This chapter illuminates the authenticity and variety of the rhetorical styles of writing in a selection of Shakespeare’s earliest plays and the epyllion, Venus and Adonis. Focusing on bombast and repetition as two of the most frequent and representative rhetorical techniques that stand out in Shakespeare’s early writing, and addressing the earliest attack on Shakespeare’s writing craft, the chapter explores different ways in which Shakespeare turns rhetoric into an instrument that produces meaning. Critical attention is paid on examining how Shakespeare produces originality in collaborative and solo works and on radical uses of rhetoric for unrhetorical purpose. Comparing Shakespeare to some of the contemporaries that inspired his writing, like Marlowe, Greene, and Lodge, the chapter offers an insight into forms of imitation and creative resistance to existing models, on examples that have not yet been explored, and within the debate about styles in poetic and rhetorical treatises of the late Elizabethan period.

The Introduction first outlines the grounds for the collection’s dating parameters for ‘early Shakespeare’. It then discusses what a category such as ‘early’ or ‘late’ might mean for someone with Shakespeare’s long career, and how such temporally bound categories can condition critical responses. Next, it considers the many variables in play in Shakespeare’s early canon, discussing these with relation to the value ascribed to these works. The chapter then reflects upon how most readers of Shakespeare begin somewhere in the middle of the collected works, with super-canonical works like Twelfth Night and Hamlet, before, if ever, working to the margins of the canon where the early works reside. It concludes with brief summaries of each of the chapters in the collection, noting how contributors shed significant new light upon the formative part of Shakespeare’s career.

Theatrically, there is nothing amateurish about Arden of Faversham, and recognition of Shakespeare’s authorship of the middle scenes of Arden is likely to impact classroom curriculums and theatrical repertoires. Drawing on the author’s experience directing the play, this essay challenges the claim by Martin Wiggins that Arden was written by an anonymous amateur who did not understand costume requirements or the limitations of boy actors playing female roles. It shows that Arden was carefully designed to give the actor playing Alice a long rest in mid-play, and that the role was well within the range of boy actors in the late 1590s and early seventeenth century. We know less about the outstanding female impersonators of the 1580s, but Richard Burbage began his long career as a boy, and as an adolescent could have played a demanding role like Alice.

This is an essay about early Shakespeare and loss. It attempts to put some kind of order on a span of several years when Shakespeare is first writing plays, or parts of plays, in a commercial environment with fellow professionals. It discusses a period of time, the mid-to-late 1580s and early 1590s, for which much information about Shakespeare and other working dramatists is lost. It asks, how do you write about that kind of loss? And, what sort of data-sets do you hold up to the blank spaces of those years, knowing only the likelihood of Shakespeare’s activity, to enable plausible deductions about his early working life? It considers how the early canon has been categorized and written about, situates the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s first forays in writing in the context of surviving evidence about theatrical activity in the 1580s, contextualizes Shakespeare’s overall career in the light of those of his peers, and, finally, considers some of the defining features of Shakespeare’s earliest writings.

This chapter explores the relationship between three stretches of text in which a hunt is described: the exchange between Tamora and Aaron in Titus Andronicus (2.3.10–50); several stanzas of Venus and Adonis (830–99); and Thomas Arden’s narrative of his nightmare in Arden of Faversham, in which he is transformed from a by-stander to the prey (6.6–34). The first two of these passages are indubitably by Shakespeare, and reasons are given for concluding that all three, which share complexes of words and images, are by a single author. The order in which the works were composed is discussed. These and samples from other early plays – including a further evocation of hunted deer in 1 Henry VI, 4.2 ߝ are analysed to illustrate distinctive aspects of Shakespeare’s early poetic style, such as the way that word-play generates imagery, giving his verse its vivid particularity.

Stanislavsky’s artistic development is tracked in its various phases during the years preceding the 1917 Revolution and according to his strongest affinities and the most important influences that he absorbed into his guiding principles for the Moscow Art Theatre. Attention is focused on Abramtsevo, the artistic colony and utopian community founded by Savva Mamontov, a family friend and significant part of the habitus that shaped Stanislavsky’s cultural attitudes and tastes. It is at Abramtsevo and also at Mamontov’s Private Opera Theatre in Moscow that Stanislavsky saw communal artistic aspirations in action and how leading visual artists, composers and singers, notably Chaliapin, combined their different talents and skills, providing him with reference points for his ensemble theatre and its aim for harmoniously integrated productions.

Related inspiration to do with Old Believer Orthodoxy and its values, Tolstoy’s beliefs, Sulerzhitsky’s Tolstoyan perspectives, Vrubel’s mystical paintings and Scriabin’s ecstatic music, along with numerous other experiences of the Russian Silver Age, not least Mikhaïl Chekhov’s stage experiments, contextualize and illuminate Stanislavsky’s theatre work in its fullest sense. Sociopolitical factors similarly situate Stanislavsky’s endeavours in the first ‘half’ of his life in art.

Kathleen Wilson has argued that if the loss of Minorca in 1756 constituted ‘the symbolic emasculation of the British nation’, then later military successes across the globe were widely regarded as manifesting a true Britishness that was independent, incorruptible, and able to impose itself on the world wherever and whenever it chose. As others have emphasized, however, the scale of British territorial acquisition additionally raised new problems of authority and governance, in relation to India as well as to North America, and colonial conquest was attended by anxiety that the growth of empire might trouble the integrity of the state and the meaning of home and belonging. From the Treaty of Paris to the American Revolution, Britons were, in Linda Colley’s words, ‘captivated by, but also adrift and at odds in a vast empire abroad and a new political world at home which few … properly understood’. The enthusiastic popular response to events such as the taking of Quebec in 1759, the ‘year of victories’, may therefore be interpreted as evidence of an ‘imperialist sensibility’, but for many it was impossible to dissociate such rejoicing from consideration of the longer-term implications of Britain’s new status as a global superpower. Thomas Gray wrote in August 1759 that ‘[t]he season for triumph is at last come,’ but in October of the same year he queried as to whether the nation ‘will … know how to behave itself, being just in the circumstances of a Chambermaid, that has got the 20,000£ Prize in the Lottery’.