Lyrical liars, animal desires and figurative kinship: Robert Henryson's defence of poetry in the prologue to The Morall Fabillis

This article cites Robert Henryson's Fables in order to contextualise the history of the medieval notion that the world of imaginary, poetic fiction, needs justification; and examines the theological sources which served as the foundation of that debate and provided the validation for the use of fable animals as moral exemplars.

Time, torture and Manus Island: an interview with Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian

Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mountains) and his collaborator Omid Tofighian speak about the experience of indefinite incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island and the psychological toll of waiting. They compare this form of detention to prison and the existential impact to torture. This Kyriarchal System, they argue, strips the individual of identity and humanity and they explain how such a system can perhaps be questioned better through the poetic fiction that Boochani has used in his path-breaking narrative than through appeal to dry rational facts and figures.

Hamlet as Poet

This chapter focuses on Hamlet's imagination and his accomplishments as a poet. It begins with the love poetry that Hamlet writes for Ophelia. The chapter then turns to consider the before, during, and after of Hamlet's attempt to adapt The Murder of Gonzago with a view to catching Claudius's conscience and unkennelling his guilt. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Hamlet responds to the lead player's speech in the person of Aeneas; to the advice offered by Hamlet to the players; to the central role of the imagination both in seeing ghosts and in creating works of poetic fiction; to the action of the play-within-the-play and the dumb show that precedes it; and to the language and assumptions through which Hamlet convinces himself that The Mousetrap has been a forensic success. As will become clear, William Shakespeare allows Hamlet to delineate his beliefs about the nature of poetic endeavour at unusual length. Crucially, one is also allowed to judge the ways in which Hamlet applies these beliefs in practice; in so doing, a series of disjunctions emerge between the theoretical and practical discourses of humanist poetics.

Centaurs of the Mind

This chapter champions the erotic sonnets of the Caelica cycle, often ignored in favour of the philosophical and religious poems of the middle, and final section of the sequence; highlighting both their playful eroticism and philosophical depth. The love poetry which scrutinizes the relationship between the mistress and the lover in terms of projection and fetishization, on closer inspection turns out to share the same philosophical grounds as the poems which examine the mechanisms of spiritual slavery later in the cycle. While certain poems, such as Caelica 39, 43, and 56 explicate the link between courtly love and idolatry, this chapter argues how Greville’s poetry contributes to the debates on the status of the imagination in Renaissance poetics, faculty psychology, and religious controversy, by exploring its affective investment in the act of poetic fiction-making.