First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

Fusing historiography with literary criticism, Between Nations produces an array of unexpected readings of early modern texts. Starting from the premise that England has never been able to emerge or define itself in isolation from its neighbors on the British Isles, this book places Renaissance England and its literature at a meeting of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh histories. It ranges from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries and deals with the "reigns" of three monarchs and one regicide—those of Elizabeth I, James I, Charles II, and Oliver Cromwell. However, it shifts the domain they ruled from the customary center into interactions between England and the other British polities. The author argues that England was able to develop into what we call a "nation" only in and by means of its relations with the other proto-"nations" that often it was also suppressing. Among the authors who served one or more of the four English rulers are Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marvell, who are studied here in the way they responded to the complexities of British history that encompassed their "nation." They not only participated in nation building/destroying, but their works are shown often to be meditations on that process and their own roles in the process. In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare both produces a vision of an ideal Britain and inscribes into his play the voices of various British peoples that are meant to be subsumed. Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland, which is often taken as an anti-Gaelic screed, is more plausibly seen as a text compounded of heterogeneous cultural influences, many of them originating from within Ireland. The complexity of the text reflects Spenser's own situation as a colonial official exiled from one British nation, England, to another, Ireland. In "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," Marvell explicitly considers the consequences of a campaign that historians have called the "War of the Three Kingdoms." In that, and in a later poem, "The Loyal Scot," Marvell emerges as a shrewd commentator on the British politics of his day. Throughout, the book demonstrates that historical readings of this period's English literary works can be as multivalent and multicentric as the British history that produced them.

Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

In eight closely interwoven essays, the author explores the techniques and themes which themes masters had in common. Originally published in 1950. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive opposites is a much-needed volume that brings together ten original papers by experts on the relations between Spenser and Shakespeare. There has been much noteworthy work on the linguistic borrowings of Shakespeare from Spenser, but the subject has never before been treated systematically, and the linguistic borrowings lead to broader-scale borrowings and influences which are treated here. An additional feature of the book is that for the first time a large bibliography of previous work is offered which will be of the greatest help to those who follow up the opportunities offered by this collection. Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive opposites presents new approaches, heralding a resurgence of interest in the relations between two of the greatest Renaissance English poets to a wider scholarly group and in a more systematic manner than before. This will be of interest to Students and academics interested in Renaissance literature.

Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.

The question of selfhood in Renaissance texts constitutes a scholarly and critical debate of almost unmanageable proportions. The author of this work begins by questioning the strategies with which male writers depict powerful women. Although Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Milton's Eve figure selfhood very differently and to very different ends, they do have two significant elements in common: mirrors and transformations that diminish the power of the female self.

Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon.

Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne, arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement. Chapters explore The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Faerie Queene, Volpone, and the Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus. The tension between tradition and subversion, both linguistic and cultural, then, can be seen to produce not aporia in any negative sense, but a positive complexity of response from the audience, animating and profoundly enriching each work. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare merges the previously despised figure of the merchant with a Christ-like figure, brilliantly reasserting the Christian condemnation of profiteering while simultaneously advocating its seeming opposite, a validation of the burgeoning mercantile activity of the Renaissance. Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literary Studies is a thoughtful study, rich in both historical scholarship and in its survey of modern criticism. Even those who are quite familiar with the texts discussed here will find Roston's focus on the tension between maintaining the expectations of the culture and pulling toward new ideas an illuminating way to freshly consider these literary works.

Christopher Highley's book explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic "other" was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.