Tom Cain – författare

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

'Lords of Wine and Oile' provides a long overdue book-length appraisal of the major seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick. The collection reads his poetry in the context of his literary, musical, political, and religious affiliations and looks at how he both presents and constructs ideals of community through his work. Herrick is best known for his poetry's grace, good humour, and tolerant inclusiveness, characteristics at odds with the publication of his work close to the end of the Civil Wars. This collection places Herrick's poetry in a much wider chronological context beginning with his early career as a manuscript poet in Jacobean London. Contributors present original research to situate Herrick within the coteries of Ben Jonson and Thomas Stanley, uncover the Royalism of Herrick's publishers, and identify the printer of Hesperides. Others examine how the context of publication in 1648 gives a political colouring to Herrick's imitations of Ovid and Anacreon and how Herrick, like Katherine Philips, uses the theme of friendship and the mode of print to construct an idea of the autonomous author. Two essays explore Herrick's musical collaborations with Henry Lawes, the first such work since 1976, and analyse the influence of musical settings and group performance on the interpretation of Herrick's lyrics. The collection also showcases an important debate on the challenges posed by Herrick's work, which consciously rejects competitive anxiety and narrative momentum, for historicist and postmodernist literary criticism. Contributors include Stella Achilleos, Line Cottegnies, John Creaser, Achsah Guibbory, Stacey Jocoy, Leah Marcus, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Nicholas McDowell, Michelle O'Callaghan, Graham Parry, Syrithe Pugh, and Richard Wistreich.

This substantial collection includes contributions from leading international Shakespeare scholars such as Tom Craik, Philip Edwards, IngA-Stina Ewbank, R.A. Foakes, G.K. Hunter, Kenneth Muir, A.D. Nuttall, Brian Vickers and Stanley Wells. The book's twenty five essays range over the whole field of Shakespeare studies and deal especially with Shakespeare and his predecessors, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Shakespeare in performance (including film) and Shakespeare in relation to later literature. Shakespearean Continuities is published in honour of the distinguished Shakespeare scholar E.A.J. Honigmann, FBA, Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at the University of Newcastle, 1970-1989.

Meet the Accident Man, Samuel CarverCarver is a good guy who makes bad things happen to bad people. Drug-baron's helicopter develops mechanical failure mid-flight: Samuel Carver. Terrorist blown-up in his own bomb factory: Samuel Carver. Ex-SAS, now freelance mercenary he is the frontline weapon of the 'Consortium', a black-ops British government outfit, or is it?Carver is called to do a hit at very short notice. Do this job for us and be paid very well. Refuse and you better run and hide. He believes the target to be a high-ranking Pakistani terrorist. The job is to organise a car crash in a Paris underpass. But Carver is being set up. When he discovers the real identity of his target, and more importantly the identity of the target's female companion, he knows one thing - his life is over. This is a secret too big to let him live, unless he can track down the real villains before they get to him.Combining the plotting of Robert Ludlum, with the pace and tension of Frederick Forsyth, Tom Cain is a major new thriller writer and The Accident Man is a classic in the making and launches Samuel Carver straight into the top rank of action heroes.

Samuel Carver makes bad accidents happen to worse people. He's very good at his job. But nobody's perfect. And one of Carver's targets has got away.Now the world faces a new age of conflict driven by religious fanaticism. In Russia, the government have admitted they no longer know the whereabouts of one hundred small-scale 'suitcase nukes'. In Afghanistan and Kosovo, ruthless terrorists plot the downfall of their hated enemies. In Texas, a dying billionaire plots his own personal Armageddon.And Carver can do nothing to stop them. He was beaten and tortured and left to die, but Samuel Carver is a hard man to kill. When he awakes in a Swiss sanatorium from weeks of torment, he discovers that the woman he loves has vanished. Somehow he must find the strength to track her down.Carver's hunt will take him deep into the heart of a conspiracy in which the lives of millions are at stake. He must confront an agonizing choice between his duty and his heart, and face the ultimate sacrifice. As the clock ticks down to doomsday, who will survive the final, explosive conflagration?In The Survivor the worlds of fact and fiction collide in a thriller that grips from the first page to the last.

