The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature

by Pincombe, Mike; Shrank, Cathy

• ISBN13: 9780199205882
• ISBN10: 0199205884
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I. It pays particularly attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical literatures under the of humanism; the self-conscious emergence of English as a literary language and determined creation of a native literary canon; the beginnings of English empire and the consolidation of a sense of nationhood. However, study of Tudor literature prior to 1580 is not only of worth as a context, or foundation, for an Elizabethan 'golden age'. As this much-needed volume will show, it is also of artistic, intellectual, and cultural merit in its own right. Written by experts from Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom, the forty-five chapters in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature recover some of the distinctive voices of sixteenth-century writing, its energy, variety, and inventiveness. As well as essays on well-known writers, such as Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt, the volume contains the first extensive treatment in print of some of the Tudor era's most original voices.

Author Biography

Mike Pincombe is Professor of Tudor and Elizabethan Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; he convened the Tudor Symposium between 1998 and 2009. He has written books on John Lyly (1996) and Elizabethan Humanism (2001), and also essays and articles on a range of mid-Tudor topics. He is presently working on William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates.
Cathy Shrank is Reader in Tudor Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her publications include Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 (Oxford University Press, 2004, 2006) and essays and articles on various Tudor and Shakespearean topics, including language reform, civility, travel writing, cheap print, and mid-sixteenth-century sonnets. She is currently working on an edition of Shakespeare's poems and a monograph on non-dramatic dialogue in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Conventions and list of abbreviations

List of illustrations

Notes on contributors

Prologue: The travails of Tudor Literature, Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank

1485-1529

Caxton and the invention of printing

Dramatic theory and Lucres' 'discretion': the plays of Henry Medwall

Stephen Hawes and courtly education

Having the last word: manuscript, print, and the envoy in the poetry of John Skelton

All for love: Lord Berners and the enduring, evolving romance

1530-1559

Thomas More, William Tyndale, and the printing of religious propaganda

Rhetoric, conscience and the playful positions of Sir Thomas More

John Bale and controversy: readers and audiences

Sir Thomas Elyot and the bonds of community

John Heywood and court drama

Thomas Wyatt and Francis Bryan: plainness and dissimulation

Piety and poetry: English psalms from Miles Coverdale to Mary Sidney

Katherine Parr and her circle

John Leland and his heirs: the topography of England

Biblical allusion and argument in Luke Shepherd's verse satires

Reforming the reformers: Robert Crowley and Nicholas Udall

William Baldwin and the Tudor imagination

Directions for English: Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric, George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, and the Search for Vernacular Eloquence

Order and Disorder: John Proctor's History of Wyatt's Rebellion (1554)

Marian political allegory: John Heywood's The Spider and the Fly

Hall's chronicle and A Mirror for Magistrates: history and the tragic pattern

A place in the shade: George Cavendish and de casibus tragedy

What is my nation?: language, verse and politics in Tudor translations of Virgil's Aeneid

Thomas Hoby, William Thomas and mid-Tudor travel to Italy

Popularizing courtly poetry: Tottel's 'Miscellany' and its progeny

1560-1579

Minerva's men: horizontal nationhood and the literary production of Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne

'For This is True or Els I do Lye': Thomas Smith, William Bullein and Mid-Tudor Dialogue

English Seneca: Heywood to Hamlet

Political tragedy in the 1560s: Cambises and Gorboduc

John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, 1563-1583: antiquity and the affect of history

Tragical histories, tragical tales

Foresters, ploughmen and shepherds: versions of Tudor pastoral

Interludes, economics and the Elizabethan stage

Ovidian reflections in Gascoigne's Steel Glass

The art of war: martial poetics from Henry Howard to Philip Sidney

Thomas Whythorne and first-person life-writing in the sixteenth century

Pageants and Propaganda: Robert Langham's Letter and George Gascoigne's Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth

Sir Philip Sidney and the Arcadias

1580-1603

Gabriel Harvey's choleric writing

The intimacy of manuscript and the pleasure of print: literary culture from The Schoolmaster to Euphues

Robert Greene's Pandosto and George Pettie's Palace of Pleasure

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Nathaniel Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience

Fictive Acts: Thomas Nashe and the mid-Tudor legacy

'Hear my tale or kiss my tail!': The Old Wife's Tale, Gammer Gurton's Needle and the popular cultures of Tudor comedy

Epilogue: Edmund Spenser and the passing of Tudor literature

Bibliography

Index

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