The Plays And Poems Of William Heminge

Containing his complete works, this text offers a biography of William Heminge, the son of Shakespeare's colleague John Heminge. It also includes texts of his two surviving tragedies, and the small group of poems assigned to him in contemporary manuscripts.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical and post-biblical context. Reformed England identified with besieged Jerusalem, establishing an equivalency between the Protestant church and the ancient Jewish nation but exposing fears that a displeased God could destroy his beloved nation. As print culture grew, secular interpretations of the siege ran alongside once-dominant providentialist narratives and spoke to the political anxieties in England as it was beginning to fashion a conception of itself as a nation. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This collection of original essays on Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's unsettling revenge tragedy The Changeling represents key new directions in criticism and research. The 13 chapters fall into six groups focusing on questions of space, theology, collaboration, disability both mental and physical, and performance both early modern and contemporary. The Changeling's critical and theatrical history, and a selected bibliography for the volume helps readers easily find the most frequently cited materials in the volume as a whole, while individual essays detail the full expanse of critical sources to pursue for further analysis. With contributors ranging from highly regarded critics to emerging scholars drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Switzerland, the collection equips readers to engage with a variety of critical approaches to the play, moving a long way beyond the last century's tendency to treat Middleton as 'the early modern Ibsen', to ignore Rowley, and to focus almost wholly on a single aspect of the play's plot. Key themes and topics include: · Performance · Space and affect · Authorial collaboration · Gender and representation · Violence · Disability