Up until this point of your degree your engagement with the Renaissance period will have been almost entirely through its drama. But the Renaissance was also a golden age of English poetry: writers like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Amelia Lanier, John Donne, Katherine Phillips, John Milton, Mary Wroth and … yes … Marlowe and Shakespeare, experimented with exciting new poetic forms and explored in their verse questions of originality and authenticity, desire and sexuality, ambition and politics, spirituality and human frailty, and what it is that makes us who we are.
The module will introduce you to a range of important poets who wrote during the profoundly formative period of English literary history between the reign of Henry VIII and the restoration of the monarchy. It is taught in interactive tutorials and workshops, in which we approach the poetry in a number of ways, from highly focused close reading to theoretical approaches that take into account issues such as gender, sexuality and social status, to placing the works in their historical and political context. The assessment incorporates both traditional and creative-critical elements, encouraging you to think not just about what the poetry might ‘mean’, but also how it ‘works’.