Henry IV 1 & 2 by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: Henry IV, Part 1 (pub. 1598) Part II (pub. 1600)

Context

• Publication: 
• Part 1 produced by the Chamberlain's Men 1596-7. Survives only as single sheet from quarto. EEBO link. 
• Part 2 produced by the same 1597-8. Published once in quarto, twice in folio collections. EEBO link.
• Feb 25, 1598: Entered to Andrew Wise: "a booke intituled The historye of Henry the iiijth with his battaile of Shrewsburye against Henry Hottspurre of the Northe wth the conceipted mirthe of Sr Iohn ffalstoff".
• Jun 25, 1603: Transferred from Andrew Wise to Matthew Law: "iij enterludes or playes. ... The Third of Henry the .4 the first parte. all kinges." (DEEP)
• Scholarship: Scholars are partly interested in Shakespeare's use of multiple spaces to establish nationhood. Accordingly, scholars are interested in the mixture of class representations between Westminster and Eastcheap. Scholars analyze representations of Glendower as analogous to the interpretation of Ireland. Politically, scholars read Hal for Machiavellian strategy and masculine characterization--useful for feminist readings of this play. Lastly, there is interest in the Oxford edition, which features names edited according to the Master of the Revels: Falstaff, importantly, was called Oldcastle--possibly referring to Foxe's idol of Protestant soldiering.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon.

Content

• Form: Two parts. Each part has five acts.
• Genre: History play.
• Plot: 
• Part 1: Henry IV's previous supporters begin to turn on him. Henry Percy Jr. fights for the king against Douglas of Scotland, but uses his prisoners to bargain for the freedom of Mortimer, the chosen successor of Richard II. Mortimer allies himself with Glendower, and thereby brings them together with Henry Percy (Sr. and Jr.) and Douglas--all united against the King. Meanwhile, Prince Hal carouses with Falstaff in Eastcheap. He pranks Falstaff with friends until being summoned by his father. Prince Hal vows to atone for his waywardness by killing Henry Percy. Falstaff begins to organize a troop of soldiers. Henry Percy Sr. falls ill and refuses to send troops to battle. Glendower does the same due to premonitions of failure, and accordingly, Mortimer does, too. Only Henry Percy Jr. appears at Shrewsbury to personally kill Prince Hal. Henry IV offers amnesty for rebels who lay down arms and take an allegiance oath, but Thomas Percy does not carry the message to Henry Percy Jr. The battle begins, Douglas goes on a killing spree, and Falstaff forswears honor in battle--to the extent that he carries a bottle of wine rather than a sword. Hal drives Douglas away from Henry IV, and then meets Henry Percy Jr. As they struggle, Douglas fights Falstaff and Falstaff feigns death. Hal defeats Henry Percy Jr., though Falstaff tries to take credit. Hal appeals to his father to free the valorous Douglas. The Lancasters are redeemed.
• Part 2: Since the Battle of Shrewsbury, the elder Henries are both failing. Henry Percy Sr. grieves his son and flees to Scotland, hoping to carry on the rebellion with the faithful troops of the archbishop of York. Henry IV has to divide his troops to hold off the Irish and the French. He is weary, ill, and troubled by his own ascent to the throne. He is heartened by the death of Glendower. Prince Hal continues his carousing until summoned back to service. Falstaff organizes a rag-tag army from in Gloucestershire, made up of men who couldn't bribe him. Prince John and York meet to discuss peace. John offers peace and reconciliation, on the condition of inspection of the surrendering rebels. They disband too quickly, while John's do not wish to disband under Westmoreland, so John uses his army to arrest rebels and the archbishop. A dying Henry IV is heartened by news of John. He advises his younger sons, Gloucester and Clarence, to maintain unity. Hal visits his fainted father, admits his regrets, promises graceful rule, and leaves with the crown. Henry IV accuses Hal of harmful wishes, but when consoled, the king admits that he gained the crown without principle and begs God for forgiveness. He wishes for a journey to the Holy Land, and advises Hal to occupy the bloodlust of his nobles with foreign conquest. Henry IV dies, and Hal becomes Henry V. A chief justice banishes Falstaff from the new king's presence, and after some dispute, Henry V agrees. He tells Falstaff that he is a changed man, and that the banishment can be gradually lifted on good behavior. Falstaff maintains that Hal is simply putting on a show.
• Other notes: Where to begin?

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Archer, Stanley. "Henry IV, Part II." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-3. Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Jan. 2013.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007. Accessed18 January 2013. <http://deep.sas.upenn.edu>.

Grigsby, John L. "Henry IV, Part I." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-3. Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Jan. 2013.

Shakespeare, William, Stephen J. Greenblatt, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.

"Lycidas" by John Milton

PRIMARY SOURCE: "Lycidas" (pub. 1638)
Context

• Publication: Milton was invited to contribute to Justa Eduardo King, a collection commemorating his Cambridge classmate Edward King (called "Lycidas" in the poem).
• Scholarship: Ann Garbett writes that "Lycidas" is considered the greatest poem in English. More generally, scholars are interested in the poem as the product of young Milton.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon

Content

• Form: Irregular meter, like an Italian canzone. Two movements with six sections each, suggesting an epic structure.
• Genre: Pastoral elegy. 
• Conceit: Invocation of the muses, description of friendship, protest against death, pastoral, description of mourners, description of the funeral, consolation in death, adaptation to new landscape. The invocation, protest, and description of mourners use heavy water imagery. The friendship is described in pastoral terms, and the pastoral itself discusses Milton's doubt over his personal goals. The protest compares King's death to the death of Orpheus, son of the muse and dead in the river Hebrus, and the protest admits that the nymphs could not save King. After discussing mourners, the speaker lashes out against faithless shepherds. At the end of the poem, the speaker sets out for new land, possibly new poetic ground.
• Other notes:
• Dubrow suggests that the structure of the poem could be inspired by either a monody (lyrical lament for one voice) or a madrigal (polyphonic song for three to six voices) (31).
• Dubrow supposes that the shift in voice at the end signals a move from an old pastoral identity to a new one, though not a shift in speaker (135).

