Andrew Hadfield – författare

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

The English Civil War was not simply a conflict between two opposing, unstable, complicated alliances of various factions, but a war of words. Supporters of the King and allies of Parliament and the New Model Army clashed over ideals, ideas, and concepts as they each sought to impose their understanding of history and visions of the future, realizing that victory could only be secured by establishing a political and cultural language that would guide and direct those who used it. Accordingly, the Civil War witnessed vociferous arguments over many key English words central to life and thought in the seventeenth century, and often up to the present day. Words at War seeks to bring together scholars of literature, history, religion, and philosophy to analyse the ways in which key terms were deployed and debated in the Civil War and Commonwealth. In doing so it refocuses attention on ideas and concepts that shaped the modern world well beyond the bloody conflict on the battlefield.

Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critical work to argue that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work, The Faerie Queene, traditionally regarded as one of the finest achievements of the English Renaissance. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as Hadfield argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Spenser should be seen less as an English writer and more as a new English writer in Ireland, his prose and poetry expressing the hopes and fears of his class. Where A View of the Present State of Ireland attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem, The Faerie Queene exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all.The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and three chapters which argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of The Faerie Queene reveals a land gradually--but clearly--transformed into its Irish other. Spenser emerges from this study as a writer whose experience in Ireland rendered him implacably opposed to the vacillations of his English monarch.

What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This innovative and wide-ranging study argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present - inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This stimulating book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. Hadfield explores in his work representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. He also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connections alongside phobic reactions to difference, the desire to co-operate alongside the desire to extinguish and exploit.The second edition of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is significantly revised and expanded, twenty years after the first edition helped to establish the field of travel and colonial writing in English. The anthology includes substantial new chapters of extracts on 'The North', detailing the important Arctic voyages and search for the elusive North-West Passage; 'Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean', includes new material on Persia, Russia, and Jerusalem; 'England from Elsewhere' includes observations of England and the English from European travellers; and the epilogue on women travellers, explores the importance in particular of Lady Catherine Whetenhall's journey to Italy, recorded after her early death. The chapter on Africa includes new material on the Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and the chapter on East Asia and the South Seas contains new material on China and Japan. There are new images of West African figures and Sir Anthony and Lady Shirley in Persian courtly attire. The introduction has been carefully revised to take into account the wealth of scholarship on English perceptions of Asia and the Mediterranean, and the analysis of race and racial identity has been expanded in line with contemporary concerns. Headnotes and notes have been revised and expanded throughout the text. The anthology is the most comprehensive single-volume available in English, and, with its newly modernized text and reader-friendly apparatus, is designed to appeal to the general as well as the specialist reader. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of travel, colonial writing, and racial politics at the time of the first British Empire.

A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connections alongside phobic reactions to difference, the desire to co-operate alongside the desire to extinguish and exploit.The second edition of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is significantly revised and expanded, twenty years after the first edition helped to establish the field of travel and colonial writing in English. The anthology includes substantial new chapters of extracts on 'The North', detailing the important Arctic voyages and search for the elusive North-West Passage; 'Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean', includes new material on Persia, Russia, and Jerusalem; 'England from Elsewhere' includes observations of England and the English from European travellers; and the epilogue on women travellers, explores the importance in particular of Lady Catherine Whetenhall's journey to Italy, recorded after her early death. The chapter on Africa includes new material on the Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and the chapter on East Asia and the South Seas contains new material on China and Japan. There are new images of West African figures and Sir Anthony and Lady Shirley in Persian courtly attire. The introduction has been carefully revised to take into account the wealth of scholarship on English perceptions of Asia and the Mediterranean, and the analysis of race and racial identity has been expanded in line with contemporary concerns. Headnotes and notes have been revised and expanded throughout the text. The anthology is the most comprehensive single-volume available in English, and, with its newly modernized text and reader-friendly apparatus, is designed to appeal to the general as well as the specialist reader. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of travel, colonial writing, and racial politics at the time of the first British Empire.

