This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

This chapter discusses the relationship of the imagination to Christian eschatology. It gives an account of the function of eschatological imagery in the Bible, discusses the changing ways in which art and literature have engaged Christian eschatology, and concludes with an account of a distinctly eschatological imagination.

Wagner’s immersion in the literary culture of Spain is seldom examined. This chapter explores his fascination with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón in particular, as borne out by his private correspondence, public essays and via Cosima’s diaries. Here, Wagner’s personal characterisation of their literary value bears scrutiny as a facet of his self-understanding of drama within Opera and Drama, even if the role of Spanish culture within Wagner’s works is paltry. Canonical works such as Don Quixote testify to a shattering of the hero myth, the decadence of the ‘Christian romance of chivalry’, while the auto sacramantales of Calderón served as a counterpart to Parsifal, reversing its path from art to religion.

What does it actually mean to read for justice and what might this entail? Yoking a wide range of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives and hard-won critical insights, this chapter argues that decolonizing the curriculum is not simply additive (”just add Achebe!”). Decolonization provides a vocabulary by which new knowledges of human development may help to reshape the literary curriculum in the direction of greater sensitivity to urgent racial and social justice issues in today’s world. The chapter examines pathways for this change through detailed readings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (and Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic adaptation), and an examination of the politics of comparison.

Created by Chicanx and Indigenous artists living and working in the US–Mexico Borderlands, Borderlands Shakespeare appropriations situate Shakespeare within the unique context of la frontera, engaging with its hybrid cultures, genres, and languages. These appropriations draw from Anglo, Spanish, and Indigenous traditions, and they confront Shakespeare’s colonial legacies, interrogating the complex layers of colonialism shaping the region and Shakespeare’s reception in it. To explore the decolonial vision of Borderlands Shakespeare, this essay focuses on Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers (1991), an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet set in Los Angeles during Día de los Muertos, and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry (2014), an appropriation of Henry IV, Part I set in post-apocalyptic San Diego. These plays engage with Shakespeare to critique imperialist policies that have resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous land, the criminalization of migration, and high levels of labor and environmental exploitation. In their use of multilingual Indigenous and Chicanx frameworks to imagine more just futures, Borderlands Shakespeare plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry offer valuable methodologies for decolonizing English literary studies and for approaching canonical Western texts in culturally sustaining ways.

Chapter 4 covers their final decade, during which the company underwent a series of changes to the core membership following two decades of stability. The company shifted around 1578 from supplementing personnel by hiring boy players to shoring up membership with an apprenticeship system. This enabled them to survive the departure of James Burbage by 1581 and the cull of members to help form the Queen’s Men in 1583. I identify evidence that several of the Queen’s Men not previously attached to any other company were likely members of Leicester’s Men, which also means the cull was greater than has been imagined in the past. A final crisis hit the company when five of their members were sent by Leicester into service in Europe for a year, but I show that Will Kempe’s development of the stage jig was ideally timed to enable the remaining few members to still tour widely with jigs as their primary play stocks. The final section explains reasons to doubt that Richard Burbage or Shakespeare were ever in Leicester’s Men, but did undoubtedly forge ties with this company’s members after Dudley died, ensuring the legacy of this company was carried forward to Shakespeare’s own career.

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s Falstaff as an anti-martyr in the two parts of Henry IV. The character of Falstaff isloosely based on the fifteenth-century Lollard martyr John Oldcastle and was indeed once called Oldcastle in performance. Even though Shakespeare transforms the martyr into a cowardly dissembler, who has very little to do with the Lollard martyr, countless allusions to Oldcastle’s martyrdom provide a meaningful interpretative framework for Falstaff’s ‘better part of valour’. However, this does not mean that Shakespeare mocks the Proto-Protestant as part of a Catholic or anti-Puritan campaign. On the contrary, in contrast with the politically subversive martyr figure in 2 Henry IV, Archbishop Scrope, Shakespeare’s transformation of the Lollard martyr rather amounts to a defence of the Elizabethan ideal of outward conformity. Falstaff’s dissimulation, insofar as it can be read as a rejection of martyrdom, is a form of political obedience. Moreover, Falstaff’s dissimulation also entails a defence of theatrical dissimulation that aligns Shakespeare’s theatre closely with the religious policies of the Elizabethan government.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written Sir Thomas More in the context of Catholic outrage over the breakdown of the Elizabethan policy of outward conformity in the 1580s and 1590s and the various means by which the Elizabethan regime made windows into men’s hearts in the late sixteenth century, including espionage, oaths, and torture. The play’s insistent Senecan intertext, which revolves around questions of silence and treason, thus becomes legible in relation to late Elizabethan legislative developments that served to penalise silence in matters of religion. As this chapter argues, the play’s biographical treatment of the famous Catholic martyr, who never specifies the convictions for which he is executed, thus reflects the predicament of Elizabethan Catholic loyalists, such as Anthony Browne, first Viscount of Montague, who were concerned with maintaining an increasingly untenable sphere of silence as a middle ground between truth and dissimulation.

