'King Lear' by William Shakespeare

Critical Edition, with full sources, notes and commentary, of William Shakespeare, King Lear.

Resistance, regard and rewriting: Virginia Woolf and Anne Thackeray Ritchie

This article discusses the literary relationship of the novelist and memoirist,Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), and her step-niece, Virginia Woolf.Ritchie’s influence was a highly significant one which prompted a powerful ambiguity in Woolf, who was alternately admiring and dismissively anxious to deny influence, eager to relegate her to a staunchly Victorian past while covertly sensitive to those elements in her writing linking her with Modernism. These ‘Modern’ elements, including emphasis on the subjective nature of reality and the everyday life of the mind, occur in Ritchie’s fiction, affecting its style and structure. This article focuses on Night and Day, then on Woolf ’s more direct comments about Ritchie in diaries, letters and essays, comparing these comments and Woolf ’s theoretical agenda in defining Modernism and, implicitly, her own place in it. It also considers some of Ritchie’s fiction, with particular attention to two novellas, one a source for To The Lighthouse.

Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite principles: science, nature and knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s 'Fancies at Leisure' and 'Mrs. Holmes Grey'

This article demonstrates how early Pre-Raphaelite poetry worked according to the principle that art should be modelled on science theorised by the Pre-Raphaelites in their early essays. As the main theorists (rather than practitioners) of Pre-Raphaelite art, F. G. Stephens and William Michael Rossetti defined the Pre-Raphaelite project in terms of observation, investigation, experiment, the “adherence to fact” and the “search after truth”. In the hands of the early Pre-Raphaelite poets, and particularly Rossetti himself, poetry too becomes a mode of scientific enquiry into the natural world, the nature of observation, human psychology and medical practice.

Persia and kingship in William Cartwright's The Royall Slave (1636)

The recent reorientation of early modern studies draws attention to the Renaissance stage as a site of exploration of images of the Islamic world. This article examines the use of ancient and contemporary Persia in William Cartwright’s The Royall Slave (1636), in which Persia figures as a convenient space through which to examine political issues relevant to the audience at home in England. Assessing the construction of idealized societies and rulers in the play, The Royall Slave is a contemporary Court and academic drama that demonstrates its importance as one of a number of synchronous texts that represent Persia.