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.

Through the dwarf Spenser treats the relationship between the invisible Church and the institutional Church in England. The “needments” he carries represent the “ornaments” imposed by the contentious 1559 “Ornaments Rubric,” together with the ceremonies that these material objects epitomized. Such forms (anathema to the dissenters) had been strongly defended by Henry’s apologist Thomas Starkey as adiaphora (or “things indifferent”). These, according to Starkey and the Elizabethan hierarchy in general, were in fact indispensable. The dwarf’s commitment to ceremonial takes a superstitious Catholic turn in canto vi, but his revival of Una in canto vi intimates that the forms of worship embraced by the Church as a national (visible) institution support the Church as the (invisible) community of the redeemed.

The speaking body on stage as the irreducible condition of theatrical experience is a trope so general as to verge on the meaningless. This tradition develops through the work of the British dramatist Howard Barker and the American dramatist Richard Foreman. Neither Foreman nor Barker, in their theoretical writings, explicitly point to Samuel Beckett's plays as a pervasive influence. Foreman's early work was based in an aesthetic borrowed from Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht. Foreman and Barker's work little resemble Beckett's pre-1962 dramatic writings. The written text serves as origination for Beckett's theatrical work, as it does for that of Richard Foreman. If Beckett fragments and deconstructs the body in post-war Western culture, Foreman attempts to reconstruct it, particularly within the politically progressive culture that surrounded his downtown New York theatre in 1968.

This chapter outlines the ways in which King Lear is subtly but consistently misunderstood by the tendency to imagine the storm happening in a particular place. It proposes that the storm itself is, aesthetically and structurally, what sustains the play. Nicholas Royle has addressed the uses of event in William Shakespeare, contending that 'its appearances are consistently associated with a sense of strangeness'. In several of Shakespeare's plays, the event verges on the announcement of the supernatural. If the play's original audience expected the supernatural when the stage machinery of the storm was utilised, such expectation might have been merited given the play's source. The conflation of storm and the curse in King Lear owes something to one of Shakespeare's sources, the anonymous chronicle play King Leir, which was first published in 1605.

The plays William Shakespeare set 'upon the very hem of the sea' in the mythopoeic landscape of Greece confront the 'Greeks and Merrygreeks'. In Antony and Cleopatra, there is a lightning-flash of ghostly precognition at Alexandria, the perennial gateway between past and future, Europe and Asia. There is an incipient 'to-effect' in Antony and Cleopatra, as urgent as the 'odour of imminence' that for Cixous makes Julius Caesar, with its cries for 'peace, freedom, and liberty', 'smell like time'. Shakespeare's 'Earls of Paradise' understood, the Neoplatonist ideology that 'the touches of sweet harmony' restore 'earthly things' to 'true perfection' is hard to resist. That was the illusion of power, 'the ability to overcome gravity controls the natural world, reveals the operations of the heavenly spheres, and was supreme expressions of Renaissance kingship'.

Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward is a play about revelation, its irresistible compulsion, and the ambiguities surrounding the notions of the victim and the perpetrator. It is also, crucially, about the apology and its status in the Christian-Humanist tradition. A culture of apology removed from the context of Christian practice finds a congenial new residence in the contemporary dispensation of Late Democracy and its tablet of laws, partly Christian, partly secular idealism, as Human Rights. The rise of the protagonist is essentially a criminal enterprise, and the corpses that decorate his progress are the detritus of a mesmeric journey that has only one terminus self-disgust and some form of suicide. In the Catastrophic play the invocation of Sacrifice renders the binary ethic of criminal/victim redundant. Humanist jurisprudence might argue as to whether the sexualised murder of the old king in Gertrude - The Cry, is murder or manslaughter.

Sir Walter Ralegh's rhetorical purposes in The History of the World were clearly overdetermined. This chapter explores how cognitive approaches can help literary study engage with texts as, in part, the productions of individual minds, and not of historical and cultural forces alone. As is apparent from the context in which he proposes the metaphor, Ralegh's purpose is to explain away the antagonism towards him. He offers a blended conception in which antagonism toward the writer is fused with that toward the pedestrian. On the one hand Ralegh is simply recapitulating the widespread early modern premise, adopted from Protagoras, that 'Man is the measure of all things'. On the other hand, from a modern and secular rather than a Renaissance Christian-humanist perspective, he seems also to ratify cognitive-theoretical postulates.

The interjection, taken from Sir Walter Ralegh's magnum opus The History of the World is squeezed into a much larger narrative devoted to Alexander the Great's encounters with the Persians. Ralegh would remain in France for at least two years, but by 1572 he had proceeded up to oriel College, oxford, from where he would eventually move on to the inns of Chancery. Quite apart from his recurring roles in court lobbying and factionalism in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Ralegh's own textual meditations were drawn inexorably to the business of military intervention. Even when Ralegh focused in his History upon antique civilizations deeply revered in his own society, he was compelled to bear witness to arresting scenes of violent hostilities allied to a more general narrative of social collapse.

Peter Lake tracks how the size, cost, and format of John Andrewes’s cheap religious pamphlets conditioned their approach to doctrinal content. In doing so, Lake resists the impulse to categorise all cheap print as ‘popular’ and therefore theologically unorthodox. John Andrewes, the so-called ‘market place theologian,’ is shown to struggle with some of the same paradoxes and tensions that motivate William Perkins’ more mainstream protestant writing, undermining false assumptions about the antagonism of popular and orthodox predestinarian religious thought.

Jeffrey Knight’s essay on what he terms the ‘genre of continuation’ grapples with the question of how the material, printed book enabled new modes of authorship. Distinct from the humanist tradition of ‘literary response,’ the genre of continuation in fact develops out of the ways in which men and women treated books in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century (binding them together, for example). In Knight’s reading, the genre of continuation imagines a kind of afterlife for the book which is akin to the human afterlife in its relative importance to the original, or starter, book.