A Companion to Renaissance Poetry E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1670

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market

Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline.

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches.

• Covers a wide selection of authors and texts

• Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe

• Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: Contexts

TRANSITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

1 The Medieval Inheritance of Early Tudor Poetry

REFERENCES

2 Translation and Translations

Introduction

Early Developments, Foreign Foundations

Genre and Form

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

3 Instructive Nymphs

Echo Repetita

Untimely Love or “Spare the Buds”

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

RELIGIONS AND REFORMATIONS

4 Poetry and Sacrament in the English Renaissance

Incarnation, Sacrament, Controversy

Poetic Text/Eucharistic Context

William Alabaster’s “The Sponge”

Robert Southwell’s “Christs Bloody Sweate”

“The Altar”

Conclusion

REFERENCES

5 “A sweetness ready penn’d”?

Marking and Contesting Confessionalism

Measuring the Bible

Imagining Community

Penning Love

REFERENCES

AUTHORSHIPS AND AUTHORITIES

6 Manuscript Culture

Introduction

Occasional Verse and Manuscript Transmission

Tudor and Early Stuart Poets and Manuscript Circulation

Coda

REFERENCES

7 Miscellanies in Manuscript and Print

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

8 Renaissance Authorship

REFERENCES

9 Female Authorship

Introduction

Authorship Studies

The Problems of Female Authorship

(Mis)reading Hester Pulter

REFERENCES

10 Stakes of Hagiography

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

DEFENSES AND DEFINITIONS

11 Theories and Philosophies of Poetry

Introduction

Truth

Function

Form

Conclusion

REFERENCES

12 Tudor Verse Form

The Progress of Poesy: Rudeness and the Motives of Decorum

The Practical Inheritance

Quantitative Metrics and the Cultivation of the Line

Puttenham, Print, and the Strophe

REFERENCES

13 Genre

Practice and Theory

A Taxonomy of Terms

A Model of Genre

Renaissance Genre Theory

Renaissance Fictions of Genre

Printing Genre

REFERENCES

Part II: Forms and Genres

EPIC AND EPYLLION

14 Edmund Spenser’s

The Faerie Queene

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

15

Paradise Lost

Choosing a Subject

Visionary Epic

Unorthodox Theological Epic

Material Cosmos

Human Sexuality and Gender Relations

Domestic Relations and Tragedy

Politics, Tyranny, and Dissent

REFERENCES

16 Forms of Creativity in Lucy Hutchinson’s

Order and Disorder

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

17 The Epyllion

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

LYRIC

18 Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses

REFERENCES

NOTE ON FURTHER READING

19 Wyatt and Surrey

Little Sounds and Little Rooms

Verse Form and Memory

Broken Pillars and Void Spaces

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

REFERENCES

20 Synecdochic Structures in the Sonnet Sequences of Sidney and Spenser

REFERENCES

21 “I am lunaticke”

