The Catholic contribution to English literary culture has been widely neglected or misunderstood. This book sets out to rehabilitate a wide range of Catholic imaginative writing, while exposing the role of anti-Catholicism as an imaginative stimulus to mainstream writers in Tudor and Stuart England. It discusses canonical figures such as Sidney, Spenser, Webster and Middleton, those whose presence in the canon has been more fitful, and many who have escaped the attention of literary critics. Among the themes to emerge are the anti-Catholic imagery of revenge tragedy and the definitive contribution made by Southwell and Crashaw to the post-Reformation revival of religious verse in England. Alison Shell offers a fascinating exploration of the rhetorical stratagems by which Catholics sought to demonstrate simultaneous loyalties to the monarch and to their religion, and of the stimulus given to the Catholic literary imagination by the persecution and exile so many of these writers suffered.

Études sur la pré-renaissance et la renaissance anglaises.

This collection of essays looks at the social criticism of such authors as Middleton, Webster, Massinger, Ford, John Fletcher, as well as considering the activities of the Actors' Companies and the production of Latin plays. Political criticism is found in the form of allusion in the tragedies, while the comedies are seen as mocking the shortcomings of the professional, middle and lower classes, some of the satire being directed against the way of speaking of the characters depicted.