‘Drunken porters keepe open gates’: Macbeth and Henry Smith

HENRY SMITH, lecturer at St Clement Danes without Temple Bar from 1587 until his retirement in 1590, was popularly known as ‘Silver-tongued Smith’, and likened by Thomas Nashe to Ovid, as gifted enough to write ditties for Apollo, and one whose death the Muses mourned.1 An undated sermon by him, ‘A Glass for Drunkards’, first appears in The Sermons of Maister Henrie Smith (1593

‘“Sermons in Stones”: Augustine, Joseph Hall, and "As You Like It"

Duke Senior claims the exiles’ ‘life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones’ (I.i.17–9). The Arden editor notes the three parallel metaphors on ‘homiletic edification in inanimate things’, and cross-refers to the passage in III.ii.152–154 where Rosalind remarks tartly on the boredom of listening to long sermons. The New Cambridge editor brings forward Richard Hooker on the threefold sources of Christian revelation: the bible, sermons, and the book of nature. The Oxford editor speaks of graceful platitudes, tinged with Stoicism

Early modern protestant listicles: God’s ‘Done’ and George Herbert’s ‘To Do’ lists

Protestant devotional writing from the turn of the seventeenth century uses the list to appeal to the reason, the emotions, and the will. Though as common a device as the dialogue, meditation, catechism, or homily, the list mostly goes unnoticed because of its humble pragmatism. This article looks first at the affordances of the list per se, then at how the period’s devotional writing characteristically entices readers with lists to argue, meditate, and act. Finally, the article argues that George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) uses the list to bring out the opportunities and comedy in the solifidian paradox

The value of literary analysis to City financial institutions

This project asked a small sample of English graduates now in senior and junior positions in accounting, investment, project or systems management, tax advice and merchant banking three principal questions: whether and how the study of English increased their efficiency, what they think creativity is in their profession, and how English academics might be of use in extending their business or providing training

Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

The introductory essay outlines the way in which Change and Exchange places literature, and, in a wider sense, imaginative practice, at the centre of early modern economic knowledge. Probing the affinity between economic and metaphorical experience in terms of the transactional processes of change and exchange, it sets up the parameters within which the essays in the volume collectively forge a language to grasp early modern economic phenomena and their epistemic dimensions. It prepares the reader for the stimulating combination of materials that the book presents: the range of generic contexts engendered by emergent economic practices, structures of feeling and modes of knowing made available by new economic relations, and economies of transformation in discursive domains that are distinct from ‘economics’ as we understand it but cognate in their intuition of change and exchange as shaping agents