Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI PDF Author: S. Dunnigan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403932700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eros and Poetry examines the erotics of literary desire at the Stewart court in Scotland during the reigns of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI. Encompassing the period from the early 1560s to the late 1590s, this is the first study to link together Scottish Marian and Jacobean court literatures, presenting a relatively unknown body of writing, newly theorized and contextualized. It argues that in this period erotic poetry can only be considered in relation to the figure of the monarch, and that the formation of elite lyric culture takes place under the shaping influence of desire for, and against, the sovereign, and her or his 'passional' and symbolic powers.

Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI PDF Author: S. Dunnigan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403932700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eros and Poetry examines the erotics of literary desire at the Stewart court in Scotland during the reigns of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI. Encompassing the period from the early 1560s to the late 1590s, this is the first study to link together Scottish Marian and Jacobean court literatures, presenting a relatively unknown body of writing, newly theorized and contextualized. It argues that in this period erotic poetry can only be considered in relation to the figure of the monarch, and that the formation of elite lyric culture takes place under the shaping influence of desire for, and against, the sovereign, and her or his 'passional' and symbolic powers.

King James VI and I

King James VI and I PDF Author: Neil Rhodes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351923951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Yet hath it been ever esteemed a matter commendable to collect [works] together, and incorporate them into one body, that we may behold at once, what divers Off-springs have proceeded from one braine.' This observation from the Bishop of Winchester in his preface to King James's 1616 Workes is particularly appropriate, since James's writings cross the boundaries of so many different fields. While several other monarchs engaged in literary composition, King James VI and I stands out as 'an inveterate scribbler' and is certainly the most extensively published of all British rulers. King James VI and I provides a broad representative selection of King James's writings on a range of secular and religious topics. Each text is provided in full, creating an invaluable reference tool for 16th and 17th century scholars working in different disciplines and a fascinating collection for students and general readers interested in early modern history and literature. In contrast to other editions of James's writings, which have been confined to a single aspect of his work, the present edition brings together for the first time his poetry and his religious writing, his political works and his treatises on witchcraft and tobacco, in a single volume. What makes this collection of James's writings especially significant is the distinctiveness of his position as both writer and ruler, an author of incontestable authority. All his authorly roles, as poet, polemicist, theologian, political theorist and political orator are informed by this fact. James's writings were also inevitably influenced by the circumstances of his reigns and this volume reflects the turbulent issues of religion, politics and nationhood that troubled his three kingdoms.

Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary, Queen of Scots PDF Author: Jenny Wormald
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857903500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, has long been portrayed as one of history's romantically tragic figures. Devious, naïve, beautiful and sexually voracious, often highly principled, she secured the Scottish throne and bolstered the position of the Catholic Church in Scotland. Her plotting, including probable involvement in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, led to her flight from Scotland and imprisonment by her equally ambitious cousin and fellow queen, Elizabeth of England. Yet when Elizabeth ordered Mary's execution in 1587 it was an act of exasperated frustration rather than political wrath. Unlike biographies of Mary predating this work, this masterly study set out to show Mary as she really was – not a romantic heroine, but the ruler of a European kingdom with far greater economic and political importance than its size or location would indicate. Wormald also showed that Mary's downfall was not simply because of the 'crisis years' of 1565–7, but because of her way of dealing, or failing to deal, with the problems facing her as a renaissance monarch. She was tragic because she was born to supreme power but was wholly incapable of coping with its responsibilities. Her extraordinary story has become one of the most colourful and emotionally searing tales of western history, and it is here fully reconsidered by a leading specialist of the period. Jenny Wormald's beautifully written biography will appeal to students and general readers alike.

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621 PDF Author: R. Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230513689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences, in comparison with the traditions of Continental women writers and of English male authors. In this focus on a single genre, Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.

"Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun"

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004358064
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume gathers together essays on Scottish literature, diverse in historical period, mode, and form in honour of Professor R.D.S. Jack, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Chronologically, the collection sweeps from the early middle ages to the early twentieth century, from Robert Henryson to J.M. Barrie, conveying a sense of the shifting and subtle identities and continuities of Scottish literary traditions across the centuries, and opening up, through a distinctive and unusual range of writers and texts, unfamiliar aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic landscapes. Unusual and wide-ranging in subject and scope, the volume explores Scottish medieval romance and allegory, Renaissance court performance, early modern travel writing, seventeenth-century poetry, Sir Thomas Urquhart’s universal language theory, Scottish Romanticism, Burns and Barrie. Shared threads of interest run through the collection: a questioning of the canonical; attentiveness to questions of language, rhetoric, and form; and a commitment to uncovering the dynamic interaction between European and Scottish traditions. Collectively, the volume charts a new series of imaginative cross-currents across historical periods and literary modes, attesting the importance of, and necessity for, a critical vision of Scottish literature which is pluralistic, comparative, and sensitive to form, mode, and rhetoric.

