The remarkable poem traditionally attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh, 'As You Came from the Holy Land', deserves special attention, both for its remarkable poetical resonance and as an indication of broader cultural shifts in late Elizabethan England. There is, as with so many poems ascribed to Ralegh, some question concerning the poem's authorship. Ralegh's Walsingham poem is all the more interesting since it was written in the heart of Elizabeth's Protestant court at a time when Catholics were menacing to both England's state religion and its nationhood. The Walsingham poem records a moment of equivalent disillusion with the mortal, virgin Queen. There is certainly no alternative virgin Queen, no replacement of one heavenly Virgin Queen by another. Instead, in the poem's devotional world, it is the grieving married lady of Penshurst who replaces the Lady of Walsingham.

C. S. Lewis has, influentially, characterized the lion of FQ I.III as “a type of the natural, the ingenuous, the untaught.” But Lewis’s was an almost literal reading. The lion allegorizes, in accordance with tradition, for Christ Incarnate. Spenser here and elsewhere implies that it is the confusion of the allegorical with the Incarnational that characterizes, and even defines, idolatry.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents historical and literary work on Sir Walter Ralegh's courtly context, including the new editions of letters and poems. It highlights aspects of Ralegh as writer and his visual image that are the subjects of new or renewed scholarly interest. The book examines the complex, ambiguous relationship between Raleigh and Edmund Spenser while they were part of the English settlement in Ireland and afterwards in London. It analyses the famous exchange between Christopher Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd to his Love' and Ralegh's 'Nymph's Reply', and the four centuries of variations on that theme. The book focuses on visual presentations of Ralegh, a man famous for outward ostentation.

Aristotle supposed that winds were analogous to rivers in that each was a largely contained system with its own idiosyncrasies. In early modern texts, however, the emphasis is rather different. Wind was far from being an element of the definition of storms as in today's language. William Fulke goes on to describe the pleasantness of this wind, which seems to be what we would now call a summer breeze. Fulke's approach to the causes of wind seems to have persuaded his contemporaries and followers. Roger Warren glosses Gower's note of the wind's direction as 'north wind'. In Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, a voyage to Tripolis is described as troubled by tempest, as 'presently there arose a mighty storme, with thunder and raine, and the wind at North'. The north wind might be understood in another way, as shown by John Deacon in his 1601 work, Dialogicall Discourses.

Readers of Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596) expected solid gold, as did Ralegh himself during his voyage the previous year. The aquascape of Guiana infuses the Discoverie, combining linguistic and fluvial forms of liquidity. As Ralegh suggests, to have an island of one's own is also to paint, to draw upon, to create. Ralegh uses the anecdote to address the question between fiction and truth that haunts his History; and yet he describes conjectures in a tolerant, even amused tone. It is amusing to imagine Ralegh brushing up on his alchemy during the long voyage of 1595, but his chemical background proves more consequential when we take into account the Discoverie's composition. By ushering in the Travels, Ralegh demonstrates his larger endeavour in the Discoverie to blur the boundaries between fiction and fact.

This chapter focuses on Howard Barker's musee imaginaire, or more precisely on some of his memories of paintings that had a part in the making of his plays and on the ways in which they inform his dramatic discourse. Barker's theatre appeals as much to the audience's memory of great artworks as it does to their recollection of verbally mediated myth and history. The presence of a pictorial reminiscence in a play by Barker usually results from his interrogation or contradiction of a painting. Barker's essay 'Goya's Grin', published prior to the premiere of the opera Terrible Mouth, illustrates the way in which he reads and adapts pictures in his theatre. Barker's best-known iconotext, Scenes from an Execution, not only makes a painting the protagonist of a play, but also presents a complex mise-en-scene of a work of art.

Thanks to the Incarnation, Una participates in the nature of God. It is in accordance with this that she has a strongly Trinitarian aspect. Her identification with the Trinity is made most obvious through the House of Holiness, which is inhabited by three quasi-divine matrons and an overlapping, generally younger, triad. Una is also identified with the Trinity through her affiliation with the medieval figure of Sapience, as treated in the Horologia Sapientiae of Henry Suso. Una’s three animals suggest Christ as God Incarnate, reflecting the interdependence of the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ—which are proclaimed, respectively, in the first and second of the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Howard Barker has written over a hundred dramatic works, six published volumes of poetry, two books of philosophical and aesthetic theory and a third-person autobiography/reflection on practice. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book reviews a range of voices, including those of theatre practitioners, scholars and civilian enthusiasts from a range of nations, ages and backgrounds, to analyse Barker's astonishing range of imaginative ambitions and practical achievements. Barker's writing and direction combine to create theatre events which will often create a sense of plethora for the audience. Barker's play The Fence in its Thousandth Year is a preeminent dramatisation of the realisation that eros 'is an issue of boundaries', it exists because of certain boundaries. The book provides a series of complementary essays on different facets of Barker's remarkable body of artistic work, in and across different media.

This chapter presents the anthologies of the Spanish Contemporary Poetry including Somos and Partida de billar by Oscar Martin Centeno, and Un dos piezas and Un oasis: El-Habla by Carlos Pardo. 'Somos' can be read as a passionate poem about the search for an identity. 'Partida de billar' is an intimate and desolate love poem that strives to accept the overwhelming sadness of a relationship that is over. Carlos Pardo's 'Un dos piezas' explores the theme of identity highly popular amongst the most recent poets in Spain through a graphic and metapoetic quest in the composition. 'Un oasis: El-Habla' is a humorous poem that imitates Arabic in its title. The chapter also presents Hemos vuelto a recorrer and El extranjero deja la ceniza en un poema by Oscar Aguado, Vi(d)as cruzadas and Dia del espectador by Virginia Canto, and Esta manana supe and Epilogo by Vanesa Perez-Sauquillo.

Matthew Zarnowiecki examines an Elizabethan literary and textual form that is a product of collective authorship: the poetic miscellany Love’s Martyr. Zarnowiecki sees the miscellany’s formal and material features as enabling particular ways of reading. Love’s Martyr invites, even demands, its readers approach its poems and essays as part of a collective poetic enterprise—as a chorus, or a conversation, on a single theme.

Repetition is a feature of Howard Barker's writing, constituting a principle in his plays. Report of news from offstage is another feature of Barker's writing, one which serves to amplify meaning. Barker believes that 'Tragedy places the actor at the centre of its undertaking, demanding powers of an unearthly kind from him or her of articulation and invention'. The role of the actor in Barker's own form of tragedy is the ultimate concern; in particular, the 'unearthly' powers of invention in speech that renews, amplifies and makes real the onstage reality. From its inception, Barker's company, The Wrestling School, has faced the challenge of how to act Barker. Dramatic and thematic foci are repeated in works such as 13 Objects and Wounds to the Face, which use repetition as a structural device similar to that of musical theme and variation.

Howard Barker's Gertrude - The Cry, first performed in 2002 in Elsinore. Gertrude, does take the question of the link between intertextuality and authorship one step further by literally focusing on Hamlet's matrix, his point of origin, his mother Gertrude. This chapter examines how Barker creates, within the plot of Gertrude, a systematic ambiguity surrounding the questions of genealogical relations. It analyses Barker's poetics of intertextuality and how they apply to the relation between his play and Shakespeare's. The chapter explains how Barker's refusal of recognition creates a specific aesthetic framework for those who venture into his work. Barker's Gertrude can in many ways be considered as Hamlet's offspring. In Gertrude Jane's birth throws off the fragile balance of genealogical order by provoking a series of reversals and upheavals underlined by the text.