Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674

Lucy Munro is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Studies at King's College London. Her research focuses on the performance and reception of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama, on editing, book history and textual scholarship, on literary style and genre, and on dramatic representations of childhood and ageing. She is the author of Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge, 2005) and editor of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer (2006), Shakespeare and George Wilkins' Pericles, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works (ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, 2007), Richard Brome's The Queen and Concubine and The Demoiselle, in Richard Brome Online (gen. ed. Richard Allen Cave, 2009), and John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed (2010). Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare and Ageing and Society, and in collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (ed. Richard Dutton, 2009), Performing Early Modern Drama Today (ed. Kathryn Prince and Pascale Aebischer, Cambridge, 2012) and The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (ed. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, 2013). Her stage history of The Alchemist appears in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, electronic edition (gen. ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, Cambridge, 2014).

• Introduction: conceptualising archaism; 1. Within our own memory: Old English and the early modern poet; 2. Chaucer, Gower and the anxiety of obsolescence; 3. Archaic style in religious writing: immutability, controversy, prophecy; 4. Staging generations: archaism and the theatrical past; 5. Shepherds' speech: archaism and early Stuart pastoral drama; 6. Archaism and the 'English' epic; Coda: looking backward, looking forward.

'Munro's method of defining and illuminating many facets of poetic archaism and their relation to cultural change through concatenated close readings makes for an enjoyably well-paced argument and an exciting sense of generative theory emerging from the verbal weave of the texts. … the conceptual apparatus and exemplary analyses that fill its pages will invite reconsideration of archaism as a lifelong Miltonic interest and strategy.' David Currell, Milton Quarterly