Topic: Passion and Despair in the English Renaissance

The 16th century is no less striking than our own for the variety and the incompatibility of the ways in which writers thought about love and/or sexual desire. How is sexual desire related to the love of others, and how is either related to the love of God? Is love for the young a pleasant pastime to be outgrown, and a degraded folly in the old? Is it a means of self-transcendence? The course will follow some of the ways in which major English Renaissance writers revise various traditions of love available to them to develop their own visions of love and sexuality.

We will spend the first weeks on a series of sonnets and sonnet sequences by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lady Mary Wroth and others to think about the way each of these develops the sonnet tradition inherited from Petrarch. In each case we will be asking how each writer's vision develops out of Petrarch's profoundly troubled ambivalence about his own love, and how he or she varies from the traditional Petrarchan scenario in which the eternally frustrated (male) lover addresses the cool, distant, idealized Lady. How does a sequence (like Shakespeare's) to a man vary from the traditional sonnet-dynamic? How does a sequence written (like Lady Mary Wroth's) by a woman revise the largely male sonnet-conventions?

The Ovidian strand of Renaissance writing will appear in selections from the Metamorphoses and two short narrative poems-Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Marlowe's Hero and Leander.

The course will be conducted by discussion with occasional lectures on background material. The course will, however, proceed mostly by discussion, and students will be expected to try out their thinking in class. There will be a midterm, two papers, and a final examination.