ISBN : 9780199607747
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight 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.
Preface
PART I: STYLE AND LANGUAGE
1. Shakespeare's Styles
2. Shakespeare's Style in The 1590s
3. Shakespeare's Late Style
4. Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition
5. Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean Numbers
PART II: INHERITANCE AND INVENTION
6. Classical Influences
7. Shakespeare and Italian Poetry
8. Du Bellay and Shakespeare's Sonnets
9. Open Voicing: Wyatt and Shakespeare
10. Grammar Rules in the Sonnets: Sidney and Shakespeare
11. Commonplace Shakespeare: Value, Vulgarity, and the Poetics of Increase in Shake-speares Sonnets and Troilus and Cressida
12. Philomela's Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender in Shakespeare s Poems and Plays
13. Shakespeare, Elegy, and Epitaph: 1557-1640
PART III: SONGS, LYRICS, AND BALLADS
14. Song in Shakespeare: Rhetoric, Identity, Agency
15. Shakespeare's Popular Songs and The Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric
PART IV: SPEAKING ON STAGE
16. Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse Line
17. Shakespeare's Word Music
18. Finding Your Footing in Shakespeare's Verse
19. From bad to verse: poetry and spectacle on the modern Shakespearean stage
20. Make my image but an alehouse sign : The Poetry of Women in Shakespeare s Drama
V. READING SHAKESPEARE S POEMS
21. To show...And so to publish: Reading, Writing, and Performing in the Narrative Poems
22. Outgrowing Adonis, outgrowing Ovid: the disorienting narrative of Venus and Adonis
23. Shame, Fear, and Love in The Rape of Lucrece
24. The Sonnets in the Classroom: Student, Teacher, Editor-Annotator(s), and Cruxes
25. Fortify yourself in your decay: Sounding Rhyme and Rhyming Effects in Shakespeare's Sonnets
26. The Conceptual Investigations of Sonnets
27. Pretty Rooms: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture, and Early Modern Visual Design
28. The Poetics of Feminine Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint'
29. Poetry and Compassion in Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint'
30. Reading 'The Phoenix and Turtle'
VI: LATER REFLECTIONS
31. Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics
32. Shakespearean Being: The Victorian Bard
33. Shakespeare's Loose Ends and the Contemporary Poet
34. The Sound of Shakespeare Thinking
35. Melted in American Air
VII: TRANSLATING SHAKESPEARE
36. Yves Bonnefoy and Shakespeare
37. Glocal Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Poems in Germany
38. Negotiating the Universal: Translations of Shakespeare s Poetry In (Between) Spain and Spanish America