Mapping the World at the Dawn of the British Empire is a compact and informative guide to the ways in which the world was understood and imagined by British travellers and readers in the Tudor and Jacobean period, just before the rapid expansion of the transoceanic British Empire from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The book shows how the relatively restricted English-speaking world understood different people and places, sometimes through direct encounters, more often through descriptions and travel narratives. The book covers British perceptions of the diverse cultures of the world known to them in the early seventeenth century, from Paris to the South Sea Islands; from the earliest precarious colonies established in the Americas to the mighty Ottoman and Chinese empires; from the frozen north as sailors vainly sought to open up new trade routes by discovering the north-west or north-east passages, to the arid deserts of the Sahara; from the rich fishing grounds of the Baltic and the North Atlantic to the mythical kingdom of Prester John, the fabled golden city of El Dorado and the hidden societies of the dangerous women warriors, the Amazons. The book shows that British readers encountered a vision of the world that simultaneously represented them as specially selected white Christians, superior to other peoples, but also reminded them how dependent they were on other peoples, whose territories produced such vast riches. Reading these accounts of travel, trade, and colonialism demonstrates that English speakers realized how much they had to learn if their nations were to survive and flourish, as well as the possibilities for accumulating wealth through trade and conquest. The book is divided into six chapters, each prefaced by a contemporary map: Europe, The North, Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, East Asia and the South Seas, Africa, and The Americas. There is an introduction, a conclusion, a bibliographical essay, and a guide explaining how to use the book. There are also 35 illustrations, comprising of maps, portraits, and images of relevant objects discussed in the text.

What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This innovative and wide-ranging study argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present - inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This stimulating book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. Hadfield explores in his work representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. He also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.

The Oxford History of the Irish Book is a major new series that charts the development of the book in Ireland from its origins within an early medieval manuscript culture to its current incarnation alongside the rise of digital media in the twenty-first century.Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 contains a series of groundbreaking essays that seek to explain the fortunes of printed word from the early Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays in section one explain the development of print culture in the period, from its first incarnation in the small area of the English Pale around Dublin, dominated by the interests of the English authorities, to the more widespread dispersal of the printing press at the close of the eighteenth century, when provincial presses developed their own character and style either alongside or as a challenge to the dominant intellectual culture. Section two explains the crucial developments in the structure and technical innovation of the print trade; the role played by private and public collections of books; and the evidence of changing reading practices throughout the period. The third and longest section explores the impact of the rise of print. Essays examine the effect that the printed book had on religious and political life in Ireland, providing a case study of the impact of the French Revolution on pamphlets and propaganda in Ireland; the transformations illustrated in the history of historical writing, as well as in literature and the theatre, through the publication of play texts for a wide audience. Others explore the impact that print had on the history of science and the production of foreign language books. The volume concludes with an authoritative bibliographical essay outlining the sources that exist for the study of the book in early modern Ireland. This is an authoritative volume with essays by key scholars that will be the standard guide for many years to come.

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

The question of ethics has dominated recent developments within the humanities. This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts.

Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Renaissance historians and literary critics. Commentators are divided on a number of questions. Was there once a concerted plan to censor all material hostile to the status quo? Or did authorities only intervene in periods of acute crisis? Did they actually read the material referred to them? This collection brings together key figures in the field and includes essays by Richard Burt, Janet Clare, Cyndia Clegg, Richard Dutton, Richard McCabe and Annabel Patterson.

This glossary offers an introduction to Irish culture and society and a route-map to further study. Designed specifically with undergraduates in mind, it contains around 400 short and accessible explanations of the key events, figures and concepts in Irish Studies since the pre-modern period.

This revised and enlarged Fourth Edition expands and improves on the strengths of the previous three editions. All selections are based on early and established texts, fully glossed, and carefully annotated. An Editor's Note follows each section.This new edition addresses the shifts in scholarly and critical interests in Spenser studies since 1993 as well as access provided by new technology. Notes reflect the information that Spenser’s best readers would have at their fingertips without spoiling the pleasure of reading Spenser for the first time. Mother Hubberds Tale from the 1591 Complaints is newly included. The Ruines of Rome, Spenser’s translation of Joachim Du Bellay’s Antiquitez, is also added to give readers the chance to see Spenser at work as a translator and to give the English perspective on Rome. Sixteen critical essays have been added to supplement fourteen earlier commentaries. Among the perspectives new to the Fourth Edition are those of C. S Lewis, Martha Craig, Gordon Teskey, Jeff Dolven, David Wilson-Okamura, and Jennifer Summit.In keeping with the last edition, critical pieces on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped together to facilitate classroom discussion. New selections from Jane Grogan, Andrew D. Hadfield, Colin Burrow, Lynn Staley, Lauren Silberman, and A. E. B. Coldiron join the readings on House of Busyrane, and “Amoretti” grows with selections by A. Leigh DeNeef and Helena Mennie Shire.A Chronology of Spenser's life and an extensive Bibliography are also included.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:*the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period*the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes*the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.The sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.If you are beginning to study Othello, this sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:*the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period*the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes*the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.The sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.If you are beginning to study Othello, this sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

