Passionate Shepherd Research Articles

A Stylistic Analysis of The Poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlow

This study aimed to analyze Christopher Marlow’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”. The poem was interpreted stylistically from the choice of words, sentence arrangements, and the poetic devices used by the writer to present his thoughts to the audience. The literary devices included in the analysis were symbolism, imagery, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and other sound devices like alliteration, consonance, assonance, and rhyme. Moreover, the study also provided an analysis of the structure and theme of the poem. By conducting this research, the researchers were able to shed light on the literary approaches, sound devices such as symbolism, imagery, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and other sound devices like alliteration, consonance, assonance, and rhyme, hidden meanings, and artistic worth of the Poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlow.

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry by Wendy Beth Hyman

Reviewed by: Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry by Wendy Beth Hyman Ryan Netzley Wendy Beth Hyman. Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiv + 201 pp. Wendy Beth Hyman’s Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry is one of those rare books that will immediately change how I teach. My students and I both tend to think that we have a pretty good bead on carpe diem poems. They maintain that they’ve heard enough pick-up lines that they can always see through such cringe-inducing clichés. I try to rebut their cynical reductions with a different brand of interpretive deflation: the invitation poem really commodifies time; the invitation really continues a classical tradition. Hyman’s book compellingly argues for the radical potential of the carpe diem tradition and the decidedly nuanced nature of its materialist philosophical commitments. In so doing, it serves as a useful antidote to my own and my students’ suspiciously pragmatic skepticism. Hyman’s introductory diagnosis of the invitation poem’s (the phrase she prefers to “carpe diem poem”) philosophical commitments and consequences is thoroughly convincing and sets the stage for much of what comes later: the Renaissance carpe diem tradition, which insists that death very much is the fast-approaching end, is predicated on a skeptical thought experiment that denies both Christian theology and social convention; in contrast to the classical invitation poem that offers non-actionable epideixis in the face of time’s inevitable passage, these Renaissance iterations insist on activity, even busyness; in part, that’s because these later poems must stage arguments against a Christian morality, as opposed to expression of consolation or contentment with the limited nature of time. Out of this compelling framing, Hyman draws two far-reaching consequences: 1) that religious unbelief is actually quite thinkable in the Renaissance and has been hiding in plain sight all these years; 2) that lyrics have speculative or optative aims on par with drama and narrative. Together, these two broad implications should prompt a welcome rethinking of materialist skepticism as something more interesting than mere cynical deflation or envious one-upmanship. [End Page 89] Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry discusses non-canonical and canonical examples of carpe diem verse in the English Renaissance, but also extends its analysis to non-lyric genres and drama. Chapter two, in addition to discussing Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd,” Ralegh’s response, and Carew’s “A Rapture,” examines the materialist world-view of the characters in Measure for Measure. Chapter five examines negative reactions to invitations to “seize the day” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. Of these examinations of non-lyric works, chapter four’s account of the eroticization of doubt in Hero and Leander seems to me the most compelling and provocative. Hyman finds traces of paradoxical encomium in Marlowe’s heroic epistle, when Hero defends (or is forced to defend) the “nothing” that stands in for virginity. This chapter deftly shows how these moments parallel Crashaw’s, Rochester’s, and William Cornwallis’ poems on “nothing” and evoke the physiological indiscernibility of the hymen as a “nothing” that must nonetheless be defended. The point here is not simply that Leander (or Marlowe) traps Hero with his rhetorical duplicity (although they both do). Rather, Hyman describes skepticism’s desirability as residing in something more than caginess in the face of thwarted aspirations, the rough-and-ready pragmatic activity that the carpe diem speaker advocates. Instead, she hints at how impossible knowledge might not be a mark of failed action, but rather a challenge to the notion that doing and acting should be our busy response to nothingness. The volume’s second chapter, on Measure for Measure and carpe diem lyrics, draws on chapter one’s careful account of the pervasive influence of Lucretian materialism in Renaissance philosophy and culture. The argument here is that Isabella and the various men in the play who seem monomaniacally interested in her chastity talk past each other because of a fundamental philosophical misunderstanding: she does not...

