This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Francis Bacon once wrote, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested... " This is a book to be chewed and digested, and these essays make as satisfying a meal today as when the first edition was published in 1597. Indeed, the present-day reader is amply rewarded for the effort of taking in the old-fashioned English...

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design The Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read...

Conventional historical wisdom focuses on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, yet, as Fred Kaplan argues, it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the turbulent decade that followed. During this vital, overlooked period in American history, pop culture exploded, court rulings unshackled prevously banned books, civil rights laws and protests broadened...

In any time or place literature is often influenced by concepts such as politics, society, philosophy, and in the true Puritan and Anglican fashion, spirituality and the Bible. It is this influence which Edward Dowden has cleverly critiqued. In his foreword, he writes, "Literature, however, and especially what is most valuable in the seventeenth-century cannot be studied without reference to the history of religion." Which is why, although the seventeenth-century...

"Today, 1913 is inevitably viewed through the lens of 1914: as the last year before a war that would shatter the global economic order and tear Europe apart, undermining its global pre-eminence. Our perspective narrowed by hindsight, the world of that year is reduced to its most frivolous features... In this illuminating history, Charles Emmerson liberates the world of 1913 from this "prelude to war" narrative, and explores it as it was, in all its...

Chronicles the life of poetic dramatist Christopher Marlowe, discussing how he challenged English society with his writings, what influence his work had on the literary world, how his life was impacted by the political and social atmosphere of his time, and other related topics.

Tells the story of a unique museum, the small town it calls home, and the great risk, hope, and power of art to transform a desolate post-industrial city. MASS MoCA is the largest museum for contemporary art in the world, but just three decades before, its vast brick buildings were the abandoned relics of a massive shuttered factory. How did such a wildly improbable transformation come to be? A testament to tenacity and imagination, Museum Town traces...

In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed through the figure of the self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; the sudden...