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This article examines ways in which Mary Sidney's psalms demonstrate an intertextual play between pen and needle. Her translations are a linguistic embroidery of the biblical poems: attention to colours and to cunning, to ornamentation and to pattern characterizes Sidney's psalms as much as they do any priestly girdle or linen ephod. To demonstrate this, I reference criticism regarding women's words and needlework as 'interrelated'; next, I argue that these female textualities are linked biblically, making Sidney's choices particularly appropriate for biblical translation. The merging of literary and material texts in Sidney's psalms is driven home in the demonstration of how her translations and linguistic word-play mirror needlework practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psalms are routinely considered to be sources of comfort and occasions of thanksgiving. In this essay I present a different, and opposite function for the psalms: that of expressing an intense state of isolation, threat, hatred and self-annihilation. So far from supplying what sixteenth-century readers called 'comfortable words', the psalm translations discussed here inflame authorial pain. They actively deprive authors of any consolation. They deprive authors even of the consolations of expressing the desire for vengeance, despite the frequency with which these texts call vengeance down upon the heads of enemies. Just as the psalms were imagined to have been written originally in a threatening courtly environment, so too are they used by early Tudor courtiers to express the predicament of court life. I focus on psalm paraphrases of the following writers: Sir Thomas Wyatt; George Blage; Henry Howard Earl of Surrey; and Sir Thomas Smith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the critical tradition which claims that Wyatt's Penitential Psalms speak with the authentic personal voice of early English Protestantism. The title references C. S. Lewis's famous essay, 'What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato', in which Chaucer is seen to 'medievalize' Boccaccio's 'Renaissance' poem, in order to question the assumption that Wyatt 'Protestantizes' his primary Italian (Catholic) source, Pietro Aretino's I sette salmi de la penitentia di David (1534). This critical tradition, it is argued, is itself predicated upon the same periodization underpinning Lewis's essay, whereby the erroneous binary opposition Catholic/Protestant becomes metonymic of medieval/Renaissance. Applying this clear-cut confessional division to the late 1530s, when Wyatt wrote (or at the very least began) his sequence, is an anachronism. What this article argues, rather, is that Wyatt's reading and rewriting of Aretino's paraphrase and Antonio Brucioli's commentary on the Penitential Psalms - which also, I argue, influenced Aretino - helps him to reform certain of the equivocations and contradictions found in the Ten Articles (1536) and the Bishops' Book (1537) into a more consistent poetics of grace; notwithstanding his diverse other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My article focuses on Seven Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinne, an expansive verse paraphrase of the seven Penitential Psalms by William Hunnis, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. First published in 1583, this text has been largely overlooked, or mentioned only in passing, by modern scholars. However, it garnered considerable popular interest in its own time, running to a total of fifteen editions by 1636 and earning revenue for several generations of printers. My task is to explore the significance of this huge commercial success for the field of psalm studies, as well as to consider why we have found it difficult to give Hunnis's publication sufficient attention to date. Analysing Seven Sobs in relation to the centuries-old tradition of praying and commenting on the Penitential Psalms, which elsewhere I have termed 'penitential hermeneutics', I elucidate how Hunnis and his publishers were able to propagate a relatively innovative reformist agenda by combining it with long-standing devotional and interpretive custom. And I argue that the challenge of understanding Hunnis's dilatory (and often tortuous) paraphrase, and the role it played in post-Reformation England, might highlight the continued importance of reading and theorizing across periods and confessions today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psalms and sonnets were the most popular lyric genres in early modern English writing. Little scholarly attention, however, has been paid to the common ground between the two forms, largely because they have been perceived as incompatible, with one epitomizing the sacred, and the other, the secular, literature of their day. Nonetheless, sixteenth-century writers often moved from one genre to the other; the first sonnet sequence in English (Anne Lock's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, 1560), takes the form of a translation of Psalm 51; and paraphrases of other psalms appear in sonnet sequences by Barnabe Barnes and Henry Lok. The figure of David as psalmist and poet is invoked in sonnets as well as psalms, and the diction of the biblical texts was harnessed and remade for the secular tradition. This essay argues for a close relationship between psalms and sonnets, and through an examination of the influences exerted on both genres, including contemporary poetics and Petrarchism, it suggests that both the biblical Book of Psalms, and the broader tradition of psalm translation, provided an important model for the early modern English sonnet sequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A criticism is presented for the influence of music on the poetry of the English author Thomas Churchyard. Topics discussed include his poem "Storie translated out of Frenche," Churchyard's involvement in the 16th century debates between religion and poetry, and instances in which Churchyard's poems were set to music.

