Fall 2006 Courses

English 313-01: Renaissance Poetry (Krier)

M/W/F 3:30-4:30pm, OLRI 301

Virginia Woolf said, “There are few greater delights than to go back three or four hundred years and become in fancy at least an Elizabethan. . . . the freshness and vigour that blow through their pages are so strong.” The poetry of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is still astonishing in its range, experimental variety, sensuousness, complexity of thought, fascination with figurative language, variety of character and setting, openness to the new and the old.

This course is a survey of Renaissance poetry, formative for Romantics and modernists alike. We aim at both wide scope and depth of reading in the great genres, modes, and voices of the 16th and early 17th centuries. We’ll meet poets, lovers, and madmen, but also alewives, shepherds, green men and wild men, femmes fatales and abandoned women, courtiers, knights male and female, gods and goddesses, nymphs, satyrs, dragons, witches. We’ll ask: How and why is Renaissance poetry so fascinated with catching the voices of vivid characters?  Why does Renaissance lyric have such a strong pull toward storytelling?  How do poets develop their undying love for mythology? 

We’ll read major authors like William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Walter Ralegh, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and the verse of poets whose names might be less familiar to you: Mary Sidney, George Gascoigne, Mary Wroth, John Skelton, Thomas Tusser, Thomas Nashe, John Webster. Our chief books will be Sixteenth-Century Poetry, edited by Gordon Braden, and Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow.

Fall 2006 Course Listings