This extends the study initiated in Chapter 7 to consider some of the ways in which Shakespeare continually returned to, and reworked, elements of his earlier plays, to the point where we should consider him as a dramatist who could fabricate his own resources, repeat and extend them in a number of different directions.

Chapter 3 uses the recent ‘hostile environment’ changes to the NHS as an exemplar of nationalisation to explore how and why the formal and informal boundaries of British nationhood have been drawn inward. In doing so, the chapter tells the story of post-imperial and post-war British nationhood, its relationship to race and immigration, and the role of the NHS – and how these became problematised in the context of austerity and scarcity.

This chapter considers how aquarium texts were used to assert specific views of science, scientists, and their role in society. In order to situate the vogue within the broader context of mid-century discourses on nature, three themes, which often resurfaced in discussions of the tank, are analysed: the relation between the rhetoric of wonder and a specific idea of science, the fight against ‘old errors’ as a way of policing truth and claiming authority, and the view of science as a collective endeavour. Finally, the aquarists’ perception of the tank’s value as a scientific tool is investigated, tracing the shift from the initial glowing expectations to the recognition that such hopes had to be severely downsized

If Ireland was the ‘child’ to ‘adult’ England in much political debate, a large nursery in which the natives would, if left to themselves, play forever in a kind of dreamtime, it was also represented as the home of childish ‘monsters’, oddities and biological and anatomical curiosities whose very existence was a threat to order and stability represented by the adult male. This chapter examines the representation of Ireland as both inhabited by monsters, and childishly monstrous itself, and the multiple political ends these representations could serve. The chapter examines Gulliver’s Travels, and reconsiders it as a ‘child’s book’ about monstrous perspectives, particularly appropriate from a man living in Ireland. Having established that the ‘monstrous’ child and the Irish have long been associated, the chapter then turns to the treatment of a child giant in Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory (1794), a much neglected early gothic text by an Irish author. The chapter treats this novel as a case study of the ways in which monstrous children could be made the embodiments of revolutionary nationalism in the late eighteenth century. The main character in this text is a perfectly proportioned child giant whose body represents the revived fortunes of a dejected and defeated family crushed by powerful enemies within the state. Cullen pointedly associates this child giant with bardic nationalism, alluding to figures such as Ossian and Carolan, in ways that suggest this novel is intended as an intervention into Irish political and cultural history.

Defining what this study means by sound, noise, speech and music, this introduction explores early modern sound effects and introduces the different methodologies through which they will be read. Using Everard Guilpin’s satire as a model, it offers a ‘soundwalk’ through early modern London, revealing the soundscape in which the plays discussed were performed. The introduction then breaks down the ways in which sound is received: by audience and by readers. it considers the role of the audience as listener, completing an ‘O’ of sound in which sound is made for and by playgoers. It also examines written records of sounds, not only in printed stage direction but in manuscript annotations. Finally, underscoring this book’s interest in the relationship between sound, space and body, it ends with a moment in Antony and Cleopatra in which a mysterious sound heard from beyond (or below) the playing space becomes a metaphor for this book’s wider work in retracing the sounds of the early modern stage.

This chapter charts the history of the emergence of a critical vocabulary for dealing with source study as formulated initially by Bullough and developed by others. It initiates an examination of the conceptual framework that has underpinned the study of sources. This chapter also contains a review of some of the more recent critical attempts to break free from established methods of source enquiry.

The introduction details the scope and aims of the book, discussing the variety of functions acquired by Victorian home aquaria. In particular, since Victorians tended to conceptualise tank keeping mostly in terms of visual pleasure, it connects the hobby with wider changes in the understanding of attention and vision. It then discusses the literary quality of aquarium texts, explaining why this was so crucial to the fortunes of Victorian tank keeping.

The second wife’s response is demonstrated to be a sort of distorted mirror of the first wife’s: she adopts many of the motifs, expressions, and concepts introduced in the first response, but reforms them anew. She also flytes her husband, but her flyting is more concerned with the performance of courtliness and courtly love. Her response includes an inset literary complaint, which is wholly unusual for the mode. In addition to highlighting similarities between her complaint and that delivered by the dreamer in Palyce, Richard Holland’s The Buke of the Howlat and The Quare of Jelusy are presented as Scottish intertexts. Concepts of melancholia and lovesickness are interwoven throughout her speech to create a grotesquely warped conglomeration of signification.

The Introduction outlines the key puzzle of the book: how and why has Britain found itself with its formal economic authority as limited and national as it has ever been? The chapter outlines the main concept that the book uses to address this puzzle: nationalisation. The term is commonly used in a limited way to refer just to the public ownership of industry, infrastructure, utilities, etc, but here it is used to characterise the process in which the state is made more national. Through this lens, we can start to see how Britain was historically an empire-state-nation and only starting looking like a nation-state in the post-war era. That nationalisation process, however, looks quite different to the nationalisation seen in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Despite the significant weaknesses (seen in human attempts at severing communion with the non-human, both worldly and divine) elsewhere in the collection, MS Ashmole 61 concludes with three vivid narratives of successful human reincorporation. St Margaret provides a transitional model, with the saint’s body a battleground on which false sacraments are transformed into true ones (boiling oil becomes holy unction; water torture becomes baptism) through the heroine’s collaboration with a piece of the holy cross, an angel, evil dragons, and her own prayer. This poem harmonises previously ruptured material and spiritual elements. Sir Orfeo models selective rewriting through the transformation of the classic tale of loss into one of recuperation, achieved by the hero through rejecting his human exceptionalism and uniting with his harp and living harmoniously among wild animals, ultimately becoming a human-tree hybrid that achieves his aims through working with rather than fighting his non-human opponent. The collection ends with the unique text King Edward and the Hermit, in which a scene of potential disharmony – latent in deer carcasses that in a different assemblage would have generated royal ire – is prevented through the intervention of a game that, with the assistance of alcohol, successfully reconstructs a relationship.

In this chapter the first response, delivered by the ‘first wife’, is examined in detail. Her response is shown initially to inhere with the conventional demande d’amour, despite veering towards sexual innuendo and humour. Her fantasy of free love and female sovereignty is compared to medieval conduct literature, especially the Scottish poem The Thewis off Gud Women. Her response, however, abruptly shifts tone, subject matter, and form in order to deliver an excoriating flyting against her husband. The Scottish poetic invective form depends on a vivid and horrifying vocabulary of abuse in order to deride opponents. The wife ably employs this in her attack on her husband, which reveals explicitly the sexual and emotional abuse to which she is subject. Her fluid discourse once again shifts as she casts herself as manipulating her husband with sexual favours in exchange for luxury material items. The complex and uncomfortable tone and subject matter created by the trio of themes is explicated by the narrative grotesque: William Dunbar destroys conventional ‘languages of love’ and perceptions about eloquent emotional expression and replaces them with discourses that meld horror and humour. This displacement of one pole of expression for another, however, is shown to be equally problematic in terms of subjectivity, authenticity, and veracity.