The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (Oxford Books of Verse)

By Emrys Jones

Book Overview

In the sixty years since we published the original Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse, a revolution in literary taste has taken place. We now know that Elizabethan literature contained much more than dainty pastorals and lovely sonnets, and that in fact many poetic traditions flourished within the sixteenth century. Now, Emrys Jones has brought together a definitive collection of verse which truly captures the diversity of this period.
By no means have the classics of Elizabethan literature been replaced--there are ample selections from Spenser's Faerie Queen, from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays (including Ariel's song from The Tempest: "Full fathom five thy father lies..."), and from John Donne (who actually produced many poems in the sixteenth century, although he has previously been thought of only as a poet of the next century). But alongside these well-known works, Jones has placed a vast array of other significant poems--from the early part of the century (when poets such as John Skelton still harkened back to Chaucer and feudal times) to the great Elizabethan period (when it seems everybody, including the Queen, was writing admirable verse).
Managing both to be inclusive and to maintain the high literary standards of the earlier collection, The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (with its engaging and informative introduction, and its copious footnotes which gloss unfamiliar words) conveys in unparalleled style all the richness of what is arguably the greatest century of English literature.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192141260
• ISBN13: 9780192141262
• Release Date: December 1991
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 808 Pages
• Weight: 1.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.5" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

Good Poems, Bad Plan

The selection of sixteenth century poetry here is representative and generally sensible. The important names throughout -- Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne, Spenser, Sidney -- are given a fair showing, and I have only two notable quibbles with the selection. The first is that the Faerie Queene selections are too patchy to give a good idea of Spenser's narrative method, and the second is that Skelton's magnificent "Colyn Clout" is left out. (I don't know much about the minor poets of this period, so I can't really say much about the editors' selection there.) The one thing that's really unsatisfactory about the Oxford Verse series is the silliness of its period divisions. This book consists of English poetry 1500-1600, and if a poem was written in 1601 it's put in the Seventeenth Century book. So several poets get split up between the volumes, and each volume on its own does a very inadequate job of representing authors who straddle the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of Donne's and Jonson's earlier work is in the 16.c. book; Campion, Chapman, Greville, and Drayton are split down the middle; a couple of very good poems by Daniel show up in the 17.c. book; and so on. It would have been better to decide (albeit a little arbitrarily) that Daniel was a 16.c. writer and Donne was a 17.c. writer. Or, if each volume had to be made comprehensive, to duplicate selections.