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Christopher Ivic, The Subject of Britain 1603-25 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 242pp. ISBN 978 0 7190 880 4. As I began reading Christopher Ivic's absorbing and timely book The [...]

I was sorry as well as rather surprised to learn that Rhodri Lewis found my book Shakespeare's Englishes so rebarbative (December 4). Certainly, he had difficulty understanding my central point [...]

This paper seeks, firstly, to reinstate the Suffolk lawyer and MP Nathaniel Bacon (1593-1660) whose ideological as well as political importance has been neglected, and, secondly, to propose that his 1647 tract in support of the parliamentary cause may have been an additional prompt to John Milton's work on his History of Britain, which dates from this period, and which counters the elder statesman's view of the Saxons as furnishing a legimitising native model of parliamentary government. In what may, in turn, have been a response to Milton, Bacon, in a "summary Conclusion" to The Continuation of this tract (1651), counters the received view of the English/British as courageous but politically unskilled inhabitants of the cold North, which Milton reiterates, notably in the "Digression" to book 3 of his History. Asserting rather the "middle temper" of the people of England Bacon claims for them a native political wisdom like that of Aristotle's Hellenic race with whom they share a "consanguinity", while Milton urges the need to look to continental Europe for political as well as cultural models. The stakes of Bacon's claims are pointed up by their appropriation to support the opposite cause by monarchists who share his nativist ideology, which is not shared by Milton as it is not shared by the monarchist William Temple whose position with respect to the continent of Europe aligns him rather with Milton. The perceived relation of England to its continental European neighbours thus cuts across the political divide between monarchists and parliamentarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'harshness' of Mercury's sentence in William Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's Lost' is likened to the harshness of the deaths of Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe, who left behind unfinished works and thus created a loss within English literary culture.

This essay brings together the 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Frank Kermode's seminal study of narrative fiction, The Sense of An Ending, in a comparative analysis of the endings of the three novels with which Austen was occupied in the period during which she was also struggling to make sense of what would turn out to be a fatal illness, most strikingly in letters penned from January to May 1817. The changing senses of an ending in accounts of her health are linked to the contrasting, if similarly self conscious endings of the two novels that sat together on her mental desk and that would be published together posthumously as Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Of key importance is an intertextual reference to the figure of the female story teller Scheherazade, added by Austen in revisions to the ending of Persuasion, which is thus associated not only with disclosure of the truth but also with death. In this context the description of two portraits of the dead with which Austen ends the unfinished novel (later called Sanditon) that she began in January 1817 and stopped at a date between two (contrasting) letters to her niece Fanny in March, acquires a poignant charge as a metonymy for the only form of survival for which she could now hope from readers to whom she delegates the project of Scheherazade to thwart her premature death by a cultural afterlife for her stories, her characters and herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including changes challenged or promoted in fiction, poetry and the use of language.

The article discusses the juxtaposition of literary filiations to the old and the new in the novel "To the Lighthouse," by Virginia Woolf. According to the author, the year the novel was published was juxtaposed with a figure of ancient classical culture. The author aims to examine the distinctive features to the filiations from within an overview of Woolf's relation to each figure.

Taking as its starting point an exchange in The Merchant of Venice between the Venetian master Lorenzo and the servant-clown Launcelot Gobbo this essay explores the symbolic economy of Shakespeare's linguistic “extravagancy”, including the word itself, which, as a Latinate neologism in Twelfth Night , is a nomadic stranger, like the figure who coins it, wandering across national boundaries, exemplifying the economy it names. A non-teleological economy of “language on holiday” (Wittgenstein) Shakespeare's “extravagancy” is self-consciously opposed, especially in The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night , to the emergent, protestant, bourgeois linguistic economy of “a plain man in his plain meaning” (Lorenzo) with its attendant ideologies of “proper” national, as well as individual, identities. Instead of this economy, in which language is instrumentalized, or, in Shakespeare's lexicon, “propertied”, as a transparent means to the end of proper meaning and exchange, and which requires a stabilization of values/identities, Shakespeare's “extravagancy” offers rather the economy of the gift, which generates surplus energy even as it traverses and undermines “proper” boundaries. It is an economy that is, moreover, assimilated to the economy of what John Calvin calls “la bonté gratuite” of an infinitely extravagant Word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]