(NB: written with secondary sources.)
Garbett, Ann D. "Lycidas." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-2.Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Jan. 2013. Dubrow, Heather. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Print.

Comus by John Milton

PRIMARY SOURCE: Comus (perf. 1634)
Context

• Publication: Probably written in 1632, and presented in 1634 at Ludlow Castle on Michelmas to John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater and newly named Lord President of Wales. Printed in 1637 by Augustus Matthewes for Humphrey Robinson. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have read Comus as masque, and as such, one of many courtly dramas. Some critics believe that Milton included too few songs for Comus to qualify as a masque, but rather, as an ethical debate. As such, Comus fits into Milton's broader interest in Providential history and clear-cut ethical choices. But more importantly, Milton saw his own work as a masque and probably meant to reclaim the debauched courtly masque form for Protestant, and therefore virtuous, purposes.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the masque.

Content

• Form: Mixed meter with songs; mostly blank verse. Three scenes. Four songs.
• Genre: Masque, ethical debate.
• Conceit: Ovidian transformation imbued with Protestant themes. The Attendant Spirit is on earth to show the audience godly virtue in the lives of the children of Neptune who are lost in the treacherous woods. In those woods live Comus, son of Bacchus and Circe, who turns travelers into animals with his magic wine. A Lady and her two brothers become lost in the woods on their way to visit father Neptune. While the brothers look for food, the Lady sings to Echo for their guidance. In the disguise of a village boy, Comus leads her away. The brothers dispute whether the Lady is safe or not as she has no guardian but her own chastity. Comus traps the Lady in an enchanted chair and tries to force her to drink a magical cup. The lady refuses, shows her right reason by arguing with Comus, and counters Comus' argument for natural indulgence by appealing to reason and higher nature. The brothers meet the Attendant Spirit in the form of a shepherd, who leads them to defeat Comus. All chase away Comus while the Lady is bound to her chair. The Spirit sings a conjure to Neptune and Triton for Sabrina, the water nymph. Sabrina sees and loves the Lady's virtue and frees her from the chair. The children are united with the parents in a celebration of the beauty and virtue of young people.
• Other notes: 
• This version of temperance is slightly complicated by Paradise Lost, since Adam is supposed to follow this method on the advice of Raphael, but falls anyway. PL seems to recognize that personal temperance is inadequate even before the fall--thus necessitating Christian transcendence.
• Milton, or at least Comus, seems to distinguish ethical virtue from aesthetic virtue when Comus says, "When once her eye / Hath met the vertue of this Magick dust, / I shall appear som harmles Villager" (165). Eyes, then, are subject to intemperate vision that the rational will can temper.

(NB: written with notes.)
Archer, Stanley. "Comus." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-4.Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Jan. 2013.

The Challenges of Orpheus by Heather Dubrow

CITATION: Dubrow, Heather. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Can the general category of lyric be examined with the necessary respect for historical context?
• Answer: Even in a limited historical period, the best exploration of lyric reveals the variety of lyrical characteristics, rather than a single, central concept.
• Method: Basically, responding to broad trends in secondary sources. The chapters are very loosely organized in the following: the definition of lyric, lyric audience, lyrical immediacy, structure, lyric and narrative, and conclusions.
• Assumptions: First, the move to the "singular" era of Elizabethan and early Stuart lyric is unexplained. Second, Dubrow implicitly relies on a Romantic vision of lyric in relation to narrative: that is, Dubrow sees lyric as intensely personal and evocative. 
• Sententiae: "The range of historical periods and of putatively lyric creations [above]... gestures towards three of the principal questions, interrelated but separable, confronting the author of a study of lyric. Should it be defined transhistorically? What other problems complicate defining and describing it? And, however that first query is resolved, should a study of this mode focus primarily on a given historical period? ... [First, w]hat might be categorized as the same characteristic may serve different functions and elicit different responses in different eras... [Second,] the history of the criticism of lyric offers all too many examples of the perils of positing as normative a characteristic that dominates in a given period or author. ... [Third,] In part because I am particularly interested in tracing in some detail the influences on lyric distinctive of or even unique to a given period and country, such an interaction among writer, printer, and publisher in English early modern print culture, I have chosen to concentrate on a single--and singular--era, the one extending roughly between 1500 and 1660..." (3-7)
  "The student of historical shifts within an era, or between eras, also needs to be alert to the risks involved in drafting predicaton into the service of narration, especially teleological storytelling--in other words, using a statement like 'lyric is x and y' to establish its superiority over preceding forms or its prefigurement of later ones." (10)
  "[D]oes the book require or profit from a single overarching thesis? I maintain that in the instance of early modern lyric, the search for a single claim that would unite the issues explored below, like the cognate search for a single defining characteristic, would be compromised by how variously that mode was written, read, and represented in the early modern period." (12-13)
  "Herrick's 'Vision,' then, supports methodological premises central to this chapter in particular and to the larger study in which it appears: close attention to language, whether of an individual text or of a recurrent trope for lyric, is one of the best methods of understanding the cultural history that informs the mode, and vice versa... Gender, 'The Vision' reminds us, variously intensifies and suppresses the guilt and other tensions associated with that mode." (53)
  "A textbook example of the interrelated questions I have been tracing--the variety and mobility of the positions the audience of lyric may assume, the imbrication of the roles of audience and speaker, the variations on and alternatives to voiceability, and the relationship of all these patterns to the central issues in the text--Shakespeare's thirty-fifth sonnet thus encapsulates the problems and theses pursued throughout this chapter. Above all, it again demonstrates that changes in direction of address often enact and thematize issues at the core of an early modern lyric." (102-103)
  "[I]f texts disintegrate, they are also stabilized, and students of early modern literature should not privilege one part of that process at the expense of others... For example, the interaction of scattering and gathering expands our interpretation of the consequences of the malleability of texts, notably teh implications for authorial agency." (187)
  "My purpose... is certainly not to suggest that a monolithic paradigm of hybridity should replace the equally rigid contrasts between lyric and narrative that are currently in use: their relationship assumes a wide range of forms that no single pattern should be privileged as normative... hybridity, a concept used too readily and loosely in contemporary parlance, is sometimes but certainly not always the most apt description." (194)
  "[S]tudents of narrative often repeat the commonplace that lyric is rooted in, and rootbound by, a static temporality. Conversely, critics whose primary work is in lyric risk associating narrative only with clear-cut events and unambiguous closure, ignoring the poststructuralist--and earlier--emphasis on the edginess of what may or may not be happening." (195)
  "One reason lyric enables narrative is that... it often functions not as an icon of instability but rather as source and symbol of an intensification, a wind-up that must be released in action." (200)