Set in Ancient Rome, "Poetaster" offers one of the first and most subtle statements in English of the Augustan cultural ideal. Jonson contrasts Augustus' wise rule with an English polity dominated (like the stage) by malice, intrigue and envy. This text examines these different strands so skilfully interwoven by Jonson, and argues for a reassessment of "Poetaster" as one of the most ideologically interesting of all early modern plays. The accompanying explanatory notes guide the reader through the personal and political illusions which gave the play its immediate satirical impact.

This edition of some five hundred recently-discovered poems by Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmorland presents the largest collection of 'new' seventeenth-century poetry since Traherne's poems were published almost a century ago.Until the rediscovery of these manuscripts, written between 1625 and 1665, Fane was known only as a patron of Robert Herrick, and as the author of a slim volume of poems, Otia Sacra (1648). This important body of manuscript poetry establishes him as a significant early modern poet.Fane’s agonised and changing representation of an England turned upside-down and back again, and of its everyday social as well as political life, is meticulously annotated in this first edition. It uses Fane's surviving account books and letters, as well as a wealth of other contemporary information, to contextualise his poems in a way rarely possible with other early modern writers. The resulting text provides fascinating and revealing insights for cultural and political historians, as well as for all readers of English poetry.

A revealing and original discussion of John Donne's workJohn Donne's voice can seem deceptively modern, yet his work demands contextual reading within early modern culture. The Life of the Author: John Donne presents Donne’s life and work as closely integrated, offering searching analysis of poetry and prose without reducing them to autobiography. Written by Emeritus Professor Tom Cain, a distinguished editor of seventeenth-century texts, this study reinterprets neglected documents and biographical details to shed new light on John Donne’s body of work.This study recovers overlooked evidence including the ramifications of Donne's brother Henry's death and a reinterpretation of the marriage settlement from his father-in-law, which Cain argues was more generous than scholars have assumed. The book also provides a detailed description of Anne Donne's death in 1617, and traces her presence in Donne’s subsequent poetry.Readers will find: Close analysis situating Donne's poetry and prose within early modern culture, while avoiding reductive autobiographical readings of the workFresh perspectives on Donne's lifelong conflict with mortality, culminating in his preoccupation with bodily resurrection alongside the soulDetailed examination of Donne's emotional state surrounding his wife Anne's death and her continuing presence throughout his later poetryNew biographical details and reassessments of neglected archival information that reshape the understanding of Donne's personal and professional circumstancesDesigned for readers at all levels of engagement, from undergraduates encountering John Donne for the first time, to scholars seeking fresh perspectives, The Life of the Author: John Donne offers a distinctive integration of biography and literary analysis that illuminates both the man and his enduring poetry.

Ben Jonson, who was with Shakespeare and Marlowe one of three principal playwrights of his age, was also one of its most original and influential poets. Known best for the country house poem ‘To Penshurst’ and his moving elegy ‘On my First Son’, his work inspired the whole generation of seventeenth-century poets who declared themselves the ‘Sons of Ben’. This edition brings his three major verse publications, Epigrams (1616), The Forest (1616), and Underwood (1641) together with his large body of uncollected poems to create the largest collection of Jonson’s verse that has been published. It thus gives readers a comprehensive view of the wide range of his achievement, from satirical epigrams through graceful lyrics to tender epitaphs. Though he is often seen as the preeminent English poet of the plain style, Jonson employed a wealth of topical and classical allusion and a compressed syntax which mean his poetry can require as much annotation for the modern reader as that of his friend John Donne. This edition not only provides comprehensive explanation and contextualization aimed at student and non-specialist readers alike, but presents the poems in a modern spelling and punctuation that brings Jonson’s poetry to life.