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

The Taming of the shrew

6 page(s

Continuations to Sidney's Arcadia, 1607-1867, Vol. 4

Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Hain Friswell (1867)316 page(s

The book of Margery Kempe : scholarship, community, and criticism

The history of The Book of Margery Kempe from its first production in 1934 is also part of the history of English literary studies. Marea Mitchell traces some of the fascinating stories behind the proliferation of productions since then, including the involvement of Hope Emily Allen and other independent women scholars, popular receptions of the Book in World War II, and current productions that locate it as part of a medieval literary canon. Working from a cultural materialist perspective, Mitchell focuses on the materiality of the text itself and of the bodies of scholarship that have arisen around it.1st ed

"The details of life and the pulsings of affect" : Virginia Woolf's Middle English texts

For Virginia Woolf, medieval literary culture is part of the fabric of "Englishness," a space that can be contested for writers and ideas that are not part of the masculinist tradition she criticizes so strongly. By focusing on The Paston Letters and the Canterbury Tales, and in creating the character Joan Martyn, Woolf explores how the ordinary, the everyday, and the unexceptional become extraordinary and exceptional. For her, Middle English texts are full of what Ben Highmore calls "the details of life and the pulsings of affect." In registering the importance of the everyday in these early texts, Woolf connects Middle English texts to life in the early twentieth century. In her reading of them and writing about them, she seeks to rebuild the concept of English literature, and she also manages to convey a new understanding of Chaucer's role in literary culture.23 page(s

Beyond the fragments again: Germaine Greer and the politics of feminism

11 page(s

Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead : transformations and adaptation

Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' and Tom Stoppard's 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' are both concerned with change and the lack of change. This paper looks at images of transformation within each play, and uses transformation as a way of thinking about the relationship between the plays, focusing on how this might be perceived by audiences.17 page(s

Dorothy Stanley's enterprise : Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia Moderniz'd (1725)

The article analyses new biographical material Mitchell has found on a previously unknown writer of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.14 page(s

Commanding perspectives on the Isles of Scilly : Robert Maybee's ballad of 'Sir Cloudesley Shovel'

11 page(s