Textbook (obligatory):
- Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students’ Guide, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1994)
Literary texts are in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 8th edition (New York: Norton, 2003), but please note the preferred edition of Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (see below).
Play:
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (ed. E. S. Donno, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Poems:
- Edmund Spenser, three sonnets from Amoretti: 64 (Comming to kisse her lyps), 68 (Most glorious Lord of lyfe), 75 (One day I wrote her name upon the strand)
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun) and 138 (When my love swears that she is made of truth)
- 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, 13, 14, 17, 19; ‘A Hymn to God the Father’
- Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us’ , ‘To John Donne’, ‘Ode to Himself’
- George Herbert, ‘The Altar’, ‘Redemption’, ‘Easter Wings’, ‘Prayer (1)’, ‘Denial’, ‘Man’, ‘Time’, ‘Death’, ‘Love (3)’
- Richard Crashaw, ‘To the Noblest & best of Ladies, the Countess of Denbigh’, incl. ‘Non vi’ (Not by force)
- Thomas Carew, ‘An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr. John Donne’, ‘To Ben Jonson’
- Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, ‘The Garden’
- Margaret Cavendish, ‘The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution’
- John Milton, ‘On Shakespeare’, ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il Penseroso’
Prose:
- Sir Philip Sidney, from The Defense of Poesy
- John Donne, Meditation 17, and excerpt from Death’s Duel
- Ben Jonson, from Timber, or Discoveries
- John Milton, from Areopagitica