Introduction
Notes Quotations from Love’s Martyr and the Diverse Poetical Essays are from the first edition of 1601. (I have modernized these titles in the text.) Otherwise, Shakespeare is quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Jonson, unless otherwise noted, is quoted from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), and Edmund Spenser from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Osgood and Fredrick Padelford, 10 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57). Introduction 1. Colin Burrow, ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 3. 2. J. C. Maxwell (ed.), The Cambridge Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xxxiii. 3. See, for instance, Catherine Belsey’s essays ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’, in Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 34–53, and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–107. 4. William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1. 5. I admire the efforts of recent editors to alert readers to the fact that all titles imposed on it are artificial, but there are several reasons why I reluctantly refer to it as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Colin Burrow, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chooses to name it after its first line, the rather inelegant ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’, which, out of context, to my ear sounds more silly than solemn.
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