Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama

The is the first book on neighbourly relationships in early modern English drama. Situating four unique, generically diverse plays within both contemporary prescriptive literature and the lived realities of neighbouring in the period, it argues that neighbourly relationships were as complex then as they continue to be today.

The book offers the first sustained examination of neighbourly relationships in early modern English drama, situating the close analyses of the selected plays within contemporary prescriptive literature (such as sermons and conduct books), letters, diaries, pamphlets, ballads, wills, proverbs, as well as the lived realities of early modern neighbourhoods as glimpsed in the historical and legal archives. The originality of the book lies in its topic, in the plays chosen for analysis, including Gammer Gurton's Needle, written in the 1550s and believed to be the first printed vernacular English comedy, and in the revisionist close readings on offer. The plays span the period between 1550s and 1620s, belong to different genres, and were aimed at different audiences and written for different kinds of playhouses, allowing for conclusions to be drawn about the way genre shapes the treatment of neighbourly relationships, as well as revealing continuities and changes in this treatment over the period under study.

Autorentext

Iman Sheeha is a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and early modern literature at Brunel University of London. She has authored Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy (Routledge, 2020) and co-edited a special issue on liminal domestic spaces for Early Modern Literary Studies (2020). Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Early Theatre, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Early Modern Literary Studies, and American Notes and Queries. She contributed a chapter to People and Piety: Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript in Early Modern England (2019) and wrote the Introduction to the forthcoming Oxford World Classics The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (2025).

Inhalt

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Neighbouring in Early Modern England

Chapter 1: '[A] neighbour of yours [...] up she took a needle or a pin': Neighbourly Tensions in Gammer Gurton's Needle

Chapter 2: 'I say shees my deadly enemie': Female Neighbourly Quarrels and Male Alliances in The Two Angry Women of Abington

Chapter 3: Alliances and Divisions: Female Neighbourly Networks in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Chapter 4: '[S]o near a neighbour, and so unkind': Home and Neighbourhood in Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women

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Conclusion

Bibliography

Index