A Companion to Renaissance Poetry

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.

Catherine Bates is Research Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of: On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney's Defence of Poesy; Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (for which she won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2015); Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric; Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud; and The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature.

Notes on Contributors ix

Preface xvii

Acknowledgments xx

Part I Contexts 1

Transitions and Translations 3

1 The Medieval Inheritance of Early Tudor Poetry 3
Seth Lerer

2 Translation and Translations 16
A. E. B. Coldiron

3 Instructive Nymphs: Andrew Marvell on Pedagogy and Puberty 31
Lynn Enterline

Religions and Reformations 50

4 Poetry and Sacrament in the English Renaissance 50
Gary Kuchar

5 “A sweetness ready penn’d”?: English Religious Poetics in the Reformation Era 63
Susannah Brietz Monta

Authorships and Authorities 78

6 Manuscript Culture: Circulation and Transmission 78
Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti

7 Miscellanies in Manuscript and Print 103
Jonathan Gibson

8 Renaissance Authorship: Practice versus Attribution 115
Stephen B. Dobranski

9 Female Authorship 128
Wendy Wall

10 Stakes of Hagiography: Izaak Walton and the Making of the “Religious Poet” 141
Jonathan Crewe

Defenses and Definitions 154

11 Theories and Philosophies of Poetry 154
Robert Matz

12 Tudor Verse Form: Rudeness, Artifice, and Display 166
Joseph Loewenstein

13 Genre: The Idea and Work of Literary Form 183
Patrick Cheney

Part II Forms and Genres 199

Epic and Epyllion 201

14 Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 201
Gordon Teskey

15 Paradise Lost: Experimental and Unorthodox Sacred Epic 214
David Loewenstein

16 Forms of Creativity in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder 227
Shannon Miller

17 The Epyllion 239
Jim Ellis

Lyric 250

18 Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses: The Sonnet Tradition from Wyatt to Milton 250
Gordon Braden

19 Wyatt and Surrey: Songs and Sonnets 262
Chris Stamatakis

20 Synecdochic Structures in the Sonnet Sequences of Sidney and Spenser 276
Catherine Bates

21 “I am lunaticke”: Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, and the Evolution of the Lyric 289
Danijela Kambaskovic�]Schwartz

22 Art and History Then: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146 303
Christopher Warley

23 Metapoetry and the Subject of the Poem in Donne and Marvell 314
Barbara Correll

24 Jonson and the Cavalier Poets 325
Syrithe Pugh

Complaint and Elegy 339

25 Complaint 339
Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross

26 Funeral Elegy 353
Andrea Brady

Epistolary and Dialogic Forms 365

27 Letters of Address, Letters of Exchange 365
M. L. Stapleton

28 Answer Poetry and Other Verse “Conversations” 376
Cathy Shrank

Satire, Pastoral, and Popular Poetry 389

29 Verse Satire 389
Michelle O’Callaghan

30 Proper Work, Willing Waste: Pastoral and the English Poet 401
Catherine Nicholson

31 Digging into “Veritable Dunghills”: Re�]appreciating

Renaissance Broadside Ballads 414
Patricia Fumerton

Religious Poetry 432

32 Female Piety and Religious Poetry 432
Femke Molekamp

33 The Psalms 446
Hannibal Hamlin

34 Donne and Herbert 459
Helen Wilcox

Part III Positions and Debates 471

35 Archipelagic Identities 473
Willy Maley

36 Chorography, Map�]Mindedness, Poetics of Place 485
Andrew Hadfield

37 Masculinity 498
Joseph Campana

38 Queer Studies 510
Stephen Guy�]Bray

39 Sensation, Passion, and Emotion 519
Douglas Trevor

40 The Body in Renaissance Poetry 531
Michael Schoenfeldt

41 Poetry and the Material Text 545
Adam Smyth

42 Science and Technology 557
Jessica Wolfe

43 Economic Criticism 570
William J. Kennedy

44 New Historicism, New Formalism, and Thy Darling in an Urn 583
Richard Strier

45 Allegory 595
Kenneth Borris

46 The Sublime 611
Patrick Cheney

Index 628

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