The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Poetry

by Michael Schoenfeldt

Overview

Shakespeare's poems, aside from the enduring appeal of the Sonnets, are much less familiar today than his plays, despite being enormously popular in his lifetime. This Introduction celebrates the achievement of Shakespeare as a poet, providing students with ways of understanding and enjoying his remarkable poems. It honours the aesthetic and intellectual complexity of the poems without making them seem unapproachably complicated, outlining their exquisite pleasures and absorbing enigmas. Schoenfeldt suggests that today's readers are better able to analyze aspects of the poems that were formerly ignored or the source of scandal – the articulation of a fervent same-sex love, for example, or the incipient racism inherent in a hierarchy of light and dark. By engaging closely with Shakespeare's major poems – Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint – the Introduction demonstrates how much these extraordinary poems still have to say to us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521705073
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/07/2010
Series:	Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Michael Schoenfeldt is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton and Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship, and he has contributed to publications including A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets and Imagining Death in Shakespeare and Milton.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Chapter 1 Shakespeare and English poetry 1

Versification and meter 4

Shakespeare and early modern poetry 11

Chapter 2 Shakespeare's banquet of sense: Venus and Adonis 19

Carnal and verbal pleasure 21

Wordplay and foreplay 24

Love and lust 31

The death of Adonis and the birth of erotic unhappiness 34

Chapter 3 Constraint and complaint in Lucrece 38

Tarquin and predatory lust 40

Lucrece: resistance and complaint 46

Founding the Roman republic 54

Chapter 4 Mysteries of the Sonnets: Dedication, publication, sequence, characters 57

Publication and dedication 57

The temptations of autobiography and sequence 60

Characters and reception 64

Chapter 5 Time and mortality in the Sonnets 69

Time and progeny 69

Time and poetry 76

Time and love 82

Time and the afterlife 84

Chapter 6 Friendship and love, darkness and lust: Desire in the Sonnets 88

The master-mistress: Sonnet 20 90

The marriage of true minds: Sonnet 116 92

Olympian restraint: Sonnet 94 96

The Dark Lady 98

Love and appetite 103

Love and disease 105

Chapter 7 Solitary and mutual flames: A Lover's Complaint and "The Phoenix and Turtle" 112

A Lover's Complaint 113

"The Phoenix and Turtle" 122

Chapter 8 Fantasies of Shakespearean authorship 130

The Passionate Pilgrim 132

John Benson, editor 134

Occasional verse 135

Passionate pilgrims: "Shall I die? And the Funeral Elegy 140

Notes 144

Further reading 152

Index 157

Editorial Reviews

"Schoenfeldt's volume has all the merits of a first-rate lecture series. It provides the facts, engages judiciously with current scholarship, and models exacting readings of target texts."
—Recent Studies of the English Renaissance

From the Publisher