Literature and degree in Renaissance England

In this volume Peter Holbrook considers the complex interrelations between the literature and social structures of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. Arguing that social stratification is one of the central topics of much literature of the time, Holbrook draws on recent work in early modern English social history to describe the ways in which discursive modes in particular Renaissance texts articulate social difference. He argues that despite recent influential historicizations of English Renaissance literature, we still need a nuanced understanding of the ways in which "degree," the structure of social distinctions in Renaissance England, was symbolized in the period's literature. Holbrook suggests that it is time to reconsider approaches that take contradiction to be the key fact of English Renaissance social and socioliterary life, and look instead at the variety of ways in which Renaissance writers articulate the relations of different social coups. After an opening chapter arguing for the central importance of status to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Holbrook turns to particular Renaissance texts that seem to take degree - or social position - as their sub