Shakespeare and Republicanism

Shakespeare and Republicanism PDF Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139445412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
This groundbreaking work, first published in 2005, reveals exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought that were critical of the English crown and constitution. Shakespeare has often been seen as a conservative political thinker characterised by an over-riding fear of the 'mob'. Hadfield argues instead that Shakespeare's writing emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility. Beginning with Shakespeare's apocalyptic representation of civil war in the Henry VI plays, Hadfield provides a series of powerful new readings of Shakespeare and his time. For anyone interested in Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, this book is required reading.

The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland

The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland PDF Author: Sebastiaan Verweij
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191074578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study presents a history of the literary culture of early-modern Scotland (1560-1625), based on extensive study of the literary manuscript. It argues for the importance of three key places of production of such manuscripts: the royal court, burghs and towns, and regional houses (stately homes, but also minor lairdly and non-aristocratic households). This attention to place facilitates a discussion of, respectively, courtly, urban or civic, and regional literary cultures. Sebastiaan Verweij's methodology stems from bibliographical scholarship and the study of the 'History of the Book', and more specifically, from a school of manuscript research that has invigorated early-modern English literary criticism over the last few decades. The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland will also intersect with a programme of reassessment of early-modern Scottish culture that is currently underway in Scottish studies. Traditional narratives of literary history have often regarded the Reformation of 1560 as heralding a terminal cultural decline, and the Union of Crowns of 1603, with the departure of king and court, was thought to have brought the briefest of renaissances (in the 1580s and 1590s) to an early end. This book purposefully straddles the Union, in order to make possible the rediscovery of Scotland's refined and sophisticated renaissance culture.

Shakespeare and Scotland

Shakespeare and Scotland PDF Author: Willy Maley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526135108
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespeare and Scotland is a timely collection of new essays in which leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic address a neglected national context for an exemplary body of dramatic work too often viewed within a narrow English milieu or against a broad British backdrop. These essays explore, from a variety of critical perspectives, the playwright's place in Scotland and the place of Scotland in his work. From critical reception to dramatic and cinematic adaptation, the contributors engage with the complexity of Shakespeare's Scotland and Scotland's Shakespeare. The influence of Scotland on Shakespeare's writing, and later on his reception, is set alongside the dramatic effects that Shakespeare's work had on the development of Scottish literature, from the Globe to globalisation, and from Captain Jamy and King James to radical productions at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow.

A King Translated

A King Translated PDF Author: Astrid Stilma
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317187741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
King James is well known as the most prolific writer of all the Stuart monarchs, publishing works on numerous topics and issues. These works were widely read, not only in Scotland and England but also on the Continent, where they appeared in several translations. In this book, Dr Stilma looks both at the domestic and international context to James's writings, using as a case study a set of Dutch translations which includes his religious meditations, his epic poem The Battle of Lepanto, his treatise on witchcraft Daemonologie and his manual on kingship Basilikon Doron. The book provides an examination of James's writings within their original Scottish context, particularly their political implications and their role in his management of his religio-political reputation both at home and abroad. The second half of each chapter is concerned with contemporary interpretations of these works by James's readers. The Dutch translations are presented as a case study of an ultra-protestant and anti-Spanish reading from which James emerges as a potential leader of protestant Europe; a reputation he initially courted, then distanced himself from after his accession to the English throne in 1603. In so doing this book greatly adds to our appreciation of James as an author, providing an exploration of his works as politically expedient statements, which were sometimes ambiguous enough to allow diverging - and occasionally unwelcome - interpretations. It is one of the few studies of James to offer a sustained critical reading of these texts, together with an exploration of the national and international context in which they were published and read. As such this book contributes to the understanding not only of James's works as political tools, but also of the preoccupations of publishers and translators, and the interpretative spaces in the works they were making available to an international audience.

Machiavelli in the British Isles

Machiavelli in the British Isles PDF Author: Alessandra Petrina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
Machiavelli in the British Isles reassesses the impact of Machiavelli's The Prince in sixteenth-century England and Scotland through the analysis of early English translations produced before 1640, surviving in manuscript form. This study concentrates on two of the four extant sixteenth-century versions: William Fowler's Scottish translation and the Queen's College (Oxford) English translation, which has been hitherto overlooked by scholars. Alessandra Petrina begins with an overview of the circulation and readership of Machiavelli in early modern Britain before focusing on the eight surviving manuscripts. She reconstructs each manuscript's history and the afterlife of the translations before moving to a detailed examination of two of the translations. Petrina's investigation of William Fowler's translation takes into account his biography, in order to understand the Machiavellian influence on early modern political thought. Her study of the Queen's College translation analyses the manuscript's provenance as well as technical details including writing and paper quality. Importantly, this book includes annotated editions of both translations, which compare the texts with the original Italian versions as well as French and Latin versions. With this volume Petrina has compiled an important reference source, offering easy access to little-known translations and shedding light on a community of readers and scholars who were fascinated by Machiavelli, despite political or religious opinion.