This chapter offers a survey of the language of source study in relation to Shakespeare that initiates the enquiry into the breadth of Shakespeare’s reading, what was available to him, and how these materials find their way into the discourse of source study and thence into the work of the practising early modern dramatist.

Chapter 7 explores how the lockdown in response to the coronavirus interacted with these nationalising moves. The key debate of the initial lockdown period saw the health of the nation pitted against the wealth of the nation, which ended up in unprecedented interventions such as furloughing that brought together nation and state. Coupled with displays of patriotism – clapping for carers, and rallying around that classic symbol of post-imperial Britishness, the NHS – one might expect this to be nationalising. Yet the response also further exposed the tensions in Britain’s constitutional set-up, pushing it further towards break-up.

The ‘Children’s Corner’ is the preferred name among modern critics for the first eight items in MS Ashmole 61 – among them a saint’s life (St Eustace), a romance (Sir Isumbras), and six conduct texts – which may have been aimed at a particular subset of the household. Focusing on this first portion of the manuscript shows how human social virtue depends on acknowledging and cooperating with human and non-human associates in the household ecology. Within this section of the manuscript, the imaginative narratives instruct through animals and other non-human figures, while the direct-address conduct texts (spoken by a father, a mother, and ‘Dame Curtasy’) teach pragmatically. A new materialist reading of this section reveals the recurring method of decentring the human and including objects in society, which encourages reading even conduct texts beyond the constraints of their overt performative instructions. This chapter demonstrates the important effects of premodern conceptualisations of the physical world on reading, on interpretation then and now, and on our understanding of and engagement with the Middle Ages.

The general argument of this study is that Spenser weakens rhyme, and does so because of the problems it poses for narrative, and because he wishes to direct attention away from the manner of his writing to the subject of that writing, to what he is writing about: Spenser’s verse aspires to the condition of blank verse, Spenser’s language aspires to the condition of transparency. Each of these entails the weakening of rhyme, of which the massive repetition in various forms is one factor. After some general comments about rhyme, the author analyses some relevant practices of poets other and often later than Spenser, to gain some purchase by comparison and contrast, before coming to a detailed examination of the relevant aspects of Spenser’s rhyme. Lastly the author bruits some consequences of Spenser’s treatment of rhyme for his language and our reading of The Faerie Queene.

This chapter presents the French courtly love debate, the demande d’amour, as the scaffolding that supports William Dunbar’s longest poem, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. The demande d’amour is assessed against the conventions typical of the French form as well as a near-contemporary Scottish example, Sir Gilbert Hay’s inset demande in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. This leads into a broader discussion of poetics in fifteenth-century Scotland, especially as represented in Dunbar’s wider corpus. Next, the composition of the locus amoenus, the frame garden, is contextualised by other examples from Dunbar’s poetry. The narrator’s role in the poem is shown to be highly influential to the concepts of narratology and subjectivity. These various aspects of the text are demonstrated to intersect at moments of narrative grotesque where conventions and expectations are ruptured and reformed in distorted and dissonant ways.

Chapter 3 offers a detailed study of the plays of Ben Jonson, who shows an interest in sound in the abstract as well as in the form of practical stage effects. His use of sound is shown to be contradictory, torn between classical precedent and popular demand, between the power of silence and the difficulty of controlling noise on the early modern stage. His paratextual material dwells on the listening audience; his poetry expresses an awareness of Aristotle’s and Horace’s sonic theories. Aware of his conscious use of sonic theory in the abstract, Chapter 3 nevertheless focuses on Jonson’s interest in the bodily production of sound. It follows work on the embodied voice as a sonic effect by both Bruce Smith and Gina Bloom, who separately consider the implications of ‘sounding through’, one possible etymology of the term ‘persona’ from the Latin per-sonare. For Smith, a human being is ‘through-sounding’, defined by the act of hearing the vibrations of external sounds; for Bloom, the term is more firmly associated with the masks of Latin and Greek drama that ‘helped amplify the actor’s voice via a resonating chamber in its forehead’. For Jonson, the body of an actor (the dramatic persona) and the body of an instrument are interchangeable means through which he can produce sound.

This chapter argues that texts deploy particular strategies that function to complicate the processes of borrowing. The early modern genealogies of texts problematised issues of what we now regard as ‘plagiarism’, and this chapter seeks to expose the specifically literary investments that critics have made in their attempts to trace specific textual links between the plays and antecedent literary texts.