REFERENCES

22 Art and History Then

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

23 Metapoetry and the Subject of the Poem in Donne and Marvell

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

24 Jonson and the Cavalier Poets

REFERENCES

COMPLAINT AND ELEGY

25 Complaint

Medieval and Tudor Origins

Erotic Complaint in the 1590s and Beyond

Religious and Political Complaint

Conclusion

REFERENCES

26 Funeral Elegy

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

EPISTOLARY AND DIALOGIC FORMS

27 Letters of Address, Letters of Exchange

REFERENCES

28 Answer Poetry and Other Verse “Conversations”

REFERENCES

SATIRE, PASTORAL, AND POPULAR POETRY

29 Verse Satire

Satire, Satyrs, and

Satura

Anti‐Court Satire and Verse Libels

Satiric Communities

Writing Men and Writing Women

Conclusion

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

30 Proper Work, Willing Waste

“Well to endyte”: Barclay and the Labor of Writing

“Worthy … travaile”: Fleming and the Value of Difficulty

“O carefull verse”: Spenser, Sidney, and the Making of the English Poet

REFERENCES

31 Digging into “Veritable Dunghills”

Kinds of the Popular: Broadside Ballads versus Traditional Oral Ballads

Tripping on Meter: Ballad Measure

Multi‐media Artifacts: Text, Tune, Image, Dance

A Protean Form: Moving Parts and Shifting Aesthetics

Broadside Ballad Heyday Subjects: A Smorgasbord

Related Genres

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

RELIGIOUS POETRY

32 Female Piety and Religious Poetry

Psalms and Mary Sidney Herbert

Interpretative Biblical Poetry

Devotional Female Community and Poetry

Materiality and Circulation

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

33 The Psalms

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

34 Donne and Herbert

Poetry and Religion

God and the Soul

Then and Now

REFERENCES

Part III: Positions and Debates

35 Archipelagic Identities

Archipelagic Entrances

Archipelagic Spenser

Archipelagic Arthur

REFERENCES

36 Chorography, Map‐Mindedness, Poetics of Place

REFERENCES

37 Masculinity

REFERENCES

38 Queer Studies

REFERENCES

39 Sensation, Passion, and Emotion

REFERENCES

40 The Body in Renaissance Poetry

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

41 Poetry and the Material Text

REFERENCES

42 Science and Technology

The Astronomer in the Ditch: Science versus Poetry

“Reasons rend”: Poetry and the Causes of Things

“Written darkly”: Poetry and the Secrets of Nature

Poetry and the New Science

Poetry as

Technê

REFERENCES

43 Economic Criticism

Breaking into Print: From Tottel to Spenser

Stages to Pages: Poet‐Dramatists from Marlowe to Jonson

Poet‐Churchmen: From Donne to Herrick

The Age of Milton

REFERENCES

44 New Historicism, New Formalism, and Thy Darling in an Urn

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

REFERENCES

45 Allegory

Conceptions of Allegory

Allegorism in Renaissance Poetics

Sidney

Spenser

Milton

REFERENCES

FURTHER READING

46 The Sublime

Defining the Sublime

Transmitting the Sublime

Englishing the Sublime

The English Renaissance Sublime

REFERENCES

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 04

Figure 4.1 George Herbert, 

The temple. Sacred poems and private ejaculations

(London, 1674), sig. A9r (p. 17): “The Altar.” Folger Shakespeare Library Shelfmark: H1521. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Chapter 19

Figure 19.1 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,

c

.1546, attrib. to William Scrots.

Chapter 31

Figure 31.1 Example of a “heyday” broadside ballad: “A merry Dialogue betwixt a married man and his wife, concerning the affaires of this careful life,” 1619–1629?, Roxburghe 1.266–267, EBBA 3090 (Ballad Sheet Facsimile).

Figure 31.2 Left: detail from “The Dairy‐Maids Mirth and Pastime on May‐Day,” 1670–1700, Pepys 3.201, EBBA 21214, showing a ring of country dancers, with the piper in center. Right: woodcut of similar scene, in Huntington Library, Armstrong #9, labeled likely incorrectly on the back as “Witches Dance,” though likely correctly as “much earlier than 1700.” Inherited by John White of Newcastle

c

.1700 on the death of his parents, who were printers in York.

Figure 31.3 Left: a sample impression of the many variant images of the “Artichoke Lady,” Pepys 1.32–33, EBBA 20154. Right: a sample impression of the many variants of the images of the “How‐De‐Do Man,” Euing 108, EBBA 31815.

Figure 31.4 “A Ballat inttuled Northomberland newes,” Huntington Britwell 18295, EBBA 32227, showing minimalist ornamentation typical of sixteenth‐century broadside ballads.

Figure 31.5 “The description of a rare or rather most monstrous fishe taken on the East cost of Holland, the .xvii of Nouember, anno 1566,” Huntington Library Britwell 18317, EBBA 32405.

Figure 31.6 “Jockey and Jenny: Or, the Scotch Courtship,” Pepys 4.110, EBBA 2253.

Figure 31.7 Left: Roxburghe collection eighteenth‐century slipsong (1740?), 3.352, EBBA 31066. Right: Confederate slipsongs 1861–1865.

Chapter 41

Figure 41.1

Recreation for Ingenious Head‐peeces

(1663, S3v). Witt’s recreations refined 1663 (engraving), English School, (17th century) / British Library, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

Figure 41.2

The Card of Courtship

(1653, 126–127).

Chapter 45

Figure 45.1

Pictura

and

inscriptio

for the emblem

The First Wisdom Apprehends the First Reasons of Things

.

Figure 45.2

Pictura

and

inscriptio

for the emblem

Worship God in Silence

.

Figure 45.3 The impresa

This Flame Consumes the Tender Midst Within the Green Branch

.

Guide

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For more information on the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series, please visit www.wiley.com

A COMPANION TO

RENAISSANCE POETRY

EDITED BY

CATHERINE BATES

This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Bates, Catherine, 1964– editor.Title: A companion to Renaissance poetry / [edited] by Catherine Teresa Bates.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2018. | Series: Blackwell companions to literature and culture ; 2287 | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017033386 (print) | LCCN 2017033652 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118585122 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781118584903 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781118585191 (cloth)Subjects: LCSH: English poetry–Early modern, 1500–1700–History and criticism. | Renaissance–England.Classification: LCC PR533 (ebook) | LCC PR533 .C66 2018 (print) | DDC 821/.309–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033386

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Notes on Contributors

Catherine Bates is Research Professor at the University of Warwick. She has published five monographs on Renaissance poetry and poetics, including Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (2007), Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (2013)—winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2015—and On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (2017). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010).

