A Mirror for Magistrates in Context

Literature, History and Politics in Early Modern England

Andrew Hadfield editor Harriet Archer editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:15th Aug '16

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A Mirror for Magistrates in Context cover

The first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the Shakespearean age.

This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence.This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

'This volume has the comprehensive quality of a handbook, with wide-ranging and thorough contributions on the Mirror's bibliographic history; its sources, influences, and analogues; on genre, rhetoric, the writing of history, Elizabethan politics and literature. But it's also imaginative, full of new critical approaches, multivocal and pleasingly readable in its concise chapters. Like the Mirror itself - whose authors are represented in conversation as they write - this collection has the feeling of scholars talking productively to one another: interacting with and sometimes disagreeing with one another's views, they are alive to the mercurial qualities of the text, its 'vanishing acts' and temporal twists and turns.' Mary Ann Lund, University of Leicester
'… this collection deserves significant praise. The editors, writing about a team of writers who each play their part in producing the works of Mirror, have themselves assembled a team of expert contributors who illuminate Mirror's significance for and impact on late-Tudor historiography and literature. Fittingly, the contributors often respond to one another's critical position; these debates and disagreements are always cordial and productive. Unlike Lewis's experience with Mirror, a reader can only lay down this collection feeling invigorated by its erudition and insight.' Rory Loughnane, Literature & History

ISBN: 9781107104358

Dimensions: 2mm x 159mm x 18mm

Weight: 510g

272 pages