Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance: Revised Edition - Softcover

successfully ambitious ... This book makes better sense than any I know of the relation of poetry in this period to the pre-revolutionary world in which the poets lived. (Christopher Hill, Notes and Queries)

valuable insistence on political content ... Norbrook is far too subtle a critic to imagine that his writers used art merely as a vehicle for political opinions. (Blair Worden, London Review of Books)

The strengths of Norbrook's argument are considerable ... connections between early and later Tudor literatures, and between Elizabethan and Stuart periods, emerge vividly. (Katharine Eisaman Maus, Western Humanities Review)

He aims to correct the distortions of history we have all inherited, and in bringing off that ambition he has written a book of exceptional interest. Nothing he discusses will be quite the same again ... This bold, finely researched and well-written book should have a decisive effect on our thinking about the poetry of the English Renaissance. (Frank Kermode, Times Literary Supplement)

This is a successfully ambitious book ... makes better sense than any I know of the relation of poetry in this period to the pre-revolutionary world in which the poets lived. (Christopher Hill, Notes and Queries)

He aims to correct the distortions of history we have all inherited, and in bringing off that ambition he has written a book of exceptional interest. Nothing he discusses will be quite the same again ... This bold, finely researched and well-written book should have a decisive effect on our thinking about the poetry of the English Renaissance.' (Frank Kermode, Times Literary Supplement)

Since its first publication in 1984, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance has been recognized as the most comprehensive and authoritative study of its kind. For this new edition, Norbrook has provided an extensive afterword which gives an overview of developments in methodology and research since 1984, responds to some criticisms, and points the way to further inquiry. Footnotes have been updated to take account of the current state of knowledge, and a chronological table has been provided for ease of reference.

Norbrook brings out the range and adventurousness of early modern poets' engagements with the public world. The first part of the book establishes the more radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. Norbrook then shows how such leading Elizabethan poets as Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully though sometimes ambivalently to more radical ideas. A chapter on Fulke Greville shows how that ambivalence reaches an extreme in some remarkable poetry. Ben Jonson emerges from this analysis as a figure with a political edge, pioneering a reaction against Elizabethan literary and political discourses for the new Stuart monarchy. That reaction in turn generated a neglected vein of 'oppositional' poetry under James I. Milton's early poetry can then be seen as negotiating a complex but increasingly emphatic path between opposing political and literary currents, looking forward to the debates of the English Revolution and beyond. This book's exceptional interdisciplinary commitment makes it a significant intervention in historians' debates about early modern political culture as well as in redrawing the map of literary history.