London in the age of Shakespeare was one of the largest and most important cities of Europe. Poets and poetasters, rhetoricians and preachers were able to use the city as an object for displays of technical rhetoric in ballads, bawdy jests, sermons, and tales. There is today an unparalleled wealth of contemporary descriptions which give us a vivid picture of what life was like in London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Professor Manley has collected a rich variety of such documents on Shakespeare's London, many of which have never before been translated into English. He has provided a general introduction to the history and literature of Tudor-Stuart London, while in further introductions to each chapter he sets the selections in their historical context and explains the conventions of literary genre that must be considered in using the selections as historical evidence. This collection will be welcomed by those interested in Renaissance history and life, and will be a useful resource for students of Renaissance poetry and rhetoric.

London in the Age of Shakespeare

Literature & Fiction

Manley, Lawrence

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays

MacLean, Sally-Beth

Dramas & Plays

Yale University Press

For a brief period in the late Elizabethan Era an innovative company of players dominated the London stage. A fellowship of dedicated thespians, Lord Strange’s Men established their reputation by concentrating on “modern matter” performed in a spectacular style, exploring new modes of impersonation, and deliberately courting controversy. Supported by their equally controversial patron, theater connoisseur and potential claimant to the English throne Ferdinando Stanley, the company included Edward Alleyn, considered the greatest actor of the age, as well as George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Hemings, who later joined William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Though their theatrical reign was relatively short lived, Lord Strange’s Men helped to define the dramaturgy of the period, performing the plays of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and others with their own distinctive flourish. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean offer the first complete account of the troupe and its enormous influence on Elizabethan theater. Seamlessly blending theater history and literary criticism, the authors paint a lively portrait of a unique community of performing artists, their intellectual ambitions and theatrical innovations, their business practices, and their fearless engagements with the politics and religion of their time.

Lit & Culture Early Modern London

In the two hundred years from 1475 London was transformed from a medieval commune into a metropolis of half a million people, a capital city, and a leading European trading center. Lawrence Manley provides a comprehensive account of the changing image and influence of London through its literature, including lyrics, ballads, jests, plays, pageants, chronicles, and treatises; and he shows how the literature and culture of London contributed to the new structures of capitalism, the process of "behavioral urbanization," and the liberation of the individual through the city's concentrated power.

Literature and Culture in Early Modern London

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

London has provided the setting and inspiration for a host of literary works in English, from canonical masterpieces to the popular and ephemeral. Drawing upon a variety of methods and materials, the essays in this volume explore the London of Langland and the Peasants' Rebellion, of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage, of Pepys and the Restoration coffee house, of Dickens and Victorian wealth and poverty, of Conrad and the Empire, of Woolf and the wartime Blitz, of Naipaul and postcolonial immigration, and of contemporary globalism. Contributions from historians, art historians, theorists and media specialists as well as leading literary scholars exemplify current approaches to genre, gender studies, book history, performance studies and urban studies. In showing how the tradition of English literature is shaped by representations of London, this volume also illuminates the relationship between the literary imagination and the society of one of the world's greatest cities.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Hardback w/ jacket; unmarked; no bent or torn pp.; jacket fine

Convention, 1500-1750

Reference

Harvard University Press

Convention, 1500–1750

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