Mucedorus: the last ludic playbook, the first stage Arcadia

This article argues that two seemingly contradictory factors contributed to and sustained the success of the anonymous Elizabethan play Mucedorus (c. 1590; pub. 1598). First, that both the initial composition of Mucedorus and its Jacobean revival were driven in part by the popularity of its source, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Second, the playbook's invitation to amateur playing allowed its romance narrative to be adopted and repurposed by diverse social groups. These two factors combined to create something of a paradox, suggesting that Mucedorus was both open to all yet iconographically connected to an elite author's popular text. This study will argue that Mucedorus pioneered the fashion for “continuations” or adaptations of the famously unfinished Arcadia, and one element of its success in print was its presentation as an affordable and performable version of Sidney's elite work. The Jacobean revival of Mucedorus by the King's Men is thus evidence of a strategy of engagement with the Arcadia designed to please the new Stuart monarchs. This association with the monarchy in part determined the cultural functions of the Arcadia and Mucedorus through the Interregnum to the close of the seventeenth century

Shakespeare\u27s Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation

This study grows out of the intersection of two realms of scholarly investigation - the emerging public sphere in early modern England and the history of the book. Shakespeare\u27s Reading Audiences examines the ways in which different communities - humanist, legal, religious and political - would have interpreted Shakespeare\u27s plays and poems, whether printed or performed. Cyndia Susan Clegg begins by analysing elite reading clusters associated with the Court, the universities, and the Inns of Court and how their interpretation of Shakespeare\u27s Sonnets and Henry V arose from their reading of Italian humanists. She concludes by examining how widely held public knowledge about English history both affected Richard II\u27s reception and how such knowledge was appropriated by the State. She also considers The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello from the point of view of audience members conversant in popular English legal writing and Macbeth from the perspective of popular English Calvinism.https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/englishbooks/1003/thumbnail.jp

The Undiscovered Countries: Shakespeare and the Afterlife

The multiple uses of religion in Shakespeare’s plays seem to counter each other at every turn. In one respect, though, I have found a surprising consistency. Moments when Shakespeare’s drama imagines the afterlife are moments that lend significant insights into the play’s action or characterization, even though the image of one undiscovered country may differ drastically from another. Across the canon, the afterlife may appear as a place of religious judgment, as in Othello, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice; as a classical Elysium or Hades where the spirit or shadow removes elsewhere (Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus); as Abraham’s Bosom—a place of rest between death and the Last Judgment (Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet); or an unidentifiable life to come (Macbeth, King Lear)

Press Censorship in Jacobean England

This book examines the ways in which books were produced, read, and received during the reign of King James I. Cyndia Clegg contends that although the principal mechanisms for controlling the press altered little between 1558 and 1603, the actual practice of censorship under James I varied significantly from Elizabethan practice. The book combines historical analysis of documents with the reading of censored texts and will be an invaluable resource for scholars as well as historians.https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/englishbooks/1006/thumbnail.jp

Review of "The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England." by Joshua Calhoun

Joshua Calhoun. The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. xii + 212 pp. + 30 illus. $55.00. Review by Cyndia Susan Clegg, Pepperdine University

Press Censorship in Caroline England

Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law, but to achieve different ends. Building on her two previous studies on press censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Cyndia Clegg scrutinizes all aspects of Caroline print culture: book production in London, the universities, and on the Continent; licensing and authorization practices in both the Stationers\u27 Company and among the ecclesiastical licensers; cases before the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber and the Stationers\u27 Company\u27s Court of Assistants; and trade regulation.https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/englishbooks/1005/thumbnail.jp