Throughout his oeuvre, Spenser shows a distinct interest in varieties of life. Often found in indistinguishable heaps, these congeries present grounds for deeper thinking about how humans categorize themselves and others. In both the title page and the poem proper of Mother Hubberds Tale, this concern is brilliantly displayed for readers to ponder. The title page takes what might have been a comforting hierarchy of being and upsets it in several ways. The poem then develops this anxiety through its investment in discourses of taxonomy and a thematic emphasis on the face as a locus of acknowledgment. Thus, the poem and its paratext need to be seen for what they are: radical statements about the contestability and uncertainty of the early modern project to draw boundaries between life-forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Thomas Heywood's Emblematicall Dialogue (1637), "Two modest Virgins, of unequall time" discuss love and marriage, focusing on the crucial moment when the maid makes her transition from maid to wife. As the meaning of each naked emblem and of the dialogue form as a whole is revealed through the passing moments of the argument so is the meaning of this moment in time which the maid faces. Cultural and biological imperatives construct time for the maid and become the ground of the debate and of her choices at this pivotal moment which will determine her success or failure as a woman in seventeenth-century England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into Andrew Marvell's allusionary references within his lyric poem "The Unfortunate Lover," to Ovid's legendary tale of Ceyx and Alcyone found in the classical Latin work "Metamorphoses." Parallels between the two tales are then cited and explicated, highlighting thematic similarities regarding birds, shipwrecks and love as well as noting divergences between them.

A criticism is presented of the English 1667 poem "Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666. An Historical Poem" by John Dryden. An overview of the poem's depiction of sacrilege against the Christian God, including the sacrilege of sailors, is provided. The poem's portrayal of the economic power of the empire of Great Britain during the second half of the 17th century, including in regard to the Second Anglo-Dutch of 1665-1667, is discussed.

Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' both iterates and interrogates the discourse of sexual libertinism. His poem presents a double picture of libertine verse and the version of Epicurean philosophy informing it. That picture problematically sets topoi from the literature of sexual libertinism against Christian orthodoxy, refusing to portray their opposition in terms of unqualified polarities. At the last, Marvell leaves his readers to choose between rival visions of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the Legend of Holiness within 16th century English poem "The Faerie Queen," Book I, by Edmund Spenser. Particular focus is given to the poem's defense of Christianity against Skepticism, including in regard to the poem's character Redcrosse's Christian faith and belief.

The most compelling portrayal of timekeeping technology in an English poem of the early seventeenth century is a long and complicated passage from John Donne's 1614 poem 'Obsequyes vpon the Lord Harrington the last that dyed.' In this passage, Donne deploys clock and sundial images to critique the values of the religio-political faction with which the deceased Lord Harington was associated, a group of courtiers and scholars strongly invested in the development of new technologies. Comparing human beings to timepieces in a conceit that plays upon the traditional iconography of Temperance, Donne challenges technological progressivism, promoting in its place a skeptical chronometry of virtue. Donne's conceit poses interpretive challenges that force readers to think analytically and critically about how technology-and in particular the technology of time-measurement-is related to human goodness and well-being. [T. M. D.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brief remarks by Frederick Furnivall (1868), Eleanor Hammond (1908), Caroline Spurgeon (1925), and Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Holton (2004), indicate that the sixteenth-century poem entitled the Debate betweene Pride and Lowlines shows in its character descriptions the influence of Chaucer. But, apart from one particular case, no details of the matter have been brought to light. Examination of the poem reveals that such influence is definite, though not pervasive, and that Chaucer's effect on the Debate is rather more various than previous comments suggest. Beyond reminiscences of the General Prologue, one finds several echoes of language and motifs drawn from other parts of the Canterbury Tales, from Troilus and Criseyde, and from the dream visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the three different endings poet Lady Mary Wroth used in her 17th-century manuscript collection of poems. The author argues that the first two endings connect to the romance genre in their references to the character Pamphilia, who stands for the author, while the third displays a feeling of anguish. Poems discussed include "A sheapherd who noe care did take," "Unquiet griefe search farder in my hart," and "Love what art thou?"

