Scottish playwright Joanna Baillie grew up as the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister, but after moving to London in her twenties, she embraced Unitarianism like many other writers and thinkers of the early Romantic period. After publishing four volumes of plays, several metrical legends and dozens of poems, in her later years Baillie turned her attention to religious theory. Her 1826 drama The Martyr, later included in Dramas (1836), reveals her fundamental Christian ideology. But her 1831 pamphlet titled A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ broaches one of the most controversial theological arguments of the period - the validity of the Trinity. This essay considers why a financially secure, religious Scot, with a certain intellectual reputation, would turn her attention to Christian fundamentalism and then reveal such a liberal position in a frontal attack on Anglican doctrine.

Previous contributors to this collection have explored the death and dying themes in a variety of ways: death as wielded by kings and as recorded in the lexical text of Historia regum Britannie, death as a thematic concern of characters, authors or audiences, and the death and dying of sundry Arthurian characters. Often, of course, these approaches and topics overlap. I wish to continue this interconnection and variety of death by combining these approaches with two new subjects: the problem of knights who die but do not stay dead in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur; and the manner in which the bibliographic or manuscript text of the Morte announces those deaths. Certain innovations in the Morte Darthur can be traced to Sir Thomas Malory's inclination away from the romance-world of his sources. What he inclines toward is less easy to name; ‘tragedy’ – if generic taxonomy is required – comes closest. Malory's book is much more preoccupied with death and ‘unhappe’ than its sources. Several of the Morte's innovations, both in its adaption generally and in the Winchester manuscript particularly, combine to alter radically the way of chivalric death. I will concentrate here on three such features. One is the consistent naming of knights who are anonymous in the source texts, a technique that increases the official population of the book. While this practice invests the book with new personages, it also invests it with new deaths; and there is a profound difference – as will be discussed below – between the death of an unnamed knight and that of a named one.

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Shakespeare Between the World Wars draws parallels between Shakespearean scholarship, criticism, and production from 1920 to 1940 and the chaotic years of the Interwar era. The book begins with the scene in Hamlet where the Prince confronts his mother, Gertrude. Just as the closet scene can be read as a productive period bounded by devastation and determination on both sides, Robert Sawyer shows that the years between the World Wars were equally positioned. Examining performance and offering detailed textual analyses, Sawyer considers the re-evaluation of Shakespeare in the Anglo-American sphere after the First World War. Instead of the dried, barren earth depicted by T. S. Eliot and others in the 1920s and 1930s, this book argues that the literary landscape resembled a paradoxically fertile wasteland, for just below the arid plain of the time lay the seeds for artistic renewal and rejuvenation which would finally flourish in the later twentieth century.

This essay compares retrospective thoughtfulness in the classical Japanese death poem, or jisei, with that expressed by Malory in the closing scenes of his Morte. The comparison may help to illuminate just what sort of clarity Malory, in the ninth year of the reign of Edward the Fourth, might have attained, and whether it called for anything like a retraction. (THC).

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