Poetry And Paternity In Renaissance England

Becoming a father was the main way that an individual in the English Renaissance could be treated as a full member of the community. Yet patriarchal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms, they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed. This study takes these anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as Sidney and Spenser deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even to come to new accommodations between the sexes. Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets' aims, but resisted their more radical implications. The result is a fiercely personal yet publicly-committed poetry that wouldn't be seen again until the time of the Romantics.

Fathers are central to the drama of Shakespeare's time: they are revered, even sacred, yet they are also flawed human beings who feature as obstacles in plays of all genres. In Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, Tom MacFaul examines how fathers are paradoxical and almost anomalous characters on the English Renaissance stage. Starting as figures of confident authority in early Elizabethan drama, their scope for action becomes gradually more restricted, until by late Jacobean drama they have accepted the limitations of their power. MacFaul argues that this process points towards a crisis of patriarchal authority in wider contemporary culture. While Shakespeare's plays provide a key insight into these shifts, this book explores the dramatic culture of the period more widely to present the ways in which Shakespeare's work differed from that of his contemporaries while both sharing and informing their artistic and ideological preoccupations.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

Renaissance poetry anthologies were crafted within the book trade and re-crafted through performance, transforming Early Modern cultures of recreation.

Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England, and inspired major Elizabethan writers including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought poems of the aristocracy - verses of friendship, war, politics, death and above all of love - into wide common readership for the first time. The major poets of Henry VIII's court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were first printed in the volume. Wyatt's intimate poem about lost love which begins 'They flee from me, that sometime did me seke', and Surrey's passionate sonnet 'Complaint of a lover rebuked' are joined in the miscellany by a large collection of diverse, intriguingly anonymous poems both moral and erotic, intimate and universal.

Presented in two volumes, this Ashgate Research Companion assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2, Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of select family members in the genres of romance, drama, poetry, psalms, and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century, English poets and printers experimented widely with a new literary format, the printed collection of lyric poetry. They not only investigated the possibilities of working with a new medium, but also wrote metaphors of human reproduction directly into their works. In Fair Copies, Matthew Zarnowiecki argues that poetic production was re-envisioned during this period, which was rife with models of copying and imitation, to include reproduction as one of its inherent attributes. Tracing the development of the English lyric during this crucial period, Fair Copies incorporates a diverse range of cultural productions and reproductions – from key poetic texts by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Gascoigne, and Tottel to legal breviaries, visual representations of song, midwives' manuals, and commonplace books. Also included are fifteen facsimile reproductions of poems in early printed books, with explanations and discussions of their importance. Calling upon these diverse sources, and examining lyric poems in their earliest manuscript and printed contexts, Zarnowiecki develops a new, reproductively centred method of reading early modern English lyric poetry.