Robyn Bolam – författare

This book looks at the traditions behind some of the common images that appeared on stage in the early seventeenth century. The years 1607-14 are particularly important, not only because of developments taking place in the playhouses, but also for the variety of drama on offer. The discussion includes Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Duchess of Malfi at the Globe and Blackfriars, The White Devil at the Red Bull, a court masque and later plays by Middleton and Ford. Dr Bolam explores contemporary performances in relation to each other and analyses the ways different dramatists handled the traditions they inherited. The book looks back to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's early plays and forward to the time when allusions to Shakespeare's plays became part of the pattern of traditions. Some modern revivals are described and illustrated with photographs showing how metaphors have been staged.

Carnival time in The Rover is a period when prohibitions are temporarily removed, privileges and rank suspended, and women - from convent girls to courtesans - take the initiative. Featuring multiple plot lines, which deal with the adventures of a group of love-struck Englishmen in Naples, Aphra Behn's play explores issues of love, trickery and deception, forced marriage, male power, fidelity, and the excesses of sexual passion. Hers is a male-dominated society, but one with a clear-sighted portrayal of the female predicament.The play is widely taught on A Level courses as well as on undergraduate literature and women's writing courses. This new edition contains a completely new introduction, and takes into account important criticism from the past decade, as well as a new understanding of the nature of theatre in Behn's time, and the significance of her contribution to English drama.

Robyn Bolam's new collection, Hyem, explores what and who makes us feel at home. Both people, and creatures - from whales off Kaikoura in New Zealand, New Forest cicadas, fish in the Thames, wrens, robins and starlings, to a climbing fox - face challenges to find homes where they can thrive. Hyem lets you walk London streets with Dickens or share the last moments of a 17th-century helmsman, whose final home is Stockholm's Vasa museum. A wolves' valley becomes home to surfers and a high voltage laboratory turns into a creative home for a poet. Hyem (home in Geordie) is also about growing up on Tyneside, loving a place through changes and celebrating those who preserve its history and spirit. Hyem is Robyn Bolam's first book of poetry since her retrospective New Wings: Poems 1977-2007, which included work from two earlier collections, The Peepshow Girl (1989) and Raiding the Borders (1996).

This comprehensive anthology celebrates four centuries of women’s poetry, covering over 100 poets from a wide range of social backgrounds across the English-speaking world. Familiar names – Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti – appear alongside other writers from America, Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand as well as the UK. The poets range from queens and ladies of the court to a religious martyr, a spy, a young slave, a milkmaid, labourers, servants, activists, invalids, émigrées and pioneers, a daring actor, and the daughter of a Native American chief. Whether writing out of injustice, religious or sexual passion, humour, or to celebrate their sex, their different cultures, environments, personal beliefs and relationships, these women have strong, independent spirits and voices we cannot ignore. In 1652, speaking of the poems she had published as her ‘babes’, a woman we know only as ‘Eliza’, answered ‘a Lady that bragged of her children’: Thine at their birth did pain thee bring, When mine are born, I sit and sing.Robyn Bolam’s helpfully annotated selection is illustrated with informative biographies. The texts are based on early editions or manuscripts but with modern spelling.