Redefining Elizabethan Literature

Abstract

Redefining Elizabethan Literature examines the new definitions of literature and authorship that emerged in one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s. Georgia Brown analyses the period's obsession with shame as both a literary theme and a conscious authorial position. She explores the related obsession of this generation of authors with fragmentary and marginal forms of expression, such as the epyllion, paradoxical encomium, sonnet sequence, and complaint. Combining developments in literary theory with close readings of a wide range of Elizabethan texts, Brown casts light on the wholesale eroticisation of Elizabethan literary culture, the form and meaning of Englishness, the function of gender and sexuality in establishing literary authority, and the contexts of the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney. This study will be of great interest to scholars of Renaissance literature as well as cultural history and gender studies.

The non- Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion

“…When Georgia Brown, for instance, writes that John Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598) is 'the most characteristic of all epyllia', she is clearly looking back on the tradition with Marston. 21 Yet it is useful to try and imagine this same tradition instead from the perspective of Barnfield in 1594, a year after the epyllia of Shakespeare and Marlowe, formative for the 'new genre', are brought to the press. Barnfield's Affectionate Shepherd borrows the stanza of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, more than a shade of its mature wooer's desperation, and its Ovidian texture of psychological tragicomedy; it builds on the homoerotic sensuality of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, its descriptive exuberance, and its Ovidian digression; but it also echoes the same poet's 'Passionate Shepherd', and, thinking on the threshold between pastoral and epic, alludes -as we have seen -to Amyntas by Marlowe's friend Watson; finally, it plays with the English hexameter in which the Amyntas had had such huge success, and experiments with a form which scales down epic, that may have been associated with Watson.…”