The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry

by Post, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780199607747
• ISBN10: 0199607745
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-09-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains 38 original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhyme to meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking "Shakespeare" in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus "A Lover's Complaint," the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and "The Phoenix and the Turtle." If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last three decades.

Author Biography

Jonathan F. S. Post is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and the founding director of the UCLA Summer Shakespeare Program in Stratford and London. He is the author of a number of critical studies with a special focus on poetry of the early modern and modern periods--most recently English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (1999), and Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric (2002). He is currently writing a critical study of Anthony Hecht's poetry for Oxford University Press. He has been a Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and twice a Fellow of the Bogliasco Foundation. He chaired the UCLA English Department from 1989-1993.

Table of Contents

Preface, Jonathan Post
Part I: Style and Language
1. Shakespeare's Styles, Gordon Teskey
2. Shakespeare's Style in The 1590s, Goran Stanivukovic
3. Shakespeare's Late Style, R. Braunmuller
4. Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition, Sophie Read
5. Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean Numbers, Margaret Ferguson
Part II: Inheritance and Invention
6. Classical Influences, Colin Burrow
7. Shakespeare and Italian Poetry, Anthony Mortimer
8. Du Bellay and Shakespeare's Sonnets, Anne Lake Prescott
9. Open Voicing: Wyatt and Shakespeare, Linda Gregerson
10. Grammar Rules in the Sonnets: Sidney and Shakespeare, Alysia Kolentsis
11. Commonplace Shakespeare: Value, Vulgarity, and the Poetics of Increase in Shake-speares Sonnets and Troilus and Cressida, Catherine Nicholson
12. Philomela's Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender in Shakespeare s Poems and Plays, Marion Wells
13. Shakespeare, Elegy, and Epitaph: 1557-1640, John Kerrigan
Part III: Songs, Lyrics, and Ballads
14. Song in Shakespeare: Rhetoric, Identity, Agency, Gavin Alexander
15. Shakespeare's Popular Songs and The Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric, Steven Newman
Part IV: Speaking on Stage
16. Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse Line, Abigail Rokison
17. Shakespeare's Word Music, Paul Edmondson
18. Finding Your Footing in Shakespeare's Verse, Bruce R. Smith
19. From bad to verse: poetry and spectacle on the modern Shakespearean stage, Jeremy Lopez
20. Make my image but an alehouse sign : The Poetry of Women in Shakespeare s Drama, Alison Findlay
V. Reading Shakespeare s Poems
21. To show. . .And so to publish: Reading, Writing, and Performing in the Narrative Poems, Charlotte Scott
22. Outgrowing Adonis, outgrowing Ovid: the disorienting narrative of Venus and Adonis, Subha Mukherji
23. Shame, Fear, and Love in The Rape of Lucrece, Joshua Scodel
24. The Sonnets in the Classroom: Student, Teacher, Editor-Annotator(s), and Cruxes, David Sofield
25. Fortify yourself in your decay: Sounding Rhyme and Rhyming Effects in Shakespeare's Sonnets, L. E. Semler
26. The Conceptual Investigations of Sonnets, David Schalkwyk
27. Pretty Rooms: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture, and Early Modern Visual Design, Russ McDonald
28. The Poetics of Feminine Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint', Melissa Sanchez
29. Poetry and Compassion in Shakespeare's `A Lover's Complaint', Katharine Craik
30. Reading 'The Phoenix and Turtle', John Kerrigan
VI: Later Reflections
31. Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics, Michael O Neill
32. Shakespearean Being: The Victorian Bard, Herbert F. Tucker
33. Shakespeare's Loose Ends and the Contemporary Poet, Peter Robinson
34. The Sound of Shakespeare Thinking, James Longenbach
35. Melted in American Air, Judith Hall
VII: Translating Shakespeare
36. Yves Bonnefoy and Shakespeare, Efrain Kristal
37. Glocal Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Poems in Germany, Christa Jansohn
38. Negotiating the Universal: Translations of Shakespeare s Poetry In (Between) Spain and Spanish America, Belen Bistue