Overstanding

• Assessment: The work needs significant reconsideration to set these discursive comments into an actionable system of thought. Dubrow's scholarly positioning is expert and--I believe--a widely sought golden mean between formalism and history. However, her intervention is unclear and her prose is difficult.
• Synthesis: In her formal concerns, Dubrow resembles Fowler. However, Fowler is much more willing to explain an alternative to realism in the renaissance than Dubrow is willing to articulate a definition of lyric in early modernity.
• Application: The most applicable element of this is Dubrow's scholarly positioning: the general project to find the structuring capabilities of language and genre to counterbalance deconstructive research.

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum by Aemelia Lanyer

PRIMARY SOURCE: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)
Context

• Publication: SDRJ was the first overt bid for patronage from an Englishwoman. After the death of Alfonso Lanyer (1613), Aemelia seems to have spent some time in the house of Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland. "The Description of Cookham" predates "To Penshurst" in publication (Greenblatt and Abrams 1314). EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Lanyer's poetry both for the origins of country house poetry and for a women's history of literature. Lanyer participates in the so-called querelle des femmes, especially on the matter of Eve's sin and the virtue of women (Greenblatt and Abrams 1314).
• Why I'm reading it: The counter-canon, women's writing, rhetorical figures, country house poem, the court.

Content

1.[Prefatory poems]

1. "To the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie"
2. "To the Lady Elizabeths Grace"
3. "To All Vertuous Ladies in Generall"
4. "To the Ladie Arabella"
5. "To the Ladie Susan"
6. "The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie"
7. "To the Ladie Lucie"
8. "To the Ladie Margaret"
9. "To the Ladie Katherine"
10. "To the Ladie Anne"
11. "To the Vertuous Reader"

• Form: Varied. Mostly iambic pentameter verse with alternating rhyme. "To Queenes" alternates single lines with five-line stanzas. Stanzas often have a rhymed volta.
• Genre: Dedication.
• Conceit: An appeal to a different interpretive audience with each dedication.
• Lanyer invites Anne to read Eve's apology.
• Lanyer compares the "first fruits" of her writing to Elizabeth's youth and potential.
• Lanyer alludes to her own scandald with Hundson while commending the courtiers to live purely.
• Lanyer praises Arabella for her powers of re-birth: Arabella is an enfant terrible for the Stuarts.
• Lanyer claims her poetry is a reflection of Susan's virtue.
• Lanyer addresses Marie in an ellaborate dream vision, without interpretation, as recognition for Mary Sidney's poetic powers.
• Lanyer implies that Lucie can accept these poems as she accepts Christ.
• Lanyer juxtaposes Margaret's inheritance with her own status as an aspiring poetess.
• Lanyer seems to have mercenary motives towards Katherine, but also pursues Katherine's daughters as an audience.
• Lanyer claims the book is a mirror to Anne's virtue, as with Susan.
• Lanyer addresses to virtuous women some remarks on women's virtue, both in these poems and in Biblical history.

2. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

• Form: Iambic pentameter. ABABABCC.
• Genre:  Religious argument, political essay, polemic.
• Conceit: A woman's history of the passion
• invocation of Margaret ("from the Court to the Countre . . . retir’d")
• defense of Women ("faire Virtues" over Helen's beauty)
• the Passion (betrayal by an inner circle)
• tears of daughters of Jerusalem ("Poore women seeing how much they did transgresse, ... labour still these tyrants hearts to move")
• sorrow of the Virgin
• Pontius Pilate (Pilate's wife defends Christ)

3. "The Description of Cooke-ham"

• Form: Iambic pentameter, couplets.
• Genre: Country-house poem
• Conceit: Frequent references to proto-feminist themes: Philomela, equality in grace, the dowry. The poem is about the estate where Lady Anne of Pembroke stayed while fighting for her daughter's inheritance.
• Other notes: Extensive use of the pathetic fallacy.

4. "To the Doubtfull Reader"

• Form: Brief essay.
• Genre: Address to the reader.
• Conceit: Dream-vision (origin of title)

(NB: written with anthology notes.)
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012. Print.

Paradise Regained by John Milton

PRIMARY SOURCE: Paradise Regain'd (pub. 1671)
Context

• Publication: Published by John Starkey by JM alongside Samson Agonistes. Licensed July 2 1670. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Most critics read PR to understand it in relation to the other poetic works of mature Milton. Critics also read PR to understand Milton's reaction to the restoration of the monarchy: Milton favors the son who rejects kingship. Critics understand Jesus' temptation for earthly power as analogous to the Puritans' own trouble establishing a zealous kingdom.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, history of religion.

