Heather James examines late-sixteenth- and early- seventeenth-century printed commonplace books, a form which played a vital role in elevating the status of English vernacular literature. James shifts our focus from this form’s place in English literary history to its impact on political subjectivity. For James, late-Elizabethan printed commonplace books enabled innovations in the ‘politics of reading’ through their organization of decontextualised sentences grouped together by topic, modelling a form of political conversation on even the most incendiary of subjects (i.e., tyranny)

This chapter considers the possibility that 'ocean' developed not only in reaction to Sir Walter Ralegh's courtly woes, including the Arthur Throckmorton disgrace of 1592, but also as a result, or reflection, of his colonial progress in the New World and Ireland. Ralegh's heroic actions while a soldier in Ireland also inspired allegorized episodes in Edmund Spenser's romance-epic The Faerie Queene, which is dedicated in part to Ralegh. Ralegh's poem was first published in 1870, soon after its discovery in Hatfield House, which location indicates that it may have been sent directly to the Cecils as original audience. Both Ralegh and Throckmorton would be exiled from Elizabeth's court. Like rapacious Lust, or a mad Irish king, Ralegh (and his wife) remains outside the pale of good repute.

Howard Barker's art of theatre has been rightly described as resolutely postmodern. Barker's postmodern stance can be synthesised along two different axes: structural and poetic. Barker engages in a subversion of the grand narratives he summons. Much more than other postmodern writers, Barker very often summons the narratives or stories that are instrumental in the constitution of the grand or meta- or master-narratives. Like other postmodern writers, Barker deconstructs the stories. Barker's language of tragedy precisely resemanticises the aporias of postmodernism: the markers of postmodernism are turned into markers of tragedy. Barker catches Lyotard in his own nets, calling postmodernism another grand narrative, thus refuting Lyotard's thesis as self-destructing and showing the possibility of transcending it. The grand narrative he invents rests on the divorce of reason and morals and on the universality of the dislocated subject.

In Adam Smyth’s study of Renaissance jests and jestbooks, textual production is characterized by a lack of authorship, since jokes never really have owners or authors. Circulated within a community of tellers, jests are extremely mobile, and this mobility is captured in print through the recounting of the telling, or performance, of the joke. Smyth’s essay plays with the ambiguity of ‘form’ to ask questions not only about the jest, but also about the jestbooks and manuscripts in which they circulated.

The novísimos were highly influenced by the mass media and new popular culture, and their literary influences stemmed mainly from outside Spain or from Spanish authors forgotten and ignored by the canon of the time. During the transition to democracy there were other voices that, linked to the novísimos, were also key to the cultural transition of the time. The official discourse on the Transicion portrays as one of optimism and positive transformation in which dialogue, agreement, negotiations and a bright future feature prominently in Spanish society: the moment in which Spain was able to finally exorcise its demons. Nueve novísimos poetas españoles included only one woman poet amongst the authors anthologised, the trend the novísimos started and the renewal they instigated in Spanish contemporary literature were key for the poetry written by women in 1980s.

The most fully realized vision of the intricately scripted life of Sir Walter Ralegh is achieved by Stephen Greenblatt. Like a favourite period ornament, Ralegh has made numerous appearances in film and television, but nearly always as a supporting player in someone else's story. In an ensuing scene, Ralegh is used to triangulate the relationship between Elizabeth and Essex. Despite Elizabeth's warnings against Essex travelling to Ireland to quell tyrone's rebellion, Essex does so with disastrous results, ultimately setting the stage for his own execution. Elizabeth proves herself the conqueror, and much of the film is a process of domesticating Ralegh, by degrees, through a series of indignities, and Ralegh fighting to free himself from that domestication. Ralegh begins the process of reclaiming his manhood and rejecting the world of Elizabeth's court when his honour is called into question in the Privy Council.

21 for 21 set out to mark the twenty-first birthday of Howard Barker's collaboration with The Wrestling School in the form of a one-day international festival of his work. In aspiration, it was designed to re-energise the perception of Barker and The Wrestling School both nationally and internationally. There is an interesting debate to be had about why The Wrestling School project should fall in the first round of Arts Council England (ACE) cuts, which are continuing in 2013. ACE, in all its iterations, had been The Wrestling School's principal funder and by his association as auteur, a key supporter of significant elements of Barker's practices. The Wrestling School contribution to the event included a staged reading by the company of Hurts Given and Received. This was within Barker's artistic control.

Shankar Raman’s essay argues that the very idea of creative invention—so central to modern assumptions about literary authorship—is embedded in philosophical and mathematical ideas and practices of making. By focusing on the “matter” of key geometrical texts, from Euclid to Descartes, Shankar Raman finds evidence of a radical change in the imagined purpose of geometric training, which he relates to new ways of thinking about poetic production. The descriptions and non-linguistic representations of algebraic and geometric problems found in Descartes’ project becomes analogous, in ways Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry seems almost to anticipate, to the poet’s struggle to make rather than to imitate.

