The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the best overview of their significance then and now." -Jonathan Dollimore, York University "Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here." -Lawrence Manley, Yale University "A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students." -Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes. Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets. Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.

Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexuality, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical debates about the body, gender, desire, print culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia , Wroth's Urania , Lyly's Euphues ; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about the gendering of labour, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.

Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe and Marston. With a focus on sexual violence, homosexuality, incest and idolatry, Carter analyses how depictions of mythology represent radical ideas concerning gender and sexuality.

Lesel Dawson examines figures afflicted with erotic melancholy in early modern literature and provides a historical context for their malady. She discusses how the literary representation of lovesickness relates to issues of gender and identity, making a contribution to the fields of literature, gender, and medical history

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney. Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as: the impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England the way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class how the popularity of reading and the subsequent demand for books led to the production and marketing of books as an industry complications for critics of prose fiction, as it began to be considered an inferior and trivial art form. Early modern prose fiction had a huge impact on the social and economic fabric of the time, creating a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure which became accessible to those previously excluded from such activities, resulting in a significant challenge to existing class structures.

Analyses English sexual culture between the Civil Wars and the death of Charles II.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

This is the first comprehensive account of English Renaissance literature in the context of the culture which shaped it: the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the tumult of Catholic and Protestant alliances during the Reformation, the age of printing and of New World discovery. In this century courtly literature under Henry VIII moves toward a new, more personal poetry of sentiment, narrative and romance. The development of English prose is seen in the writing of More, Foxe and Hooker and in the evolution of satire and popular culture. Drama moves from the churches to the commercial playhouses with the plays of Kyd, Marlowe and the early careers of Shakespeare and Jonson. The Companion tackles all these subjects in fourteen newly-commissioned essays, written by experts for student readers. A detailed chronology of major literary achievements concludes with a list of authors and their dates.

Woodbridge shows that the prevailing image of the vagrant poor in Renaissance England--sturdy, comical, resourceful rogues who were adept at living on the fringes of society--was essentially a literary fabrication pressed into the service of specific social and political agendas.