ENGLISH RENAISSANCE EPITHALAMIA Approvedi Major Professor
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE EPITHALAMIA APPROVEDi Major Professor : ~ Director of the ^Department of English si Deaf of the Graduate School \ ENGLISH RENAISSANCE EPJTHALAMIA THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Larry B. Corse, M. M, Denton, Texas August, 1970 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter I, THE CLASSICAL BACKGROUND 1 II. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 20 III. EDMUND SPENSER 31 IV. JOHN DONNE 48 V. BEN JONS ON AND ROBERT HERRICK. 78 VI. CONCLUSIONS 90 APPENDIX 97 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 108 ill CHAPTER I THE CLASSICAL BACKGROUND In the late sixteenth century, the classical genre of marriage songs called epithalamia-'- appeared In England. A few fine poems in this tradition were written by some of the major English poets: Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Jonson, and Herrick. The genre was important for only three decades in England before it fell into the hands of minor poets and literary hacks. When the English Renaissance poets took up the epithalamic genre, it had a two-thousand year old tradition behind it, a tradition which began in Greece, flourished for a time in Rome, then disappeared until the Renaissance, when epithalamla were written in Italian, French, Spanish, Latin, and English poetry. After the Renaissance, the classical tradition lost its influence on English epithalamia, and not until the twentieth century have major English poets written marriage songs patterned on the classical models. ^To avoid confusion which might arise from the several forms of this word ending in -urn, -a, -ie, -ies, -on, and -ons, the Latin forms, epithalamium and epithalamla, will be used throughout this thesis except in quotations and titles where the original spelling will be raaintained.
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