This chapter locates Gavin Douglas’s poem, The Palyce of Honour, within a wider medieval tradition of dream vision poetry. Geoffrey Chaucer’s dream vision poems, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, as well as Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid are presented as intertexts to Douglas’s vision. Douglas’s text is shown to fracture typical expectations of the dream vision landscape, the dreamer’s interaction with this landscape, as well as the narrator’s conceptualisation of the process of recording the dream vision. The poem is then set in conversation with concepts of Italian humanist poetics, which conceived of the poet as a divine conduit, a prophet, that could transmit divinely inspired discourses. The framework of the narrative grotesque is applied in order to elucidate the ways in which Douglas warps the medieval genre to integrate humanist philosophies of poetics into his work.

This chapter explores the formulae available to the practising early modern dramatist, and the ways in which they were deployed. It takes the notion of the ‘meme’ – a recurrent formulation used to negotiate particular situations, both as phenomena to be repeated (and recognised by an audience) and as a starting point for theatrical and textual innovation.

A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene offers a unique insight into Spenser’s creative processes and the tools of his trade. It enables readers to review the variety of Spenser’s rhyming in a detail which has not previously been possible. In this study, Richard Danson Brown illustrates this rhetorical variety by focusing on a selection of key devices which are characteristic of the poem as a whole, and which stress the radical and hybrid aesthetic which underpins The Faerie Queen.

This chapter outlines the historiographical gap in Irish Studies in relation to the history of childhood, and, in particular, the lack of attention paid to the discursive treatment of childhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Metaphors of childhood and education, growth and development abound in debate and discussion concerning Irish Catholics in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This Introduction will also examine a number of political pamphlets and treatises about the status of Ireland which invoked the metaphor of Ireland as a child repeatedly, especially focusing on the pamphlet debate generated by the publication of William Molyneux’s celebrated (and very quickly notorious) Case of Ireland, Stated (1698), in which he tried to prove beyond any doubt that although part of the same family, Ireland was an equal partner to England rather than a subordinate child.

This essay looks at the botanical imagery in Titus Andronicus in order to interrogate the nature of revenge tragedy. In particular, it examines Shakespeare’s mistletoe image, a plant rich in mythic and legendary significance, but also noted in the period for its reputedly poisonous nature and for its mysterious propagation. Speculated to be poisonous, mistletoe was also deemed a ‘preservative against all poisons’ and was frequently given the name ‘All Heal’. As a kind of homoeopathic remedy where like heals like, mistletoe poisons in order to heal; likewise, revenge tragedy seeks to purge violence with violence, thereby restoring the body politic. Mistletoe’s noxious effects thus can serve as an analogy for the degradation and paradoxically generative poisoning of the Andronici line and of Rome. Revenge is feminised in the play as a fecund, breeding entity, so excessive in its fertility as to be potentially deadly. Revenge begets revenge. The revenge action in the play replicates the life cycle of mistletoe, mysteriously breeding and self-perpetuating. In its seemingly chaotic growth that threatens to overtake its host, mistletoe mirrors the social disintegration of the revenge plot. Yet by yoking the revenge action to generating plant bodies, particularly mistletoe, Shakespeare effectively creates a macrocosmic perspective that undermines, or at least reconfigures, revenge tragedy within the larger context of the cycles of nature.

During the early modern period, syphilis went by many names, but one of the most common was lues venera or ‘plague of Venus’, which suggests not simply an illness associated with sexual intercourse, but one linked with the female deity who embodies erotic love. In popular literature, and even in some medical tracts, the bodies of women were often presented as little more than delivery systems for poison. Owing in part to a lack of lexical fixity within medical literature, ‘poison’ was used to describe not only venoms and toxins, but infections and contagious pathogens as well. Mistrust and misunderstanding of female anatomy in the period contributed to the misapprehension that women were immune from venereal infection yet capable of transmitting the disease. In numerous texts from the early modern period, narratives about the pox are yoked with the long-established trope of the ‘venomous woman’ or poison damsel, which features a female body that is literally toxic and even sometimes intentionally infused with poison so that she may be used as both assassin and assassin’s weapon. Within the plays, female sexuality is portrayed as predatory, coercive, and deadly. However, in the syphilis-savoured poison-damsel dramas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critiques of the feminine extend beyond the realm of sexual excess and into the arena of social mobility. In these works, the erotic and the economic merge so that female desire itself is rendered toxic – and for those infected with this poison, there is no hope for palliation, only extermination.

