This is a wide-ranging, closely-researched collection, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, on the cultural placement and transmission of texts between 1520 and 1750. Material and historical conditions of texts are analysed, and the range of works is wide, including plays and the Lucrece of Shakespeare (with adaptations, and a discussion of 'reading' playtexts), Sidney's Arcadia, Greene's popular Pandosto (both discussed in the contexts of changing readerships and forms of fiction), Hakluyt's travel books, funerary verse, and the writings of Katherine Parr and Elizabethan Catholic martyrs.

Acknowledgements - Notes on Contributors - Introduction - Complications of Intertextuality: John Fisher, Katherine Parr, and 'The Book of the Crucifix'; J.Mueller - Southwell's Remains: Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England; A.F.Marotti - 'A Very Good Trumpet': Richard Hakluyt and the Politics of Overseas Expansion; P.Neville-Sington - Sidney's Arcadia as Cultural Monument and Proto-Novel; P.Lindenbaum - The Triumph of Time: the Fortunate Readers of Robert Greene's Pandosto; L.Humphrey Newcomb - Editing Sexuality, Narrative, and Authorship: The Altered Texts of Shakespeare's Lucrece; S.Roberts - The Birth of the Author; R.Dutton - Mending and Bending the Occasional Text: Collegiate Elegies and the Case of 'Lycidas'; C.C.Brown - Between the 'Triumvirate of Wit' and the Bard: the English Dramatic Canon, 1660-1720; P.Kewes - Friends or Lovers: Sensitivity to Homosexual Implications in Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1640-1701; P.Hammond - Index