In 1623 a team of stationers published what has become the most famous volume in English literary history: William Shakespeare's First Folio. Who were these publishers and how might their stories be bound up with those found within the book they created? Ben Higgins offers a radical new account of the First Folio by focusing on these four publishing businesses that made the volume. By moving between close scrutiny of the Folio publishers and a wider view of their significance within the early modern book trade, Higgins uses Shakespeare's stationers to explore the 'literariness' of the Folio; to ask how stationers have shaped textual authority; to argue for the interpretive potential of the 'minor' Shakespearean bookseller; and to examine the topography of Shakespearean publication. Drawing on a host of fresh primary evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, manuscript letters, bookseller's bills, and the literature itself, Shakespeare's Syndicate illuminates our understanding of how this landmark volume was made and what it has meant to scholars since. Moreover, it models exciting new ways of working with stationers and of reading the event of early modern publication itself. This innovative study demonstrates that despite four hundred years of history, the volume at the centre of Shakespeare's canon continues to generate new stories.
This is the story of a crucial year in the history of England, brimming with great political and social upheaval: the year 1603. 1603 was a time of last goodbyes and new beginnings; of waning customs and fresh political and constitutional visions. It saw an aged queen die and a king from the far north rise as sovereign over a foreign nation. It also witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of bubonic plague, which began in London and spread indiscriminately through the provinces, killing up to 30,000 people. Catholicism was a second major disease doing the rounds in 1603. Its presence would lead to an attempt to dethrone King James I in the very first months of his reign, culminating in a trial staged at Winchester Castle in November. One of the candidates the conspirators had in mind to replace him was the would-be queen Lady Arbella Stuart. Indeed, Arbella would bring her own dramas to an already crowded and politically and socially charged year. The present work considers the entirety of the year 1603 in England, from January to December. In this same spirit, it also pays attention to the lives of ordinary men and women, as well as the lives of the great and powerful of the land. How aware were so-called common folk of the significant national episodes playing out around them? Did they even care? The answers are both fascinating and unexpected, and raise important questions about the interrelationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary in seventeenth-century England.
John H. Reagan was one of the most important figures in Texas history; this was the first biography of him to be published. Reagan, who was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1818, came to Texas twenty-one years later—while Texas was still a republic—and stayed to play many major roles in its later economic and political development. In this excellent biography, Ben H. Procter not only re-creates for us the character of the man, with his forthright integrity and his boundless desire for knowledge, but also places him against the background of the time in which he lived. In vivid language Procter portrays the violence and vigor of pioneer life, the excitement of frontier politics, the dedication, devotion, enthusiasm, and—ultimately—despair of the Civil War, and the bitterness of the struggle with the railroad tycoons and their gargantuan monopolies. Spanning as it does the Republic of Texas, early statehood, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and the era of the "robber barons," the story of John H. Reagan encompasses a panoramic sweep of mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States history. Throughout his long life, respect came to Reagan almost as a matter of course. The forceful strength of his personality made an impression few people could ignore. From the day when Colonel Durst hired the young Reagan as a tutor for his children, exclaiming, "This man is a scholar," until the day some fifty years later when Governor Hogg persuaded him to leave the U.S. Senate to become chairman of the new Railroad Commission because the Commission "must be above reproach," his extraordinary character and ability were recognized. In fact, the perceptive intelligence that made him examine all aspects of a situation, and the sturdy integrity and courage that made it impossible for him to abandon a position he believed to be right simply because it was for the moment unpopular, frequently gave him the appearance of a prophet. Although this "prophetic gift" occasionally led to interludes of public disfavor, Reagan was accorded honor, even in his own land—and in later years veneration—that any prophet might envy.
Illustrated with more than 200 colour and black-and-white photographs, maps and artworks, The Plantagenets is an expertly-written account of a medieval dynasty who have long captured the popular imagination.
