Slow reading in Shakespeare's England

2015-04-15This project explores an important but largely overlooked phenomenon in early modern studies: how poets, in the midst of a radically expanding culture of reading and print, chose to take time with and within English verse as an act of cultural resistance for readers and poets alike. This work considers emblematic texts, central works of poetry and romance in the period, as well as models of classical transmission, education, and the reading practices of Elizabethan England to show how key poets pit their works against the political, moral, and even practical ends that their vernacular literature was supposed to serve. Restoring the cultural context to this process of ""slow reading""—a practice intimately related to the pastoral mode—shifts our understanding of thinkers whose writings are often miscategorized as escapist and politically disengaged