In response to an internet search for 'Sir Walter Ralegh in art', the 'Public Domain Clip Art' website retrieves two items: the first by Nicholas Hilliard and the second by 'H' monogrammist. Hilliard's miniature of Ralegh, earlier thought to be Henry Howard, was painted in 1585 at the height of Ralegh's influence with Queen Elizabeth I. In the portrait by 'H' monogrammist, executed in 1588, the NPG panel draws attention to Ralegh's pearls: 'Ralegh's dramatic costume is lavishly embellished with pearls, symbols of purity and much favoured by Elizabeth I. Agnes Latham was to declare in her opening remarks to her 1929 edition of Ralegh's poems that 'it is difficult to believe in Walter Ralegh. Among the treatments of Ralegh's life in T. N. Brushfield's bibliography was the famous assessment of Ralegh's undertakings in Ireland by John Pope Hennessy.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about art and power on William Shakespeare's stage, and how the sovereignty of the playwright is complicated by his service as a player. It argues that his plays are systematically engaged in untying freedom from royalty by dismantling sovereignty in all its forms. The book describes the Hamlet as the great refusal of the absolutist system symbolized by such triumphal facades. King Lear is its author's profoundest critique of his own Ubu- like 'abject position', of the perverse power of weakness, the queer art of failure, and the absolutism of the autonomous artwork. As a King's Man, Shakespeare may himself have 'borne the canopy' on one of the triumphal arches at King James's coronation in 1604.

This chapter explores the ways in which the play's opening storm allows for a reading of the weather in the text. In Back To Nature, Robert N. Watson, exploring As You Like It, 'interprets the longing for reunion with the world of nature as a sentimental manifestation of a philosophical problem: the suspicion that our cognitive mechanisms allow us to know things only as we liken them'. The chapter argues that the possibilities and the connotations of the theatrical storm are repeatedly investigated during the play and that this process is part of The Tempest's wider concern with the dramatic representation of nature. William Shakespeare is careful to complement the staging of the storm effects with the dramatic language of his characters. Although the storm is an illusion, the actions and diction of the crew are firmly grounded in Jacobean reality.

The turn of the new millennium was a key event for Spanish poetry, and Spanish society in general. On the social and historical front, the Partido Popular, which had been in power since 1996, enjoyed an absolute majority in the 2000 elections. The terrorist attacks of 2004 in Madrid, known in Spain as 11-M, were a decisive factor in the following elections, won with an absolute majority by the Partido Socialista Obrero Español. In the poetic field, the younger authors facing the new millennium seemed to completely abandon the old skirmishes and confrontations so prevalent in the 1990s, despite still following a mainly commonsensical poetic expression. The visual arts and the prevalence of visual culture in the new millennium, in television, cinema or the plastic arts, also had a significant effect on the poetry being written. Purism and metapoetry were interesting aspects that the poets of the new millennium explored.

In cantos ii-iii Spenser allegorizes the history of the heavenly City’s relationship with the visible institutions that have failed to accommodate it: Abessa’s flight represents the rejection of the gospel by the Synagogue; Una’s miserable night in the house of Corceca represents the fate of the redeemed in a superstitious pre-Reformation Church. Joined by Archimago, and attacked by Sans Loy, Una represents the abiding predicament of the redeemed. The allegory of Christ’s life (and death) on earth incorporates a quasi-prophetic allegory of the history of the Church under Henry VIII: the lion’s slaughter of Kirkrapine, for instance, alludes both to Christ’s expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple and to the dissolution of the monasteries.

Simon Harward was obviously affected by the lightning experience, as it moved him to write his pamphlet, A Discourse of the Several Kinds and Causes of Lightnings. Harward, William Fulke and other writers of meteorological texts understood that some clouds are invested with a particular energy which results in lightning. But whilst the understanding of lightning in early modern England was broadly agreed upon, there was a wealth of poetic resonance in the detail. Writers have long called on lightning when an image of swiftness is required, and of course, William Shakespeare and his contemporaries were no different. Just as the lightning in Homer was often literal and deadly, so the manifestations of it in early modern England were terrifying, as Harward found. Lightning was much more than a representation for speed, and whether harmless or destructive, metatheatrical or metaphorical, its range of meaning provided a wide resource for writers.