An in-depth political study of Alabama’s government during the Civil War Alabama’s military forces were fierce and dedicated combatants for the Confederate cause.In his study of Alabama during the Civil War, Ben H. Severance argues that Alabama’s electoral and political attitudes were, in their own way, just as unified in their support for the cause of southern independence. To be sure, the civilian populace often expressed unease about the conflict, as did a good many of Alabama’s legislators, but the majority of government officials and military personnel displayed pronounced Confederate loyalty and a consistent willingness to accept a total war approach in pursuit of their new nation’s aims. As Severance puts it, Alabama was a “war state all over.” In A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause, Severance examines the state’s political leadership at multiple levels of governance—congressional, gubernatorial, and legislative—and orients much of his analysis around the state elections of 1863. Coming at the war’s midpoint, these elections provide an invaluable gauge of popular support for Alabama’s role in the Civil War, particularly at a time when the military situation for Confederate forces was looking bleak. The results do not necessarily reflect a society that was unreservedly prowar, but they clearly establish a polity that was committed to an unconditional Confederate victory, in spite of the probable costs. Severance’s innovative work focuses on the martial character of Alabama’s polity while simultaneously acknowledging the widespread angst of Alabama’s larger culture and society. In doing so, it puts a human face on the election returns by providing detailed character sketches of the principal candidates that illuminate both their outlook on the war and their role in shaping policy.
In post-Civil War Tennessee, Severance studies the influence of Republican governor William Brownlow's deployment of the partisan Tennessee State Guard, two thousand men of whom five hundred were African-American members. This militia enforced the Reconstruction policies by policing elections, protecting recent freedman, and operating against paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
A scholarly edition of works by Ben Jonson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
The first biography of the 18th-century landscape gardener, Uvedale Price, showing the key interconnections between his roles as landowner, art collector, forester, landscaper, connoisseur and scholar. Uvedale Price achieved most fame as the author of the influential Essay on the Picturesque of 1794 in which he argued that the work of the greatest landscape artists, such as Salvator Rosa, Rubens and Claude, should be usedas models for the "improvement of real landscape". His attack on the smooth certainties of Capability Brown sparked off a public controversy, drawing in Richard Payne Knight and Humphry Repton, which became a cause célèbre. This is the first biography of Uvedale Price, bringing out his contradictory and elusive character and revealing an astonishing cast of friends and acquaintances, including Gainsborough, Voltaire, William Wordsworth and ElizabethBarrett Browning. The book shows how he developed his ideas through practical experimentation on his own land and buildings and provides an understanding of the context of Price's practices and theories and the key interconnections between his roles as landowner, art collector, forester, landscaper, connoisseur and scholar. CHARLES WATKINS is Professor of Rural Geography, University of Nottingham; BEN COWELL is Assistant Director, External Affairs, National Trust.
This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare’s forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures. Haworth’s nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court.
This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833.
Having completed commentaries on all of the New Testament books, a remarkable feat in itself, Witherington now offers ... a two-volume set on the theological and ethical thought world of the New Testament. The first volume looks at the individual witnesses, while the second examines the collective witness"--
Light on a people's forward path comes from behind - from the past. Because Cumberland Presbyterians are eager for illumination for their ongoing mission this set of books have been written. In ÒA People Called Cumberland PresbyteriansÓ three writers have endeavored to directly and effectively present the convictions, dedication and purpose that formed this Presbyterian denomination on the American frontier and have impelled it through more than 160 years to the present. The books illuminate some of the most distinctive traits of the church. Many persons and events come to life in it. Not only the better known heroes and heroines of the movement are presented, but also many of the lesser known who play colorful and significant roles, and details typical of the ongoing life of the church are here, along with accounts of the stirring hours of its history.
A depiction of the history of North America and the United States told through maps old and new. The history starts with the peoples who first settled the land tens of thousand years ago, and continues to the present day. Includes a timeline of American history, a guide to the fifty U.S. states, and a map showing the birthplace of every U.S. president.
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