Our period (1500-1660) really begins with the coronation in 1485 of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Its historical midpoint is the death in 1603 of Queen Elizabeth I, who was the last of the Tudors and who had ruled England for nearly five decades; and the ascension to the throne of James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. Our period ends with the restoration of Charles II (James’s grandson) to the throne after an eleven-year period (1649-1660) of republican rule. And during all of this, five generations of English writers, male and female, were very busy indeed. In this survey course, we are faced with a real embarrassment of riches such that the problem is not which writers to include but which writers to leave out. To partially redress this problem, students (probably in pairs) will be reporting on a writer not on the syllabus. In addition, individual students will be investigating and reporting on (at midterm time) a non-literary aspect of our period: clothing, money, medicine . . .
We will start with Sir Saint Thomas More’s Utopia, a wonderful introduction to some of the concerns of our period. We will end with the fascinating lyric poetry of Andrew Marvell, John Milton’s friend (unhappily, we will probably not be reading Milton’s Paradise Lost). Between the beginning and ending of the semester, then, we will read a still-relevant piece of early literary criticism (Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy), several wonderful lyric poets (e.g., sonnets by Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare; secular and religious poetry by–besides Marvell–John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and George Herbert, among others), parts of one of the greatest long poems in English (Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene), some of the period’s prose (e.g., selections from John Lyly’s Euphues, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Thomas Brown’s oxymoronically titled Religio Medici [“The Religion of a Doctor”]), and a few plays (Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Jonson’s Volpone, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi).
Course requirements: My usual mix of letters to the class (and a portfolio at the end of the semester), three essays (one on sixteenth-century poetry, one on early seventeenth-century poetry, and one on the plays), a midterm report on an aspect of early modern culture, a presentation (possibly in pairs) on an author not on the syllabus, and a final examination.
Texts:
Sir Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan, 3rd ed. (Norton, 2010).
Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th ed., vol. B (Norton, 2018).