Emily Mayne

Locating Hercules

Locating Hercules is a study of the reception and significance of the hero-god Hercules in sixteenth-century England, and of the sources and poetics of classical mythology in English writing c. 1540-1600. Locating Hercules provides the first full account of the reception of Hercules in early modern England, and of the literary and cultural potentialities of this multi-dimensional figure, discussing a range of 'Herculeses' across genres and forms, including the works of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. The book provides a novel account of the early modern Hercules as a multiplex figure possessed of a range of overlapping and often contradictory generic, tonal, and geographical associations: potentially comic and/or tragic; hypermasculine and/or unmanned; part of British legendary history and/or peripheral to it. The book identifies for the first time a significant aspect of this Herculean plurality and its literary effects in a new set of texts: classical geographical writing. It shows that texts such as Strabo's Geography and Pausanias's Description of Greece circulated in early modern Britain and that these texts and their methods shape the use of classical mythology and figures in sixteenth-century literature. As such, the book reveals the distinctive status and importance of Hercules in early modern English culture and literature, and outlines a fresh way of reading mythological allusions more generally as flexible, topographically-informed elements within early modern writing.