This unique anthology offers a more comprehensive look at the poems of Christopher Marlowe, England's first great poet and playwright, than any other volume currently in print. Bringing together the complete body of Marlowe's poetry--including Ovid's Elegies, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," Lucan's First Book, Hero and Leander, and a Latin epitaph on the jurist Sir Roger Manwood--the book also incorporates related works by other writers. These ancillary selections include Sir John Davies's Epigrams, Renaissance response poems to "The Passionate Shepherd," and continuations of Hero and...

Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion presents twenty-seven analytical essays on individual plays from the early modern period. Each essay is written by a leading scholar and examines a play in terms of a cultural or literary topic, from London to the law, servants to sovereigns, and geography to religion. Incorporating current perspectives in critical studies, the essays address issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, as well as key aspects of intellectual and social history, including humanism, science, the law, and theology.
Featuring the authors...

Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion presents twenty-eight original essays on the major poems of the English Renaissance. Each essay is written by a leading scholar and examines a poem in the context of an important topic in early modern culture. The selections provide groundbreaking scholarship on subjects ranging from the invention of English verse, Petrarchism, pastoral, elegy, and satire to women's religious verse, the politics of town, the place of homoeroticism, and Cavalier poetry.
An ideal supplement to both primary texts and anthologies of Renaissance...

Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton assembles a collection of essays on the compelling topic of death in two monumental representatives of the early modern canon, Edmund Spenser and John Milton. The volume draws its impetus from the conviction that death is a central, yet curiously understudied, preoccupation for Spenser and Milton, contending that death - in all its early modern reformations and deformations - is an indispensable backdrop for any attempt to articulate the relationship between Spenser and Milton.

Sixteen leading scholars provide authoritative chapters on relevant topics of Marlowe's life and works in this complete introduction to the famed pioneer of both the Elizabethan stage and modern English poetry. The essays cover his texts and style, use of classicism, and representations of sexuality and gender, as well as of geography and identity. The volume also considers the religious, political, courtly, and literary contexts of Marlowe's authorship, his presence in modern film and theater, and his influence on subsequent writers.

Sixteen leading scholars provide authoritative chapters on relevant topics of Marlowe's life and works in this complete introduction to the famed pioneer of both the Elizabethan stage and modern English poetry. The essays cover his texts and style, use of classicism, and representations of sexuality and gender, as well as of geography and identity. The volume also considers the religious, political, courtly, and literary contexts of Marlowe's authorship, his presence in modern film and theater, and his influence on subsequent writers.

This Companion provides a full introduction to the poetry of William Shakespeare through discussion of his freestanding narrative poems, the Sonnets, and his plays. Fourteen leading international scholars provide accessible and authoritative chapters on all relevant topics: from Shakespeare's seminal role in the development of English poetry, the wide-ranging practice of his poetic form, and his enigmatic place in print and manuscript culture, to his immersion in English Renaissance politics, religion, classicism, and gender dynamics. With individual chapters on Venus and Adonis, The Rape of...

Re-situating Shakespeare as an early modern professional, in this book Patrick Cheney views him not simply as a man of the theatre, but also as an author with a literary career. Rather than present himself as a national or laureate poet, as Spenser does, Shakespeare conceals his authorship through dramaturgy, rendering his artistic techniques and literary ambitions opaque. Accordingly, recent scholars have attended more to his innovative theatricality or his indifference to textuality than to his contribution to modern English authorship. By tracking Shakespeare's 'counter-laureate...

Reassessing Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist, Patrick Cheney contests critical preoccupation with Shakespeare as "a man of the theatre" by reclaiming his original standing as an early modern author. Cheney considers him as a working dramatist who composed extraordinary poems and traces Shakespeare's literary origins to his favorite author, Ovid. Although the book concentrates on Shakespeare's poems, it makes frequent reference to the plays, and ranges widely through the work of other Renaissance writers.