Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture

Natália Pikli is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and was Guest Lecturer at the Hungarian University of Theatre and Film Arts.

• List of figures; Acknowledgements; Note on texts; Introduction; 1. The hobby-horse and the early modern morris dance; 2. Living nostalgia and the cluster of allusions around 1600; 3. Gender, prejudice, and popular dramatic medleys; 4. The hobby-horse in university plays and on politicized public stages; 5. Hobby-horses in cheap print and iconography (1610s–1635); Appendix; Index

''This fascinating book uses its revelations about the hobby-horse in fact and metaphor to complicate our understanding of performance, orality and print. It explores hobby-horses as they are performed in morris dances, depicted in stained glass windows and emblem books, and referred to in ballads, pamphlets, and plays, casting a new light on popular culture. With its wide-range of textual reference, from the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson on the one hand, to the pamphlets of water-poet John Taylor on the other, ‘the hobby-horse is forgot’ no longer as a result of this riveting study.'' Tiffany Stern, FBA, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham