It explores how the influence of Giordano Bruno's Heroic Enthusiasms, Plato's Symposium, Trismegistus' Corpus Hermiticum, emblem books, and Italian "magic" in its various overlapping forms provided the foundation and content of Shakespeare's sonnets. Contains a concise history of the 200-year detective search to locate historical persons to match the unnamed beloveds of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Healy demonstrates how Renaissance alchemy shaped Shakespeare's bawdy but spiritual sonnets, transforming our understanding of Shakespeare's art and beliefs.

Translations with introductions: Lodovico Ariosto's The Coffer; The Two False Gypsies. (a scenario from commedia dell'arte); Niccolo Machiavelli's La Mandragola; Miguel de Cervantes's The Magic Cave of Salamanca and The Marvellous Puppet Show; Lope de Vega's Peribanez and the Comendador of Ocana; Tirso de Molina's Damned for Despair; and Gil Vicente's The India Play and The Boat of Hell. - Available at a text price for multiple-copy text orders.

Critiques recent representations of the Renaissance, particularly those presented in new historical and cultural materialist criticism. Examines the function of the late medieval/early modern opposition in recent historical interpretations of Renaissance texts, concluding that the new historicists do not succeed in acknowledging the otherness of the Renaissance. Explores Shakespeare's versions of the dialectic between the king's body natural and body politic, and addresses the issue of historical change. Rolls received a Phd from the National University Ireland, Galway, in 1998. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

A world list of books in the English language.

For all their pride in seeing this world clearly, the thinkers and artists of the English Renaissance were also fascinated by magic and the occult. The three greatest playwrights of the period devoted major plays (The Tempest, Doctor Faustus, The Alchemist) to magic, Francis Bacon often referred to it, and it was ever-present in the visual arts. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age John S. Mebane reevaluates the significance of occult philosophy in Renaissance thought and literature, constructing the most detailed historical context for his subject yet attempted.

This work explores the discussion of the idealization of women in medieval and Renaissance texts. This book has three main goals: to show textual connections between literary masterpieces (and thus, delineate a literary history from within the texts) in order to show how authors consciously or unconsciously interact with one another regardless of time and boundaries; to present biographical and autobiographical heroines, their work and legacy; and finally to grasp man's imaginary world of women.

This two-volume set contains the first-ever edition of the works of the poet Thomas Watson, many never before edited in any form. Contains introductions, translations of his Latin works, and running commentaries.

Based on the discovery of a small portion of the long-surpressed letters between James Barrie (author of Peter Pan) and his adopted son, Michael Llewelyn Davies, Sky Gilbert's fourth novel takes us into the lives of five very different men.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others