Review: "Echoing Texts: George Chapman's Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron is an intertextual study, offering a close comparative exploration of the discourses behind Chapman's text and the text itself with a view to activating the interpretive potential of the intertextual links. Chapter 2 investigates the French chronicle material from Edward Grimeston's General Inventorie and how Chapman's departures from this material influence our reading. Chapters 3 and 4 look at the effects of the classical subtexts, above all transpositions from Homer's Iliad, Plutarch's Moralia and Seneca's Oedipus, but also Lucan's Pharsalia. Chapter 5 deals with the cultural and political negotiations in the double play, tracing references to the earl of Essex and his rebellion and allusions to topical issues of Stuart kingship." "The intertextual reading projects a problematization of the concept of the patriarchical monarch and the absolute state and a veiling of the representative of liberty and individual heroism in a nostalgic light. Together with the overlays of meaning caused by the classical texts, the changes in the chronicle material and the topical allusions register an ideological stance. Repressed, represented in sometimes devious ways, Chapman's version of near-contemporary history nevertheless makes a powerful statement about the relationship between ruler and ruled, pointing to problems of contemporary statecraft."--BOOK JACKET

Originally published in 1979, this two-volume modern spelling of George Chapman's The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron is split into two parts: a critical introduction and commentary, and the texts of the double-play, the Conspiracy (contained in Volume I) and the Tragedy (Volume II - not currently available). The Critical Introduction comprises five chapters treating the date, sources, scholarly tradition, interpretation, and unity of The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron.

An international group of scholars working in early modern English literature and culture have been invited to reflect upon one of the most dynamic dialectics of the period: the opposition between the concept “human, humanist, humanism” versus the concept “barbarous, barbarian, barbarism.” The result is Writing the Other: Humanism versus Barbarism in Tudor England. The essays in this volume range widely across the literary and cultural field mapped out by this opposition, thus revealing a rich multiplicity of voices and approaches to one of the fundamental processes by which self-fashioning and also “other-fashioning” operated during the Tudor reign. The focus moves from England to North Africa, to Hungary and to the New World in its panoramic display of the vast theatre in which identities were forged. The volume as a whole demonstrates how the cultural OtherOther was as much invented as described—“forged” in the sense, perhaps, of “counterfeited” —during the early modern and especially the Tudor period. This invention occasionally led to the demonisation of the object of its gaze, at other times its rehumanisation; sometimes we may detect evidence of a painful act of distortion, and at others we see the purposeful and profitable creation of a self-identityidentity with an eye on the rhetorical, religious, poetic, national expectations of the readers in the new context of print culture. But everywhere we witness the remarkable energy and fertility of the primary opposition which gives this collection its central theme.

"This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modern drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence." "The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642; however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."--Jacket.