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English 252: Sixteenth Century Literature Topic for Spring, 2003: Writing about Love in the Sixteenth Century The sixteenth century is no less striking than our own for the variety and incompatibility of the ways in which writers thought about love. 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 in the old a degraded folly, or is it a means of self-transcendence? What part should love play in marriage? How do notions of gender in the Elizabethan period affect ideas of love? The course will investigate a number of the fundamental literary/philosophical "models" for loving inherited by Renaissance writers: Petrarchan, Platonic (and neoplatonic), Ovidian and the combination of attitudes that appear in medieval and Renaissance romances. We'll also work with a number of other Renaissance writings on marriage. The course will consider how English Renaissance writers revise these various traditions to create particular visions of love and sexuality. We'll spend about five weeks on 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'll be asking how each writer's vision develops in relation to Petrarch's troubled ambivalence about his own love, and how he or she varies from the traditional Petrarchan scenario in which a frustrated (male) love addresses a cool, distant, idealized Lady. How does a sequence like Shakespeare's, written to a man, vary 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. These narratives will lead into consideration of the Third Book of Spenser's Faerie Queene with its complex investigation of the many forms of love. The course will end with either Sidney's prose romance, the Arcadia or with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The course will be conducted largely by discussion with occasional short lectures on background material. Students will be expected to try out their thinking in class. One of the indispensable ways to think carefully about a subject and to there will be a good deal of writing: a number of ungraded exercises, three essays (the first two written in draft and then revised) and a final exam. Recommended background: English 199 or English 200 or GLT 291. |
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