Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play (Arden Shakespeare The State of Play)

"Tracing the development of narrative verse in London's literary circles during the 1590s, this volume puts Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece into conversation with poems by a wide variety of contemporary writers, including Thomas Lodge, Francis Beaumont, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion and Edmund Spenser. Chapters investigate the complexities of this literary conversation and contribute for the current, vigorous reassessment of humanism's intended consequences by drawing attention to the highly diverse forms of early modern classicism as well as the complex connection between Latin pedagogy and vernacular poetic invention. Key themes and topics include: Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality, Classicism and commerce, Genre and mimesis, Rhetoric and aesthetics."--Bloomsbury Publishing. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page CONTENTS SERIES PREFACE NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Introduction On ‘schoolmen’s cunning notes’ Notes PART ONE Reckoning with rhetoric 1 ‘Reck’ning’ with Shakespeare’s Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece The force of rhetoric The rhetoric of Lucrece Conclusion: Shakespeare’s Orpheus Notes 2 Poetry at the limits of rhetoric in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece Fellow-feeling at a remove Poetic contemplation Self, receding Notes PART TWO Debating mimesis 3 Epic Oenone, pastoral Paris Undoing the Virgilian rota in Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris Notes 4 ‘Arte with her contending, doth aspire T’excell the naturall’ Contending for representation in the Elizabethan epyllion Not entirely dead things: the power and limits of poetry Art with her contending: the moving, speaking poetic picture Lively expressions of nature’s lineaments: ekphrasis and epyllia Notes 5 Learning to read with Lucrece ‘Read it in me’: empathy, imitation and the tragedy of understanding ‘I have enough’: ineptitude, anticlimax and the comedy of disengagement Notes PART THREE Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality 6 From discontent to disdain Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis and the Inns of Court Thomas Lodge – reveller and Innsman London’s a harlot Glaucus complaining The discontented narrator Conclusion: ‘vindicating self-will’? Notes 7 Love will tear us apart Campion’s Umbra and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis Notes 8 Love lovesVenus and Adonis, Venus and Anchises Notes PART FOUR Classicism and mercantile capital 9 Crossing the Hellespont The erotics of the everyday in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander Musaeus and Greek minor epic between the ancient and (early) modern Mocking the gods in Marlowe Hero, Leander and Nashe’s red herring Notes 10 ‘Unthriftie waste’ Epyllia, idleness and general economy Notes APPENDIX Chronological list of narrative poems mentioned in this volume INDEX