This is the only edition of George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres to respect the integrity of the first edition, which he published as an anonymous anthology in 1573. Earlier editors either based their work on The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire, self-censored and published in1575, or omitted the two plays, Supposes and Jocasta. But, from a bibliographical point of view, the plays are an integral part of the first edition, and the work that suffers most from revision is Gascoigne's masterpiece, The Adventures of Master F.J. The critical apparatus of this edition allowsthe reader to reconstruct the changes Gascoigne made to The Posies, and all the works which appear there for the first time are included. Half of the works in this edition, including the plays and Gascoigne's longest poem, `The fruites of Warre', have never received any commentary before. The commentary closely studies Gascoigne's use of his sources, especially in his translations from the Italian, and situates his works in theirliterary and social milieux. It also includes all of the extensive marginal notes that Gabriel Harvey made in his copy of The Posies. The biographical introduction corrects a number of mistakes in Prouty's standard biography and, in particular, offers a fuller, more accurate account of Gascoigne'smilitary service in the Netherlands.

First modern full-length study of the Elizabethan poet George Gascoigne.

This collection of essays situates George Gascoigne in context as the pre-eminent writer of the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His ceaseless experimentation was hugely influential on those later Elizabethans - including Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare - who represent the great flowering of the English literary renaissance. Gascoigne rarely returned to a genre, writing prose fiction, blank verse, plays, sonnets, narrative verse, courtly entertainments, satire and many other literary forms, and the later Elizabethans were fully aware of his significance. These essays are organised into three main sections: influences upon Gascoigne, such as Skelton; Gascoigne’s influence on others, including Spenser; and finally a reassessment of his critical neglect and the story behind his marginalised status in the English literary canon. As only the second multi-authored essay collection on Gascoigne, this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this important and often misunderstood writer.

This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O’Brien, Magdalena Ożarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

This fully-annotated anthology of sixteenth-century English verse features generous selections from the canonical poets, alongside judicious selections from lesser-known authors. Includes complete works or substantial extracts of longer poems wherever possible, including Book III of the ‘Faerie Queene’ and the whole of ‘Astrophil and Stella’. Covers a range of genres, including the love lyric, mythological narrative, sacred poetry and political poetry. Encourages readers to discover unusual and interesting connections and contrasts between poems and poets. Detailed annotations facilitate close reading of the poems.

In recent years the twin themes of travel and translation have come to be regarded as particularly significant to the study of early modern culture and literature. Traditional notions of 'The Renaissance' have always emphasised the importance of the influence of continental, as well as classical, literature on English writers of the period; and over the past twenty years or so this emphasis has been deepened by the use of more complicated and sophisticated theories of literary and cultural intertextuality, as well as broadened to cover areas such as religious and political relations, trade and traffic, and the larger formations of colonialism and imperialism. The essays collected here address the full range of traditional and contemporary issues, providing new light on canonical authors from More to Shakespeare, and also directing critical attention to many unfamiliar texts which need to be better known for our fuller understanding of sixteenth-century English literature. This volume makes a very particular contribution to current thinking on Anglo-continental literary relations in the sixteenth century. Maintaining a breadth and balance of concerns and approaches, Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century represents the academic throughout Europe: essays are contributed by scholars working in Hungary, Greece, Italy, and France, as well as in the UK. Arthur Kinney's introduction to the collection provides an North American overview of what is perhaps a uniquely comprehensive index to contemporary European criticism and scholarship in the area of early modern travel and translation.