This chapter presents the anthologies of Spanish Contemporary Poetry including Merece la pena by Luis Garcia Montero and El final de la fiesta by Felipe Benitez Reyes. 'Merece la pena (Un jueves telefionico)' traces the daily routine of the poetic voice. 'El final de la fiesta' can be read as a panegyric or an eulogy to youth and what it represents. The chapter also presents Domingos bajo las sabanas by Carlos Marzal and Herida de muerte by Maria Antonia Ortega. Drawing on many of the precepts of poesía de la experiencia with regard to style and content, the 'Domingos bajo las sabanas' makes an appeal to the senses, focusing particularly on the warmth re-created in the poem. 'Herida de muerte' perfectly portrays the spirit of poesía de la diferencia, a trend that strived for and claimed the right to write something different.

The storm of 1505 was not the only important storm of Luther's life. It seems that he had a susceptibility to the weather and that it substantially affected his temperament. During the early modern period, Luther was described approvingly as 'that sonne of thunder' and condemned as one who 'hath stered a mighty storme and tempest in the chirche'. Shakespeare's attention to the contradictions and mutability of weather interpretation is evident in all of his storm plays and particularly in Julius Caesar. Storms are an important metaphorical figure throughout Shakespeare's plays and especially for those characters who, like Cassius and Marina, are subjected to them. Shakespeare seriously considered the impact of the special effects of thunder and lightning when writing staged storms, whether creating the sense of the new Globe or using the Blackfriars' to gull the audience.

Christopher Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd to his Love' and Sir Walter Ralegh's 'Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd' were printed, certainly not for the first time, but in what have become their standard versions in Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. This was the first time 'The Nymph's Reply' was attributed to Ralegh, an attribution which has been generally accepted ever since. Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' is a pastoral invitation based on roughly similar invitations in Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid. Even before the first printed version of Ralegh's reply in 1599, Marlowe's poem had an immediate influence, and must have circulated quickly in manuscript. From England's Helicon to the present, Marlowe's and Ralegh's poems have been paired as standard inclusions in anthologies. A full appreciation of William Wordsworth's 'The Mad Mother' depends on the reader's perception of his deeply ironic troping of earlier poems in the Marlowe-Ralegh tradition.

Howard Barker was first invited to the Odeon theatre in Paris, in 1995 with his production of Hated Nighfall and with Kenny Ireland's production of The Castle, both presented by The Wrestling School. The Barker season in Paris gives us the opportunity to examine the response to his Theatre of Catastrophe by the various stage directors, the audience and the drama critics. Four productions, by three directors, were programmed at the Odeon. The opening production stood apart from the rest of the season for several reasons: Gertrude was a French premiere whereas Knowledge and a Girl/Blanche-Neige and The Europeans/Les Europeens were not. Gertrude was the only play to be performed in the Odeon Italian theatre itself, the other three plays being staged in the outskirts of Paris. Barker's immediately subsequent French productions included another production of Gertrude and Guillaume Dujardin's production of Deep Wives, Shallow Animals in Paris, September 2009.

Poetry by women in the 1980s was seen as a breath of fresh air, in the sense that it provided the reader with innovative experiences and different points of view. Ana Rossetti's poem in the anthology clearly engages with the subversion of gender conventions and objectifies the male body, challenging traditional models and embracing sexual freedom. Almudena Guzman's poem involves alterations to gender dynamics in a romantic relationship and draws on unashamed sexual innuendo despite an apparent innocence. Julia Otxoa's poem is an example of powerful gender-engaged poetry, and a composition that highlights the sexualisation and fragmentation of the female body and the consequences of this for women. Juana Castro's poem is a highly committed composition in terms of gender, as it deals with gender discrimination and inequality, drawing on the role of women in society in countries other than Spain.

William Shakespeare span many sad stories about the 'bare/ruin'd choirs' and 'thorny point of bare distress', caused by England's textile-driven capitalist revolution. Historian Paul Veyne likens Shakespeare to Michel Foucault for his 'sceptic renouncement' of a self- presence that would make sense of the world. Shakespeare was, not the first to pathologize the infuriating silence of the 'Spartan dog' who hides himself behind impenetrable lies, as Katharine Eisaman Maus demonstrates in her study of interiority. The physical act of kneeling embodies the paradoxical power of weakness for Shakespeare. The old legal figment of Nobody, a subject without an identity, was much on Shakespeare's mind as an Odyssean figure for the disavowal of subjective authorial responsibility, recent critics show. Shakespeare was the author of his own authorship, who produced himself as the 'subject of his own creation'.

Howard Barker's play I Saw Myself is his most elegantly developed probe into ways that creative acts and actors go to work. The situation the play presents is simple: it is set in thirteenth-century Europe; able-bodied men have followed their noble lord to war; that lord has been killed, and the play's action takes place in the widow's household. The widow is Sleev and her serving women are weaving a tapestry that will depict the heroic tale of how the men left their homes, fought and died. The play extends the analogy between Sleev and her companions to the relationship between creator and critic. Within the action, characters repeatedly engage art-making through critical analysis. The weavers select from an established vocabulary of imagery to construct the narrative for others. Barker authors Sleev's desire. In defining the character's agency through her desiring subjectivity, he risks limiting the character.