Renaissance Poets

Thomas Campion

Physician, student of law, composer and poet, Thomas Campion was a Renaissance Man. Many of his airs and songs are at Luminarium complete with sound files—“Followe Thy Faire Sunne” and “Beauty Is But a Painted Hell,” for instance.

Thomas Campion

His complete Observations in the Art of English Poesie is online at Richard Bear’s Renascence Editions at the University of Oregon.

Mary Herbert

“Second only to the queen as an Elizabethan femme savante,” Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was known as a patron of the arts as well as a practitioner. Renascence Editions has published her translation of Robert Garnier’s Antoine, The Tragedie of Antonie, online.

Luminarium Renaissance English Literature

Anniina Jokinen’s labor of love is a beautiful multimedia collection of photos, introductory essays, texts and critical resources covering More, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and many more. The very best place to start your study of Renaissance literature on the Net.

Christopher Marlowe

Born the same year as Shakespeare, Marlowe was nonetheless his predecessor: he had made his name as a dramatist and been killed in a tavern brawl at the age of 29 by the time Shakespeare began his career. His complete works are online at the Perseus Project and Luminarium has a good collection of essays on Marlowe.

William Shakespeare

Lee Jamieson’s About Shakespeare is a good place to look for anything related to the Bard’s works, his language, performances of his plays, his life and times.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s complete works are online at MIT with search facilities. But Terry Gray’s comprehensive Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet site is also a good place to begin your study.

Shakespeare Plays

Among the Shakespearean resources at the University of Northern British Columbia are hypertext versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, plus a Shakespearean Poetry Search engine.

Shakespearean Poetry Search

The UNBC Literary Engine allows you to search for a word or a line in Shakespeare’s sonnets and his other poems, Venus and Adonis, A Lover’s Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim and The Rape of Lucrece.

John Skelton

Poet Laureate of both Oxford and Cambridge, tutor to the young Henry VIII, clergyman and wag, Skelton’s poems are online at Luminarium and the University of Toronto.

Edmund Spenser

Luminarium’s Renaissance lit site is a good place to begin looking for Spenser online, with several interesting essays and a link to Spenser quotes from Bartlett’s Quotations at Bartleby.com.

Edmund Spenser

Richard Bear’s Renascence Editions at the University of Oregon has published many of Spenser’s works online, including the complete Faerie Queene.

Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion

The complete text of Edmund Spenser’s sonnets (“Amoretti”) and the 24 poems comprising his cycle entitled “epithalamion” are in the University of Virginia Library’s Electronic Text Center.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

The debate as to whether Oxford was the true author of the works credited to Shakespeare rages on the Net: see Frontline’s The Shakespeare Mystery and UC Berkeley Professor Alan Nelson’s collection of resources on the authorship question.