Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510--1613 : Merry Worlds

Explores nostalgia for the medieval past in early modern popular entertainment, bringing together plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Munday and Chettle, together with extensive research on contemporary ballads and other cheap print. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of early modern literature, history, drama and print culture.

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.