On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature

Description

John Kerrigan is one of the foremost critics of English literature. This richly informed collection brings together his essays on such major figures as Sir Philip Sidney and Milton, but also less celebrated writers, including Thomas Carew and - in a new piece - William Drummond, to reconfigure the familiar and help extend the canon. Shakespeare looms large; his plays and poems, and his influence on Keats, are the subject of half the book. But themes and issues are pursued from the 1580s to the late Restoration. Kerrigan acutely reassesses the nature of early modern texts-their production and reconstruction by writers, printers, theatre companies, and readers-and their relationship with socio-political circumstance.
This original and eloquent book shows what criticism can do when closely engaged with verbal fabric and form. Always alert to the scholarly and theoretical debates that have raged within literary studies, it concentrates on drawing out the distinctive qualities of poems and plays.

About the Author
John Kerrigan, Professor of English 2000 at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John's College

Reviews

Review from previous edition Though elegantly written, Kerrigan's essays are densely argued and formidably erudite . . . The quality of Kerrigan's work sets a standard for others to aim at. - Neil Rhodes, Around the Globe
These essays consolidate Kerrigan's position as one of the outstanding scholars of the English Renaissance of his generation - E. A. J. Honigmann, Times Literary Supplement
"John Kerrigan is a close reader with a broad knowledge, ready with the big picture and the small detail." --Leonard R.N. Ashley, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance
"...John Kerrigan's pithy and polymathic essays in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (reissued in paperback)...an enthusiastic piece on 'Shakespeare as Reviser' and a more cautious one on 'The Editor as Reader.'"--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"These essays consolidate Kerrigan's position as one of the outstanding scholars of the English Renaissance of his generation." --Times Literary Supplement

Table of contents

I: Shakespeare
1: Shakespeare as Reviser (1987)
2: Between Michelangelo and Petrarch: Shakespeare's Sonnets of Art (1994)
3: Keats and Lucrece (1988)
4: Henry IV and the Death of Old Double (1990)
5: Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night (1997)
II: Early Modern Literature
6: The Editor as Reader: Constructing Renaissance Texts (1996)
7: Astrophil's Tragicomedy (1992)
8: William Drummond and the British Problem
9: Thomas Carew (1988)
10: Milton and the Nightingale (1992)
11: Revenge Tragedy Revisited, 1649-1683 (1997)
Index