FULL CONTENTS OF WOOL-GATHERER 1:

‘Cast Sorrow to the Cock’: the mental breakdown and recovery of Thomas Hoccleve.

‘Confounding Elysium’: the geography of the afterlife – Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

‘Monsters in Cupid’s Pageant’: the tentative courtship of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

‘And are there Neanderthals still in Scotland?’: Samuel Johnson’s journey to the Western Isles.

‘Transvestism and the Pursuit of Happiness’: cross-dressing themes in Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.

‘Oh to be in England (or perhaps somewhere much nicer)’: mixed messages about the relative merits of home and abroad from Robert Browning.

‘Women’s Page’: poems by women writers – Maura Dooley, Fleur Adcock, Mary Alcock.

‘And now – a Commercial Break’: poems by Hugh Parry; short stories by Margaret Wakefield.

‘Roll over, Beethoven’: musical aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

‘George Herbert and “The Forerunners”’: does literary skill in a religious poem dignify the subject or feed the writer’s vanity? (see Extracts page)

‘Apolonius and Silla’: the stories of Barnabe Riche; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and its source; the Elizabethan treatment of lunacy; ambiguous punctuation.

‘Publish and be Cuckolded’: translations of Ovid’s Amores compared.

‘Rites of Passage’: the coming-of-age of Telemachus in Homer’s The Odyssey. (see Extracts page)