Content

• Form: Blank verse, four books, roughly 500 lines each (2000 total).
• Genre: Epic, narrative poetry, religious disputation.
• Conceit/Plot: Satan struggles to subvert Jesus' life in the world. Jesus is baptized and Satan consults with the fallen angels: they decide to overthrow the new enemy. God and the angels know Satan will fail. Jesus meditates in the desert and refuses foreknowledge of his future. At the first time Jesus feels hunger, Satan--disguised as an old man--tempts him to turn stones to bread. Jesus calls out Satan, and they dispute self-justification. Satan's war council suggests tempting Jesus with women, but Satan instead decides to offer Jesus praise. Jesus dreams of the miraculous food given to Elijah, and when he wakes, Satan offers him food; Jesus refuses all gifts from Satan. Satan offers glorious conquest; Jesus favors piety over conquest and differs all glory to God. Satan offers freedom for the Jews; Jesus  differs all power to God. Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world; Jesus refuses earthly empire. Satan offers Jesus the literature of Greece and Rome; Jesus prefers the literature of the Hebrews. Satan gives Jesus bad dreams and a storm, then takes him to the pinnacle of the temple and demands proof. Jesus refuses to tempt God, and Satan falls a second time. Angels serve Jesus a table of celestial food, and return Jesus to his mother's house.
• Other notes:
• Milton's Satan gives Jesus the choice of literature: classical or pious? Milton's Jesus chooses pious literature over the classics, offering an interesting complication of Norbrook's view of early modern humanism (that is, Norbrook argues Protestantism is a result of the application of classical humanist heuristics to religion).

(NB: Written with notes.)
Martin, Catherine Gimelli. "Paradise Regained." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-3. Literary Reference Center. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.

Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism by Ania Loomba

CITATION: Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How does race intersect with religious, geographic, and other forms of difference in early modern England?
• Answer: Gender and sexuality provided "a language for expressing and developing ideas about religious, geographic, and ultimately racial difference" (31).
• Method: Loomba's first chapter considers "whether and in what form the concept of racial difference existed in Shakespeare's time" (22) in the following aspects (mneumonic: Libertarian Fairy Germs Claim Colorado Rastafarians Cough):
• Lineage: Race is etymologically related to "root," and this meaning of race is defined by and enforced through procreative sexuality. 
• Ex: Antony would beget a "lawful race" with his wife, if not for Cleopatra.
• Faith/Nation: Race is understood as an outward sign of inward heresy. Conversion complicated this thought, and led to theories of biological race. 
• Ex: Aaron in Titus is referred to as a black devil.
• Gender and sexuality: People in distant countries both embodied and subverted and traditional gender roles. 
• Ex: Amazons were said to inhabit faraway lands.
• Class: "Racially marginalized peoples were also described in terms of servitude..." (34). 
• Ex: Caliban is "ungrateful, incapable of learning, rude, rebellious, and physically repellent" (34).
• Colour: Blackness is a permanent sign of racial difference and depravity. 
• Ex: Aaron declares his blackness cannot be washed white.
• Racism without race: Racial difference was ascribed to the people at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy, even if they share many characteristics with the dominant group.
• Ex: The English settled in Ireland were forbidden from wearing Irish clothes or hairstyles.
• Colonialism and race: "ideologies of difference were both geographically and temporally mobile--the notion of outsiders honed in one part of the world not only influenced attitudes in another, but older habits of thought both reinforced and were themselves reshaped by newer histories of contact" (42).
• Ex: English attitudes towards the New World Indians were shaped by the English treatment of the Irish, but the English attitudes also adapted to create narratives allowing the colonization of both English subjects (the Irish) and so-called "noble savages" (the New World Indians).
• Assumptions: Loomba responds to a tradition of interpretation regarding Shakespeare's black characters: whether to reclaim and valorize the likes of Aaron, or to abolish the blackface tradition in Othello. Loomba largely objects to trans-historical applications of current racial ideology, but she analogizes early modern Turk-ophobia to contemporary cultural narratives about Islam and terrorism.
• Sententiae:
  [see "Method"]
  "Racial difference was imagined in terms of an inversion or distortion of 'normal' gender roles and sexual behaviour-Jewish men were said to menstruate, Muslim men to be sodomites, Egyptian women to stand up while urinating... Patriarchal domination and gender inequality provided a model for establishing  (and were themselves reinforced by) racial hierarchies and colonial domination." (7)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Very solid theoretical refinements, with some slightly underwhelming readings. For instance, "Othello ultimately embodies the stereotype of Moorish lust and violence-a jealous, murderous husband of a Christian lady" (95). Othello is a tragic hero not entirely defined by the early modern conception of race--though that conception of race does prove to be complex.
• Synthesis: This is a natural compliment for DiGangi, since both scholars correct trans-historical applications of contemporary terms of difference. But while DiGangi emphasizes the symbolic economies of sexuality--by which hierarchies of power can be subverted--Loomba emphasizes the adaptability of hierarchical power.By extension, Loomba can be considered alongside O'Connell. O'Connell argues that early modern drama combined logocentricism appropriate to early modern humanism with embodied iconicity appropriate to the late medieval period.
• Application: Therefore, the dramatic representations that Loomba studies in early modernity may have roots in late medieval religious theory. If Christ's pain is visibly embodied and made subject to the viewer, then dramatic vision--especially when applied to racialized others--has a preexisting characteristic of moral judgment. This explanation works for visible and dramatic forms of race, but not for other forms noted by Loomba. For example, the "idolatrous eye" may have a more difficult task viewing racial lineage.

(NB: written with reviews.)

Glaze, Stephen. "Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism." Sixteenth Century Journal. 35.1 (2004). Print.

Mallin, Eric S. "Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism." Shakespeare Quarterly. 55.3 (2004). Print.

Utopia by Thomas More

PRIMARY SOURCE: Utopia (Latin 1515-6, English 1551)
Context

• Publication: Printed in English by Abraham Vele. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholarship on Utopia addresses the book's humanism, the status of counsel, religious freedom, communism, rhetoric, and other matters of politics and religion.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, economics, history of religion.