Kenneth Borris is Professor of English at McGill University, and serves on the Editorial Board of Spenser Studies. A former Canada Research Fellow and winner of the MacCaffrey Award, he has authored Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (2017), Allegory and Epic (2000), and Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy (1990). His four edited and co‐edited books include The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (2007) and Same‐Sex Desire in the English Renaissance (2004).

Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is author of Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradtion (1985), The Idea of the Renaissance (1989; with William Kerrigan), and Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), and co‐editor (with Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie) of the Renaissance volume of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2010).

Andrea Brady is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, where she runs the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now (www.archiveofthenow.org). She is currently writing a book on poetry and constraint across several historical periods. Scholarly works include English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (2006). Her books of poetry are Dompteuse (2014), Cut from the Rushes (2013), Mutability (2012), and Wildfire (2010).

Joseph Campana is a poet, arts critic, and scholar of Renaissance literature and author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012), The Book of Faces (2005), Natural Selections (2012), and co‐editor of Renaissance Posthumanism (2016). He received the Isabel MacCaffrey Essay Prize, the MLA’s Crompton‐Noll Award for LGB studies, and grants from the NEA and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He teaches at Rice University, where he is editor of Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900.

Patrick Cheney is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State. With Catherine Bates, he is co‐editor of Sixteenth‐Century British Poetry, volume 4 in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, for which he serves as General Editor.

A. E. B. Coldiron, the Berry Chair in English Literature at the University of St Andrews, is author of Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (2015) and other books and essays on late‐medieval and Renaissance literature, translation, poetics, and print culture. In 2014–15 she directed the Folger Institute’s Year‐Long Colloquium on Translation. She guest‐edited The Translator’s Voice, a special double issue of Philological Quarterly (2016), a collection of Colloquium participants’ research.

Barbara Correll teaches English Renaissance literature and culture at Cornell University. She is the author of The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (1996) and co‐editor of Disgust in English Renaissance Literature (2016). She has published essays on Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Spenser, Webster, Erasmus, and cinema.

Jonathan Crewe is the Leon Black Professor Emeritus of Shakespearean Studies at Dartmouth College. He has edited five Shakespeare plays and the narrative poems for the New Pelican Shakespeare. His extensive publications include three books and numerous articles on English Renaissance poetry and prose; he has also published on cultural memory, and on writing in South Africa.

Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of English at Georgia State University. His publications include Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (1999), Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: “Samson Agonistes” (2009), and The Cambridge Introduction to Milton (2012). His most recent book is Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in “Paradise Lost” (2015).

Jim Ellis, Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, is the author of Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (2003) and Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (2009). His more recent work concerns poetry and performativity in the early modern period, particularly in relation to the Renaissance pleasure garden and progress entertainments.

Lynn Enterline is Nancy Perot Mulford Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her publications investigate the overlapping histories of rhetoric, affect, gender, and sexuality from the classical to the early modern periods. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (2012), The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000), and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (1995).

Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Director of UCSB’s online English Broadside Ballad Archive, and author of Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (2006) and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (1991). She has just completed a book on moving media and tactical publics in English broadside ballads, 1500–1800.

Jonathan Gibson is Senior Lecturer in English at The Open University (UK). Earlier in his career he worked as a researcher on the Perdita Project on early modern women’s manuscript writings. His publications span many topics, including Ralegh, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, translation, early modern letter‐writing, italic script, codicology, and Elizabethan fiction. His most recent book is Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence (2014), co‐edited with Carlo M. Bajetta and Guillaume Coatalen.

Stephen Guy‐Bray is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Renaissance poetry and queer theory. Forthcoming are essays on love and war in Renaissance sonnets, on Venus and Adonis, and on women and textual production. He is currently working on Renaissance inactivity.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of studies of early modern literature, culture, and history, including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005). He is currently working on a study of lying in early modern culture and is general editor, with Joe Black, Jennifer Richards, and Cathy Shrank, of the Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, both forthcoming. He is chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies, a regular reviewer for the Irish Times and a visiting professor at the University of Granada.

Hannibal Hamlin is Professor of English at The Ohio State University, author of Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004) and The Bible in Shakespeare (2013), and co‐editor of The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (2009) and The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (2010). He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion as well as an anthology of Psalms for the MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations.