Shakespearean Ballads in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Transition from Oral Songs to Printed Historical Documents

Thomas Percy’s ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, marks a point of intersection between balladry and Shakespeareana, which both went through a transitional phase from vocal performance to literary undertaking in the eighteenth century. In the Reliques, ballads that had been orally transmitted by minstrels were changed into validated printed sources for a scholarly project. This transition helped eighteenth-century editors gain a historical understanding of Shakespeare and emend his traditionally received texts. These editors were persuaded to use the ballads in the Reliques as reliable sources for their emendation since they were printed as authoritative documents that were useful for their academic editions of Shakespeare. They gained easy textual access to the printed ballads in the Reliques to search for contextual or emendatory materials. A comparison of four Shakespeare-related ballads in the Reliques (“King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,” “Take Thy Old Cloak about Thee,” “Willow, Willow, Willow,” and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) to their counterparts in editions of Shakespeare reveals that the ballads that were printed as historical documents in the Reliques advanced the editors’ contextual illustration of Shakespeare and that they authorized the emendation of the textus receptus. This article focuses on the effect of the historical information provided by Percy’s printed ballads on George Steevens’s and Edmond Malone’s contextualization of Shakespeare and on their emendation of Shakespearean texts. In addition, it concentrates on the possibility that Edward Capell referred to Shakespearean ballads in Percy’s Reliques combined with old Quarto editions of Shakespeare’s works.

James M. Bromley Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of ShakespeareIntimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare. James M. Bromley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. viii+210.

<i>James M. Bromley</i> Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare<i>Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare</i>. James M. Bromley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. viii+210.

Candace Eleanor Genovese: Memoriam, In Exaltation, and Dolor

She, with customary modesty, left a mere 21-line obituary in which she named her parents, her husband, their children and spouses, their locations, and the number of her grandchildren. She cited her interest in modern history, genealogy, and organizations she had assisted and stated that her ashes would be buried in Wellesley; in Chatham, Ontario; and in Toronto. But there is so much more to tell! national newspaper of Canada, the Globe and Mail, as well as the Boston Globe, carried articles on her remarkable career. Her son, Steven, provides a blog at http://celeanorgenovese.blogstream.com/. Eleanor Genovese served as Managing Editor of this journal with painstaking competence, deep interest, and innovative intelligence for seven years, although first listed as Assistant Editor beginning with the January 1989 issue. She participated in every aspect of the work entailed in its production. Her talents for organizing and recording the data on the movement of manuscripts through the mill of publishing were critically required. In keeping with a shared view of how the world should function, we had equal (minimum wage) salaries. She had always worked hard for women's causes, such as raising money for scholarships through the American Association of University Women, and in the reading and sorting out the over 1,000 entries to the Justice for Homemakers--Babson-Bernays Competition, which now reside in the Schlesinger Library. It was fitting that the flags on the Mrs. Helena Kaushik Women's College in India flew at half-mast and that the Massachusetts Senate adjourned in her honor after her untimely death due to failures of medical personnel: there is a Genovese Room at the Indian college, and it is no accident that the Graduate School at Babson College became co-ed to lead the whole college to this enlightened status while I, her husband, served as dean and founder. Her talents had been instilled and enhanced by her devoted parents, Candace Crafts Moorhouse, a patient and dedicated teacher of children with special needs, and Douglas Moorhouse, farmer, foreman, journalist, and chief turnkey of Essex County Gaol in Windsor, Ontario, and a dedicated Dickens scholar. Eleanor's weekly trips with her father to the library allowed her only three books, which she usually finished on the way home. Three books a week and many magazines were about her weekly quota for the rest of her life. She was an eclectic and voracious reader, often polishing off the entire efforts of a newly discovered and now favored author. A detective story was devoured in two hours. She was an interesting and constant tutor to friends and family. On a personal note, I was introduced to a vivacious beautiful redhead by mutual friends on December 9, 1940 at a spot I can indicate on the Hart House side of University College of the University of Toronto. I walked her home to her residence on Bloor Street ever so slowly and arranged a first date, during which I told her we were to be married. It was gratifying to find a bookmark in a book of poetry on her bedside table marking Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. first stanza reads: Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills and fields, That woods, or steepy mountain yields. This was my proposal to Eleanor, and she did, and we did. I think she married me because I did what was so beautifully advised in South Pacific: Once you have found her, never let her go! Dean of Women of Victoria College informed her that she had more late leaves than any other girl in the college! Before we moved to Massachusetts, Eleanor taught high school in Canada and worked for the Ontario Department of Education and for the Executive and Professional Branch of the Canadian Employment Service. She was a Great Books discussion leader, and gave adult education courses in world affairs. …

Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama by Douglas Bruster

158 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Douglas Bruster. Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xi + 268 pp., $55.00 Reviewed by William N. West On the first page of his Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture inEarly Modern Drama, Douglas Bruster quotes two words?"bricolage" and "thickness"?that reveal the divided critical loyalties of this ambitious refashioning of how we best interpret early modern literature. Split between the New Historicists' Geertz and Derrida's Levi-Strauss, but firmly in the camp of cultural anthropologists, this book offers a cor rective to what Bruster sees as the partiality of recent criti cism. Rather than correcting the oft-cited problems of New Historicism by moving to a closer study of non-literary writ ten sources and material artifacts, as much recent work has tried to do, Bruster reaffirms the grounding of history?both its telling and the elusive thing itself?in literary texts and their interrelations. Elsewhere Bruster has been more emphatic on how little a materialist emphasis changes criti cal practice. In "Shakespeare and the Composite Text" (Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen [New York: Palgrave, 2002]), he observes that many recent works look at cultural "texts" much as their predecessors looked at "literary" ones, reading "parts of books themselves as the sources of a larger cultur al text. Critics have reversed the objects of the procedure, then, but have left the procedure intact" (48). In Quoting Shakespeare, Bruster looks again to the sources that make up texts. Analyzing the wide range of practices that he calls "quotation" (how texts re-use prior texts, distort them, absorb them, and thus comment on them), he recovers the temporal dimension that escapes the synchronous readings of New Historicism and reintroduces the possibility of track ing agency through the swirl of culture. Bruster in effect suggests the possibility of a revitalized literary history, with equal weight on both terms. The critical manifesto of the first chapter introduces two crucial concepts in this project: "quotation" and "position." Quotation is the "textual incorporation" of bits of other Reinews 159 texts, "midway between citation and imitation" (4). Bruster stresses the importance of picking out patterns of borrow ings rather than isolated striking echoes. While quotation provides Bruster with a formal basis for connecting texts across time, such patterns reveal what he calls "position"? consistent personal or textual attitudes, expectations or beliefs?and introduce the possibility ofmoving from strict ly formal analysis to the discourses of, for instance, "ethics, historical study, and feminism" (6). Although this project has affinities with the reception aesthetics of Jauss, Bruster distinguishes his approach by his avoidance of broad claims about horizons of expectation and his focus on readings of individual works in all their polyphony of commitments. Bruster's analyses seek to return the historically individual writer and reader back to literary texts, avoiding the mud diness and absence of agency involved in concepts like the "circulation of social energy" without reinstating or presup posing an ahistorical text-immanence. Either method tends to reduce cultural copia to one or two oversimplified posi tions; by paying attention to quotation and the multiple positions that it reveals, Bruster argues, we can recognize the polyvalent differences of individual writers and actors and see how they maneuver within a heterogeneous cultur al terrain as (limited) agents. Bruster's subsequent chapters put his critical theories to work on a variety of texts. His subtitle "Early Modern Drama" is too modest; each chapter brings a range of con temporary materials to bear in the explication of particular texts. Chapter 2, for instance, looks at the Theocritan ances try of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd" and its afterlife in later lyrics and dramas. Observing that this lyric demands a response because it so completely excludes one, and that it is often quoted as a precursor to sexual violence, Bruster suggests that the persuasive Marlovian rhetoric of the piece was associated with a dangerously narcissistic attitude that eclipsed the autonomy of its addressee. As Bruster notes, this conclusion could hardly be reached through close read ing of Marlowe's text, nor is it supportable from what are...

Career Rivalry and the Writing of Counter-Nationhood: Ovid, Spenser, and Philomela in Marlowe's "The Passionate Shephered to His Love"

