Elizabethan Poetry (Read)

The course title "Elizabethan Poetry" represents a slight case of false advertising, as we will also be studying some earlier Tudor verse and a few pieces of prose, most notably Sidney's Defence of Poesy. The object of the course is to gain a broader sense of not only the accomplishments of individual poets in sixteenth-century England but also the continuity of-and the complex interplay between-traditions, genres, and social/political/religious institutions that characterizes cultural expression during the English Renaissance. Our main focus will be on primary texts, though as required we will take time to investigate the historical and theoretical contexts of the material under discussion.

English Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Milton (Read)

In this course we will study the two most significant attempts at writing epic poetry in early modern England, Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, in the context of Renaissance conceptions of the epic as a genre and a mode of expression. Milton acknowledged Spenser as his primary "teacher" in the writing of epic, so we will investigate the explicit and implicit relations between the two poems. We may also consider at least one of Spenser's and Milton's continental precursors such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso.

Shakespeare and His Sources (Read)

Our project in this course will be to examine selected dramatic and poetic works of Shakespeare in light of the major sources for those works. We will follow a twofold approach, thinking about Shakespeare's use of his sources and also considering the sources as cultural testaments in their own right, with their own complex histories outside of the Shakespearean orbit. The sources will include Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's Lives, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Montaigne's Essays; where possible, we will use the versions that Shakespeare would have used. The works may include Venus and Adonis, the Sonnets, Richard III, Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.

The Literature of London (Kerwin)

The period that literary scholars variously refer to as "Renaissance" England and "Early Modern" England was characterized by two dramatic things: a flowering of literature and an explosive growth of London. From a city of 120,000 in 1550, one that was a virtual backwater in matters cultural, economic, and scientific, London grew to a population of 200,000 in 1600 and to between 350,000 and 400,000 in 1650. By the end of the seventeenth century, London had become the largest city in Europe, and its economic and scientific center. Drama, verse, and prose had all been thoroughly transformed.

This course will look at English Renaissance literature through the prism of this new urban culture, focusing on the London of the imagination. We will consider questions of form, as well as history, in the hopes of both considering and bridging-at least partially-some of the divides in contemporary models for literary criticism. Those divides include aspects of our own department: how do creative writing and aesthetics relate to historical criticism and cultural studies? Fundamentally we will consider how the literature gives form to a new urban sensibility. What new "structures of feeling" did urbanization produce or encourage? How did writers create their own "structures of feeling" in response?

The forms we will consider include drama, verse, and prose. Texts include Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday; Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair; Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman; Kathleen McLuskie, ed. Plays on Women; Thomas More, Utopia; Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works; Shakespeare, Measure for Measure; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus.