Mending “the injurie of oblivion”: “Englishing” Chaucer and Barbour in early printed editions

This article examines the editorial choices made in Edinburgh printer Andro Hart’s 1616 edition of John Barbour’s Brus. Comparison of the 1616 Hart edition with Thomas Speght’s 1602 Chaucer edition displays similar concerns with preserving accessibility to historical texts despite significant language changes in both Older Scots and English, noting shared employment of assistive paratextual apparati. Linguistic assessment comparing Hart and Speght’s editions to their parent texts demonstrates how both editors modernize language to improve reader accessibility while preserving archaic qualities and metricality. Contextualization of the declining prestige of Older Scots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further clarifies this assessment. Hart’s edition portrays both a genesis of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English, and a coda for Older Scots as a literary prestige tongue.

English travelers in early modern Cyprus: Piety, commerce and anti-Ottoman sentiment

English travelers in Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus saw the island as the last obligatory stop on their maritime pilgrimage route to the Holy Land. After the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (1571) the island was visited almost exclusively by English merchants on the lookout for the construction of factories on Eastern Mediterranean shores. They were attracted by Cyprus’s famed fertility and by the abundance of much-valued products to trade with. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English traders were nevertheless issued with warnings by English travel accounts. These dealt with the danger of over-trusting the paradise-like prospects of the island and remaining there for good, with the subsequent risk of “turning Turk.” In order to discourage English travelers and residents from becoming renegades in Cyprus, travel accounts included abundant morbid information on the brutal repression applied by the Great Turk upon Cypriot cities in the Wars of Cyprus and upon other anti-Ottoman Christian insurrections.

The story of what might have been: Interrogating Romeo and Juliet under the Portuguese dictatorship

In 1969, Teatro Estúdio de Lisboa performed Anatomy of a Love Story, an interrogation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for a generation politicized by their struggles against the dictatorship. This article delineates a narrative of what might have been if this incipient attempt to stage a more inclusive political theatre had prevailed, illustrating how attributions of success and failure to performances during this period need to be contextualized within the limitations imposed by censorship on the one hand, and, on the other, an evocation of a class-based popular theatre that excluded questions of gender and sexuality.

“By Jupiter, forgot”: Volscians and Scots in Shakespeare and Arbella Stuart

This essay examines the representation of Volscians in two texts, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and a letter of Lady Arbella Stuart’s referring to Virgil’s Camilla. It argues that for both authors, it matters that the relationship between the Volscians and the Romans could trope that between the Scots and the English. In the month in which Queen Elizabeth died, Arbella Stuart reached for a Volscian as a way to connect herself to Scotland; five years later, in the wake of James’s failed attempt to achieve political and constitutional union between England and Scotland, Coriolanus uses the Volscians to question that project.

A ballad of treason for Queen Mary I’s accession

A ninuectyue agaynst Treason is a ballad that was printed upon Queen Mary I’s accession. It is comprised of fourteen stanzas; the first ten each have seven lines, and the last four are only four lines each. The ballad is not so much celebratory of the new Queen Mary, but a lesson or warning about the dangers of acting against a Tudor monarch.

Priestly playwright, secular priest: William Drury’s Latin and English drama

This article examines the literary career of the secular priest William Drury, with an emphasis on his drama. The Latin plays which he wrote for performance at the English College in Douai are among the best-known English Catholic college dramas of the Stuart era; markedly different from the Jesuit drama which dominates the corpus of British Catholic college plays, they suggest conscious dissociation from that imaginative tradition. Hierarchomachia: or the Anti-Bishop, a satirical closet drama which intervenes in the controversy surrounding the legitimacy and extent of England’s Catholic episcopacy, can also be attributed to Drury. In both his Latin and English drama, Drury draws imaginative stimulus from his ideological opposition to Jesuits and other regulars. Yet his characteristic blend of didacticism and comedy, and his sympathy for the plight of all English Catholics—surely fomented by the death of his Jesuit brother in the notorious “Fatal Vesper”—point to broader priestly concerns.

From Lives to Discurso in the biographies of Thomas More: Roper, Harpsfield and Herrera

This article compares the books about the Lifes of Thomas More written by Roper and Harpsfield and the work Tomás Moro by Fernando de Herrera. The comparison is taken as a case in point of the divergent early development of the biographical genre in England and in Spain. The three texts were written by Catholic humanists, but under different contexts, which produced different kinds of text. Roper’s and Harpsfield’s Catholicism, marked by a close contact with the Morean tradition, the English form of Counter-Reformation under Mary, and the Elizabethan reversion to Protestantism, makes them drift towards an early form of modern biography. Fernando de Herrera, however, sets out to write his text from the background of the Spanish Counter-Reformation and a different discursive and textual conception of life writing.

Writing and Weaving: The Textual and the Textile in Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene, III.i

Most often, Ovidian allusions are woven into Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590) without developing into an open re-telling of myths. One significant exception occurs in Book III, Canto 1: there the action comes to a temporary stop in order to make space for a detailed description of the tapestry in the hall of Castle Joyous, which depicts the story of Venus and Adonis. This article intends to offer a reading of that episode that focuses on the importance of materiality and self-reflexivity as keys to its significance at the opening of Book III, and in the larger structure of The Faerie Queene. Here, the descriptive powers of the poet are both foregrounded and questioned, in a double movement of ekphrasis which gestures towards a serious interrogation of the value of representation, both in poetry and the visual arts. Implicitly, it is the poet (and through him, the reader him/herself) that must question his/her role and participation in the gradual and often painful awareness of the body that is foregrounded throughout Book III.

Truth and Wonder in Richard Head’s Geographical Fictions

In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.

The School of Salamanca in the sixteenth century and the way kingship is canvassed in Shakespeare’s Richard II

Although there appears to be no direct evidence that Shakespeare had access to the relectiones taught in the School of Salamanca during the sixteenth century, this study demonstrates that, forty years after their dissemination, the theories of Francisco Vitoria and his disciples were probably in circulation throughout England. The methodology in this article juxtaposes Shakespeare’s Richard II with one of Vitoria’s relectiones. This relectio modified the medieval idea of the divine origin of kingship, and generated a discussion about the origin of royal power which is central to the plot of Shakespeare’s play.