Michelle O'Callaghan

Thomas Middleton is one of the major English Renaissance dramatists alongside Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Middleton continues to fascinate audiences and readers with his black humour, his wry and witty treatment of sexuality, morality, and politics. He is a consummate professional dramatist, experimenting with stagecraft in a manner that combines the visual and the verbal to startling effect. This book brings together these aspects of Middleton's craft through a detailed study of his major plays. Middleton experimented with, and helped to shape, a range of dramatic genres: city comedy, tragicomedy, romance, and revenge tragedy. This new guide analyses in detail how the plays work in terms of the early modern theatre and dramatic genres, as well as elucidating the broader cultural issues shaping the plays. It provides an introduction to critical readings of Middleton's works as well as modern performances, demonstrating how modern critics, producers, dramatists and film makers see Middleton's dark, playful and challenging plays as speaking to our times.Key Features*Ideal student guide with its wide ranging introduction to Middleton's city comedies, tragedies, and collaborative plays and its readings of key texts such as The Roaring Girl, Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Revenger's Tragedy, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling*Uses the most recent edition available, the Oxford Middleton (2007)*Provides background contexts guiding readers through criticism of the plays as well as recent work on early modern theatre and culture*Emphasis on Middleton's stagecraft and its assessment of modern adaptations and film versions of his plays

Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist

Michelle Frances O'Callaghan

The Jacobean Spenserian poets, William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke represented themselves as a distinctive oppositional community in the years 1612 to 1625. The author examines the group's response to contemporary political events.

Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612-25

The 'shepheard's Nation'

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Inns of Court and fashionable London taverns developed a culture of clubbing, urban sociability and wit. The convivial societies that emerged created rituals to define social identities and to engage in literary play and political discussion. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the lawyer-wits, including John Hoskyns, in company with authors such as John Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Coryate, consciously reinvigorated humanist traditions of learned play. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue between civility and licence, and between pleasure and the violence of scurrilous words. The wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century. This study will provide many insights for historians and literary scholars of the period.

Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England

The English Wits

Renaissance poetry anthologies were crafted within the book trade and re-crafted through performance, transforming Early Modern cultures of recreation.

Early Modern Cultures of Recreation

Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England

Katharine Hodgkin

Sue Wiseman

Dreams have been significant in many different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This thought-provoking collection of essays explores dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements. In topics ranging from the dreams of animals to the visions of Elizabeth I, and from prophetic dreams to ghosts in political writing, this book asks what meanings early modern people found in dreams.

Michelle O'Callaghan

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