Course Description
Poetry of the earlier English Renaissance, such as works by Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe, and the sonnets of Shakespeare.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be responsible for a more extensive syllabus, for secondary reading, and for more ambitious, sophisticated writing.
Athena Title
Elizabethan Poetry
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in ENGL 4300W
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Semester Course Offered
Offered every odd-numbered year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
At the end of the course, students, having read a substantial body of literature, will be able to discuss the assigned works (orally and in writing) with a considerable degree of critical sophistication, to reread them with pleasure, to read and enjoy other works from the period, and to converse with fellow students about texts and issues related to the subject matter of the course.
Topical Outline
The choice and sequence of topics will vary from instructor to instructor and semester to semester. The topics will consist of selected works by various authors, to be read outside of class and discussed in class, examined individually and comparatively in the context of the times and the circumstances of their composition. Periodically during the semester, students will perform a number of graded tasks, including some combination of tests and out-of-class papers. A possible series of topics and assignments might resemble this: • Early Tudor verse: Thomas More, John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), others • Later Tudor writers of short poems: Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, William Shakespeare, Fulke Greville, others • Longer Tudor poems: Thomas Sackville (and other authors of The Mirror for Magistrates), Marlowe (“Hero and Leander”), Shakespeare (“The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis”), Drayton (“Poly-Olbion”), others • The epic: Spenser’s Faerie Queene Students should expect to write at least twenty pages over the course of the semester, ranging from low-stakes postings or responses to formal, argumentative, literary-critical essays and at least one task requiring outside research in an archive or library.
Syllabus