Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play

Lynn Enterline, Lena Cowen Orlin, Ann Thompson

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350197633
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350073371
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Tracing the development of narrative verse in London's literary circles during the 1590s, this volume puts Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece into conversation with poems by a wide variety of contemporary writers, including Thomas Lodge, Francis Beaumont, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion and Edmund Spenser. Chapters investigate the complexities of this literary conversation and contribute for the current, vigorous reassessment of humanism's intended consequences by drawing attention to the highly diverse forms of early modern classicism as well as the complex connection between Latin pedagogy and vernacular poetic invention.

Key themes and topics include:
-Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality
-Classicism and commerce
-Genre and mimesis
-Rhetoric and aesthetics

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: On ‘schoolmen’s cunning notes’
• Part One Reckoning with rhetoric
• 1 ‘Reck’ning’ with Shakespeare’s Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece
• 2 Poetry at the limits of rhetoric in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece
• Part Two Debating mimesis
• 3 Epic Oenone, pastoral Paris: Undoing the Virgilian rota in Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris
• 4 ‘Arte with her contending, doth aspire T’excell the naturall’: Contending for representation in the Elizabethan epyllion
• 5 Learning to read with Lucrece
• Part Three Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality
• 6 From discontent to disdain: Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis and the Inns of Court
• 7 Love will tear us apart: Campion’s Umbra and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis
• 8 Love loves: Venus and Adonis, Venus and Anchises
• Part Four Classicism and mercantile capital
• 9 Crossing the Hellespont: The erotics of the everyday in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander
• 10 ‘Unthriftie waste’: Epyllia, idleness and general economy
• Appendix
• Index
• Copyright