Analyses the attitudes of Essex and his followers towards war, religion, and domestic politics; examines Essex's impact on Elizabethan political culture

In sixteenth-century England Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, enjoyed great domestic and international renown as a favourite of Elizabeth I. He was a soldier and a statesman of exceptionally powerful ambition. After his disastrous uprising in 1601 Essex fell from the heights of fame and favour, and ended his life as a traitor on the scaffold. This interdisciplinary account of the political culture of late Elizabethan England explores the ideological contexts of Essex's extraordinary career and fall from grace, and the intricate relationship between thought and action in Elizabethan England. By the late sixteenth century, fundamental political models and vocabularies that were employed to legitimise the Elizabethan polity were undermined by the strains of war, the ambivalence that many felt towards the church, continued uncertainty over the succession, and the perceived weaknesses of the rule of the aging Elizabeth. Essex's career and revolt threw all of these strains into relief. Alexandra Gajda examines the attitude of the earl and his followers to war, religion, the structures of the Elizabethan polity, and Essex's role within it. She also explores the classical and historical scholarship prized by Essex and his associates that gave shape and meaning to the earl's increasingly fractured relationship with the Queen and regime. She addresses contemporary responses to the earl, both positive and negative, and the earl's wider impact on political culture. Political and religious ideas in late sixteenth-century England had an important impact on political events in early modern England, and played a vital role in shaping the rise and fall of Essex's career.

In sixteenth-century England Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, enjoyed great domestic and international renown as a favourite of Elizabeth I. He was a soldier and a statesman of exceptionally powerful ambition. After his disastrous uprising in 1601 Essex fell from the heights of fame and favour, and ended his life as a traitor on the scaffold. This interdisciplinary account of the political culture of late Elizabethan England explores the ideological contexts of Essex'sextraordinary career and fall from grace, and the intricate relationship between thought and action in Elizabethan England. By the late sixteenth century, fundamental political models and vocabularies that were employed to legitimise the Elizabethan polity were undermined by the strains of war, the ambivalence that many felt towards the church, continued uncertainty over the succession, and the perceived weaknesses of the rule of the aging Elizabeth. Essex's career and revolt threw all of these strains into relief. Alexandra Gajda examines the attitude of the earl and his followers to war, religion, the structuresof the Elizabethan polity, and Essex's role within it. She also explores the classical and historical scholarship prized by Essex and his associates that gave shape and meaning to the earl's increasingly fractured relationship with the Queen and regime. She addresses contemporary responses to theearl, both positive and negative, and the earl's wider impact on political culture. Political and religious ideas in late sixteenth-century England had an important impact on political events in early modern England, and played a vital role in shaping the rise and fall of Essex's career.

In the period between 1575 and 1625, civic peace in England, Scotland, and Ireland was persistently threatened by various kinds of religiously inspired violence, involving conspiracies, rebellions, and foreign invasions. Religious divisions divided local communities in all three kingdoms, but they also impacted relations between the nations, and in the broader European continent. The challenges posed by actual or potential religious violence gave rise to complex responses, including efforts to impose religious uniformity through preaching campaigns and regulation of national churches; an expanded use of the press as a medium of religious and political propaganda; improved government surveillance; the selective incarceration of English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics; and a variety of diplomatic and military initiatives, undertaken not only by royal governments but also by private individuals. The result was the development of more robust and resilient, although still vulnerable, states in all three kingdoms and, after the dynastic union of Britain in 1603, an effort to create a single state incorporating all of them. R. Malcolm Smuts traces the story of how this happened by moving beyond frameworks of national and institutional history, to understand the ebb and flow of events and processes of religious and political change across frontiers. The study pays close attention to interactions between the political, cultural, intellectual, ecclesiastical, military, and diplomatic dimensions of its subject. A final chapter explores how and why provisional solutions to the problem of violent, religiously inflected conflict collapsed in the reign of Charles I.

Fulke Greville's reputation has always been overshadowed by that of his more famous friend, Philip Sidney, a legacy due in part to Greville's complex moulding of his authorial persona as Achates to Sidney's Aeneas, and in part to the formidable complexity of his poetry and prose. This volume seeks to vindicate Greville's 'obscurity' as an intrinsic feature of his poetic thinking, and as a privileged site of interpretation. The seventeen essays shed new light on Greville's poetry, philosophy, and dramatic work. They investigate his examination of monarchy and sovereignty; grace, salvation, and the nature of evil; the power of poetry and the vagaries of desire, and they offer a reconsideration of his reputation and afterlife in his own century, and beyond. The volume explores the connections between poetic form and philosophy, and argues that Greville's poetic experiments and meditations on form convey penetrating, and strikingly original contributions to poetics, political thought, and philosophy. Highlighting stylistic features of his poetic style, such as his mastery of the caesura and of the feminine ending; his love of paradox, ambiguity, and double meanings; his complex metaphoricity and dense, challenging syntax, these essays reveal how Greville's work invites us to revisit and rethink many of the orthodoxies about the culture of post-Reformation England, including the shape of political argument, and the forms and boundaries of religious belief and identity.

How did it feel to hear Macbeth's witches chant of "double, double toil and trouble" at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first saw Romeo and Juliet? In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard's era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience's own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, "grunt and sweat under a weary life." Black's clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays' histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe broadens our understanding of the final years of the last Tudor monarch, revealing the truly international context in which they must be understood. Uncovering the extent to which Shakespeare's dramatic art intersected with European politics, Andrew Hiscock brings together close readings of the history plays, compelling insights into late Elizabethan political culture and renewed attention to neglected continental accounts of Elizabeth I. With fresh perspective, the book charts the profound influence that Shakespeare and ambitious courtiers had upon succeeding generations of European writers, dramatists and audiences following the turn of the sixteenth century. Informed by early modern and contemporary cultural debate, this book demonstrates how the study of early modern violence can illuminate ongoing crises of interpretation concerning brutality, victimization and complicity today.

Combining an expertise on the Tudor dynasty with an authoritative understanding of its religious and political make-up, A Short History of the Tudors provides a fresh and accessible perspective of one of the most formative periods of British history. Rex considers the ways in which the Tudors shaped the beginnings of modern England through the momentous break with Rome in a comprehensive yet balanced way. Close attention is also paid to the dismantling of the baronial system and centralisation of secular power, as well as an exploration of the break with Rome, the two pillars on which the author's argument will rest. The book is organised chronologically and divided up into time periods, making it the ultimate companion for anyone keen to delve into the history of Britain's most notorious dynasty. The famous and infamous key players in the Tudor age have long endured in text books and are, brought to life here by Rex. Lively portraits of John Fisher, Thomas Moore and Thomas Wolsey and Mary Queen of Scots are painted, as well as the lesser-known players like the flamboyant Robert Devereux. A leading authority on the Tudors and British religious history, Richard Rex brings to life a dynasty which continues to engages and fascinate readers.

Rather than seeking to survey the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, the essays in the collection display a variety of perspectives, insights and methodologies found in current historical work that may also inform literary studies. In addition to Elizabethan and early seventeenth century polities, they examine such topics as the characteristics of the early modern political imagination; the growth of public controversy over religion and other issues duringthe period and ways in which this can be related to drama; attitudes about honour and shame and their relation to concepts of gender; histories of crime and murder; and ways in which changing attitudeswere expressed through architecture, printed images and the layout of Tudor gardens.

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences continue to matter now and in the future.