Content

• Form: A discourse in two parts: first, Raphael Hythloday comes to England and meets Cardinal Morton, with whom he discourses on the state of England; second, Hythloday describes the workings of Utopia.
• Genre: (Political) Discourse.
• Conceit: Hythloday recommends that England reduce its violence (war, capital punishment) and inequality (enclosure, gambling, commodity prices). Then Hythloday explains the organization of Utopia (54 shires, 30 families per shire, one town per shire, one councilman per town, one elected prince, semi-weekly meetings), the Utopian economy (guild system, academics, labor rotation, communism, distaste for precious metals), health (vice is replaced with profitable recreation, slaves slaughter cattle, hospitals care for the sick, communities dine together, the elderly are favored), domestic law (slavery replaces the death penalty for crimes such as adultery, companionate marriage is encouraged but limited by age) foreign policy (enemies are bribed and divided, rather than conquered), and religious tolerance (Christianity survives alongside other faiths, but atheism and secularism are forbidden).
• Other notes: 
• Ironic detachment from Hythloday ("nonsense-talker") and Utopia ("nowhere").
• Profoundly Aristotelian understanding of wealth: no reserve value, and actually a weapon against less-enlightened peoples.
• Education as entertainment.
• Despite the passing reference to religious tolerance, most of the practices described resemble austere western Christianity.

Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe

PRIMARY SOURCE: Hero and Leander (pub. 1598)
Context

• Publication: Printed in 1598 by Edward Blount for Adam Islip. Chapman's additions were included in the 1600 and 1606 editions, printed for John Flasket. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Hero and Leander to analyze Marlowe's interpretation of the Ovidian tradition and his representation of rhetoric.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, vision, satire-fodder (for Jonson).

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter, rhymed couplets. Two sestiads by Marlowe, four by Chapman.
• Genre: Amorous epic (as opposed to heroic).
• Conceit: Heavy classical reference: the rough seas of the Hellespont separate Hero from Leander; Hero is Venus' nun; each body is the object of mythical comparison.
• Other notes: Marlowe's classicism may not be entirely sincere, considering the frequent shifts of voice, anachronisms, and the "something is lacking" ending to the 1598 edition.

The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama by Mario DiGangi

CITATION: DiGangi, Mario. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What does queer theory tell us about the subversive effects of early modern dramatic homoeroticism?
• Answer: When understood without the moralizing term "sodomy," homoeroticism can be understood "within other economies of difference... [such as] masculinity, militarism, reproductive sexuality, colonialism, and race" (160).
• Method: DiGangi reads for clues of homoerotic subversion among masculine authority figures in (mostly) non-Shakespearean Ovidian comedies, satires, tragedies, and tragicomedies (those figures being the father, the master, the king, and the general, respectively).
• Assumptions: First, DiGangi responds to the tradition of addressing homoeroticism in terms of "sodomy," a term with implicit claims to moral order. Second, DiGangi reacts to Shakespearean over-represention in this scholarly field. Third, DiGangi ultimately relates representations of homoeroticism to overarching statements about symbolic economies.
• Sententiae: "Before the emergence of male-male sexuality as an identifiable practice or condition of deviation from 'normal' gender identities, object choices, or sexual roles--and the concomitant naming of those deviant people and practices--homoerotic practices were 'normal' aspects of even the most socially conventional relationships." (1-2)
  "... I find it necessary more fully to demonstrate several points: the pervasiveness of nonsodomitical or nonsubversive homoerotic relations in early modern England; the diversity of homoerotic relations as they are represented in a range of literary and nonliterary texts; the implication of homoerotic relations within social, economic, and ideological power structures. To my mind, the studies I have summarized exhibit three tendencies - in different degrees and combinations - which have prevented the above goals from being more fully realized: (1) an emphasis on sodomy, as opposed to a detailed textual analysis of homoeroticism [;] (2) a reliance on psychoanalytic and deconstructive, as opposed to more rigorously materialist, methods [;] (3) a focus on largely familiar texts, especially by Shakespeare, as opposed to less author-centered and more generically diverse consideration of cultural patterns." (9)
  "Similarly, the Renaissance category of sodomy derived its stigmatizing power from threateningly exotic significations: the sodomite was devil, heretic, New World savage, cannibal, Turk, African, papist, Italian--these categories overlap--or a beastly defiler of boys, whores, and goats." (13)
  "No more intrinsically orderly or disorderly than heteroerotic relations, homoerotic relations could sustain one ideology (the master-servant hierarchy) while challenging another (companionate marriage). The point, then, is to identify as precisely as possible the social and ideological contexts in which different kinds of erotic practice accrued meaning." (19)
  "The display of male bodies on the Renaissance stage, if sometimes sensationalistic, is often undeniably sensual. We ignore the homoerotic sensuality of the drama at the cost of misjudging  the centrality of homoeroticism to the ideological and social practices of early modern England." (28)

Overstanding

• Assessment: DiGangi has written a subtle, acute description of early modern homoerotics, indulging neither in revisionism nor psychologism. The method by which DiGangi ultimately hopes to relate homoeroticism with other symbolic economies may unnecessarily reduce his readings.
• Synthesis: The obvious connection is to The Idolatrous Eye: the means by which drama negotiate image and text implicate the audience. For O'Connell, incarnation subjects power to the audience; for DiGangi, performance presents eroticism to the audience.
• Application: DiGangi's interest in symbolic economies may be turned, in an autocritical move, back to the material history of early modern England. Specifically, book history can provide information about  how material systems of difference implicated homoerotics. How did books printed in economies of "masculinity, militarism, reproductive sexuality, colonialism, and race" represent homoeroticism?

(NB: Written with reviews)
Hammond, Paul. "The Homoerotics Of Early Modern Drama (Book Review)." Seventeenth Century 14.2 (1999): 172. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Jan. 2013
Ian MacInnes. "Book Reviews - the Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama." Shakespeare Quarterly. 50.3 (1999): 399. Print.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Faerie Queene (pub. 1590-6)
Context

• Publication: The Faerie Queene was written in Ireland, first, during the employ of Lord Grey of Wilson, then, in Kilcolman castle in Munster; partially published (three books) in 1590; rewarded with a pension from the Queen of fifty pounds per year; more fully published (six books with the Mutability Cantos) in 1596; ultimately published (seven books) in a 1609 edition (Greenblatt and Abrams 706). EEBO link 1, 2, and 3,
• Scholarship: Scholars read the poem for the complexity of its allegory, for the tension between its prophetic message and political production, for the formal inspiration taken from the Tasso and Ariosto, for the representation of Ireland and imperialism.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, book history, formalism, tapestries, and ekphrasis.

