This essay establishes a link between Garrick’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest, which opened at Drury Lane on 11 February 1756, and the imminent escalation of the French and Indian War (1754–63) into the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In this essay, Massai argues that Garrick’s Tempest, generally dismissed as a flop and as an embarrassing misjudgement on his part, takes on greater topical significance and political resonance if reconsidered alongside the ‘Dialogue’ that Garrick wrote to be performed as prologue to the opera. By means of a close analysis of both texts, alongside Dryden and Davenant’s earlier adaptation of The Tempest (1667), Massai shows how Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ are in fact representative of wartime uses of Shakespeare, which, as this collection shows, often served as an important platform for the fashioning of current attitudes towards military conflict.

This chapter explores georgic writing that appeared during the second half of the seventeenth century, with special attention to engagements with civil war and its aftermaths. The discussion also attends closely to Virgilian strains in English georgic writing and to the significances of literary imitation and translation. Authors covered include Andrew Marvell, John Evelyn, Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Joseph Addison and John Dryden, as well as the ancient writers Hesiod and Virgil.

Writing to Lord Holland in 1812, Byron anxiously petitioned the peer for help in completion of a couplet: ‘I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another.—I always scrawl in this way, and smoother as much as I can but never sufficiently, & latterly I can weave a nine line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning’ (BLJ, II. 210). Byron’s implausible boast about the velocity of his Spenserian scribbles is in part an attempt to re-establish his poetic credentials with a socially superior friend, yet it remains an odd pretension to assert. Not because of the improbability that he could write nine rhymed lines that incorporated a terminating couplet of sorts faster than a single pair, but because by the date of this letter he had already proven his skill in the couplet form in no fewer than three satires – English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Hints from Horace (wr. 1811) and The Curse of Minerva (also wr. 1811) – and would soon compose his second blockbuster Eastern narrative, The Corsair (1814) in the same form. For the purposes of this chapter, what’s most intriguing about Byron’s brag is not that he is dismissive of a form he returned to throughout his life, but that the forms that most preoccupied him during his early career were avowedly English.

This chapter traces the growth of Chaucer’s reputation from the early eighteenth century through the Romantic period. It begins with Dryden’s free modernisations that helped to popularise Chaucer’s works, examines the effects of John Urry’s 1721 edition, and looks closely at the groundbreaking linguistic and editorial work of Thomas Tyrrwhitt, who was the first to edit Chaucer’s verse from the manuscripts, and explained for the first time both the grammar and pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English, as well as an explanation of his metre. Tyrrwhitt’s edition generated new interest in Chaucer among the Romantic poets, especially evident in William Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrims,” the modernisations of Chaucer written by William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Elizabeth Barrett, and the dubious effort by the literary hacks R. H. Horne and Thomas Powell to publish a new set of Chaucer modernisations in 1841.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.