An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts.

First published in 1984, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England traces how and why the modern reaction to death has come about by examining English attitudes to death since the Middle Ages. In earlier centuries death was very much in the midst of life since it was not, as now, associated mainly with old age. War, plague and infant mortality gave it a very different aspect to its present one. The author shows in detail how modern concern with the individual has gradually alienated death from our society; the greater the emphasis on personal uniqueness, the more intense the anguish when an individual dies. Changes in attitudes to death are traced through alterations in funeral rituals, covering all sections of society from paupers to princes. This gracefully written book is a unique, scholarly and thorough treatment of the subject, providing both a sensitive insight into the feelings of people in early modern England and an explanation of the modern anxiety about death. The range and assurance of this book will commend it to historians and the interested general reader alike.

In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

SHAKESPEARE STUDIES is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its socio-political history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. In addition to articles, the journal includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modern literature. Volume XXXVIII features another in the journal's ongoing series of Forums on an issue of importance to Renaissance studies. Organised and introduced by Greg Colon Semenza, this Forum, 'After Shakespeare and Film', includes the interdisciplinary perspectives of nine contributors on the positioning of Shakespeare studies in digital and other contemporary technologies. The volume also features an article on representing 'blackness' in Shakespearean productions from 1821 to 1844, and another on the influence of 19th-century melodrama on the Shakespeare critical tradition, as well as a review article on 'Shakespeare and the Gothic Strain'. Reviews in this issue address such disparate topics as Shakespeare and the problem of adaptation, Renaissance culture and the rise of the machine, and locating privacy in Tudor England.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, this book situates voyage drama in its historical and intellectual context between the individual act of reading in early modern England and the communal act of modern sightseeing.