Love Poems for Lucrezia Bendidio


Book Description

"Presents Tasso's 120 love poems for Lucrezia Bendidio for first time in English with verse translations and original Italian on facing pages. Introduction outlines the poems' arrangements and analyzes key themes. Includes detailed notes by both Tasso and Wickert, plus bibliography and indexes"--Provided by publisher.




The Poems of Lord Byron - Don Juan


Book Description

Byron’s Don Juan is one of the greatest poems in the English language. Byron’s friends initially agreed that ‘it will be impossible to publish this’. Byron prevailed, however, and the first two cantos were issued anonymously after much editorial revision. Even in its revised form, Don Juan was perceived as a radical attack on establishment values; the poem has remained a beacon for freedom of speech and retains its power to shock. Since it was published in 1819–24, all printed editions of the poem have used the text prepared by Byron’s publishers, John Murray and John Hunt. This is the first new text of the poem to be printed in two hundred years. The Longman edition is based on a comprehensive line-by-line analysis of the manuscripts, so the text of the poem follows Byron’s own voice, pace and pauses, rather than the grammatical punctuation and more cautious word choice inserted by his nineteenth-century editors. The Longman Don Juan has been annotated afresh, allowing readers to see where Byron left open the choice of words or rhymes, and demonstrating the extraordinary breadth and depth of his literary allusions, topical and cultural references, and socially coded jokes. Textual annotation includes reception history, extensive bibliographies and a detailed chronology, situating Don Juan in the literary, scientific, dramatic, political, musical and social life of the early nineteenth century. A detailed index to the poem and annotation provides an unparalleled resource for students and scholars.




Rhymes of Love


Book Description




The Donna Angelica and the British Enlightenment Poets


Book Description

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment. In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry—and intellectual history—from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century. It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif). They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros—whether singly or diversely directed, concerned with sexuality or spirituality, informing personal or public experience. The myth has as many faces, so to speak, as does desire; it is one and yet many. Thus, the book pursues a particular fable of eros that appears in a multiplicity of texts in a multiplicity of guises. It studies how some of the most interesting poets from Dryden to Crabbe bring the angelic lady motif into modernity.




Ut pictura amor


Book Description

Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700 examines the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia. The term ‘reflexive’ is here used to refer to images that invite reflection not only on their form, function, and meaning, but also on their genesis and mode of production. Early modern artists often fashioned reflexive images and effigies of this kind, that appraise love by exploring the lineaments of the pictorial or sculptural image, and complementarily, appraise the pictorial or sculptural image by exploring the nature of love. Hence the book’s epigraph—ut pictura amor—‘as is a picture, so is love’.




Stories of Warriors and Sweethearts at the Holy Crusades


Book Description

The First Crusade to the Holy Land, transformed by the imagination and religious fervor of an Italian gentleman of the late sixteenth century. A mission of war armed protagonists, watched over by angelical and diabolical forces, interrupted by adventures, enchantments, love stories, unexpected transgressions. In Tasso’s world, dedication to a cause is always something extreme and fatal; love is characterized by unhappiness and defeat (Erminia, Tancredi, Clorinda) and the war is ferociousness without either pity or a solution.




Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara


Book Description

The musica secreta or concerto delle dame of Duke Alfonso II d'Este, an ensemble of virtuoso female musicians that performed behind closed doors at the castello in Ferrara, is well-known to music history. Their story is often told by focussing on the Duke's obsessive patronage and the exclusivity of their music. This book examines the music-making of four generations of princesses, noblewomen and nuns in Ferrara, as performers, creators, and patrons from a new perspective. It rethinks the relationships between polyphony and song, sacred and secular, performer and composer, patron and musician, court and convent. With new archival evidence and analysis of music, people, and events over the course of the century, from the role of the princess nun musician, Leonora d'Este, to the fate of the musica secreta's jealously guarded repertoire, this radical approach will appeal to musicians and scholars alike.




Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse


Book Description

Writers of the English Renaissance, like their European contemporaries, frequently reflect on the phenomenon of exile—an experience that forces the individual to establish a new personal identity in an alien environment. Although there has been much commentary on this phenomenon as represented in English Renaissance literature, there has been nothing written at length about its counterpart, namely, internal exile: marginalization, or estrangement, within the homeland. This volume considers internal exile as a simultaneously twofold experience. It studies estrangement from one’s society and, correlatively, from one’s normative sense of self. In doing so, it focuses initially on the sonnet sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (which is to say, the problematics of romance); then it examines the verse satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston (likewise, the problematics of anti-romance). This book argues that the authors of these major texts create mythologies—via the myths of (and accumulated mythographies about) Cupid, satyrs, and Proteus—through which to reflect on the doubleness of exile within one’s own community. These mythologies, at times accompanied by theologies, of alienation suggest that internal exile is a fluid and complex experience demanding multifarious reinterpretation of the incongruously expatriate self. The monograph thus establishes a new framework for understanding texts at once diverse yet central to the Elizabethan literary achievement.




The Liberation of Jerusalem


Book Description

'The bitter tragedy of human life— horrors of death, attack, retreat, advance, and the great game of Destiny and Chance. ' In The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata, 1581), Torquato Tasso set out to write an epic to rival the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unlike his predecessors, he took his subject not from myth but from history: the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The siege of the city is played out alongside a magical romance of love and sacrifice, in which the Christian knight Rinaldo succumbs to the charms of the pagan sorceress Armida, and the warrior maiden Clorinda inspires a fatal passion in the Christian Tancred. Tasso's masterpiece left its mark on writers from Spenser and Milton to Goethe and Byron, and inspired countless painters and composers. This is the first English translation in modern times that faithfully reflects both the sense and the verse form of the original. Max Wickert's fine rendering is introduced by Mark Davie, who places Tasso's poem in the context of his life and times and points to the qualities that have ensured its lasting impact on Western culture. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.




The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth


Book Description

Although her poems are little know today, Lady Mary Wroth was one of the most accomplished women writers of the English Renaissance. Her poems were circulated among many of the leading authors of her time, including Ben Johnson, who praised her work for its profound understanding of the nature of romantic love. Lady Mary's sonnet cycle, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was the first English sequence to be written from a women's perspective. The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, her romance interspersed with poetry, was one of the first works of prose fiction to be composed by an Englishwoman. In this complete edition of Lady Mary Wroth's verse, Josephine Roberts has brought together and annotated all 192 of the surviving poems, many of which have never been published before. As the eldest daughter of Sir Robert Sidney and Lady Barbara Gamage, Lady Mary took great pride in the Sidney literary heritage. During the years of her marriage she assumed the roles of both poet and patron, an example set for her by her father and her more famous uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. She further followed the precedent of her uncle by choosing for her own work the artistic forms that he had favored -- the sonnet sequence, pastoral romance, and pastoral drama. As a young woman, Lady Mary belonged to Queen Anne's intimate circle, but in the years following her husband's death she suffered a precipitous decline in social status. She violated the social taboos of her age by becoming the mistress of her first cousin, William Herbert, earl of Pembroek, and bearing him two illegitimate children. Her artistic efforts aroused equal controversy when, after the publication of her prose romance, the Urania, several prominent noblemen attacked her for portraying their private lives under the guise of fiction. Despite these obstacles -- and the added burden of the unpaid debts that were the legacy of her disappointing marriage -- Lady Mary maintained an independent spirit and trusted in an ability to make her own decisions. In her prose works she lashed out at the hypocrisies of life at court; in her poetry she wrote of more personal concerns -- the treacherousness of emotion, the eternal elusiveness of love. Rising above well-worn Elizabethan conceits, the best of Lady Mary's poems reveal an ambivalence toward romance and a wise understanding of the vicissitudes of human emotion.