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Shakespeare did not only write plays. In this course, we shall concentrate on his poetry – his sonnets, but above all his longer poems, such as Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Phoenix and Turtle („Let the bird of loudest lay“). Work in class will foreground close readings of these texts, but we will also study them with an interest in the various literary interactions that give shape to them both thematically and structurally. Thus, topics will include the poems’ place in the European sonnet tradition, their rewriting of classical mythology, transformations of Roman history and ancient philosophy under early modern English auspices, Renaissance negotiations of religious as well as aesthetic issues. Participants must possess the texts in annotated print editions, such as: (a) The Norton Shakespeare (one-volume paperback edition of the complete works); or: (b) The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. by Colin Burrow (Oxford 2002); or, both in the Arden Shakespeare Third Series: (c) Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (London 2010), and Shakespeare’s Poems. The Narrative and Other Poems, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London 2007). |
