"This is a Ph.D. dissertation. William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Michael Drayton's Matilda (1594) and Thomas Middleton's The Ghost of Lucrece (1600) appeared at a time when the religious troubles in the wake of t"

Caesarian power was a crucial context in the Renaissance, as rulers in Europe, Russia and Turkey all sought to appropriate Caesarian imagery and authority, but it has been surprisingly little explored in scholarship. In this study Lisa Hopkins explores the way in which the stories of the Caesars, and of the Julio-Claudians in particular, can be used to figure the stories of English rulers on the Renaissance stage. Analyzing plays by Shakespeare and a number of other playwrights of the period, she demonstrates how early modern English dramatists, using Roman modes of literary representation as cover, commented on the issues of the day and critiqued contemporary monarchs.

Examination Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine" (Anglistik IV), language: English, abstract: Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Gründungsmythos der römischen Republik, d.h. mit der Vergewaltigung der Lucretia durch Tarquin, als literarischem Motiv. Obwohl auch Texte aus der Antike und dem Mittelalter betrachtet werden, in denen dieser Mythos verarbeitet wurde, liegt der Schwerpunkt auf drei Texten (zwei Gedichten und einem Theaterstück) der englischen Renaissance: William Shakespeares "Rape of Lucrece", Thomas Middletons "The Ghost of Lucrece" und Thomas Heywoods "Rape of Lucrece". Sie werden erst einzeln vorgestellt und dann kontrastiv mit einander verglichen. This study deals with the founding myth of the Roman republic, that is the rape of Lucrece by Tarquin, as a literary motive. Although also texts from Antiquity as well as the Middle Ages are considered, the main focus is centred on three texts (two poems and one play) of the English Renaissance period: these are William Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece", Thomas Middleton's "The Ghost of Lucrece" and Thomas Heywood's "Rape of Lucrece". They are first analysed in depth one after the other before a contrastive comparison takes place.

In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture. The volume has two purposes: first, to explore the resistance these pervasive representations generate and have generated for readers - especially for the female reader- and second, to explore what these representations tell us about social formations governing the relationships between men and women. More particularly, Rose and Robertson are interested in how representations of rape manifest a given culture's understanding of the female subject in society.

Region, Religion and English Renaissance Literature brings together leading scholars of early modern literature and culture to explicate the ways in which both regional and religious contexts inform the production, circulation and interpretation of Renaissance literary texts. Examining texts by a wide variety of early modern writers - including Edmund Spenser, Lodowick Lloyd, Richard Nugent, Thomas Middleton and John Webster, Richard Montagu, and John Milton - the contributors to this volume enhance our understanding of the complex cultural contexts of early modern Anglophone writing.

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England, including the political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses that governed the codes of lying and truth-telling from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The contributions to this collection draw on a wide range of early modern English literature from Shakespeare to Swift, and from travel writing to poetry, in order to explore the extent to which plays, poems, and narrative texts in this period were sites of negotiation, and, at times, of ideological warfare between the moral imperative of truth-telling and the expediency of telling lies. What were the cultural norms of truthfulness and lying, and on what basis were they constructed? What were the consequences when someone did not share the assumed common project of truth-telling? And which forms of communication were exempt from the pragmatic strictures on mendacious discourse? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.