Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England

Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England explores the elite and popular festival materials appropriated by Renaissance writers in a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Jennifer Vaught focuses on how Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Milton and Herrick incorporated the carnivalesque in their works. Further, she demonstrates how these texts were used-and misused-by later writers and inventors of spectacles, notably Mardi Gras krewes in New Orleans.