English Renaissance Literary Criticism

This is the first comprehensive collection of English Renaissance literary criticism to appear for nearly a century. Brian Vickers has brought together a wide-ranging selection of texts, some well-known (such as Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry, the most brilliant critical essay of the whole Renaissance, here given complete), some little-known (Dudley North's account of Metaphysical poetry), and one being printed for the first time (John Ford's elegy on John Fletcher).

Preface, Abbreviations, Introduction, Further Reading, A Note on the Texts, 1: Sir Thomas Elyot, 2: Henry Howard, 3: Thomas Wilson, 4: Alexander Neville, 5: William Baldwin, 6: Roger Ascham, 7: George Gascoigne, 8: George Whetstone, 9: Edmund Spenser and E.K., 10: George Puttenham, 11: Edmund Spenser, 12: Sir John Harrington, 13: William Shakespeare, 14: Gabriel Harvey, 15: Sir Philip Sidney, 16: George Chapman, 17: Robert Southwell, 18: John Hoskyns, 19: Thomas Campion, 20: Samuel Daniel, 21: Ben Jonson, Rhymes against rhyme, 22: Francis Bacon, 23: Ben Jonson, The moral function of poetry, 24: Thomas Heywood, 25: John Fletcher, 26: Dudley North, 27: George Chapman, 28: Ben Jonson, The faults of contemporary drama, 29: William Drummond, 30: Ben Jonson, A tribute to Shakespeare, 31: John Ford, 32: Philip Massinger, 33: Thomas Carew, 34: Ben Jonson, Notes on literature, 35: John Milton, 36: Thomas Hobbes, Glossary, List of Rhetorical Figures, Index

Brian Vickers is Chair of English Language and Literature, ETH Zürich