Content

• Form: 
• Spenserian stanza: eight lines iambic pentameter with an alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbcc. 
• Forty-eight stanzas per canto (432 lines per canto [12^2 x 3 = 4^2 x 3^3]), twelve cantos per book (5184 lines per book [72^2], 576 stanzas per book), and twelve announced books. 
• Genre: Epic. Moral allegory.
• Conceit: Six private virtues, six public virtues. Private virtues: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy (mneumonic: Horses Try Chewing Fake Jello Carrots). Knights: Redcrosse, Guyon, Britomart, Campbell & Triamond, Artegall, and Calidore (mneumonic: Rudolf Gently Bathes Conneticut Army Captains).
• Other notes: 

Knight	Maid	Quest	Enemy	Squire / Ally
Redcrosse, of Holiness	Una (truth)	Free Una's parents from the dragon	Archimago & Duessa (idolatry & false faith)	Arthur (Britain is the ally of Holiness)
Guyon, of Temperance	Medina (moderation)	Destroy Acrasia's Bower of Bliss	Cymochles & Pyrochles (indecision & temper)	Palmer (trustworthy pilgrim)
Britomart, of Chastity	Artegall (like Arthur)	Return Amoretta to Scudamore	Malbecco, Busirane (jealousy, the captor of hearts)	Glauce (elderly woman)
Campbell & Triamond, of Friendship	Canacee & Cambina (healing & concord)	Aid the honor of Canacee & Cambina	Blandamour, Paridell, Duessa, & Ate (jealous friends, false faith & strife)	Each other
Artegall, of Justice	Eirene (peace)	Rescue Eirene from Grantorto	Grantorto (great wrong is the enemy of justice)	Talus (iron justice)
Calidore, of Courtesy	Pastorella (shepherdess courtier)	Slay the Blatant Beast	The Blatant Beast (slander)	Tristram (noble lineage)

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012. Print.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: Midsummer Night's Dream (perf. 1595-6)
Context

• Publication: Q1 published by Thomas Fisher in 1600. Signatures: A-H4. Q2 published in 1619 and introduces new errors carried through the First Folio. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Fairies are read for representations of the erotic--as arbitrary and fixative, the imagination, and the theater--as a space of dreams. The same-sex pairings can be read as a forceful heterosexual coupling that overcomes same-sex bonds.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, meta-theater.

Content

• Form: Five acts and an epilogue. Iambic pentameter with irregular rhyme. Meta-play: Pyramus and Thisbe.
• Genre: Comedy; performed by the Chamberlain's Men.
• Plot: Theseus is to marry Hippolyta: Hermia is to marry Demetrius or be placed in a nunnery, or die. Lysander and Hermia escape Athens into the forest, to be wed at the home of his aunt. Helena tells Demetrius, to win his approval. Demetrius pursues Hermia, Helena pursues Demetrius. The actors rehearse a play for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Titania refuses to give Oberon a changeling boy for a page, so Oberon orders Puck to charm her with a charming juice. Oberon also pities Helena, so he orders the same for Demetrius. Puck charms Lysander, instead, who falls for Helena. Thanks to Puck, Titania falls for Bottom, dressed in the head of an ass. Oberon enjoys this, but notices Puck wrongly charmed Lysander. Puck corrects this by also dosing Demetrius. Helena disbelieves both men, and both men abuse Hermia. Oberon orders Puck to lead the men in circles, to the point of exhaustion, when Puck removes the charm from Lysander and Titania. Oberon wins the page from Titania. All on the same day, Hermia will marry Lysander; Helena, Demetrius; Theseus, Hippolyta. Bottom returns from the forest to the wedding just in time to star in Pyramus and Thisbe, which is comically bad.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: Hermia, who loves Lysander; Lysander, who loves Hermia but is charmed into pursuing Helena; Helena, who loves Demetrius; Demetrius, who loves Hermia but is charmed into pursuing Helena; Oberon, the Fairy King; Titania, the Fairy Queen charmed into loving Bottom; Bottom, a weaver and actor; Puck, Oberon's page; Theseus, duke of Athens.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)Shakespeare, William, Stephen J. Greenblatt, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007. Accessed18 January 2013. <http://deep.sas.upenn.edu>.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: As You Like It (perf. 1598-1600)
Context

• Publication: Published in 1623 Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies folio by Blount, Edward; Smethwick, John; Jaggard, Isaac; Aspley, William. "This edition exists in three distinct states: the first does not contain Troilus and Cressida; the second contains Troilus and Cressida but without its prologue and with a redundant final page of Romeo and Juliet crossed out by the printer; the third contains Troilus and Cressida with its prologue, which replaces the redundant page of Romeo and Juliet" (DEEP). EEBO link.
  • Aug 4, 1600(?): "as yow like yt: / a booke ... to be staied".
  • Nov 8, 1623: Entered to Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard: "Comedyes. ... As you like it".
  • Jun 19(?), 1627: Transferred from the widow of Isaac Jaggard to Thomas Cotes and Richard Cotes: "her parte in Shackspheere playes."
  • Nov 16, 1630: Transferred from Edward Blount to Robert Allott, by a note of 26 June: "As you like it."
  • Jul 1, 1637: Transferred from the widow of Robert Allott to John Legat (2) and Andrew Crooke (1) (by order of a court): "saluo Iure cuiuscunque ... Shakespeares workes their Part."
• Scholarship: The scholarship addresses the treatment of the pastoral, both critiquing the court and affirming just power; the treatment of the forest as allusive to social injustice, by way of Robin Hood; Petrarchan love; cross-dressing, and the implications for essentialist philosophies. 
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, the pastoral.

