Curtis Breight challenges the view that Renaissance English rulers could not dominate their domestic population. He argues, alternatively, that the Elizabethan state was controlled by the Cecilian faction, which maintained power by focusing English energies outwardly. Cecilians launched relentless assaults by land and sea against England's neighbours. By the 1590s their policies had enriched a few yet destroyed countless people, and this book reads the drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in relation to ongoing national and international conflict.

This national and international conflict energised the drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, both of whom scrutinised the Cecilian policies in their plays. Drawing on archival sources, pamphlets, state and critical theory together with historiography, this groundbreaking study interprets their drama from a postdisciplinary perspective and shows it to be closely bound with the realpolitik of its time.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies as well as book reviews of the many significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realized in its drama exclusive of Shakespeare.

Annotation Methods and Nationscritiques one of the primary deployments of twentieth-century social science: comparative politics whose major focus has been "nation-building" in the "Third World," often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. International relations theorists, unable to resist the "cognitive imperialism" of a state-centric social science, have allowed themselves to become colonized. Michael Shapiro seeks to bring recognition to forms of political expression-alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people, and spaces-that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states and the complicit nation-sustaining conceits of social science

1590s Drama and Militarism is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of various textual interventions into the military realities of the late Elizabethan period. Its major strength is its insistence on the discursive nature of militarism, and the author convincingly uses literary and non-literary texts-including manuals and contemporary military correspondence-to reconstruct the particular anxieties which surrounded the military exigencies of the 1590s, a particularly fraught and unstable period of the aging queen's reign. The literature of the 'art of war' has been little studied by literary scholars, despite their richly rhetorical nature. Dr Taunton's analysis thus brings to light a neglected but culturally significant form of Renaissance textuality. In doing so she is able to shed new light on the Renaissance drama, which she shows to have responded sensitively (and sometimes critically) to these textual constructions of actual warfare, and problematised the anxious idealisations of the military manuals. The particular readings of plays here are richly rewarding for the scholar of Renaissance drama-the significance of Henry's nocturnal surveillance of his own camp on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, for example, benefits immeasurably from being contextualised in the light of contemporary theories of encampment. The role of the women in Tamburlaine's camp in Marlowe's plays is also given particular significance when viewed in the light of the contemporary proscriptions regarding the presence of women in camps during the military campaigns in the Low Countries. In this study Dr Taunton makes appropriate (and critically inflected) use of Foucault's theories of surveillance, Lefebvre's theories about the ideological production of social space, and Michel de Certeau's theories of social practice are put to good use in her analysis of military strategy. These theoretical perspectives are usefully combined with highly specific and well-documented historical analyses.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Dr Peter Orford and his editing team have collected articles from the next generation of Shakespeare scholars to offer a glimpse into the future of Renaissance Studies. The essays included were presented at the International British Graduate Shakespeare Conference and represent research from around the globe, either exploring new territory, or redefining the work of those before them. In his foreword, Professor Stanley Wells states that ‘The essays printed here demonstrate that the future of early modern dramatic scholarship and criticism is in good hands.” The articles included are: • “Seldom Seene: Observations from Editing The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife” by Matteo Pangallo • “Thomas Heywood and the Construction of Taste in the Repertory of Queen Henrietta’s Men” by Eleanor Collins • “Bawdiness, Crime and Low Characters in Late Elizabethan Comedy” by Shelly Hsin-Yi Hsieh • “Print and Elizabethan Military Culture” by Dong-Ha Seo • “Actors, Audiences and Authors: The Competition for Control in Brome’s The Antipodes” by Audrey Birkett • “Shakespeare’s King Richard III: The Perverted Machiavel” by Conny Loder • “Women in the Shakespearean Audience – Recognition and Authority” by Brian Schneider • “Dis-playing History: The Case of Shakespeare’s Globe” by Kelly Jones • “‘Ever Holy and Unstained’: Illuminating the Feminist Cenci Through Mary Wollstonecraft and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” by Kristine Johansan • “Narcissus and Modernity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets” by Will McKenzie • “Cowboys and Romans: Cymbeline and Paradigmatic Change in the Theatre” by Miles Gregory