Danijela Kambaskovic‐Schwartz is Research Associate, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion 1100–1800, formerly Assistant Professor, Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, University of Western Australia. She was born in the former Yugoslavia, migrated to Australia in 1999, and writes in Serbian and English. She has published widely on Shakespeare, history of genres, social and religious history, history of love and courtship, early modern mental health, and religious doctrine and the history of the senses; she is an award‐winning poet.

William J. Kennedy is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His publications include three books on European Renaissance poetry: Authorizing Petrarch (1994), The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (2003), and Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (2016).

Gary Kuchar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (2005), The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (2008), and George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth‐Century England (2017), and co‐editor of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II (2015).

Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, where he served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He has published widely on medieval and early modern literature, children’s literature, the history of the English language, and the institutions of scholarship and criticism. His most recent book is Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past (2016).

David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at Penn State‐University Park. He has published widely on Milton and on politics and religion in early modern English literature. His book Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013) examines the construction of heresy and heretics from More to Milton. With Thomas Corns, he is editing Paradise Lost for the Oxford University Press edition of The Complete Works of John Milton.

Joseph Loewenstein is the author of two books on Jonson and another on the history of intellectual property and the rise of “possessive authorship.” He has edited The Staple of News for the Cambridge Ben Jonson (2012) and is one of the editors of the Oxford Collected Works of Edmund Spenser. He currently directs the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser (1997), and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003). Edited collections include Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (1993), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002), Shakespeare and Scotland (2004), Shakespeare and Wales (2010), This England, That Shakespeare (2010), and Celtic Shakespeare (2013).

Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Wayne State University and Director of its Emeritus Academy. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995), Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti‐Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005), and (with Steven W. May) Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book (2014).

Robert Matz is Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University. He is the author of Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (2000) and The World of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Introduction (2008), which was designated a Choice 2008 Outstanding Academic Title. His most recent book is an edition of two early modern marriage sermons.

Steven W. May is adjunct Professor of English at Emory University, Atlanta. His books include The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (1991), an edition of Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (2004), Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First‐Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603 (2004), and most recently (with Alan Bryson), Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland (2016). His research interests center on English Renaissance manuscript culture, the Tudor court, and editing early modern documents.

Shannon Miller is a Professor in and Chair of the English and Comparative Literature Department at San José State University. She is the author of Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth‐Century Women Writers (2008) and Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World (1998), as well as numerous articles on women writers in the Renaissance and Restoration including Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn.

Femke Molekamp has held Leverhulme and AHRC early career fellowships at the University of Warwick, and more recently a Global Research Fellowship at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study. Her work explores the history of reading, women’s writing, and engagements with religion and emotion in early modern literature. She is the author of Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (2013).

Susannah Brietz Monta is Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (2009), Teaching Early Modern English Prose (2010, ed. with Margaret W. Ferguson), and A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic response to The Faerie Queene (2016). She edited Religion and Literature from 2008 to 2015 and is a co‐editor of Spenser Studies.

Catherine Nicholson is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. In addition to articles and essays on Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and the early modern art of rhetoric, she is the author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (2014). She is at work on a book about reading, reception history, and The Faerie Queene.

Michelle O’Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The ‘shepheards nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (2007), and Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (2009), and co‐editor of Verse Miscellanies Online, a digital edition of Elizabethan poetry anthologies.

Syrithe Pugh is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen and works mainly on classical reception in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century English poetry. Among her publications are various articles on Jonson, Herrick, and Fanshawe, and a monograph on the politics and allusive practices of the latter pair. She has also published extensively on Spenser: her latest monograph is Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems (2016).

Sarah C. E. Ross teaches English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth‐Century Britain (2015), Katherine Austen’s ‘Book M’: British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454 (2011), and numerous articles on early modern women, religious writing, and manuscript culture. She is the co‐editor, with Paul Salzman, of a volume of essays titled Editing Early Modern Women (2016).

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999), and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010), and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006). He is currently editing John Donne in Context for Cambridge University Press, writing on a book entitled Reading Seventeenth‐Century Poetry for Blackwell, and researching pain and pleasure in early modern England.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Writing the Nation in Reformation England (2004) and co‐editor of the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (2009). She is co‐editor of Shakespeare’s Poems (Annotated English Poets, forthcoming) and general editor of the AHRC‐funded Collected Works of Thomas Nashe, in preparation for Oxford University Press. With a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, she is writing a monograph on dialogue.

Rosalind Smith is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (2005), as well as articles and chapters on gender, genre, politics, and history in early modern women’s poetry. She is the lead researcher on a large, multi‐institutional project funded by the Australian Research Council on the production, transmission, and circulation of early modern women’s writing, and from that project has edited both the collection Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2014) as well as a digital archive of early modern women’s writing: http://hri.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/da/index.php?content=digitalarchive.

Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His publications include Autobiography in Early Modern England (2010) and Material Texts in Early Modern England (2017). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Chris Stamatakis, Lecturer in Renaissance Literature in the Department of English at University College London, is author of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (2012) and articles on Gabriel Harvey, early Tudor literary criticism, and sixteenth‐century poetics. Works in progress include a monograph on the influence of Italian literature on sixteenth‐century English poetry; essays on the transmission of Petrarch in England; and an edition of Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares ouer Ierusalem.

M. L. Stapleton is Chapman Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University‐Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He is editor of Marlowe Studies: An Annual and The New Variorum Shakespeare Julius Caesar. His most recent book is Marlowe’s Ovid: the “Elegies” in the Marlowe Canon (2014).

Richard Strier, Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983), Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1996), and The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2011), which won the Warren‐Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism. He is co‐editor of Shakespeare and the Law, The Theatrical City, The Historical Renaissance, and other interdisciplinary collections.

Gordon Teskey, professor of English at Harvard University, is author of Allegory and Violence (1996), Delirious Milton (2006), The Poetry of John Milton (2015), and numerous essays on Spenser, including the major entry “Allegory” in The Spenser Encyclopedia. He is editor of the Norton Edition of Paradise Lost (2005; 2nd ed. forthcoming). His next book, Spenserian Moments, is in progress.

Douglas Trevor is Professor of English and Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (2004), the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (2005), and the novel Girls I Know (2013). He is currently completing a study of radical interpretations of charity in late medieval and early modern Europe.

Wendy Wall, Avalon Professor for the Humanities at Northwestern University, is author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (1993), Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (2002), and Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (2015). Professor Wall has published articles on topics such as editorial theory, gender, early modern poetry, national identity, authorship, food studies, domesticity, theater, women’s writing, and Jell‐O.

Christopher Warley is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (2014) and Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (2005). His current project is “Auerbach’s Renaissance: Literature, History, Criticism.”

Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at Bangor University. Her research interests lie in early modern devotional poetry, Shakespearian tragicomedy, early women’s writing, and the relationship between literature and music. Recent publications include The English Poems of George Herbert (2007), 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England (2014), and (with Andrew Hiscock) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (2017).

Jessica Wolfe is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of UNC’s program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She is the author of Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (2004) and Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (2015), and is currently editing Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica​ for the forthcoming Complete Works of Thomas Browne (Oxford).

Preface

This book aims to do two things. The first is to situate its readers from the outset amid current debates that are shaping the discipline and to position them at the forefront of new directions in which contemporary work on Renaissance poetry is taking forward our understanding of the early modern period and of poetics more generally. Major developments in the last 20 years or so have opened up whole new areas of study (great projects of archival recovery, for example, which have restored the centrality of manuscript culture to the period) and introduced fresh topics of inquiry, many of which—concerning technology or the environment, for example—show the issues of today to have been just as live in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Areas formerly neglected are being brought into the light (the current project to archive the “street” poetry of ballads and broadsides is one example). Positions formerly established are being tested and reinvigorated (the identity of a distinctly “Protestant” poetics, for example, or the supposed antipathy between historicist and formalist approaches to poetry). Theoretical approaches long familiar are being self‐critiqued and stretched (as feminism and queer studies provide an impetus to renewed investigations into early modern masculinity, or psychoanalysis to questions of performance and embodiment, or Marxism to the so‐called economic criticism). And new—often interdisciplinary—areas of collective interest and excitement have emerged (such as the history of the emotions, chorography and the poetics of place, “archipelagic” as opposed to national identities, materiality and the world of objects). The aim of this book is to capture this energy and to provide readers with a snapshot of the field in its early twenty‐first century articulation.

The second aim of the book is to present a picture of Renaissance poetry and poetics that remains attuned to the period’s own literary categories and structures of thought and that, even allowing for the changes of half a millennium or more, a reader of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries would not find wholly alien or strange. Many of the terms with which we identify the most basic poetic genres or types—words such as ballad, elegy, epic, epigram, georgic, lyric, ode, pastoral, satire, or sonnet—entered the language for the first time in the sixteenth century (or for the first time in a distinctly literary sense). This was the period in which the idea of English poetry as an intellectual category—with its own linguistic, formal, and generic boundaries—began to emerge in its own right, the history, traditions, and possibilities of which came to be shaped and scoped by a host of figures (Gascoigne, Lodge, Sidney, Spenser, Harvey, Puttenham, Webbe, Carew, Campion, Daniel, Drayton, Chapman, Jonson), most of them poets themselves. It was their theories and practice that forged and mapped a poetic domain that—however open to subsequent adaptation, extension, revision, and subversion—we have largely inherited today. Much of the impetus for their projects came from the new: the impact of humanist scholarship, the unprecedented availability of new or previously unknown texts, and their rapid absorption into the language and culture by means of translation and imitation. But continuities with the past were no less important. Other familiar literary terms (epistle or complaint, for example) derived from Chaucer, a figure whom—as they “walk so stumblingly after him” (Sidney) and “follow here the footing of thy feete” (Spenser)—the poets of this period had no doubt was the great progenitor of English poetry. In capturing that period’s unique spirit of inquiry and definition, its synthesis of past and present in making sense of a new and emerging field, this book aims to offer an Art of English Poesy for our own times.

