Faculty Committee: Patricia Fumerton, Ken Hiltner, James Kearney, Michael O’Connell, Mark Rose

It is assumed that students taking the first qualifying examination in the Renaissance will be familiar not only with the following primary texts but also with the principal critical and interpretive issues concerning these texts and the period at large. Students are thus encouraged to read widely in the relevant secondary literature. Selections marked by an asterisk (*) can be found in the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 1). Those marked with a cross (+) can be found in a booklet available for purchase at the graduate desk. Questions concerning this list may be directed to any of the faculty members who work in the area.

Sir Thomas More, Utopia

Other writers of the early sixteenth century
John Skelton*
Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder*
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey*

George Gascoigne
The Adventures of Master F.J. +
"Woodmanship"*

Other early Elizabethan writing
A Mirror for Magistrates , 1559 prefaces and tragedies of Tresilian, Mortimer, Gloucester, Mowbray, and Richard II+
Arthur Golding, Preface to Ovid's Metamophoses+
Isabella Whitney, "Will and Testament"*
Queen Elizabeth I*

Sir Philip Sidney
The Old Arcadia
An Apology for Poetry
Selected poems*

Edmund Spenser
Selections from The Shepheardes Calender*
The Faerie Queene, Books I, II, and III, Book VI, cantos 9-12, and the letter to Raleigh
Selections from Amoretti*
Epithalamion*

Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveler
Selected poems and prose*

Other Elizabethan poets
Robert Southwell*
Mary ( Sidney) Herbert*
Samuel Daniel*
Michael Drayton*
Thomas Campion*

Christopher Marlowe
The Jew of Malta
Doctor Faustus
"Hero and Leander"* and "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"*

William Shakespeare
At least eight plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest Selected poems*

Ben Jonson
Volpone
Bartholomew Fair
Selected poems*
Masques: Masque of Blackness*, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue+, and Oberon+

Other Renaissance drama
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Anonymous, Arden of Faversham
Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl

John Donne*

George Herbert*

Henry Vaughan*

Richard Crashaw*

Robert Herrick*

Andrew Marvell*

John Milton
Comus
Paradise Lost
Selected poetry and prose*

Other seventeenth-century poets
Thomas Carew*
Sir John Suckling*
Richard Lovelace*
Edmund Waller*
Abraham Cowley*
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Miriam

Mary Wroth
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus *
Book 1 of Urania

Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (including the dedicatory poems and "The Description of Cooke-ham")

Other seventeenth-century women writers
Katherine Philips*
Margaret Cavendish*
Lucy Hutchinson*
Lady Anne Halkett*
Anna Trapnel*
The Controversy about Women: Hic Mulier and Haec Vir+

Seventeenth-century prose writers
Richard Hooker*
Francis Bacon*
King James I+
Thomas Hobbes*

Revised 6/02