Singh - A companion to the global Renaissance: English literature and culture in the era of expansion

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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This paperback edition first published 2013

2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization 2013 Jyotsna G. Singh

Edition History: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to the global Renaissance : English literature and culture in the era of expansion / edited by Jyotsna Singh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-5476-5 (cloth)978-1-118-43880-0 (pbk.)

1. Great BritainIntellectual life16th century. 2. Great BritainIntellectual life17th century. 3. Great BritainCommerceHistory16th century. 4. Great BritainCommerceHistory17th century. 5. English literatureEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism. 6. Globalization in literature. 7. Great BritainForeign relations. 8. Literature and society. 9. RenaissanceEngland. I. Singh, Jyotsna G., 1951

DA320.C656 2009

909.5dc22

2008044501

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Elizabeth I, Armada Portrait, attributed to George Gower, c. 1588. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire / The Bridgeman Art Library

Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

For my parents

Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

John Michael Archer is Professor of English at New York University. He received his BA and MA from the University of Toronto in 1982 and 1983, and his PhD from Princeton University in 1988. He has taught courses in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Renaissance Drama, and Literary and Cultural Theory at Columbia University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of New Hampshire, as well as at NYU. Archers first book, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford University Press, 1993), discusses the portrayal of political surveillance in the works of Montaigne, Marlowe, Bacon, and other authors. Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford University Press, 2001) extends his interest in knowledge-gathering to the later seventeenth century, by analyzing European travel writings along with literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. In addition, he has co-edited an anthology of critical essays entitled Enclosure Acts (1994), on depictions of sexuality and property during the period. His most recent book is entitled Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). It combines recent historiography with the close reading of playtexts to show how the London citizen and the immigrant city-dweller figure in the action and verbal texture of Shakespeares drama.