This comprehensive anthology contains selections from the work of twenty-five poets of the sixteenth century. Employing the original, rather than normalized, texts, the volume includes complete, non-excerpted poems by John Skelton, Philip Sidney and others. The selections - which include such works as 'The Steele Glass'. Richard S. Sylvester examines the evolution of English poetry through the century, tracing the development of the early Tudor poets through the eloquence of Surrey.

This comprehensive anthology contains selections from the work of twenty-five poets of the sixteenth century. Employing the original, rather than normalized, texts, the volume includes complete, non-excerpted poems by John Skelton, Philip Sidney and others. The selections - which include such works as 'The Steele Glass'. Richard S. Sylvester examines the evolution of English poetry through the century, tracing the development of the early Tudor poets through the eloquence of Surrey.

How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon.

This fully-annotated anthology of sixteenth-century English verse features generous selections from the canonical poets, alongside judicious selections from lesser-known authors. Includes complete works or substantial extracts of longer poems wherever possible, including Book III of the ‘Faerie Queene’ and the whole of ‘Astrophil and Stella’. Covers a range of genres, including the love lyric, mythological narrative, sacred poetry and political poetry. Encourages readers to discover unusual and interesting connections and contrasts between poems and poets. Detailed annotations facilitate close reading of the poems.

Reference guide to poetry anthologies with descriptions and evaluations of each anthology.

"This anthology contains selections from the work of twenty-five of the major poets of the sixteenth century. Employing the original, rather than "normalized" texts, the volume includes complete, non-excerpted poems by John Skelton, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe. Edmund Spenser, Thomas Campion, Thomas More, George Gascoigne, Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, Thomas Sackville, Walter Raliegh, Michael Drayton, and others. The selections, including "The Steele Glas," "Amoretti," "Epithalamion," "Prothalamion," "Astrophil and Stella," and "Hero and Leander," represent both major poems and major poets of the period, with the fullest possible representation given to those individuals who loomed the largest in the era. In his introduction, Professor Sylvester examines the evolution of English poetry through the century, tracing the development of the early Tudor poets through the eloquence of Surrey, the experimentation of Sackville and Gascoigne, and the maturity and sophistication of the works of Spenser and Sidney. This collection, when used with a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets, is the basic text for the major poetry of the sixteenth century. The texts in the volume are thoroughly annotated, and the work of each poet is supplemented by a biography, bibliography, and source notes." -Publisher.

Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.

The Broadview Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose makes available not only extensive selections from the works of canonical writers, but also substantial extracts from writers who have either been neglected in earlier anthologies or only relatively recently come to the attention of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars and teachers. Popular fiction and prose nonfiction are especially well represented, including selections from popular romances, merchant fiction, sensation pamphlets, sermons, and ballads. The texts are extensively annotated, with notes both explaining unfamiliar words and providing cultural and historical contexts.

How did English dramatists portray the neighboring domain of France and its history in their plays? The study examines a selection of Shakespearean and other history plays, the French tragedies of George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe's revealing historical tragedy The Massacre at Paris, and several literary and nonliterary historical texts. The result is a unique and timely contribution to our understanding of how cultural differences influenced the historical perspectives of English dramatists as well as how Renaissance plays shaped, and were shaped by, their historical material. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, historiography, and ethnography, this study re-examines the historical representation of a neglected yet influential part of early modern Europe and the paradoxical relationship between English writers and their French subject matter. Although information about France and French history was becoming increasingly available in England at the end of the sixteenth century, for English writers France remained a distant land, its history and people misunderstood and misrepresented.