Poison, race and magic were materially and metaphorically linked in early modern English theatre. When Black bodies were racially simulated on stage, their characters were prevented from being accepted into what we might call the ‘white world order’ of their respective plays. That is, in cases of Black isolation – where Black characters were surrounded by an all-white, European, dramatis personae – Black bodies were seen as a poisonous toxin that contaminates the white populace, in particular white women. As such, Black bodies were themselves poisoned to preserve this white world order. This essay examines literal and ideological poisoning in Othello, William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet. Othello and The Lost Lady, two plays of the early modern period that were performed by the King’s Men theatre company, extricate Blackness from their white, female, romantic leads. Harlem Duet, a modern response play to Shakespeare’s Othello, presents an alternative Black world order that is contaminated by a white, female, romantic antagonist necessitating the dissolution of a marriage and subsequent poisoning of Blackness. This essay demonstrates the paradox of poisoning Black bodies as a result of identifying them as poisonous themselves, through the medium of magic, specifically Egyptian magic. In the early modern imaginaryimagination, Egyptians were not only renowned for their expertise in mummification but also for their abilities in deploying magic to subjugate their victims. In order to purify the white, female body and preserve the white world order, the Black, Egyptian and often magical body must be poisoned.

This essay considers how Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech provides an important frame for the two potions in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In response to Romeo’s mention of a dream, Mercutio references Mab to acknowledge the phenomenon of demonic sleep – that is, sleep affected by demons. Contemporary theories about sleep all maintain that the mind’s defences are inhibited at night. Wakefulness allows people to distract their minds, whereas sleep leaves people especially vulnerable to Satanic persuasion. Treatises on the interpretation of dreams conclude that the Devil’s delusions often seduce people to actions that prove destructive to themselves. The two potions in the play similarly corrupt the senses and understanding. Both still the blood, stop the heart, and induce oblivion, and the text suggests only distillation differentiates them. Despite this, Juliet’s concerns about her draft conform with the period’s belief that sleep is an imitation of death, and her apprehension indicates that the potion makes her especially susceptible to demonic influence. Unable to defend her body, she reasons the resorting spirits and noisome smells ‘together with the terror of the place’ will drive her to commit suicide upon waking (4.3.33–54). Examining contemporary medical tracts and theories on sleep as a frame for its readings, this essay argues the play’s representations of poison and sleep (and their mutual connections to the Devil) perform early modern anxieties about humans’ physical and spiritual vulnerabilities to demons.

Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656) includes two heroines who strategically procure poison to attempt suicide to escape threatening men: Lady Miseria in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ and the She-Anchoret. Cavendish was clearly familiar with the use of poison as a narrative detail in her romances, so her plays might well have been littered with poisonous death given the heavy influence of a long history of Renaissance tragedies. Cavendish wrote many more comic than tragic plays, but of the two she herself deemed tragicomedies, The Matrimonial Trouble contains her only use of poison. Throughout Cavendish’s many dramatic works, poison and its several variants – potions, venom, and draughts for good or ill – appear often, but not as a weapon. More often, she connects poison to words and their influence, and more specifically, to women’s words and the influence of their physical presence. This chapter traces Cavendish’s use of poison, as object and descriptive metaphor, as motif and literal action, in several of her dramatic works. It demonstrates that Cavendish’s use of ‘poison’ was strategically gendered, but also ambiguous given that she uses ‘poison’ in a similar way to her detailed discussion of remedies emerging from her personal experience and her interest in chemistry. In every instance, and in every form, we are left to consider the distinction between poison and remedy.