Recent Studies in the English Renaissance

Abstract

A few years ago, having refused a couple of previous invitations because of other commitments, I agreed to write this essay during the year 2000; that date sounded close enough not to seem like another refusal, yet improbable enough not to seem real. The millennium did come, and with it some seventy-five books that crystallize the major shifts in our profession that have variously been hailed as the New Jerusalem and condemned as Armageddon. Apportioning space to those volumes was not the least challenge of this review, and the resulting decisions sometimes do not reflect value judgments. For instance, on the whole I have given less attention to studies by comparatists, historians, and medievalists, despite the exciting connections between their field and early modern literature; I have treated briefly, if at all, reprints that do not involve substantial revision; and I have omitted one indubitably major book received this year, David Norbrook's Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660, because it was reviewed here previously. With a handful of exceptions, within each section of this essay books are alphabetized by author. The unpredictability of many changes in the profession (which is among the reasons our graduate students should be cognizant of but not driven by professional fashions in shaping their work) emerges when I recall a conversation with a distinguished and indubitably au courant theorist some years ago: discussing shifts in professional interests, he joked, Well, we've moved from texts