The volume thus seeks to combine a deep respect for and sensitivity toward the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctively English poetry with an engagement with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. The last of the book’s three sections consists of a series of discrete essays that focus on some of these key debates, but the questions driving them are not, as a result, cordoned off as if in a designated area.

Part I provides a contextual framework designed to explain the many and complex factors that made possible the formation of an “English poesie” in the period. The emphasis throughout this section is on breaking down such hegemonic entities as the “Renaissance” or “Reformation” in order to recover as nearly as possible the mixture and mess of actual lived experience, with all its compromises, contingencies, and irrationalities. As with the volume as a whole, this section aligns itself with those revisionist approaches that seek to set the sudden breaks, traumas, and decisive turns that history undeniably delivers alongside the persistence of deep and pervasive continuities, however contradictory and illogical the results. A number of subsections organize these essays around a series of key headings that aim to negotiate such scenes of complexity. “Transitions and Translations,” for example, sets the unmistakable innovations of the “new learning” against the pervasive influence of Chaucer, considers ways in which translation “naturalized” (or otherwise) classical and continental models, and gauges the effects of a humanist pedagogy that, as Lynn Enterline has recently argued, included its recipients’ taste for reproducing Ovidian elegy, epyllion, or female complaint—rather than more culturally approved forms such as epic—among its unintended consequences. “Religions and Reformations” fields the sheer welter of competing doctrines that are now accepted as forming the experience of the English Reformation. What used to be branded as a “Protestant” poetics is increasingly being differentiated into inflections of a Lutheran or Calvinist cast, or modified by the ongoing sacramental or visionary poetics of what one critic has recently termed the “Catholic Imaginary.” As Donne suggested, “To adore, or scorn an image, or protest” presented alternatives that contemporaries might accept, reject, or hold in ingenious or uneasy combination. Essays under the next heading, “Authorships and Authorities,” consider the impact that the thoroughly mixed picture of manuscript and print transmission had on the contemporary evaluation of poetry in the period. They ask what kinds of poetic “status” these different forms of material record were taken to signify, whether the differences between them were exaggerated or downplayed (as in printed miscellanies, for example), for what reasons, and with what success. Questions of self‐presentation—the stigmas or otherwise of being a “poet in print”—mutate naturally into questions of authorship and the authority, if any, that could be assumed by or accorded to the writer of poetry, be it as originator or translator or both (compositions by female hands posing a distinctive set of variations on this theme). The last subsection, “Defenses and Definitions,” assesses the period’s own answers to some of these questions in its many justifications and apologia (not all of them self‐consistent) and, by looking in particular at its preoccupation with matters of definition and form—what could be said to constitute English verse, rhyme, and given forms and genres (inherited or hybrid)—it sets the scene for Part II.

The second and central section of the volume offers a comprehensive analysis of non‐dramatic poetry in English between Wyatt and Milton and is organized along the broadly generic lines with which the period classified its poetic productions. The first subsection therefore focuses on epic, considered the master of all poetic forms in the Renaissance on account of its literary credentials, inclusiveness, and ambition. Given the scope of the great literary epics of the English Renaissance, individual essays are devoted to specific texts, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, of course, but also Lucy Hutchinson’s recently edited Order and Disorder. The last essay in this subsection looks at the mini‐epic or epyllion—the racy narrative poems of Lodge, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and so forth—which, in identifying with Ovid rather than Virgil, exemplify the complexity of period’s response to its classical inheritance: as receptive to contending, alternative, “counter” forms as to approved or official ones. The following subsection is devoted to lyric and, in much the same way, considers the “songs and sonnets” tradition of the period as existing from the very outset in self‐conscious relation with an inherited master discourse, in this case Petrarch’s. Recent descriptions of the lyric output of the period as, variously, “anti‐,” counter‐,” pseudo‐,” or “post‐” Petrarchan testify to this complex mesh of imitation and contention, proximity and divergence, although such self‐contradiction is as prevalent in the master discourse as in its counter forms and thus, arguably, endemic to lyric itself. An opening essay that sets this scene gives way to individual essays on specific authors ranging from Wyatt and Surrey through to the Cavalier poets of the 1630s and 1640s. Subsequent subsections go on to consider a whole range of literary genres and forms, including the complaint, various epistolary and dialogic forms, the funeral elegy, pastoral, verse satire, popular poetry, and religious poetry (including the tradition of female devotional poetry, and Psalm translations). With a view to combining coverage with depth, essays focus either on individual works or authors or on more largely defined categories as appropriate. Within each subsection, topics are arranged more or less chronologically, so that readers can trace the etiologies, developments, and deviations within a particular form in order to garner a deeper understanding of both individual works and the form as a whole. At the same time, they can learn about individual authors across a range of different essays—reading about Spenser under the categories of epic, lyric, and pastoral, for example—gaining, through a diversity of approaches, a richer understanding of the poetry in both its Renaissance and contemporary contexts.

