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  3. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

The past twenty years have seen a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural history. Recent writing on the nature of representation, the historical construction of gender and of the concept of identity itself, has opened new avenues. This series is designed to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theater from recent theoretical perspectives. The view of history envisioned is above all a view of our own history, a reading of the Renaissance for and from our own time.

  • General Editors: Stephen Orgel, Stanford University, California
  • Editorial Boards: Anne Barton, University of Cambridge, Jonathan Dollimore, University of York, Marjorie Garber, Harvard University, Massachusetts , Jonathan Goldberg, The Johns Hopkins University , Nancy Vickers, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania , Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Kate McLuskie, University of Southampton

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27 results in Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

Page 2 of 2

Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England
  • Christopher Warley
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 July 2005
  • Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social classification, the book revises studies that have tied the influence of sonnet sequences to either courtly love or to Renaissance individualism. Drawing on Marxist aesthetic theory, it offers detailed examinations of sequences by Lok, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It will be valuable to readers interested in Renaissance and genre studies, and post-Marxist theories of class.

The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative
  • Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell
  • Dorothy Stephens
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 November 1998
  • Although theories of exploitation and subversion have radically changed our understanding of gender in Renaissance literature, to favour only those theories is to risk ignoring productive exchanges between 'masculine' and 'feminine' in Renaissance culture. 'Appropriation' is too simple a term to describe these exchanges - as when Petrarchan lovers flirt dangerously with potentially destructive femininity. Spenser revises this Petrarchan phenomenon, constructing flirtations whose participants are figures of speech, readers or narrative voices. His plots allow such exchanges to occur only through conditional speech, but this very conditionality powerfully shapes his work. Seventeenth-century works - including a comedy by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell - suggest that the civil war and the upsurge of female writers necessitated a reformulation of conditional erotics.

Author's Pen and Actor's Voice
  • Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre
  • Robert Weimann
  • Edited by Helen Higbee, William West
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 July 2000
  • In this seminal work, Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or 'playing', in Shakespeare's theatre. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theatre, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays including Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, among others, as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the duality between playing and writing: the imaginary world-in-the-play and the visible, audible playing-in-the-world of the playhouse, and Weimann focuses especially on the gap between these two, between the so-called 'pen' and 'voice'.

Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England
  • Theodore B. Leinwand
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 February 1999
  • This interesting study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Plays discussed include Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens, Jonson's The Alchemist and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. They are paired with writings by and about the finances of the corrupt Earl of Suffolk, the privateer Walter Raleigh, the royal agent Thomas Gresham, theatre entrepreneur James Burbage, and the Lord Treasurer Lionel Cranfield. Leinwand's new readings of these texts reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

The Italian Encounter with Tudor England
  • A Cultural Politics of Translation
  • Michael Wyatt
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    01 December 2005
  • The small but influential community of Italians that took shape in England in the fifteenth century initially consisted of ecclesiastics, humanists, merchants, bankers and artists. However, in the wake of the English Reformation, Italian Protestants joined other continental religious refugees in finding Tudor England to be a hospitable and productive haven, and they brought with them a cultural perspective informed by the ascendency among European elites of their vernacular language. This study maintains that questions of language are at the centre of the circulation of ideas in the early modern period. Wyatt first examines the agency of this shifting community of immigrant Italians in the transmission of Italy's cultural patrimony and its impact on the nascent English nation; Part Two turns to the exemplary career of John Florio, the Italo-Englishman who worked as a language teacher, lexicographer and translator in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare
  • Douglas Bruster
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 November 1992
  • Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres. He identifies in the drama a materialist vision which has its origins in the climate of uncertainty engendered by the rapidly expanding economy of London. His examples range from the economic importance of cuckoldry to the role of stage props as commodities, and the commercial significance of the Troy story in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and he offers new ways of reading English Renaissance drama, by returning the theatre and the plays performed there, to its basis in the material world.

Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama
  • Frank Whigham
  • Published online:
    17 August 2009
    Print publication:
    26 January 1996
  • In Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama Frank Whigham combines an analysis of English Renaissance plays with an enriched sense of their social surroundings. He traces the violent gestures of social self-construction that animate many such plays, and the ways in which drama interacts with the conflict-ridden discourses of social, rank, gender, kinship, and service relationships. In Whigham's view, The Spanish Tragedy initiates the 'matter of court,' a complex and marauding discourse of gender warfare and master-servant manipulations; Arden of Faversham explores linked redefinitions of land, service, and marriage in county culture; The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and A Yorkshire Tragedy present a powerful critique of the traditional imperialism of kinship in northern England; and The Duchess of Malfi explores metaphors of erotic transgression.

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