• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

Why You Should Read Allan Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’

What Scottish play, published in 1725, reached over 100 printings by 1800, was called ‘the noblest pastoral’ by Robert Burns, inspired more than forty paintings, more than ‘from the entire works of Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, or Fielding’ (R. Altick, Paintings from Books), and was performed by amateur companies throughout Scotland as late as the end of the 19th century?

Ben Jonson on the Internet

Compared with video material dealing with Shakespeare, there are relatively few really helpful videos dealing with Ben Jonson, either on the internet in general or on YouTube in particular. This, of course, is also true of most “Renaissance” authors aside from “the Bard.” However, one particularly valuable video documentary dealing to some degree with Jonson (and in fact titled “Ben Jonson”) was released as part of the “ShaLT [Shakespearean London Theatres] Project”:

CounterText 8.1 – The Mimetic Condition

The articles in this special issue offer powerful transdisciplinary testimony to the rich potential of the contemporary return to mimesis, and in doing so suggest ways in which the mimetic turn and the post-literary turn may be understood as critically supplementing each other. In this short accompanying video Guest Editor Nidesh Lawtoo offers a foretaste of what readers can expect.