ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the first account of internal exile as a preoccupation in Elizabethan literature and culture. It examines the non-dramatic verse of six major writers: Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Joseph Hall, and John Marston. Marston’s verse satires, recurrently foreground myths of self-transformation. In particular, they highlight the myth of Proteus. Thereby however they do not establish a pattern of mythic allusion to self-transformation. Across the 1590s, then, a preoccupation with internal exile is embedded in both the great collections of sonnets seeking to rival Petrarch’s Rime sparse and the formal verse satires aspiring to overwrite Roman precedent. It is embedded in the literary culture of late Elizabethan England, in romance and anti-romance.