This chapter explores how early modern dramatists were often preoccupied with ideas of pity and compassion, and sought out new words and metaphors for articulating such feelings. It begins by considering Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1585-6) and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), arguing that these plays centralize ideas of emotional comparability, receptivity, and resistance that fed into the subsequent emergence of the term sympathy. It goes on to examine Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), which contains an important early example of the word sympathy being used to describe a harmony of woe. The chapter then explores the emergence of the verbal form sympathize in several plays from the late 1590s, including The Comedy of Errors and Troilus and Cressida. It concludes with a discussion of Samuel Brandon’s 1598 closet drama The Vertuous Octavia, in which the protagonist invokes the possibility that she might ‘simpathize’ with her husband, while simultaneously suggesting that she is capable of resisting such emotional forces. This new word reflected and enabled a more active conception of sympathy as a practice of individual choice and agency.

This chapter explores how the term sympathy was co-opted into political discourse in the first part of the seventeenth century, and how Jacobean literary and dramatic texts debated the political aspects of pity and compassion. Focusing on responses to the crises of succession and the plague, the chapter discusses the representation of sympathy in William Muggins’s Londons Mourning garment (1603), William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Croesus (1604), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). It argues that King Lear exposes the ethical and philosophical problems involved in emotional perspective-taking, and points to the ways in which concepts of sympathy in this period were complicated by an individual’s class and status. The chapter then turns to royal elegies from the 1610s and 1620s, including poetic responses to the deaths of Prince Henry and Queen Anne. The chapter also explores several religious works that express concerns about a decline of sympathy during this period, and proposes that the increased bleakness of the 1623 Folio text of Lear may reflect wider social anxieties about what Thomas Medeley calls ‘this iron and flinty age’.

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.

This chapter uses David Garrick’s career-long engagement with Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681) to demonstrate two points about Restoration Shakespeare. First, it shows how Garrick’s production of Tate’s alteration continued the work undertaken by the late seventeenth-century playwright to fit the Jacobean tragedy to new theatrical contexts. Promptbook evidence and review accounts indicate that Garrick, like Tate and his contemporaries, added music and other special effects to the King Lear story, thus augmenting the already strong multimedia dimensions of the Restoration versions of Shakespeare’s plays. These same sources, however, also indicate how Garrick modified Tate’s own alteration to provide an even greater focus on the monarch, one of this actor-manager’s most famous and most often performed parts. Second, this chapter takes Garrick’s reworking of Tate’s King Lear as an example of how generations of theatre practitioners – including our own – might use the writings of Tate and his contemporaries as a useful intermediary between themselves and Shakespeare’s works.

Once the misattribution to Matthew Locke of some music for Macbeth published in 1770 was finally resolved in the 1960s, it was concluded that just one song and one dance by him could be connected with some certainty to Restoration stagings of the play. In this chapter, I discuss the ‘The Rare Theatrical’ compositions by Locke, which survive in the manuscript US-NYp Drexel 3976 and show how many of them can be identified as dating from the time of the Macbeth productions of 1663/4 and 1667. An understanding of the nature of the instrumental scoring of the English violin band, which at that date reflected French practice with two viola parts, is combined with other evidence to enable a reconstruction of Locke’s instrumental music for Macbeth, which takes the form of pre-performance music, a Curtain tune and Act tunes. While the particular grouping of movements used in the reconstruction remains largely speculative, the methodology devised to create it enables the identification of a significant body of theatre music from the 1660s, shedding light on the role of music in theatre productions of the time while also providing a context for the better-known music of the following decade.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between individual, communal, and political contentment in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare presents contentment as most successful when shared between selves, whereas an overly possessive attitude toward one’s contentment jeopardizes its existence. As You Like It depicts a commonwealth built upon the bonds between subjects and preserved through mutual contentment. By contrast, the malcontent Iago identifies vulnerabilities in Othello’s understanding of contentedness to destroy his relationships with Desdemona and Venetian society writ large. In As You Like It, communal contentment counteracts the social threat of envy, but in Othello jealousy distorts content beyond the point of recognition or redemption. Shakespeare does not shy away from the challenges to contentment, but he attempts to provide audiences with collective experiences of positive emotion and to unite them in the face of tragedy. Though recent critics have described the Renaissance theatre as an arena for emotional extremes, this chapter broadens our perspective of Shakespearean emotion to include a contentment that shares the stage with other affects.

This chapter considers how the moving, working bodies of boy actors were depicted on stage throughout the early modern period, drawing together a number of metatheatrical instances which explicitly stage the acquisition and performance of theatrical skill. Focusing particularly on moments in plays by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare, it argues for a theatre directly influenced by and representative of early modern culture's fascination with boys' physical capacities. Having established the early modern stage as a site of heightened physical display, the chapter moves to consider what bearing this culture of physical training and skill demonstration had on the careers and reputations of individual boy actors. It traces the careers of leading boy actors Nathan Field and Richard Robinson, attending to the highly physical nature of the roles these boys played, as well as how playwrights and audiences celebrated and commemorated the corporeal nature of their performances. Boy actors' physical performances, it ultimately argues, had a demonstrable impact on individual careers and reputations as well as company repertories.