Shakespeare's visionary women, usually confined to the periphery, claim centre stage to voice their sleeping and waking dreams. These women recount their visions through acts of rhetoric, designed to persuade and, crucially, to directly intervene in political action. The visions discussed in this Element are therefore not simply moments of inspiration but of political intercession. The vision performed or recounted on stage offers a proleptic moment of female speech that forces audiences to confront questions of narrative truth and women's testimony. This Element interrogates the scepticism that Shakespeare's visionary women face and considers the ways in which they perform the truth of their experiences to a hostile onstage audience. It concludes that prophecy gives women a brief moment of access to political conversations in which they are not welcome as they wrest narrative control from male speakers and speak their truth aloud.

This study of radical prophecy in 17th-century England explores the significance of gender for religious visionaries between 1650 and 1700. Phyllis Mack focuses on the Society of Friends, or Quakers, the largest radical sectarian group active during the English Civil War and Interregnum. The meeting records, correspondence, almanacs, autobiographical and religious writings left by the early Quakers enable Mack to present a textured portrait of their evolving spirituality. Parallel sources on men and women provide a unique opportunity to pose theoretical questions about the meaning of gender, such as whether a "women's spirituality" can be identified, or whether religious women are more or less emotional than men.

This book addresses the inter-linked lives and fortunes of children and women in the first two decades of the twentieth century in England. This was a time of shifts in thinking and practice about children’s and women’s status, lived lives and experiences. The book provides a detailed explanation of how children experienced home, neighbourhood and elementary school; as well as discussing the impact of the women’s movement, namely its suffrage and socialist work. These two concerns are linked by the work women did about and for children. Essentially, the book explores childhood and womanhood; generation and gender; and socialism and feminism. Using existing studies on women’s work, and autobiographies and interviews about childhood, Mayall argues that women played a large part in re-thinking childhood as a special period in life, and children as participants in learning and in politics. This book will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of history, education and sociology, particularly those interested in the women’s movement, and the history of childhood.

Shakespeare's visionary women, usually confined to the periphery, claim centre stage to voice their sleeping and waking dreams. These women recount their visions through acts of rhetoric, designed to persuade and, crucially, to directly intervene in political action. The visions discussed in this Element are therefore not simply moments of inspiration but of political intercession. The vision performed or recounted on stage offers a proleptic moment of female speech that forces audiences to confront questions of narrative truth and women's testimony. This Element interrogates the scepticism that Shakespeare's visionary women face and considers the ways in which they perform the truth of their experiences to a hostile onstage audience. It concludes that prophecy gives women a brief moment of access to political conversations in which they are not welcome as they wrest narrative control from male speakers and speak their truth aloud.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem is an idea frequently encountered in mass market science books, discourse on Intelligent Design, and debates on the merits of writing produced by chatbots. According to the Theorem, an infinite number of typing monkeys will eventually generate the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence is a metaphysical analysis of the Bard's function in the Theorem in various contexts over the past century. Beginning with early-twentieth century astrophysics and ending with twenty-first century AI, it traces the emergence of Shakespeare as the embattled figure of writing in the age of machine learning, bioinformatics, and other alleged crimes against the human organism. In an argument that pays close attention to computer programs that instantiate the Theorem, including one by biologist Richard Dawkins, and to references in publications on Intelligent Design, it contends that Shakespeare performs as an interface between the human and our Others: animal, god, machine.

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature connects changing seventeenth-century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675. Maternal nurture gains new prominence in the early modern cultural imagination at the precise moment when England undergoes a major paradigm shift — from the traditional, dynastic body politic, organized by organic bonds, to the post-dynastic, modern nation, comprised of symbolic and affective relations. The book also demonstrates that shifting early modern perspectives on Judeo-Christian relations deeply inform the period's interlocking reassessments of maternal nurture and the nation, especially in the case of Milton. The book's five chapters analyze a wide range of reformed and traditional texts, including A pitiless Mother, William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and Milton's Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes. Equal attention is paid to such early modern visual images as The power of women (a late sixteenth-century Dutch engraving), William Marshall's engraved frontispiece to Richard Braithwaite's The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (1641), and Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Pero and Cimon or Roman Charity (1630). The book argues that competing early modern figurations of the nurturing mother mediate in politically implicated ways between customary biblical models of English kingship and innovative Hebraic/Puritan paradigms of Englishness.

Although the field of early modern women's studies has blossomed in recent years, little attention has been paid to women poets of the period. This new collection is specifically designed to fill the gap, applying new critical methodologies and theories to this group of early modern writers. Write or Be Written also contributes to ongoing debates about canonicity, periodicity, disciplinarity, and the construction of knowledge. The essays in this volume reflect today's sophisticated critical thinking, and represent a broad range of approaches and methodologies. Topics covered include contextualizing the self; female discursive strategies; religious discourses and gender; writing a female space; negotiating power and desire; female writing and the marketplace/publishing; and revisions of male-dominated poetic conventions and traditions.

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of William Hazlitt, John Keats and Charles Lamb to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.

This wide-ranging examination of the genres of early modern women's writing embraces translation in the fields of theological discourse, romance and classical tragedy, original meditations and prayers, letters and diaries, poetry, closet drama, advice manuals, and prophecies and polemics.

Penelope Anderson's original study changes our understanding both of the masculine Renaissance friendship tradition and of the private forms of women's friendship of the eighteenth century and after. It uncovers the latent threat of betrayal lurking within politicized classical and humanist friendship, showing its surprising resilience as a model for political obligation undone and remade. Incorporating authors from Cicero to Abraham Cowley and Margaret Cavendish to Mary Astell, the book focuses on two extraordinary women writers, the royalist Katherine Philips and the republican Lucy Hutchinson. And it explores the ways in which they appropriate the friendship tradition in order to address problems of conflicting allegiances in the English Civil Wars and Restoration. As Penelope Anderson suggests, their writings on friendship provide a new account of women's relation to public life, organized through textual exchange rather than bodily reproduction.