Taking as its starting point a little-known text by George Buck entitled The Third Universitie (1615) and as its endpoint the early years of the Royal Society, this chapter explores seventeenth-century knowledge exchange, research networks and innovation. What began as a civic challenge to Oxbridge ended in an outward-facing institutional sphere that drew its inspiration, founding figures and key personnel from the archipelagic and colonial contexts within which its pioneering interests developed. The Royal Society’s origins lie in a range of institutions identified by Buck, including Gresham College; in later developments such as the Invisible College and the Hartlib Circle; and in the idea for a directory of expertise, or ‘Office of Address’. Colonial investors and adventurers hard-wired into emerging networks of experts working across collaborative communities of scholar-practitioners ensured the advancement of knowledge was intimately intertwined with political intelligence and economic exploitation. There was no new medicine without frontiers, no new husbandry without fresh fields to plant, and, crucially, no knowledge exchange without satire.

This chapter offers a critical reading of Macbeth as a play preoccupied with war, including civil war and border warfare. Macbeth is arguably the greatest example of a character whose brutality is condemned so soon after being celebrated. There is an exploration of doublethink in a play that holds up savagery as heroism in its opening act in the shape of the severed head of a rebel and holds up the head of the executioner, a hero-turned-villain, in its closing scene. Working at the intersection of military history and medical humanities, this reading of the play tracks the effects and aftereffects of war and wounding, examines modern responses to the play by soldiers and psychiatrists that raise issues around care and control of veterans, addresses the politics of remembering and remembrance, and reflects on recent responses to Macbeth as a drama depicting the consequences of post–traumatic stress disorder.

This chapter examines the latticework of links between Shakespeare and Spenser, telling a tale of two writers. One goes to London to become poet and playwright, the other to Dublin with dreams of a dramatic career, where he finds his theatre of worldlings is a theatre of war. If Spenser’s influence on Shakespeare, especially early Shakespeare, is seldom discussed, Shakespeare’s influence on Spenser remains an even more neglected topic. Spenser is crucial here, since that poet’s Irish residence necessitates a broadening of horizons, and he is viewed as part of a recognizable circle. Shakespeare, a lifelong co-author and collaborator influenced by several of Spenser’s Irish contemporaries, is too often viewed in isolation. From the Spenser–Harvey correspondence and the early histories onwards, this study tracks the collaborative underpinnings of both writers’ work, charting their influences from a shared reliance on Holinshed to a common concern with innovation in form and genre.

The recent turn towards historicist criticism in Spenser studies, exemplified by the fashion for placing the poet in an Irish context, has inhibited studies of a more formal kind. Critics like S. K. Heninger and Jean Brink have tried to rein in readers bent on contextualising Spenser to death. The last major work on Spenser's language was Herbert Sugden's The Grammar of Spenser's Faerie Queene, first published in 1936 and reissued thirty years later. Sugden's findings - that Spenser's style was cramped by his approach to poetic diction, his desire to enhance poetic language, the limitations of theme and the constraints of his chosen verse form - have found general acceptance. In her contribution to The Spenser Encyclopedia Barbara Strang pointed out the paradox that despite universal acknowledgement of Spenser's facility for language, this aspect of his work 'has received practically no attention during the last thirty years, when items for the Spenser bibliography have been pouring off the presses at an average rate of three a week'. It is a measure of the richness and complexity of the subject that Strang's comprehensive entry on this topic is supplemented by separate essays on dialect, etymology, glossing, morphology and syntax, names, neologisms, pronunciation, puns, rhyme and versification. The problem is that all of these features overlap.

While the advent of a new genre, such as the new British history, invites the study of new texts, it also encourages us to look for new angles on old ones. In recent years there has been an increasing interest among historians in the ‘British problem’. This development has been unusual insofar as no significant concomitant development has occurred in literary studies. One can speculate as to why this should be the case. Some of the presently dominant, theoretically informed approaches to literature, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction, appear to play down questions of context in favour of close reading and an assiduous attention to language that can at times come down to cavilling on the ninth part of a hair. Others which do declare themselves to be historically grounded, such as new historicism and cultural materialism, have always acknowledged Ireland as a special case, an exemplary site of colonial activity, but have preferred to set it against some monolithic Englishness or Britishness – and often the terms are interchangeable – rather than to see it as part of a complex process of state formation. In this chapter I want to focus on a genre which has long been read as concerned almost exclusively with Irish history. I shall suggest that the three texts here chosen as representative of it can usefully be considered in terms of the ‘British problem’. I should perhaps say at the outset that my interest in the so-called British problem in the early modern period is as a crisis of identity or crises of identities in Renaissance culture, and that I am particularly interested in the way in which Scotland disappears in terms like ‘Anglo-Irish’.