Satan and his fellow fallen angels masquerade in Paradise Regained as "Demonian spirits" (2.122), as if they were divinities abstracted out of Nature and its World-Soul rather than the creatures of God. They literally masquerade as such nature-spirits in the two episodes of the brief epic most closely associated with romance, as benign woodland nymphs coming to minister to Milton's Jesus in the banquet temptation of book 2, and as scary storm-demons who menace him in the tempest of book 4. Jesus sees through and puts an end to their revels, exorcising from the human mind the belief in the very existence of such nature-daemons, the basis of Renaissance magical thinking. Paradise Regained disenchants the natural world and reflects the shift of Renaissance thought itself toward the objectivity of science, at the possible cost to poetry and romance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Eric B. Song considers the artistic, religious, and political value of privacy in Paradise Regained. The topic of privacy condenses Milton's thinking about gender and sexuality, domesticity, the fraught work of publishing intimate truths, and the relationship between Christian and Hebraic modes of religious polity. The depiction of privacy in Paradise Regained relates not only to Milton's earlier poetry and prose but also to twentieth-century theories of private and public life that contrast classical and modern societies. The productive friction between Milton's religious convictions and his advocacy for personal liberty speaks to controversies that persist in present-day American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eve, named eight times in Paradise Regained, is usually assimilated to the so-called triple equation between the temptations failed by Adam and resisted by the "second Adam" Jesus. In this essay, Andrew Kau argues that the androcentric typological "equation" should be replaced with an "Eve function" that generates from within the "inputs" of the poem's formal and dramatic structures various interpretive "outputs" that challenge its surface values of typological orthodoxy, masculine virtue, and epic triumph. While Satan absorbs the negative role assigned Eve by the mainstream Christian tradition, Jesus gradually becomes identified with the Eve of Paradise Lost, a representative of moral autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two opposed traditions of Milton scholarship arose in the eighteenth century, one that places special emphasis on classical sources, and one that reacts against the first by stripping away all annotations except to note biblical allusions. Milton criticism reproduces the Athens temptation from Paradise Regained, in which Satan tempts the Son with the fruit of classical culture. Through the early variorum editions, readers may overcome the impasse of Milton's rejection of the learning his poetry embodies. By the end of the poem, veneration of the classics becomes logically consistent with devotion to the figure rejecting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines discussions of homoerotic desire in English Renaissance lyric poetry through an analysis of works by poet and playwright William Shakespeare and poet Richard Barnfield. Works discussed include Barnfield's "The Affectionate Shepheard. Containing the Complaint of 'Daphnis' for the Love of Ganymede'" and "Sonnet 3" and "Sonnet 20" by Shakespeare. Focus is given to the reception of such poems, with the author arguing that the poets' use of lyric verse as the mode to discuss homoeroticism led to the works' negative reception.

The article presents poetry criticism of the poem "The Faerie Queene," by Edmund Spenser, focusing on book 6, "The Legend of Courtesy." It comments on themes of pleasure, romance, and self-discipline in the poem and on the character Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy. The author also examines Renaissance literary theory, reflecting on the idea of the value and ethics of poetry.

The author critiques the poem "The Gallery" by English Renaissance poet Andrew Marvell, which describes portraits of a woman referred to as Clora, who the author claims refers to Mary Kirke, daughter of poet Aurelian Townsend. Poetic allegory, Clora's cruelty, and erotic English poetry of the 17th century are discussed, as well as the poem "Let not thy beauty" by Townsend.

The article offers poetry criticism of the anonymous Elizabethan poem "Willobie His Avisa." The author proposes that the character of a suitor in the poem, identified as "H. W.," is meant to represent English earl Henry Wriothesley. He suggests that the poem depicts a bisexual love affair between English earl Edward de Vere, de Vere's wife Elizabeth Trentham, and Wriothesley. He notes his belief that de Vere wrote the works attributed to poet and playwright William Shakespeare.

While Behn's versatility as a writer who excelled in all three primary genres of drama, narrative and lyric poetry is now widely acknowledged, current scholarship reverses the preference of her contemporaries and focuses chiefly on her work for the theatre and her prose fiction. Even when it attends to her poetry, it usually overlooks the very quality that makes it verse: her prosody. This essay draws attention to the subtle and complex texture of Behn's verse, and to how metrical analysis can illuminate her practice as a Restoration poet. Following a brief survey of the whole range of poems in Janet Todd's edition of Behn's work, and an explanation of the significance of various verse forms in the Restoration, the essay considers a range of metrical forms and devices in detail through close attention to poems including “The Disappointment” and “To the fair Clarinda”, as well as others that are much less well known. It not only demonstrates Behn's expertise in all the main forms and genres current at the period, including narrative as well as lyric verse, but also her creative inventiveness with different kinds of variation in metre, stanza and line length, poetic syntax and rhyme scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

