating the play, McCraney mobilised a black history that re-ignited the race politics and recalculated the costs of regime change written into Shakespeare’s original.

David Foster Wallace was deeply involved in a tricky and vexed research on pornography from 1989, as the recurrence of this theme in several non-fiction essays, brief stories, novels, interviews, and archival documents makes clear. The analysis of pornography in Wallace’s oeuvre offers the opportunity both to further explore his commitment to other fundamental topics – such as the overlap between addiction and entertainment – and to understand the significance of this theme in his overall literary project. Thus, employing a chronological approach, the chapter focuses on some published writings and unpublished documents in the period which runs from 1989 to 2006. The chapter argues that Wallace mobilized the paradox of pornography – which he understood as the erotic engagement of the viewers and the denial of any form of relationship among viewers and performers – in order to show that there was another way to experience intimacy through an aesthetic practice, namely the act of reading which, as he often stressed, is characterized by a distinctive and powerful conversation between author and reader.

Chapter 1 examines writing by Peter Abrahams and Dan Jacobson, who both lived in London in the 1950s. Despite important differences, what these writers have in common is their affiliation, however ambivalent, with forms of liberal humanism, imbricated with their reading of canonic English literature. The chapter discusses the development of Peter Abrahams’s early works in 1940s London, the complex response to his 1954 memoir, Return to Goli (1954), and the representation of London’s Pan-African networks in A Wreath for Udomo (1956). The second section of this chapter explores the limits and uses of liberal humanism in postwar London, as presented in Dan Jacobson’s short story ‘A Long Way from London’ (1955). The comparison between the two writers affords a nuanced discussion of the entanglement of English education in South Africa with literature, liberal humanism and anti-racist and anti-colonial activism.

This chapter gets its title from the word spoken by the angel to Mary at the Annunciation, a greeting that at once surprises and recognizes its addressee. So, too, is transfiguration, for this book, a practice that surprises, that calls something new out of the world, even as it bears witness to what, in the world, has never not been there. Through Francis of Assisi no less than poets Donna Masini and Mary Szybist, the world we share with the Middle Ages is one that calls us out, takes us by surprise and restores us to ourselves.

Observing that after Shakespeare’s death, while Antony and Cleopatra survived in print, it disappeared from the English stage for the next 150 years, this chapter looks in detail at the play that replaced it on the Restoration stage: John Dryden’s All for Love, or The World Well Lost. It reads All for Love as a domestic drama for a formally correct but licentious age that conducts a psychomachia across a series of two-handed ‘debate scenes’: will Antony be summoned back to Roman duty – or will he remain tangled in the captivating toils of the Egyptian queen? The chapter then fast-forwards across a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions that all used Dryden’s text before Shakespeare’s, Dryden-free, was returned to the stage in 1849, just at the moment that ‘Egyptomania’ hit England and when spectacular Shakespeare, Shakespeare performed with eye-popping scenes and lavish costuming, was the rage. The chapter ends surveying twentieth-century productions of the play up to 1931, seeing earlier theatrical extravaganzas that necessitated deep textual cuts and re-ordering of Shakespeare’s scenes giving way, under the direction of Harley Granville Barker, to Shakespeare restored, with all his words and scenes, mostly uncut, played in the right order.