The Elizabethan Renaissance has left us with some of literature’s most enduring and thought-provoking explorations of the experience of desire. It was the Golden Age of the English love sonnet – and much more. We will look closely together at a selection of lyric and narrative verse on the theme of love, focusing on five of the period’s greatest poets: Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Donne. We will also look at some of the more significant things that Elizabethan writers had to say about love poetry, and consider how theory and commentary interacted with poetic practice.
The late Elizabethan period produced the greatest flowering in English of sonnet sequences, chiefly (though not exclusively) on the theme of love. Dozens of Elizabethan poets, major and minor, tried their hand at the genre, and many produced works of quality. We shall look closely at two of the best and most influential sequences, as well as at how, by the end of the Elizabethan age, love lyric was striking off in new directions under new management. Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is the first as well as one of the finest of the English sonnet sequences, and established the late-sixteenth-century vogue for the genre. Shakespeare’s Sonnets turns the form in unprecedented directions and gives us some of the most powerful and still some of the best-known love lyric in the English language. Donne’s Songs and Sonnets pours scorn on the whole Elizabethan notion of what love lyric should do and what it should sound like, setting new trends for seventeenth-century verse and leaving us with much food for thought.
By way of comparison, we will also look at some Elizabethan narrative poetry on the theme of love, including two relatively short works, by Shakespeare and his scandalous contemporary Christopher Marlowe, considering how they differ from lyric both in form and in their approach to their subject matter. We will also explore together one book of the period’s greatest (and longest) narrative poem, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in which the love quest of a female knight frames a complex and profound rumination on the nature and consequences of love.
As well as looking closely at individual poems and authors, we will consider more generally why the poetic forms and themes with which they worked attained such popularity. In terms of form, where did the sonnet and other important Elizabethan verse structures come from? To what did they owe their success as poetic forms and their popularity at this particular historical moment? What resources for expression did they provide and how did these great poets exploit them?
In terms of theme, the focus of the course will be poets’ exploration of the experience of desire. We will consider the ambivalent view that Elizabethan society took of lovers and poets, and some of the grounds on which love and love poetry were attacked and defended. We will examine the importance to English poets in this respect of classical and Italian ideas and literary examples, and some of the ways in which those influences were variously adapted and resisted by different English writers.