Syllabus/achievement requirements

To buy (mandatory books/editions):

  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. E. S. Donno, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge UP, 2004.
  • The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (9th edition). Except where noted (*), all poems and prose texts listed below are in this volume.

POETRY:

  • Sir Philip Sidney, sonnets from Astrophil and Stella: 1 (Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show); 15 (You that do search for every purling spring); 41 (Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance); 45 (Stella oft sees the very face of woe); 71 (Who will in fairest book of Nature know). Also by Sidney: (*) song from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (What tongue can her perfections tell?) (available on Fronter)
  • Edmund Spenser, sonnets from Amoretti:  64 (Comming to kisse her lyps); 75 (One day I wrote her name upon the strand)
  • Mary Wroth, sonnets from Pamphilia to Amphilantus: 16 (Am I thus conquered?); 103 (My muse now happy, lay thyself to rest)
  • William Shakespeare, sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?); 130 (My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun); 138 (When my love swears that she is made of truth)
  • Michael Drayton, sonnets from Idea: 6 (How many paltry, foolish, painted things); 8 (There’s nothing grieves me, but that age should haste); 50 (As in some countries far removed from hence)
  • John Donne, “The Good Morrow”; “The Apparition”; “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”; “The Relic”; Elegy 19 (To his Mistress going to Bed); Holy Sonnets 1, 5, 10, 13, 14, 19
  • George Herbert, “Easter Wings”; “Denial”; “Man”; “Death”
  • Richard Crashaw, “To the Noblest & best of Ladies, the Countess of Denbigh”, incl. “Non vi” (Not by force)
  • Katherine Philips, “Upon the Double Murder of King Charles”
  • Margaret Cavendish, “The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution”

PROSE:

  • Sir Philip Sidney, from The Defense of Poesy
  • John Donne, Meditation 17, and excerpt from Death’s Duel
  • Izaac Walton, from The Life of Dr. John Donne
  • Ben Jonson, (*) from Timber, or Discoveries (short excerpt available on Fronter)
  • John Milton, from Areopagitica

Recommended background reading (more suggestions will be posted on Fronter):

  • Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students’ Guide, 2nd edn (Routledge, 1994)
  • Peter G. Platt, “Shakespeare and Rhetorical Culture,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. D. Scott Kastan (Blackwell, 1999), 277-96
  • Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme ,” Critical Inquiry 8:2 (1981), 265-79
  • Alison Shell and Arnold Hunt, “Donne’s Religious World” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge UP, 2006), 65-82
  • Marcy L. North, “Women, the Material Book and Early Printing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge UP, 2009), 68–82
Published Apr. 27, 2016 11:11 AM - Last modified Apr. 28, 2016 8:55 AM