Books in the News in Cromwellian England

This article offers detailed analysis of the patterns of book advertising in Marchamont Nedham’s government-sponsored newsbook, Mercurius Politicus. It contends that, for a brief period, Politicus was the nearest thing that the mid-seventeenth century had to a literary periodical and contests standard accounts that Politicus was only successful because government monopoly made it so. Instead I show that Politicus was instrumental in creating an image of the Commonwealth and Protectorate as a Republic of Letters; the cheap print of its small advertisements insisted that the publication of a book was an event, that London was a city of the book, and that its inhabitants might respond to the uncertainty of political revolution by eagerly imagining a future comprised of new books as yet unread

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

Literal figures of speech : the book and the body politic in Milton's Areopagitica

This paper will explore the tropic structure of Milton's pamphlet in an effort to understand Milton's idea of authorship. To whom does Milton grant the creation of a book: to the author who writes it, to the reader who must interpret it, or to the publisher who finds it an audience? The problem some modern readers encounter with Areopagitica lies in their misunderstanding of the passage cited above; many modern readers impose onto the speech some kind of post-Romantic notion of the writer as a solitary creator. One must remember, however, that Milton composes Areopagitica in 1644, more than 150 years before Wordsworth, writing as a representative of late eighteenth century Romanticism, will locate the origin of a poem in the individual writer over the external world. Milton's pamphlet instead reflects the values of his seventeenth century culture; in his speech he envisions writing as a process of co-authorship. When taken out of context, the above passage heralding a writer's 'progeny' may appear to argue for an author's autonomy. Yet, with a more careful inspection of Milton's figures of speech and legal citations, one discovers that even while emphasizing the role of the writer, Milton never entirely excludes the contributions of the reader and publisher. If Milton seems to argue more adamantly for a writer's contribution over the importance of these other agents, he does so to offset the views of a society that marginalizes the writer's role.Englis