Model court conduct in the Renaissance shared many rhetorical features with poetry. Analyzing these stylistic affinities, Professor Javitch shows that the rise of the courtly ideal enhanced the status of poetic art. He suggests a new explanation for the fostering of poetic talents by courtly establishments and proposes that the court stimulated these talents more decisively than the Renaissance school. The author focuses on late Tudor England and considers how Queen Elizabeth's court helped poetry gain strength by subscribing to a code of behavior as artificial as that prescribed by Castiglione. Elizabethan writers, however, could benefit from the court's example only so long as their contemporaries continued to respect its social and moral authority. The author shows how the weakening of the courtly ideal led eventually to the poet's emergence as the maker of manners, a role first subtly indicated by Spenser in the Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This title establishes the radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. The author shows how Elizabethan poets like Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully if sometimes ambivalently to radical ideas.

Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context is a stimulating refereed collection of new work dedicated to Emeritus Professor Christopher Wortham of The University of Western Australia. The essays provide a rich context for the interdisciplinary study of the English Renaissance, from its medieval antecedents to its modern afterlife on stage and screen. Their up-to-date engagement with many scholarly fields - art and iconography, cartography, cultural and social history, literature, politics, theatre, and film - will ensure that this book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary Renaissance studies, with a special interest for those researching and teaching English literature and drama. The nineteen contributors include distinguished Renaissance scholars such as Ann Blake, Graham Bradshaw, Alan Brissenden, Conal Condren, Joost Daalder, Heather Dubrow, Philippa Kelly, Anthony Miller, Kay Gililand Stevenson, Robert White, and Lawrence Wright. Work on Shakespeare forms the core of this coherent collection. There are also significant essays on Magnificence, Donne, Marlowe, A Yorkshire Tragedy, Jonson, Marvell, the Ferrars of Little Gidding, and female conduct literature. hardbound with dust jacket; xii+353 pp; 18 b/w illustrations.

Renaissance poetry anthologies were crafted within the book trade and re-crafted through performance, transforming Early Modern cultures of recreation.

This book, the first single volume to collate essays about sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry, explores the remarkable changes that have occurred in the interpretation of English Renaissance poetry in the last twenty years. In the introduction Cristina Malcolmson argues that recent critical approaches have transformed traditional accounts of literary history by analysing the role of poetry in nationalism, the changing associations of poetry and class-status, and the rediscovered writings of women. The collection represents many of the critical methodologies which have contributed to these changes: new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and an historically informed psychoanalytic criticism. In particular, three diverse readings of Spenser's 'Bower of Bliss' canto illustrate the different approaches of formalist close-reading, new historicist analysis of cultural imperialism and feminist interpretations of the relation of gender and power. The further reading section categorizes recent work according to issues and critical approaches.