The traditional way of conceiving source study is to think of it as an elephants’ graveyard. This conclusion proposes that in what was considered a ‘graveyard’ there is a very live ‘elephant’ that enacts dynamically with what it encounters. The textual resources that Shakespeare deploys are not inert or skeletal; they are dynamic, and that dynamism is repeated in the ways in which subsequent generations of writers have appropriated, deployed, plagiarised Shakespearean texts and made of them literary artefacts.

The conclusion draws together several correspondences and divergences between The Palyce of Honour and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. Textual hybridisation and transfiguration are noted as key themes; concepts of authenticity, veracity, and eloquence in poetic expression are also discussed in their various contexts in the two texts. This brief collation is presented as locus for further applications of the narrative grotesque in medieval texts. The literary complaint and animal allegories, specifically avian, are both touched on as possible venues for this strategy to be used.

Chapter 1 starts with the initial post-crash austerity era. The chapter provides a rereading of this period through nationalisation. In doing so, it shows that although austerity was justified through a ‘negative’ and economically dubious story of Labour’s fiscal irresponsibility, it was also justified through a ‘positive’ story of national renewal. To ‘live within means’ was also an implicit promise to restore the nation after a debt-fuelled moral decline. This was framed as restoring some of the values associated with Britain’s supposed historical glories and national values, thereby making the state more congruent with the nation.

In the final chapter on The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, the widow’s response is shown to be the culminating speech in the text. Her discourse is delivered in the form of a medieval sermon. As a preacher, the widow is shown not to parody the genre nor use it ironically; rather, she engages the form as a suitable apparatus for delivering her exposition of a ‘venerean’ morality. This morality plays off of anti-feminist discourses and conduct literature. But, the widow’s sermon complicates any reading of the text as simply an embodiment of anti-feminist discourse; William Dunbar integrates various allusions to allegorical representations of Venus, especially as found in other Scottish poems, such as Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe and Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, in order to invest her discourse with a deep and pervasive ambivalence. The narrative grotesque shows the ways in which these influences and discourses are ligatured together in order to question modes of authority, rhetoric, and generic boundaries.

This Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene is based on a complete text of the poem prepared by J.B. Lethbridge, and lists every word in rhyme position in the verse portions of The Faerie Queene, including those of the arguments to each canto, of both endings to Book III and relevant variant forms throughout. Each word rhyming with the headword in each stanza in which that headword occurs is listed next to the headword; this list takes the place of the local line or phrase context supplied by an orthodox complete concordance. Against each rhyme is noted the numeric stanza reference (Book, canto, stanza) and an alpha reference giving the rhyme group in the stanza (‘a’-, ‘b’- or ‘c’-rhyme) formed by the terms listed in that entry. Terminal punctuation in the line has been reproduced.

The lists within this section are essentially elaborations of the main Concordance: lists of words in rhyme-position, organised by quantity (numerically) and alphabetically. These lists are controlled by lists of all words in The Faerie Queene, arranged similarly.The section is comprised of: Alphabetical List of Rhymes with Frequency and Distribution; All Words in The Faerie Queene Arranged Alphabetically; Rhymes in Order of Frequencey of Occurrence; All Words in The Faerie Queene Arranged in Order of Frequency of Occurrence; Reverse Index of Rhymes; The hapax legomena in Rhyme Position; Rhymes on Two Separate Words; List of Variant Forms Included in the Concordance; Names in Rhyme Position (Omitting Arguments); Hyphenated Rhymes.The list of rhymes organised alphabetically is of particular importance: it gives the distribution of rhymes by Book and canto in The Faerie Queene as well as the total number of occurrences. Such a listing will have many uses, but it is hoped that it might contribute to the analyses of the composition of The Faerie Queene.

Chapter 4 shows how a particular meaning of inequality became salient in the post-crash years. Scandals over undeserving poor and rich groups, coupled with new evidence of increasing income and wealth inequality, gave sense that a majority ‘squeezed middle’ were suffering and losing out from a rigged system. This imagined hierarchy created the conditions for the racialising ‘left behind’ representation that helped justify the Brexit project and coalesce its unusual coalition of support – an essential move in the nationalisation process studied in this book.

This chapter builds on the previous one by focusing more closely on the temporal dissonance and thus multiple subjectivities created between the two protagonists: Douglas the dreamer and Douglas the narrator. It is shown that their voices create an affective antinomy that appears most vividly at moments of textual rupture and fusion. This narrative grotesque reveals Gavin Douglas’s self-conscious exploration of the role of the poet and of poetics in society; a pursuit greatly influenced by the precepts of Italian humanism. This concern is in part demonstrated through the recurring motifs of harmony and transfiguration. Furthermore, his destruction of medieval dream vision conventions is shown through contrastive comparisons with Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame. The inset literary complaint is also demonstrated to multiply this destructive effect by reimagining the purpose and form of the complaint as a discourse about love.

This chapter focuses on the affective instruction that inanimate objects offer human members of the household in MS Ashmole 61, among them a collection of tools critiquing and defending their layabout master (Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools), a finger-pointing drinking horn (Sir Corneus), out-of-season cherries and gifts bearing distributive justice (Sir Cleges), an embodied document of religious redemption (Short Charter of Christ), and a host of household objects that test the embodied human’s commitment to social and spiritual ethics (Dietary). These non-human participants are not purely symbolic anthropomorphic figures: in none of these cases is the object presented a human-subject-in-drag or a direct representative of human (or divine) will. Instead, the materiality of the object remains central (not merely superficial) and the object behaves in terms of its particular network, influencing the human agents sharing that network but not acting solely for the benefit of the human.

Through the analysis of James Shirley Hibberd’s The Book of the Aquarium, Chapter 3 explores the ornamental functions that Victorian tanks were meant to perform: on the one hand, the aquarium was conceptualised as a mirror of its owner, situating the hobby within a cluster of social, moral, and economic discourses that did much to foster the vogue, endowing it with further resonance and meaning; on the other hand, though, such density of expectations might have contributed to the demise of tank keeping. The second part of the chapter considers the beauty of marine creatures in the tank and the ways in which it was framed, both conceptually and stylistically, through an array of literary strategies, which included emphasis on detail, creative analogies, and the extensive use of poetic language and poetic quotations. Many of these features were common in popular science writing, but aquarium texts strove to adjust their approach to the specificities of tank keeping, while participating in wider debates about the appropriate way to discuss natural phenomena for a broad and non-specialist public.

Chapter 6 analyses the Johnson government’s nationalising vision for post-Brexit Britain. By ‘unleashing Britain’s potential’ and ‘getting Brexit done’, the Johnson government promised national renewal. The chapter shows how post-EU nationalisation differs from post-imperial nationalisation: not as inward-looking in terms of global capitalism, as policies such as freeports show, and more divisive through stoking culture wars issues over the moral character of the nation.