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This study is the first systematic exploration of Racine's theatricality. It is based on a close examination of all Racine's plays and on evidence for performance of them from the seventeenth century to the present day. The author considers, with the help of illustrations, the relationship between verbal and visual effects. He shows how the decor in plays such as Andromaque, Britannicus, and Berenice is significant for the action, and indicates the rich, often symbolic implication of stage properties and physical gestures, particularly in Mithridate, Phedre, and Athalie. Racine's usually neglected single comedy, Les Plaideurs, is shown to cast light on the theatrical language of his eleven tragedies. Some familiar topics of tragedy — moral ambiguity, error, and transcendence — emerge in a fresh light, and the concept of the tragic genre is critically examined from the theatrical standpoint. This study challenges many long-established views of Racine and lays the foundation for a reassessment of his role in French drama. It also opens new perspectives on his relationship with dramatists writing in other languages.

Restoration Theatre and Crisis is a seminal study of the drama of the Restoration, in particular that of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. This was a time of unprecedented political partisanship in the theatre. This book considers all the known plays of this period, including works by Dryden and Behn, in their historical context. It examines the complex ways in which the drama both reflected and intervened in the political process, at a time when the crisis fractured an already fragile post-interregnum consensus, and modern party political methods first began to develop.

Jean Desmarets, later Sieur de Saint-Sorlin, was a late Renaissance ‘universal man’: first Chancellor and founder-member of the Académie Française, last jester of the French royal court and star performer in ballets, novelist, playwright, poet, architect, inventor, and mystic. He was also the first man to publicise the notion of ‘a century of Louis XIV’. This book examines that notion by looking afresh at Desmarets's vigorous career and relating the ‘century of Louis XIV’ to its origins in the reign of Louis XIII. It questions historical misconceptions about Cardinal Richelieu's cultural policies and demonstrates the importance for the Court ballet of his patronage. Giovanni Bernini's illusionist sets and lighting effects for the Grand'Salle, which later became Molière's theatre and the Opéra, are discussed here. Desmarets's many high-level court offices, his family connections, and works — ballets, plays, poems, and religious and polemical pieces — reveal new and important links with contemporary institutions and preoccupations. In particular, the book considers the plays in the light of exemplary eloquence, and considers the intentions of the Académie Française, and the Quarrel of the Imaginaires, in relation to royal policy and the Cartesian revolution.

Long after the establishment of printing in England, many writers and composers still preferred to publish their work through handwritten copies. Texts so transmitted included some of the most distinguished poetry and music of the seventeenth century, along with a rich variety of political, scientific, antiquarian, and philosophical writings. While censorship was one reason for this persistence of the older practice, scribal publication remained the norm for texts which were required only in small numbers, or whose authors wished to avoid ‘the stigma of print’. The present study is the first to consider the trade in manuscripts as an important supplement to that in printed books, and to describe the agencies that met the need for rapid duplication of key texts. By integrating the large body of findings already available concerning particular texts and authors it provides an arresting new perspective on authorship and the communication of ideas.

Historicist and feminist accounts of the ‘rise of the novel’ have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. This book explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the ‘masculine’ power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French 17th-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively ‘English’ and female ‘form’ for the amatory novel.

This is the first modern study of the production and circulation of manuscripts during the English Renaissance. The book examines the relationship between manuscript and print, looks at people who lived by their pens, and surveys authorial and scribal manuscripts, paying particular attention to the copying of verse, plays, and scholarly works by hand. It investigates the professional production of manuscripts for sale by scribes such as Ralph Crane and Richard Robinson. The second part of the book examines Sir Philip Sydney's works in the context of research conducted for this book, discussing all of Sidney's important manuscripts, and seeking to assess his part in the circulation of his works and his role in the promotion of a scribal culture. A detailed examination of the manuscripts and early prints of his poems, his Arcadias, and of Astrophil and Stella shed new light on their composition, evolution, and dissemination, as well as on Sidney's friends and admirers.