Career Rivalry and the Writing of Counter-Nationhood: Ovid, Spenser, and Philomela in Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” * Patrick Cheney Marlowe’s lovely pastoral lyric, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” occupies a special place in the canon of English poetry. Ever since Izaak Walton referred to “that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago,” critics have eulogized “The Passionate Shepherd” as “[o]ne of the most beautiful lyrics in English literature.” 1 In accord with such a famous poem, critics have long emphasized a wide array of topics: the complex history of the manuscript; the problem of dating the poem; the maze of classical and Renaissance sources from which Marlowe drew; his recurrent use of the poem in his plays; subsequent writers’ imitations of Marlowe; the version of pastoral he pens; the philosophy of sexuality he expounds; and, most recently, the “political aspects of the Marlovian invitation as mode.” 2 This extensive commentary prepares us well to turn to a contextualizing principle that can help us organize the disparate topics and extend the fruitful scholarship on them: Renaissance ideas of a literary career, especially “the commonplace of Renaissance criticism—the [Virgilian] progression from pastoral to epic.” 3 No one has yet examined the “career” principle, but long ago Harry Levin briefly situated “The Passionate Shepherd” within the first of three phases of Marlowe’s literary career—what he termed the “youthfully lyric phase” of “libido sentiendi” or “the pastoral fields of Ovidian lyricism.” 4 Levin’s model approximates the career principle when he fuses a psychoanalytic-based appetitive model of Marlowe’s career, structured on “the triad of basic urges,” and a triadic generic model of literary “modes,” derived from classical Roman authors: “the lyric pleas for libido sentiendi, the epic vaunt for libido dominandi, and the tragic lament for libido sciendi. . . . If Marlowe learned the lyric mode from Ovid and the epic mode from Lucan, it may well have been Lucretius who schooled him in tragic discernment of the nature of things.” 5 [End Page 523] Although Levin leads us to a genre-based career idea as an organizing principle for “The Passionate Shepherd,” he overlooks four significant facts. First, Marlowe could have found a three-phase generic model—amatory lyric, epic, and tragedy—in Ovid himself, and in a poem that Marlowe had translated: the Amores. Second, in the Amores Ovid inscribes his three-genre cursus precisely as a competitive alternative to the Virgilian cursus of pastoral, georgic, and epic—a literary context that Marlowe naturally builds into his translation. Third, in rivaling Virgil, Ovid is writing a “counter-nationhood”—a poetics of nationhood founded not on a patriotic and imperial system of the state but rather on what Ovid’s literary heir, Lucan, calls simply libertas—in that other poem that Marlowe translates: the Pharsalia. 6 And fourth, in “taking” this precise counter-Virgilian “course” from the lower to the higher genres Marlowe is contesting the authority of a contemporary who was just then styling himself the “Virgil of England”—to use Thomas Nashe’s 1592 phrase for Spenser. 7 Marlowe was the first Western writer in any vernacular to translate the Amores and thus the first to make the three-genre Ovidian cursus his own. 8 The five programmatic poems of the Amores (I.i, II.i, II.xviii, III.i, and III.xv) highlight the drama of Ovid’s turn from elegy to the “area maior” (translated by Marlowe as “greater ground”). 9 As E. J. Kenney writes, “The phrase area maior suggests the major genres of tragedy and epic.” 10 The three-genre cursus dramatized in the Amores turns out to predict fairly accurately the three genres that Ovid went on to pen before his exile: the series of elegiac poems, including the Amores, the Ars amatoria, the Heroides, and the Fasti; his one known tragedy, Medea (extant in two lines); and his epic, the Metamorphoses. 11 We can profitably situate “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” within the inaugural or amatory phase of Marlowe’s Ovidian career and thus within its contemporary context of Spenser’s Virgilian career. In this situation, Marlowe...

Wordsworth's Michael and the Pastoral Tradition

When William Wordsworth called Michael a pastoral poem, he pointed to a literary tradition that seems at first glance far removed from this tale of a Lake-country shepherd. What has his poem in common with Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd,' for example, or with the sort of pastoral written by Pope or Ambrose Philips a century earlier? Its opening lines evoke anything but a sense of delicate pastoral charm and tranquillity. Instead there is a 'tumultuous brook' and the prospect of a struggle on an 'upright path' that would challenge an experienced climber. And surely 'Courage!' had never before been demanded of one who would enter the pastoral world.

Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

Deification through Love: Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

Deification through Love: Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

The Passionate Shepherd; And English Poetry

The aim of the following paper is two-fold. First, its endeavor is to point out the probable source of Christopher Marlowe's posthumously published pastoral poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and to trace the direct influence of this set of verses through English literature down to the present time. Second, the article strives to demonstrate the fact that, initiated by Marlowe's poem and its frequent imitation, a literary device, “the invitation to love,” became established in English literature and has persisted in it down to our own time. My design, therefore, may be briefly given as a discussion of “The Passionate Shepherd” and its influence, with an incidental history of the invitation to love so far as it is related to Marlowe's poem.