John Dryden uses one of his final, original poems, "To My Honour'd Kinsman," published barely a month before his death, to define his political and poetic legacy. Couched in the guise of traditional verse forms--retirement poetry, panegyric, familiar verse epistle--"Kinsman" voices the oppositional politics of Country Party ideology. Dryden recognized fully that real political power had, by 1699, shifted from monarch to Parliament. with this poem, he seized the opportunity that his cousin's return to a Parliamentary seat afforded him to create a portrait of an ideal MP and the views that he should hold. Dryden's kinsman, however, is not that ideal, and the poem is about Dryden himself, rather than his namesake cousin. "Kinsman" articulates the tenets of the Country Party: the natural suitability of the landed gentry for governance; the necessity of individual integrity and virtue; an isolationist foreign policy; an emphasis on naval power, rather than land forces in Europe; and a nostalgic English chauvinism. For Dryden, writing "To My Honour'd Kinsman" is a patriotic act, appropriate to the public role of the poet. At the end of his life, he employed the cultural power of oppositional poetry to dictate to Parliament the direction that he wished English politics to follow and to leave what he calls a "memorial" to himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Refraining Songs" reappraises the role of the songs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella as they reveal Sidney's own theoretical views on narrative in lyric and strengthen the case for the 1598 ordering of the poems. These formally diverse lyrics interspersed among the sonnets both narrate the more important events of Astrophil and Stella's affair while also acting as interruptions or extended articulations of Astrophil's overburdened emotional state. This essay reconciles these divergent capacities of the songs, arguing that Sidney uses the songs to create an opposition between narrative and lyric in order to explore narrative's effects upon poetic sequence. Complicated by shifts within and juxtapositions of poetic form in the sequence, narrative itself becomes a lyric refrain as events are written and rewritten, creating a recursive narrativity that Sidney exploits for innovative possibilities of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, who closely identified with the printed word, John Donne is often thought to have shown no interest in the idea of literary property. However, this assumption does not account for the visceral metaphors, such as authorial cannibalism, that Donne applied to the circulation of his poems in manuscript. Through a close reading of Donne's Satyre II, which situates his concerns for misappropriation in a legal context, this essay argues not only that Donne was in a better position than his contemporaries to appreciate the needs for authorial control, but that due to his training in the law he was also better able to articulate an inchoate conception of proprietary authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Milton and Homer: 'Written to Aftertimes,'" by Gregory Machacek.

A literary criticism of the poem "The Faerie Queene," by Edmund Spenser, is presented. The author discusses the character of the Redcrosse Knight in the poem and suggests that the story of Redcrosse is a Christian allegory of Protestant salvation found in the Bible in the book of Romans. Other topics include the character of Una as Catholic, the character of Archimago as Satanic, and the character Redcrosse as seeking sanctification and holiness.

A literary criticism of the poem "Lycidas" by John Milton, is presented. The author suggests that the character of the pilot does not represent the Biblical figure of Saint Peter but rather represents Jesus Christ. The author discusses the Greek pastoral imagery of the poem and its Christian meanings. The author examines evidence from the poem arguing against the pilot as representing Saint Peter.

The article presents poetry criticism of the poems "The Sacrifice" and "Redemption" by George Herbert. According to the author, the poems do not follow the Christology of theologian John Calvin but instead are illustrative of theologian Martin Luther's concept of the communion of human and divine properties. Topics discussed include redemption, suffering, sacrifice, and the relationship between God and humanity.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "The Shepheardes Calender" by Edmund Spenser. According to the author, Spenser used the resources of a group of scholars studying Old English manuscripts to compose this poem. It is suggested that his etymological use of several words shows his knowledge of their Anglo-Saxon origins. Topics discussed include textual glosses, linguistic estrangement, and Spenser's critical attitude towards the Elizabethan Church.

The article discusses the Christian symbolism in book eight of the epic poem "Paradise Lost" by John Milton. It addresses the question of which Person of the Trinity is represented as creating Adam and Eve. Milton did not clearly specify this, but used ambiguous phrases such as a "shape Divine" in his descriptions. An argument is presented that the symbolism works best if the shape Divine is thought of as representing Christ the Son, the second Person of the Trinity.

Andrew Marvell's poem 'Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax' has justifiably received much critical attention in recent decades, not least for its proto-environmental concerns. However, another contemporary poem concerned not only with the same Yorkshire retreat but also, intriguingly, the same theme of oak-felling, has passed almost entirely unnoticed by scholars: 'The Vocal Oak' (1679), by Fairfax's cousin, Brian Fairfax. This article argues that in addition to its treating tree-felling as an intrinsically significant, deleterious ecological event, Fairfax's poem illustrates the usefully rich metaphorical and symbolic uses to which such occasions could be put, with particular regard to constructing the posthumous reputation of his illustrious cousin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the devotional poems of George Herbert that appear in the book "The Temple," particularly the author's frequent use of the word "sweet" in various forms. The author argues that the word is deliberately used by Herbert to describe his relationship to God. Other topics include the difference between public and private devotion, God's love, imagery in the poems, and delight.

The article reviews the book "Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion," edited by Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garret A. Sullivan Jr.

The article reviews the book "The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558-1582," by Stephen Hamrick.