Acknowledgments

Thanks must in the first instance go to the many contributors to this volume, without whose individual, joint, and collective efforts this project would never have come into being. I am grateful to all of them for their receptiveness to the idea of a rather extensive collection of essays devoted to English Renaissance poetry, and their willingness to participate in what has of necessity been a long process of commissioning, thinking, writing, gathering, and editing. The present volume is the result of work on many fronts. I would also like to thank a number of colleagues formerly of Wiley Blackwell, especially Emma Bennett for her initial approach as commissioning editor, and Deirdre Ilkson for maintaining support while Emma was away on maternity leave. Bridget Jennings was extraordinarily helpful at the contracting stage, and Ben Thatcher was equally efficient in dealing with permissions issues. More recently, it has also been a pleasure to work with Manish Luthra on the final stages of preparation.

Part IContexts

TRANSITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

1The Medieval Inheritance of Early Tudor Poetry

Seth Lerer

Among the many poems attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt that have been preserved in the famous Devonshire Manuscript (British Library MS Add 17,492), the one beginning “Absence absenting causeth me to complain” has largely been ignored. Unlike the sonnets, lyrics, and ballades that have defined Wyatt’s “unquiet” sensibility for generations—poems such as “They flee from me,” “Mine own John Poyntz,” and the Petrarchan translations—this poem lacks what we have come to expect from the poet at his best. Rather than strut in careful iambs, this verse seems to limp along in uneven stresses. Rather than looking forward to the Italianate sprezzatura of Sidney or Spenser, this one seems to look back to the aureate diction of Stephen Hawes or John Lydgate. And rather than developing an argument through sinuous logic, the quatrains of this poem appear only to repeat themselves. The poet’s isolation builds through iteration, echoing the final phrasing of each quatrain in the opening words of the next. And while the text is no less clear than that of any other poem in the Manuscript, its verbal insecurities have led one of its most recent editors, R. A. Rebholz, to emend its phrasings for regularization and, most strikingly, to edit its final two lines out of existence (Rebholz 1978, 277, 524).

Readers of late medieval and early modern English poetry will recognize the problems posed by such a poem. Scholarship since the 1980s has revealed that there was no clear break between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance” in English literature (Spearing 1985; Ebin 1988; Lerer 1993, 1997; Scanlon 1994; Trigg 2002; Meyer‐Lee 2007; Wakelin 2007). Chaucer, for example, continued to be read and copied, imitated and alluded to, throughout the Tudor age. The Devonshire Manuscript itself (compiled by members of the Howard and Shelton families in the 1520s and 1530s) offers a remarkable poetic exchange drawn from selected stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde (Heale 1998). Richard Tottel printed Chaucer’s “Truth” (albeit unattributed) in his Songes and Sonettes of 1557. And provincial anthologists included selections from Chaucer’s poetry, as well as that of Lydgate and Hawes, until well into the reign of Elizabeth I (Lerer 1997).

Our categories of medieval and Renaissance are both cultural and retrospective. While we may find Lydgate’s Fall of Princes or Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure to be irrevocably grounded in fifteenth‐century allegory and idiom, they were among the most popular texts published by England’s earliest printers. Wynkyn de Worde, Robert Copeland, and Richard Tottel kept these authors in circulation well into the middle of the sixteenth century (King 1987; Gillespie 2006). It was only with the Elizabethan rejection of much of this earlier poetry as “papist” and sacramental that it fell out of favor. Roger Ascham’s comment, in his Scolemaster of 1570, represents changes in literary ideology and taste that firmly demarcated medieval verse for early modern readers:

In our forefathers’ time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons.

