This Coupled Work: Poetry and Community in Early Modern England

Catalog description

When we consider some of the “great” works of early modern English poetry—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example—we are often tempted to treat them as the product of unique inspiration and individual craft when they are, in fact, heavily invested in creating and sustaining collaborative relationships. The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost were published with dedicatory poems by Sir Walter Ralegh and Andrew Marvell, respectively, that stand as some of the best interpretive readings of each work to date; Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect the intimacies of patron-client relationships, which forcefully shaped the early modern literary marketplace. Indeed, framing poetic authorship in the early modern period as the work of aloof geniuses can obscure the poetic forms that honored creative communities: verse letters, epitaphs, country house poems, song settings, and unfinished works “completed” after a poet’s death, to name a few. In this course, we will explore collaborative authorship in early modern English poetry. Besides reading selections from The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Paradise Lost, we will survey poetry that illuminates the community ethics of THE CURRICULUM 96 these major texts: Spenser’s friendly verse epistles to his friends and desperate dedications to his patrons; works circulated through the poetic circles fostered by Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; and the poems written by royalists and revolutionaries to promote new kinds of community during the English Civil War. Along the way, we will also encounter poems that show the unique characteristics of early modern English literary collaboration: Ben Jonson’s verses for his adopted poetic “sons,” Mary Sidney’s heartbreaking completion of her late brother’s psalm translations, and George Herbert’s…