Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613
Merry Worlds

Uncovers the importance of popular literature in promoting and shaping medieval nostalgia in early modern England.

Harriet Phillips (Author)

9781108711807, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 October 2020

251 pages
23 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.37 kg

'In this smart, thoughtful, and important book … Harriet Phillips offers a welcome and rich expansion of early modern scholarship on nostalgia. As its subtitle suggests, this book challenges us to think critically about how early modern nostalgia could not only or exclusively commodify, but how it enabled collaboration and collective fantasy between writers and their readers and audiences.' Kristine Johanson, Modern Philology

For many people in early modern England the Reformation turned the past into another country: the 'merry world'. Nostalgia for this imaginary time, both widespread and widely contested, was commodified by a burgeoning entertainment industry. This book offers a new perspective on the making of 'Merry England', arguing that it was driven both by the desires of audiences and the marketing strategies of writers, publishers and playing companies. Nostalgia in Print and Performance juxtaposes plays with ballads and pamphlets, just as they were experienced by their first consumers. It argues that these commercial fictions played a central role in promoting and shaping nostalgia. At the same time, the fantasy of the merry world offered a powerfully affective language for conceptualising longing. For playwrights like Shakespeare and others writing for the commercial stage, it became a way to think through the dynamics of audience desire and the aesthetics of repetition.

Introduction: the merry worlds of merry England
1. Merry worlds: Tudor nostalgia
2. Dreamless art for the people: cheap print and catharsis
3. Common people: drama and dialogue
4. Martin and anti-Martin, 1588–90
5. Merry histories, 1598–99
6. Shakespeare's Ballads, 1598–1610
7. The merry worlds of Windsor in 1600
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Shakespeare plays [DDS], Plays, playscripts [DD]