This chapter considers the first appearances in print of the word sympathize (1594) and argues that complaint poetry was an especially fertile genre in which ideas of emotional imitation and transmission were themselves imitated and transmitted. The chapter examines the poetics of feeling in Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592). It goes on to discuss Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and focuses on Lucrece’s emotional encounter with her maid, who, ‘enforced by sympathy’, begins to weep herself. The chapter then examines how this sympathetic encounter was appropriated and reworked by several writers in the years that followed, including John Trussell’s The First Rape of Faire Hellen (1595) and Samuel Nicholson’s Acolastus (1600). This process of textual transmission and dissemination is also at work in the various poetic miscellanies that appeared at the turn of the seventeenth century, including Bel-vedére; or, The Garden of the muses (1600) and Englands Parnassus (1600), both of which include extracts from several of the poems discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 2 argues that Andrew Wise’s editions of Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, and 2 Henry IV established Shakespeare’s early print reputation as a dramatist of English monarchical history. The chapter begins by driving a wedge between stage and print patterns during the late sixteenth century, demonstrating that Shakespeare’s English histories were unrepresentative of the historical subjects that were popular on the London stages. It proposes that Wise’s selection and presentation strategies were contingent on three main factors: the book trade’s interest in English monarchical history and its application to Elizabethan politics; the connection of Wise to Shakespeare’s company and George Carey’s patronized writers, which can be seen as a flexible model of textual patronage that eschews a direct link between patron and stationer; and the growing marketability of Shakespeare’s name. The result is an assessment of Shakespeare’s histories and ideas of genre that reveals the intersection of multiple agendas: it draws attention to the book trade as a collaborative system of exchange that frustrates efforts at singularizing agency and notions of genre.

Sir William Alexander’s tragedies on classical themes include two relating to Alexander the Great: one is about the latter’s defeat of Darius III and the other follows the fortunes of the successors after Alexander’s death. (It begins with a long speech by Alexander’s ghost). This chapter aims to combat the prevailing critical contempt for these plays by demonstrating the high level of scholarship that went into their composition and the thematic unity to the Alexandraean Tragedie conferred by the series of chorus meditations on Fortune and mutability. Sir William’s educational background and classical reading are explored, as well as his connections with the stage, and his work is compared with earlier Elizabethan plays on classical themes, including the comparable play by Samuel Daniel, Philotas.

This chapter focuses on Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594). Both poems are dedicated to women from overlapping and affirmedly Protestant circles, focused around the Sidneys and the Dudleys: namely, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Rosamond), and Lucy Harrington, soon to be Countess of Bedford (Matilda). Yet Drayton and Daniel suffuse their poems with references to aspects of pre-Reformation devotional culture and flash-points of sixteenth-century religious controversy: indulgences, legendaries of saints’ lives, monasticism, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, pilgrimage, confession. Whilst some allusions can be read ironically, the deployment of these religious allusions is not consistently or straightforwardly critical. This chapter consequently explores the ambivalent shadow cast by these poets’ recourse to emblems of pre-Reformation piety and to the fault lines of Reformation ideology, and examines the way in which these complainants’ desire to tell their stories simultaneously activates memories of Reformation. It argues that, in doing so, Daniel and Drayton comment on the fictionality and potential transience of their own poetic memorials, and interrogate the way in which memory is posthumously preserved and contested in an age in which historical reputations were being rewritten, and which bore witness to deliberate acts of erasure.

This chapter provides the readers with a reassessment of the Stuart masque. In order to have a broader perception of the Stuart masque texts themselves, Barroll contrasts them with the livrets of a number of ballets presented at the contemporary courts of France. Then, turning to Jonson, Barroll observes that if one considers the literary values in the printed texts of Ben Jonson’s masques, they emerge as uneven records of his oeuvre. The poet’s various attempts to influence the transmission of his masques have affected our assumptions about them. Barroll pays specific attention to the transmission history of Oberon and Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, first printed, with four others, in Jonson’s 1616 Folio. Beyond our sense of Jonson’s inclination to present all his F1 masques not as multi-dimensional spectacles but as literary endeavors, another factor may well have contributed to this great difference in detail between the Oberon and Love Freed texts, Barroll suggests. This was the changed atmosphere of the 1615 as opposed to the 1610 Stuart court.