Chapter 4 moves forward to the religious and political conflicts of the 1640s and 50s, focusing on the Royalist, Church of England poet Henry Vaughan. For Vaughan, the method and structure of evidentiary procedures at law present a crucial resource for negotiating the challenges of mid-century tumult. Having established Vaughan’s legal interests in his career and earlier writing, the chapter explains why questions of legal process became especially charged in the civil wars and Interregnum and why they presented Vaughan with a framework for discussing faith in Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655). The chapter surveys a range of attitudes adopted by Vaughan’s verse towards legal methods of proof: while they can cause activities of biblical interpretation to go awry, they can also, as exegetical processes, help to underpin an enduring faith in God’s mercy and salvation. In the end, it is the regularity of due evidentiary process that itself helps to articulate the justice and order of God’s providence.

The Societies for the Reformation of Manners' first victim in their systematic entrapment of 'homosexuals', Edward Rigby was earlier acquitted of sodomy by a naval court. Plain Reasons, Hell upon Earth, John Dunton's 'He-Strumpets', and Ward's London Clubs are all invested in a conservative gender and class hierarchy. Like their sixteenth-century predecessors John Bale, Thomas Beard and William Prynne, the writers engage in virulent xeno-homophobia, painting 'homosexuality' as a foreign vice bent on the destruction of the English nation. Edward (Ned) Ward's description, in fact, complicates our perception that the new 'homosexual' is characterized largely at the turn of the century by an increasingly strong link between sodomy and effeminacy. Trial transcripts and published polemics describing and condemning the new 'homosexual' subculture have proved highly controversial sources, particularly when they have been used to date the shift from Renaissance to modern models of 'homosexual' identity.

This chapter discusses religious reform and pastoral forms in the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. It determines that, when placed beside each other, these two concepts show the complexity of representing religious debates as poesy and even reveal the ways in which these two authors play with the ‘bodies’ available to them. The chapter briefly outlines some of the reasons why pastoral poetics were available to reflect religious controversies, and then identifies some of the core religious debates and concerns in England during the 1590s. It also looks at the ways hermits and savage men ponder on conversations about the roles of religious leaders and ceremonies related to communion.

This chapter begins with a defining stage moment from the 1990s that translated the sense of danger into an image of a devastated world. It occurred during Stephen Daldry's revival of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls — one of the key productions of the decade. Daldry's production rescued An Inspector Calls from its perceived status as a creaky old repertory ‘war-horse’, but its huge critical and popular success cannot entirely be credited to the director, or the equally gifted designer. The longevity of the production, and the lesser success of other recent revivals of Priestley's plays seem to suggest that they have reclaimed a hold on audiences because they tap into the Zeitgeist of our age of anxiety.

This chapter considers an important, but frequently neglected, outcome of reading: pleasure. It places this subject within the context of early nineteenth-century debates about novel-reading. While pleasure was often seen as a threat to the efficient management of one's imaginative economy, writers including Anna Letitia Barbauld celebrate what Jane Austen describes as the ‘unaffected pleasure’ produced by novel-reading. But is pleasure really as simple and spontaneous a matter as Austen appears to imply? To what extent does it disrupt the regulatory function of reading? These questions are explored in relation to Austen's Northanger Abbey and Barbauld's The British Novelists, as well as works by Hannah More and John Aikin. Ultimately, the texts discussed in this chapter celebrate the identity of the female novel-reader; they draw upon earlier debates about reading to suggest ways of reconciling the pursuit of pleasure with the exercise of independent, critical judgement.

An ubiquitous early modern genre, the letter was something that most literate people would have produced, its popularity prompting the publication of a number of letter-writing manuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Constance Fowler wrote eight letters to Herbert Aston, while he accompanied their father, Sir Walter Aston, on a Spanish diplomatic embassy. According to David Bergeron, the James I and VI - George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham correspondence constitutes a record of the longest, most loving, and most mutual of James's relationships with his favourites. Buckingham's talents and commitment to James's service were demonstrated in his reorganization and revitalization of the navy. Twentieth-century critics have generally viewed Mary Stuart's eighty letters to Frances Apsley as grotesquely inflated expressions of devotion; excused them as reflecting the passionate language of 'a romantic young lady to a girl friend'.

This chapter explores ideas about laughter that circulated in early modern discourse. Renaissance scientists and scholars were fascinated by the phenomenon of laughter, and a number of theories were put forward to explain what triggered it. While most philosophers continued to draw on the classical idea of laughter as an expression of ridicule, increasingly the idea was mooted that laughter might be bound up with pleasure, not derision. Humanist scholars such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were enthusiastic collectors of jests and witty apophthegms and lauded the effects of pleasurable recreation. Interestingly, it was Erasmus who spearheaded the campaign to reform manners that gained particular momentum in the age of religious reform. The eradication of the tradition of mystery plays led to the birth of a professional theatre based in London. Recreation became a commodity purveyed in a fledgling entertainment industry. The main function of laughter in the Shakespearean theatre was to create social cohesion within an audience drawn from all ranks of society. This chapter looks at laughter in William Shakespeare' A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Introduction outlines the intermedial method of this book, which brings together Milton with nineteenth-century writers and artists who engage with each other’s work at the same time as reading Milton directly. It provides an overview of Milton’s place in the visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century. This includes the literary galleries of the late eighteenth century, the development of proto-cinematic technologies and stage spectacles, illustration on canvas and the page, and interventions in books such as extra-illustration and marginalia. The Introduction also addresses the various metaphors drawn from Milton’s writing that scholars have used to explain his influence, comparing him to a ghost, a troll, a father, even God. It then proposes the epic simile as a useful model for the way Milton is understood in this book: just as Milton’s similes describing Satan suggest, a powerful figure can be like many disparate things at the same time.