William Shakespeare

Attached to Septimus is a different cluster of characters that includes his anxious young Italian wife and his doctors, the bluff Dr Holmes, who tells him to pull himself together, and the dogmatic and unfeeling...

Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson (whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises), it encompasses Blair , Sterne and Smollett as travel-writers, and Homer . Grant charges Samuel Johnson

This novel is set during the opening production at The Dolphin, a recently derelict and now lovingly restored Victorian theatre beside the Thames in London. The central character, Peregrine or Perry Jay, is a...

This book makes some pretence of being an early text, though the way that Nicholas Moldwarp is named and introduced suggests the superior eye of posterity. Manning once again imitates not only early spelling, but...

The periodical's theatre reports, provided by a little court of female criticism that includes Mary Singleton and a further six virgins, deplore the displacement of Shakespeare 's original King Lear by Nahum Tate

Randall Martin notes how Dowriche's use of Gentillet/Patrick brings her work into the anti-Machiavel tradition. Her Machiavel is a female one: Catherine de Medici (which was not unusual). Her Catherine speaks in gendered terms when...

This was one of the earliest novels of sensibility, and was probably influenced by Frances Sheridan 's Sidney Bidulph. Its sentimental content, however, co-exists both with comment on politics and with a coherent plot...

Hatchways is one of ES 's more humorous novels, since much is made of a foreign visitor's response to English culture and his desire to know more about what he takes to be its representatives....

JP divides this novel into three parts, one for each woman. Much of the section on Catherine of Valois (whom many readers would remember as a charming young woman being wooed in broken French at...

Brooke's advertisement to volume 3 says she gave up her plan for an essay on the writing of history, and settled instead on using notes to demonstrate how this work is, as all history ought...

The canonical name of Shakespeare was sufficient warrant to offer children stories which did not reliably reward virtue and punish vice, or make clear what action ought to be taken in response to events on...

Mary addressed herself particularly to female readers, because she knew that access to Shakespeare in the original was likely to be harder for girls than for boys. Sarah Burton argues that she had a hidden...

Critic Dianne Chisholm calls this book an autobiographical fiction in the genre of case history narrative, and argues that it employs the discourse of hysteria Finding no semiotic system that represents her experience, no...

After harking back to the days in which eminent authors were not public figures, she amusingly described the culture of public performance which arose during the 1960s. Highlights in her narrative were the first Writers'...

This first dialogue concerned the Baconian controversy. CS 's father was given to harping on his belief that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare . This is the position taken by Smedley's Victorian...