On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays - Hardcover

Kerrigan's best credential is his capacity for close reading, exposition, and elaboration of implications drawn from key phrases in his texts ... a scholar's book.

... a volume that is more than the sum of its parts. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

The ability to hold complicated detail in focus, and to draw the larger arguments, is remarkable; Kerrigan pulls off the trick of seeing both the wood and the trees. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

Anyone with an interest in the period will enjoy these essays, and come away the richer for having read them. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

All eleven essays repay reading or rereading, being distinguished by a combination of literary acumen and scholarship, as well as being lucid and well written. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

These essays consolidate Kerrigan's position as one of the outstanding scholars of the English Renaissance of his generation (E. A. J. Honigmann, Times Literary Supplement)

Though elegantly written, Kerrigan's essays are densely argued and formidably erudite ... The quality of Kerrigan's work sets a standard for others to aim at. (Neil Rhodes, Around the Globe)

John Kerrigan is one of the foremost critics of English literature. This richly informed collection brings together his essays on such major figures as Sir Philip Sidney and Milton, but also less celebrated writers, including Thomas Carew and - in a new piece - William Drummond, to reconfigure the familiar and help extend the canon. Shakespeare looms large; his plays and poems, and his influence on Keats, are the subject of half the book. But themes and issues are pursued from the 1580s to the late Restoration. Kerrigan
acutely reassesses the nature of early modern texts-their production and reconstruction by writers, printers, theatre companies, and readers-and their relationship with socio-political circumstance.
This original and eloquent book shows what criticism can do when closely engaged with verbal fabric and form. Always alert to the scholarly and theoretical debates that have raged within literary studies, it concentrates on drawing out the distinctive qualities of poems and plays.