Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia (1627)
Title | Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia (1627) PDF eBook |
Author | Emma Buckley |
Publisher | MHRA |
Total Pages | 461 |
Release | 2020-11-27 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1781889953 |
Lauded after his death as ‘champion of the English Commonwealth’, but also derided as a ‘most servile wit, and mercenary pen’, the poet, dramatist and historian Thomas May (c.1595–1650) produced the first full translation into English of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile shortly before a ruinous civil war engulfed his own country. Lucan, whose epic had lamented the Roman Republic’s doomed struggle to preserve liberty and inevitable enslavement to the Caesars, and who was forced to commit suicide at the behest of the emperor Nero, was a figure of fascination in early modern Europe. May’s accomplished rendition of his challenging poem marked an important moment in the history of its English reception. This is a modernized edition of the first complete (1627) edition of the translation. It includes prefatory materials, dedications and May’s own historical notes on the text. Besides an introduction contextualising May’s life and work and the key features of his translation, it offers a full commentary to the text highlighting how May responded to contemporary editions and commentaries on Lucan, and explaining points of literary, political, philosophical interest. There is also a detailed glossary and bibliography, and a set of textual notes enumerating the chief differences between the 1627 edition and the others produced in May’s lifetime. This volume aims not just to provide an accessible path into the dense, sometimes provocative poem May shapes from Lucan, but also a broader appreciation of the translator’s literary merits and the role his work plays in the history of the English reception of Roman literature and culture.
The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain
Title | The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain PDF eBook |
Author | Donald R. Kelley |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 408 |
Release | 1997-09-13 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780521590693 |
Distinguished historians and literary scholars explore the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction.
War, Liberty, and Caesar
Title | War, Liberty, and Caesar PDF eBook |
Author | Edward Paleit |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 351 |
Release | 2013-04-25 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199602980 |
In War, Liberty, and Caesar, Edward Paleit discusses how readers and writers of the English Renaissance read and understood Lucan's epic poem on the Roman civil wars. Looking at engagements with Lucan across a wide variety of literary forms, Paleit questions what made this Latin author so relevant during this period.
Conversations
Title | Conversations PDF eBook |
Author | Syrithe Pugh |
Publisher | Manchester University Press |
Total Pages | 238 |
Release | 2020-12-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1526152665 |
For educated poets and readers in the Renaissance, classical literature was as familiar and accessible as the work of their compatriots and contemporaries – often more so. This volume seeks to recapture that sense of intimacy and immediacy, as scholars from both sides of the modern disciplinary divide come together to eavesdrop on the conversations conducted through allusion and intertextual play in works from Petrarch to Milton and beyond. The essays include discussions of Ariosto, Spenser, Du Bellay, Marlowe, the anonymous drama Caesars Revenge, Shakespeare and Marvell, and look forward to the grand retrospect of Shelley’s Adonais. Together, they help us to understand how poets across the ages have thought about their relation to their predecessors, and about their own contributions to what Shelley would call ‘that great poem, which all poets...have built up since the beginning of the world’.
Thomas May's Tragedy of Julia Agrippina, Empresse of Rome
Title | Thomas May's Tragedy of Julia Agrippina, Empresse of Rome PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas May |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 342 |
Release | 1914 |
Genre | English drama |
ISBN |
Afterlives of the Roman Poets
Title | Afterlives of the Roman Poets PDF eBook |
Author | Nora Goldschmidt |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 247 |
Release | 2019-12-05 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1107180252 |
This innovative book reconceptualises Roman poetry and its reception through the lens of fictional biography ('biofiction').
Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton
Title | Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Shifflett |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 196 |
Release | 1998-08-28 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780521592031 |
This 1998 book examines key seventeenth-century writers in the context of their common interest in the philosophical tradition of Stoicism.