This chapter presents the anthologies of Spanish contemporary poetry including Chico Wrangler by Ana Rossetti, Como me dueles, mujer by Julia Otxoa, Presos los dos by Almudena Guzman and Penelope by Juana Castro. 'Chico Wrangler' revolves around the expression of desire by the poetic voice towards a male figure whose only identity is that of modelling Wrangler jeans. The Como me dueles, mujer can be viewed as a gender-engaged composition, one that serves as a severe criticism of the idealisation of female beauty, how some women might behave or how women may be forced to behave by society. In 'Presos los dos', the female character does not act as a passive agent but rather establishes an equal relationship between both genders. The Penelope features many of the characteristics that epitomised the boom of poetry written by women in Spain.

The theorist of political theology considered that Shakespeare was committed to the myth of divine right, and in allusions like the one to touching for the 'King's Evil' as 'A most miraculous work in this good King. William Shakespeare's framing of the body of the monarch in the mirror of Macbeth has come to be viewed as one of the definitive statements of Baroque court art. In Portrait of the King Louis Marin described how the Eucharistic doctrine of sacral kingship came in France to be disastrously identified with his body natural. For a survivor of Hitler and Stalin, such as Kott, the 'double trouble' of Macbeth is the nightmare of the criminal state. The stirrer of 'double trouble' in Macbeth was obsessed by the doppelganger story of Cain and Abel, writes R.A. Foakes in his study Shakespeare and Violence, but with a sense of the arbitrariness of God's empowerment.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the Shakespeare's storms, that can be read along-side a wide range of storms written by his contemporaries. It argues that Shakespeare's investment in storm in Julius Caesar is a canny and financial one, for Shakespeare seriously considered the impact of the special effects of thunder and lightning when writing staged storms. The book shows that Macbeth stages different concepts of the weather, between natural and supernatural and keeps them ironically separate. It focuses on King Lear, speaks to ecocritical ideas about wilderness and shows that the play's representation of nature has been misunderstood. The book describes the discourses of performance history and ecocritisim to argue that Shakespeare's storms have so far been misread or ignored.

Alan Stewart traces the theatre’s thematic and structural engagements with early printed newsbooks. Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI makes structurally central the unreliability of newsletters, particularly from France, which had become by the late sixteenth century the primary model for early printed newsbooks. It is not only the formal features of the newsbook that matter for Stewart, but their impact on the shape of the English history play, with its re-imagining of past events (reported in the chronicles with a seeming inevitability) as chaotic and uncertain.

The term poetry of experience was first employed in relation to Spanish poetry in 1959 by Jaime Gil de Biedma. A review of critical works and poetic publications throughout the last twenty years demonstrates that poesía de la experiencia is the label, and the trend, that has created the greatest controversy in Spanish contemporary literature. The so-called poesía de la diferencia was an assembly of poets that came together to claim their right to write poetry following a different aesthetic to the dominant one. Under the all-encompassing label of poesía metafisica readers could find epic poetry, Neo-surrealism, hermetic trends or poesía del silencio, all of them greatly different in terms of aesthetics. The arguments even prompted the publication of an anthology, El sindicato del crimen: antologia de la poesía dominante, behind whose pseudonym was the experiential poet Felipe Benítez Reyes.

The dismemberment of Hipplytus (described in canto v) is one of many instances of division and dispersal that characterize the demonic counterparts of Una and her allies. Una’s contrasting oneness testifies to Judeo-Christian monotheism, and to Atonement. Una is “one” in the sense that she is healed and whole. Although her number is, paradoxically, increasing, that number is united into “one body” (which stands as a rebuke to the tragic division of Christendom).

At an unspecified point during the night before she leaves Archimago’s house in canto ii, Una changes. Spenser’s reticence on the question of how the change took place intimates that it was the product of election, described by Calvin as God’s “secret adoption.” As Calvin notes, God chooses his children not “in themselues” but “in his Christ,” and it is in accordance with Calvin’s doctrine that Spenser goes on to incorporate his allegory of the Incarnation in canto iii. In using the lion to represent Christ, Spenser follows Biblical and medieval traditions. The meaning of the lion’s appearance is conveyed in part by the intense emotion with which the scene is suffused.