Content

• Form: Five acts and an epilogue. Soliloquies in blank verse.
• Genre: Comedy; performed by the Chamberlain's Men.
• Plot: The Banished Duke lives a pastoral life in the Forest, while his daughter Rosalind stays at court under the protection of Celia, daughter of the usurping brother Frederick. Frederick tries to embarrass Orlando through a wrestling match with his champion, but Orlando wins and impresses Rosalind. Frederick banishes Rosalind, who leaves with Celia and Touchstone the jester. Rosalind takes the identity Ganymede, and Celia, Aliena. Orlando flees from his brother with his servant Adam. Orlando attacks the Banished Duke in desperation, but the Duke instead provides hospitality to Orlando and Adam. Orlando writes poems to Rosalind on trees, but Ganymede discovers them, meets Orlando, and instructs him in how to woo Rosalind. Touchstone shows his wit in response to Orlando's poems, and then woos Audrey. Silvius falls in love with Phebe, who falls in love with Ganymede. Orlando travels to visit Ganymede, but along the way saves sleeping Oliver from a snake and a lioness, ready to strike. Oliver and Orlando are reconciled. Orlando is wounded by the lioness and sends Oliver with a bloody handkerchief to Ganymede. Ganymede feints, and Aliena falls for now-compassionate Oliver. They agree to be married, inspiring Orlando to marry Rosalind. Ganymede promises to produce Rosalind for Orlando. Frederick marches into the forest to capture and kill the Banished Duke and his followers, but is dissuaded by an old hermit. Rosalind exposes herself as Ganymede and engineers four marriages for the same day: Orlando and Rosalind; Oliver and Celia; Silvius and Phebe; Touchstone and Audrey. Frederick takes religious orders and returns the dukedom to the Banished Duke.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: The Banished Duke, brother of Frederick; Frederick, instigator against Orlando; Orlando, son of Rowland de Boys, brother of Oliver, and lover of Rosalind; Rowland de Boys, ardent supporter of the banished duke; Oliver, oldest son of Rowland but negligent guardian of Orlando; Rosalind, daughter of the Banished Duke, Celia, daughter of Frederick; Touchstone the jester, champion of courtly wit; Silvius;  shepherd; Phebe, shepherdess.
• The forest can be treated as both an idyllic space and the space of poverty and vagrancy. 
• Touchstone can be both aggressive and compassionate. 
• Rosalind produces all of the crucial plot points.
• Touchstone and Rosalind critique the Petrarchan traditions of Orlando's poetry and performance.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)
Shakespeare, William, Stephen J. Greenblatt, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007. Accessed18 January 2013. <http://deep.sas.upenn.edu>.

The tragicall history of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe

PRIMARY SOURCE: Doctor Faustus (perf. 1592-3)
Context

• Publication: A short version that Thomas Bushell published in 1604 combines Marlowe's tragic scenes "with the farcical contributions of a collaborator" (Bevington 249) Signatures: A-F⁴ (-F4); Stationer’s Register: Entered 7 January 1601. EEBO link. A longer version was published by Henslowe in 1616.
• Scholarship: Marlowe is the object of study as a freethinker, and the play is open to orthodox and subversive readings. Faustus is both a damned fool and a profoundly learned thinker: caught at the frustrating imperfections of human knowledge on questions of the gods. A humanist reading finds Faustus genuinely at a loss for will, namely, the will for repentance.
• Why I'm reading it: The canon, the history of science, Johann Fust, book history, illustration.

Content

• Form: Prologue (by Chorus), five Acts, and an Epilogue. Soliloquies in blank verse.
• Genre: Tragedy; performed by the Admiral's Men.
• Plot: Faustus dismisses the three fields of knowledge and instead summons two scholars to teach him the dark arts. He summons a demon, and despite warnings from a Good Angel and divine intercession, sells his soul to Lucifer to have the service of Mephistopheles for 24 years.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: Faustus, who begins with a desire to do everything, but who gives up both on power and on his salvation; Wagner, who serves Faustus; Mephistopheles, who serves as intercessor between Faustus and Lucifer; the Clowns Rafe and Robin, who try to steal Faustus' power, but are tortured by Mephistopheles; the Seven Deadly Sins.
• Faustus dismisses the liberal arts as obsolete (medicine), mercenary (law), and fatalist (theology).

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Bevington, David M, Lars Engle, Katharine E. Maus, and Eric Rasmussen. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Print.

Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell

PRIMARY SOURCE: Upon Appleton House (comp. 1651)
Context

• Publication: Miscellaneous Poems, 1681, "by his former housekeeper as support for her unsuccessful claim to be his widow and heir" (Rumrich 531) EEBO entry.
• Scholarship: Compared to "Horation Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" for political commentary on Fairfax, who refused to invade Scotland and was replaced by Cromwell.
• Why I'm reading it: Dubrow uses the country house poem to apply New Formalism to the Renaissance.

Content

• Form: Iambic tetrameter; couplets; eight-line stanzas; 97 stanzas. (Based around 8-8-8 organization.)
• Genre: Country house poem or topographical poem.
• Conceit: "The framework is a guided tour: a description of the house itself (lines 1-80), modulating into moralized history--the story of the nunnery and the attempted seduction of the Fairfax ancestor, the "blooming Virgin Thwaites"--and into false and corrupted religion (81-280). The grounds are described: the gardens (281-368), laid out in military style; the meadows (369-480), where the order of the seasons prevails; the woods (481-624), image of the retired life; the river (625-648). Finally, at evening, returning to the mode of elaborate compliment, the poet describes Mary Fairfax, the epitome of the natural scene, the microcosm of the place, and the hope for a new and better order (649-776)." (Rumrich 559)
• Other notes: 
• The play places a high value on embodied reason.
• Transcendental imagery.
• Unclear image: "I was but an invented tree" (ln. 565)
• Mneumonic from the apple trees on Rahn Rd., down Rahn, then over to John Hole on Whipp.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Rumrich, John P, and Gregory Chaplin. Seventeenth-century British Poetry, 1603-1660: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.

Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance by David Norbrook

CITATION: Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Can poetry animated by an "organic society" (see FR Leavis, esp.) transcend politics?
• Answer: Critics must politicize aesthetics, and by determining the "specific ideological allegiances" of poets the critic can reconstruct authorial intention. 
• Method: New Historicism. The chapters move mostly chronologically through More, early Milton,  Sidney, Spenser, Greville, Jonson, and Milton. Norbrook's methods re-integrate these poets into their radical, prophetic tradition, and the canon--because New Critics favored private and apolitical metaphysics. Norbrook finds The Shepherdes Calender and Lycidas to have paid homage to earlier prophetic poetry.
• Assumptions: The introduction responds to both new critical and radical traditions, asking chiasmically, whether to aestheticize politics or politicize aesthetics. The chapter arrangement bases the prophetic tradition of English poetry in the Edwardian period--Mary's reign is seen to have produced a "paucity" of poetry. These poets are interpreted in terms of class consciousness, especially under patronage. Shakespeare, lastly, is viewed separate from the tradition.
• Sententiae: 

"To attempt to politicise the sphere of the aesthetic is to risk the accusation of reductionism... And a rigid antithesis between political and aesthetic spheres is itself reductive... From religious rituals to conventional sexual roles, such systems postulate particular power relations as part of the natural order... Our conventional notion of the 'political' itself involves certain assumptions about those institutions which are open to question and those which are not..." (6-7)
"Literary historians have sometimes regarded the ideals of humanism as inimical to those of the Reformation, and regarded radical Protestantism as hostile to literary culture. but it was the application of humanist methods of the exegesis to the Bible that provided the rationale for the Protestant critique of ecclesiastical tradition, for a decisive and unprecedented break with the past." (8)
"In questioning abstract systemisation, the humanists emphasized the need to set texts in their historical context; and their historical scholarship made them increasingly aware of the discrepancies between medieval and classical conceptions of human nature." (23)
"More's communism is a way of criticising the aristocratic belief that work is degrading." (28)
"Spenser... draws attention to the difficulties, and the political implications, of interpretation...  No new collection of English poems before 'The Shepheardes Calender' had provided such an array of aids to interpretation: a preface, general and particular arguments, woodcuts, and lengthy glosses." (73)
"Interpretations which tie the 'moral' eclogues down to personal allusions or to a defence fo a pure Church of England against Roman corruption fail to do justice to the work's prophetic character." (76)
"Spenser's stanza overgoes by one line the eight-line stanza favoured by Ariosto and Tasso. The self-enfolding dispersion of the rhymes reinforces the effect of self-conscious analysis rather than unreflective narrative movement, while the final alexandrine permits a further reflection before moving to the next stanza." (112)
"Spenser may have been drawing on Neoplatonic theory in which the highest kind of unity is not just a prosaic mean between extremes but a more dynamic and paradoxical kind of coincidence of opposites." (114)
"On Elizabeth's progresses this process [of poetic prophesy remaking the world] of transformation could be made actual: landscape artists would prepare the way for the queen's advent by smoothing out blemishes, adorning statues, even digging whole lakes. The transformed landscape symbolised the civility which good rule produced." (147)
"The masque form dramatised this dependence of the nobility on the monarch: all the participants had to act out a formal pattern that centered on the ruler." (180)
"But Jonson aimed to naturalise the artifice of his poetry, to give an impression of directness and colloquial energy. The verbal texture of a poem, he said, should be 'like a Table, upon which you may runne your finger without rubs, and your nayle cannot find a joynt; not horrid, rough, wrinckled, gaping, or chapt'." (186)
"The Spenserian poets tended to adopt a style which drew attention to its own artifice and thus highlighted the inability of language fully to embody transcendent truths: where Jonson's verse gives the impression that ideals can be organically embodied in existing institutions and linguistic formulations, Spenserian verse constantly confesses its inadequacy." (200)

"Rubens was a diplomat as well as an artist and used his influence with Charles and Buckingham and their advisers to try to dispose the English government better towards Spain. Buckingham's artistic tastes made him ideologically suspect... His enemies were particularly  prone to associate him with illusion because he loved spectacular masques, which lacked the lasting value of Rubens's canvases but had an immediate  if short-lived appeal. He had first brought himself to the king's favour by his skill in dancing in a masque." (224)

"[Milton] believed that an element of disorder and dissension was essential to the maintenance of liberty, that to try to achieve complete, static harmony  was to invite stagnation. When he used aesthetic analogies in his political works he modified their traditional associations. If building the reformed church was carving a statue, it was necessary to acknowledge that this task was bound to produce an element of waste matter, the sects that could not be harmonised with the main church: here Milton's emphasis was on the process, the 'struggl of contrarieties', not on the finished project." (239)

"Milton adopted a Protestantised version of the Renaissance theory that music and poetry had once been indissolubly allied, that the music of the ancients had unusual emotional power because each note was precisely adjusted in pitch and quantity to a corresponding syllable... Champions of the new 'monodic' music saw themselves as overcoming this aural 'idolatry'  and restoring the just relations between sound and sense." (244)

"Puritans had long valued music as more spiritual, less immediately sensual than the visual arts, and they especially valued the ability to harmonise sound with sense." (260)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Norbrook veers at times away from his own warning against reductionism, politically by  describing Rubens mostly as a diplomat, or formally by granting Spenser's alexandrine a universal capacity for reflection.
• Synthesis: Norbrook argues that Buckingham was controversial for selling off lower titles (223), a claim sympathetic to DiGangi. And, of course, Norbrook's new historicism is compatible with King's Tudor Royal iconography, albeit with a through-line following the prophetic tradition rather than courtly power.
• Application: Norbrook's treatment of music is infrequent, but still useful for a formalist overview of the period. 

(NB: written with reviews.)
King, John N. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Huntington Library Quarterly. 49.3 (1986): 277-280. Print.
Rudnytsky, Peter L. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Renaissance Quarterly. 40.1 (1987): 153-155. Print.