Should we assume that people who lived some time ago were quite similar to us or should we assume that they need to be thought of as alien beings with whom we have little in common? This specially commissioned collection explores this important issue through an analysis of the lives and work of a number of significant early modern writers. Shakespeare is analysed in a number of essays as authors ask whether we can learn anything about his life from reading the Sonnets and Hamlet. Other essays explore the first substantial autobiography in English, that of the musician and poet, Thomas Wythorne (1528-96); the representation of the self in Holbein’s great painting, The Ambassadors; whether we have a window into men's and women's souls when we read their intimate personal correspondence; and whether modern studies that wish to recapture the intentions and inner thoughts of early modern people who left writings behind are valuable aids to interpreting the past.This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

For many years C. S. Lewis's dismissal of the sixteenth century as a 'drab age' influenced literary scholars. Andrew Hadfield offers a challenging reinterpretation, through study of the work of some of the century's most important writers, including Skelton, Bale, Sidney, Spenser, Baldwin and the Earl of Surrey. He argues that all were involved in the establishment of a vernacular literary tradition as a crucial component of English identity, yet also wished to use the category of 'literature' to create a public space for critical political debate. Conventional assumptions - that pre-modern and modern history are neatly separated by the Renaissance, and that literary history is best studied as an autonomous narrative - are called into question: this book is a study of literary texts, but also a contribution to theories and histories of politics, national identity and culture.

In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of representation - aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual - and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary, combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics from the Reformation to the Restoration.

The Cambridge Companion to Spenser provides an introduction to Spenser that is at once accessible and rigorous. Fourteen specially commissioned essays by leading scholars bring together the best recent writing on the work of the most important non-dramatic Renaissance poet. The contributions provide all the essential information required to appreciate and understand Spenser's rewarding and challenging work. The Companion guides the reader through Spenser's poetry and prose, and provides extensive commentary on his life, the historical and religious context in which he wrote, his wide reading in Classical, European and English poetry, his sexual politics and use of language. Emphasis is placed on Spenser's relationship to his native England, and to Ireland - where he lived for most of his adult life - as well as the myriad of intellectual contexts which inform his writing. A chronology and further reading lists make this volume indispensable for any student of Spenser.

The Cambridge Companion to Spenser provides an introduction to Spenser that is at once accessible and rigorous. Fourteen specially commissioned essays by leading scholars bring together the best recent writing on the work of the most important non-dramatic Renaissance poet. The contributions provide all the essential information required to appreciate and understand Spenser's rewarding and challenging work. The Companion guides the reader through Spenser's poetry and prose, and provides extensive commentary on his life, the historical and religious context in which he wrote, his wide reading in Classical, European and English poetry, his sexual politics and use of language. Emphasis is placed on Spenser's relationship to his native England, and to Ireland - where he lived for most of his adult life - as well as the myriad of intellectual contexts which inform his writing. A chronology and further reading lists make this volume indispensable for any student of Spenser.

This groundbreaking work, first published in 2005, reveals exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought that were critical of the English crown and constitution. Shakespeare has often been seen as a conservative political thinker characterised by an over-riding fear of the 'mob'. Hadfield argues instead that Shakespeare's writing emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility. Beginning with Shakespeare's apocalyptic representation of civil war in the Henry VI plays, Hadfield provides a series of powerful new readings of Shakespeare and his time. For anyone interested in Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, this book is required reading.

This groundbreaking work, first published in 2005, reveals exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought that were critical of the English crown and constitution. Shakespeare has often been seen as a conservative political thinker characterised by an over-riding fear of the 'mob'. Hadfield argues instead that Shakespeare's writing emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility. Beginning with Shakespeare's apocalyptic representation of civil war in the Henry VI plays, Hadfield provides a series of powerful new readings of Shakespeare and his time. For anyone interested in Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, this book is required reading.