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As England entered the Renaissance and as humanism, with its focus on classical literature and philosophy, informed the educational system, English intellectuals engaged in a concerted effort to remake the culture, language, manners—indeed, the whole national style—through adapting the classics. But how could English literature, art, and culture, become'classical,'not only in imitating the ancients, but in the sense subsequently applied to music:'classical'as opposed to popular, as formal, serious, and therefore as good?For several decades in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Stephen Orgel writes, the return to the classics held out the promise of refinement and civility. Poetry was to be modeled on Greek and Roman examples rather than on the great English medieval works, which though admirable, lacked'correctness.'More than poetry was at stake, however, and the transition would not be easy. Classical rules seemed the wave of the future, rescuing England from what was seen as the crudeness and the sheer popularity of its native traditions, but advocacy was tempered with a good deal of ambivalence: classical manners and morals were often at variance with Christian principles, and the classicism of the age would need to be deeply revisionist.'Christian humanism'was never untroubled, Orgel writes, always an unstable or even paradoxical amalgam.In Wit's Treasury, one of our foremost interpreters of Renaissance literature and culture charts how this ambivalence yielded the rich creative tension out of which emerged an unprecedented flowering of drama, lyric, and the arts. Orgel has here written a book that will appeal to anyone interested in English Renaissance art and literature, and particularly in the cultural ferment that produced Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, and Milton.

This bibliography will give comprehensive coverage to published commentary in English on Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition during the period from 1961-1985. Doctoral dissertations will also be included. Each entry will provide a clear and detailed summary of an item's contents. For pomes and plays based directly on classical sources like Antony and Cleopatra and The Rape of Lucrece, virtually all significant scholarly work during the period covered will be annotated. For other works such as Hamlet, any scholarship that deals with classical connotations will be annotated. Any other bibliographies used in the compiling of this volume will be described with emphasis on their value to a student of Shakespeare and the Classics.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book'English Seneca read by candlelight,'wrote the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe,'will afford you whole Hamlets.'In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary and theater historians took Nashe at his word,finding Senecan tragedy at the source of Renaissance drama. More recently, critics have been inclined to dismiss traces of classical antiquity as a superficial veneer on a drama derived from medieval traditions. Lorraine Helms revisits this terrain to explore the rich and various ways in which classical learning shaped the theatrical culture of the Renaissance. She uncovers the practical advice on acting and stagecraft to be found in the writings of ancient rhetoricians; reconstructs the extraordinary circumstances under which an English woman first rendered Euripides into her native language; and ponders the precedents in antiquity for Elizabethan portrayals of prostitution and female martyrdom.

The great nineteenth-century English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson received an unusually thorough education in the classical languages, and he remained an active classical scholar throughout his lifetime. His intimate knowledge of both Greek and Latin literature left an indelible stamp on his poetry, both in terms of the sound and rhythm of his verses and in the themes that inspired him. Stateliest Measures, the first full-length study of Tennyson's thematic and metrical uses of classical material, examines the profoundly important role that his classical background played as he fashioned himself into a poet in the 1820s and 30s, and as he defined himself as poet laureate as of 1850.A.A. Markley examines Tennyson's objectives in developing the classical dramatic monologue, which, together with In Memoriam and his experiments with classical meters, indicate the degree to which he patterned himself after the Roman poet Virgil in attempting to provide modern Britain with a literature worthy of a new and rapidly expanding world empire. Stateliest Measures demonstrates that Tennyson's engagement with the long-running and complex nineteenth-century debates concerning Hellenism, Imperialism, and modern British culture was much more profound than his critics have recognized.