Renaissance Literature

English Department - Renaissance Literature

 

Reading List  2009-2010 – Renaissance Literature

 

 

Sir Thomas Wyatt

 

“Farewell, Love”

“Ye old mule”

“Mine own John Poins”

            In Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz.*

 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

“Wyatt resteth here . . .”

 

Sir Philip Sidney

           

            The Defense of Poesy (Norton excerpts)

            Astrophil and Stella: sonnets 21, 47, 81

 

Mary Sidney Herbert

           

            “To the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney”

            A Dialogue Between Two Shepherds, Thenot and Piers

            In Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemelia Lanyer: Renaissance

            Women Poets, ed. Danielle Clarke.*

 

Edmund Spenser

           

            The Faerie Queene, Book I

                        In Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton.*

 

William Shakespeare

 

            The Tragedy of King Lear (Folio version)

                        In The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al.*

 

John Donne

 

            “The Autumnall”

            “Love’s Growth”
             “A Lecture Upon the Shadow”

            “A Funerall Elegie”

                        In The Complete Poems, ed. John T. Shawcross*

 

Ben Jonson

 

            “To William Camden”

            “To John Donne”

            “On Lucy, Countess of Bedford”

             “Ode to Himself”

            Volpone

 

Thomas Carew

 

            “An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr. John Donne”

            “To Ben Jonson”

 

Elizabeth Cary

 

            The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry

In The Tragedy of Mariam . . ., ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W.   Ferguson.*

 

John Milton

 

             “On Time”

            “How Soon Hath Time”

            Paradise Regained

                        In John Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard.*

 

SecondaryWorks

 

Brian Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” New Literary History 14.3 (1983): 497-537. (Available in via JStor).

 

Christopher Martin, “Fall and Decline: Confronting Lyric Gerontophobia in Donne’s “The Autumnall,” John Donne Journal 26 (2007): 35-54.*

 

*On reserve at Penrose Library. 

All texts not designated as on reserve may be found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., Vol. 1 (B).