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The purpose of this thesis is to outline a new understanding of the relationship between England’s Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite courtier, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. This new understanding proposes that their childhood experiences and education were fundamental to their relationship as adults. They learned their manipulative abilities as a key to survival early in their lives, and repeatedly manifested this pattern throughout the years, as willing participants in a sexual and artistic game lasting only as long as both players followed the rules. The highpoint of this union was reached during the summer of 1575 when Leicester entertained Elizabeth at his palatial country house, Kenilworth. Critical interpretation and a multidisciplinary research approach, including history, child psychology, architecture, and literature, provide significant proof that Elizabeth and Leicester sexually manipulated each other in order to survive the turbulence of sixteenth century England.

The phenomenon of modern fantasy is the result of a tradition that originated with romance. It is a tradition that has experienced continual redefinement and utilization over the years. This is evidenced by the rediscovery of certain characteristics of the Medieval Romance and the development of others by the Romantics, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These characteristics are identifiable in the works of such later writers as Charles Dickens, William Morris, H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. The concern of these succeeding authors is the same as that of the Romantics, i.e., the nature and condition of man in modern technological society. The study of the works of these authors reveals two distinct approaches to the relationship of man and his society, and these approaches produce two different types of hero.

Global Milton and Visual Art showcases the aesthetic appropriation and reinterpretation of the works and legend of the early modern English poet and politician John Milton in diverse eras, regions, and media: book illustrations, cinema, digital reworkings, monuments, painting, sculpture, shieldry, and stained glass. It innovates an inclusive approach to Milton’s literary art, especially his masterpiece Paradise Lost, in global contemporary aesthetics via intertextual and interdisciplinary relations. The fifteen purposefully-brief chapters, 103 illustrations, and 64 supplemental web-images reflect the great richness of the topics and the diverse experiences and expertise of the contributors. Part I: Panoramas, provides overviews and key contexts; Part II: Cameos offers different perspectives of the varied afterlives of the most widely-circulating illustrations of Paradise Lost, those by Gustave Doré; Part III: Textual Close-ups focuses on a rich variety of book illustrations, from centuries-old elite engravings to a twenty-first century graphic novel; and Part IV: A Prospect beyond Books, explores visual media outside of books that manifest powerful connections, direct and indirect, with Milton’s works and legend.

Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591) is a significant example of material-textual Englishing: under the direction of Harington, his book’s emblematic title page, copperplate engravings, typography, mise-en-page, and commentary apparatus are all transmutations of the preeminent Italian editions of the sixteenth century, most notably Francesco de Franceschi’s lavish 1584 edition. This article traces how Harington cannily deploys his bibliographic code in metatextual and metavisual ways to call attention to how the material-textual manipulates the reader’s experience. In what could be called an act of early postmodern deconstruction, Harington playfully dismantles the edifying structures of pragmatic humanism in the same way that romance dissolves epic.