(Ryan 1967, 68)

John Lydgate, known in his afterlife as the “Monk of Bury,” could not have been far from Ascham’s contempt for these “idle monks,” and the reference to those books read “for pastime and pleasure” cannot but evoke the title of Hawes’s best known poem. These were, in fact, precisely the writers that the Marian interregnum saw reprinted—as if Mary Tudor’s resurgent Catholicism gave permission, after Henry VIII’s condemnations, to recirculate those narratives of pilgrimage and chivalry characteristic of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (King 1987).

For the modern reader coming to Wyatt’s “Absence absenting causeth me to complain,” there will be much that resonates with the legacy of the Monk of Bury and the author of the Pastime of Pleasure. Is this a modern or a medieval poem? Is it a throwback to an earlier, aureate practice or is it an example of how a distinctively forward‐looking writer could adapt old idioms to new aesthetics?

This essay begins with a literary text that straddles old and new forms of poetic expression. It seeks to expose our critical presuppositions about literary periods, but also to expose our expectations of aesthetic value in the early modern lyric. What is the relationship between the medieval and the early modern, and how do our categories of authorship inflect our sense of literary history? What are the canons of vernacular verse‐making and how do they bear on the social, cultural, and political contexts of, in this case, the early Tudor court? In the course of answering these questions, this essay will look back to the inheritances of Chaucer’s vernacular authorship: to his synthesis of Boethius’ philosophical laments with contemporary courtly complaint and to the impact of that synthesis on writers such as Lydgate, Hawes, Skelton, and Charles D’Orleans. This is an essay, then, less about shifts from medieval to Renaissance than about how the English verse associated with those periods could coexist and couple.

Absens absenting causithe me to complaine

my sorowfull complaints abiding in distresse

and departing most pryvie increasithe my paine

thus lyve I vncomfortid wrappid all in hevines

In hevenes I am wrapid devoyde of all solace

Nother pastyme nor pleasure can revyve my dull wytt

My sprites be all taken and dethe dothe me manace

With his fatall knif the thrid for to kitt

Ffor to kit the thrid of this wretchid lif

And shortelye bring me owt of this cace

I se yt avaylith not yet must I be pensif

Sins fortune from me hathe turnid her face

Hathe turnid with cowntenance contrarious

And clene from her presens she hathe exilid me

Yn sorrowe remaining as a man most dolorous

Exempte from all pleasure and worldelye felicitie

All wordelie felicitye nowe am I private

And left in deserte most solitarilye

Wandring all about as on withowt mate

My dethe aprochithe what remedye

What remedye alas to reioise my wofull herte

With sighis suspiring most rufullie

Nowe welcome I am redye to deperte

Fare well all pleasure welcome paine and smarte

(Devonshire Manuscript, 81v–82)

To read Wyatt’s poem not in a modernizing paperback but in an edition faithful to this manuscript is to read it through in the legacy of late medieval poetics (see A Social Edition). Absence here is a personification, a kind of embodied condition on a par with the personifications of late medieval complaint. Old Age, Sorrow, Fortune—all stand, in the poetry from Lydgate through Charles D’Orleans, as instigators of the poet’s complaining. Here, in a bit of repetitive verbal trickery, the poet affirms what Absence does: it creates a state of absence. The poem also affirms what Fortune does: turns her face away and generates a heaviness and lack of comfort in the poet. His “dull wit” (a touchstone phrase of post‐Chaucerian abnegation; see Lawton 1987) cannot be revived by “pastime nor pleasure”—a verbal collocation that, much like Ascham’s rebuke half a century later, evokes Hawes’s courtly allegory. Fortune has turned her face “with countenance contrarious,” an alliterative pairing worthy of Skelton, whose character Counterfeit Countenance in the play Magnyficence embodies all that is duplicitous about the courtly life. But such duplicity hearkens back to the Consolation of Philosophy itself, whose prisoner laments that Fortune’s “clouded, cheating face has changed” (fallacem mutavit nubile vultum) (Stewart, Rand, and Tester 1973, 132–133). The poet’s exile from felicity recalls, too, the terms of the Boethian prisoner’s opening condition, while the request for a remedy similarly brings to mind the figure of Lady Philosophy as the soul’s physician. The narrator’s is now a “dolorous” state, and that word chimes with the laments of Lydgate, Skelton, and Hawes throughout their poetry. Indeed, a search of this poem’s key words against the online databases of medieval and early Tudor verse firmly enmeshes the text in the verbal net of Chaucer’s heirs. There is, here, a pervasive aureation, an insistent repetition, and a use of alliteration far less evocative of Langland or Sir Gawain than it is of Skelton.

“Absence” had emerged as a characteristic term of Chaucerian and post‐Chaucerian lament. It shows up as early as the Book of the Duchess