SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Elizabethan Prose.—Good selections from Ascham, Hakluyt, Raleigh,
Holinshed, Stow, Camden, North, Sidney, Foxe, Hooker, Lyly, Greene,
Lodge, and Nashe are given in Craik, I.[31] Chambers, I. and Manly,
II. also give a number of selections. Deloney's The Gentle Craft may
be found in the Clarendon Press edition of his Works. For Bacon, see
Craik, II.
These selections will give the student a broader grasp of the Elizabethan age. The style and subject matter of Lyly's Euphues, Sidney's Arcadia, Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Bacon's Essays should be specially noted. Which one of these authors exerted the strongest influence on his own age? Which one makes the strongest appeal to modern times? In what respects does the style of any Elizabethan prose writer show an improvement over that of Mandeville and Malory?
Lyrics.—For specimens of love sonnets, read Nos. 18, 33, 73, 104, 111, and 116 of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Compare them with any of Sidney's Spenser's sonnets. Other love lyrics which should be read are Spenser's Prothalamion, Lodge's Love in My Bosom Like a Bee and Ben Jonson's To Celia. Among pastoral lyrics, read from Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar for August, 1579, Perigo and Willie's duet, beginning:—
"It fell upon a holy eve,"
and Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. The best pastoral lyrics from the modern point of view are Shakespeare's two songs: "Under the Greenwood Tree" (As you like it) and "When Icicles Hang by the Wall" (Love's Labor's Lost). The best miscellaneous lyrics are the songs in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, The Tempest, and As You Like It. Drayton's Ballad of Agincourt and Sonnet 61 are his best lyrical verse. Read Ben Jonson's An Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy and, from his Pindaric Ode, the stanza beginning:—
"It is not growing like a tree."
From John Donne, read either The Funeral, The Canonization, or The Dream.
Good selections from all varieties of Elizabethan lyrics may be found in Bronson, II., Ward. I., Oxford, Century, Manly, I. Nearly all the lyrics referred to in this list, including the best songs from the dramatists, are given in Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics (327 pp., 75 cents). This work, together with Erskine's The Elizabethan Lyric and Reed's English Lyrical Poetry from its Origins to the Present Time, will serve for a more exhaustive study of this fascinating subject.
From your reading, select from each class the lyric that pleases you most, and give reasons for your choice. Which lyric seems the most spontaneous? the most artistic? the most inspired? the most modern? the most quaint? the most and the least instinct with feeling?