Shakespeare's Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture Natalia Pikli 9780367514150

• The book fills a niche in early modern scholarship, no such comprehensive treatment of hobby-horse allusions was published before.
• Relevant dictionaries and glossaries in critical editions will be much helped by the book, because it contextualizes and often corrects traditional explanations for the word 'hobby-horse.'
• The comprehensive treatment of hobby-horse allusions, ranging from cultural history to theatrical, print productions and images allows for a fuller understanding of how popular culture worked in early modern England.
• Comparative close readings of little known and canonical plays highlight differences between types of dramaturgical composition, and such conclusions may be useful for theatre practitioners even today.
• The book caters for the interests of people coming from various fields: theatre, cultural history, literature, art history, folklore studies.
• The book is written in an accessible language, guiding the reader informatively through a lot of early modern texts and concepts.

Natalia Pikli is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, School of English and American Studies, Eoetvoes Lorand University, Budapest, and was Guest Lecturer at the Hungarian University of Theatre and Film Arts.

''This fascinating book uses its revelations about the hobby-horse in fact and metaphor to complicate our understanding of performance, orality and print. It explores hobby-horses as they are performed in morris dances, depicted in stained glass windows and emblem books, and referred to in ballads, pamphlets, and plays, casting a new light on popular culture. With its wide-range of textual reference, from the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson on the one hand, to the pamphlets of water-poet John Taylor on the other, 'the hobby-horse is forgot' no longer as a result of this riveting study.'' Tiffany Stern, FBA, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham