Period A: British Literature, 700--1660

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Old English (7th to 10th centuries)

“Cædmon’s Hymn”
Beowulf
Old English “elegies”: The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, The Wife’s Lament, Wulf and
Eadwacer
The Dream of the Rood

Middle English (11th to 15th centuries)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
William Langland, from Piers Plowman (Prologue and a Passus) OR Pearl (complete)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess OR The Parliament of Fowles
———, from the Canterbury Tales: “The General Prologue,” “The Knight’s Tale,” “The
Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and “Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s
Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” “Chaucer’s Retraction”
Everyman
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe OR Julian of Norwich, Revelations of
Divine Love
Marie de France, Lais
Ancrene Wisse (The Anchoress’s Guide): “Author’s Introduction” and either Part III,
“Inner Feelings” OR Part VII “Love”

RENAISSANCE/EARLY MODERN LITERATURE (16th to 17th centuries)

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia (1516)

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), poems and translations: Psalm 51, “My Lute, Awake!”
“Whoso List to Hunt,” “Farewell, Love,” “They Flee from Me,” “And Wilt Thou
Leave Me Thus?”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), poems: “Love, That Doth Live and Reign
within My Thought,” “Alas! So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace,” “London,
Hast Thou Accused Me?” “O Happy Dames, That May Embrace,” “Prisoned in
Windsor, He Remembereth His Pleasure There Passed,” “Epitaph on Sir Thomas
Wyatt”

Anonymous 16th-century lyrics: “Back and Side, Go Bare, Go Bare” (1575), “In Praise
of a Contented Mind” (1588), “Come Away, Come, Sweet Love” (1597)

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Astrophil and Stella (1591), sonnets: 1, 5, 16, 31, 41, 81
———, The Defense of Poesy (1595)

Sir Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), “Aprill” and “November” from The Shepheardes
Calendar (1579)
———, The Amoretti (1595), sonnets: 68, 79
———, The Faerie Queene (1596), Book I, Canto I; Book II; Book V
Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618), poems: “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” “Nature,
That Washed Her Hands in Milk”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), essays: “Of Truth,” “Of Marriage and Single Life,” “Of
Superstition,” “Of Studies,” [“The Idols”] (Novum Organum [1620] 38-62)

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1562-1621), poem: “To the Angell Spirit
of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” and *translations of the Psalms: 44, 59,
138, 139, 150

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), poem: “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

———, Edward II (1592) OR Doctor Faustus (1594)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), sonnets: 18, 29, 30, 55, 60, 65, 73, 94, 106, 116, 130
———, plays (performed 1590-1612): ONE of these histories: Richard II, Henry IV
Part 1 OR Part 2, OR Henry V; ONE of these comedies: Much Ado about
Nothing, Twelfth Night, OR As You Like It; TWO of these tragedies: Hamlet,
Othello, Macbeth, OR King Lear; *ONE of these late romances: A Winter’s Tale,
The Tempest

Prose fiction by Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), OR

George Gascoigne (1539-1578), The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), OR
Thomas Deloney (1543-1600), Thomas of Reading (1632)

Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), poems from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611): title poem
and “The Description of Cooke-Ham”

Thomas Dekker (1572-1632), The Roaring Girl (1611)

John Donne (1572-1631), poems: “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization,” “The Flea,”
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “The Ecstasy,” “The Relic,” “Going to
Bed,” Satire 3, Holy Sonnets 1, 5, 7, 10, 13, 14; “A Hymn to God the Father”
———, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation 17

Ben Jonson (1572-1637), poems: “On My First Daughter,” “To Penshurst,” “Song: To
Celia (Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes),” “To Heaven,” “To the Memory of
My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,”
“Ode to Himself,” “Ode: If Men and Times Were Now,” “Slow, Slow, Fresh
Fount”
———, ONE of three plays: The Alchemist, Volpone OR Bartholomew Fair

John Marston (1576-1634), The Malcontent (1603)

John Webster (1580?-1625?), The White Devil (1612)

Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639), The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) OR Edward II (1680)

Lady Mary Wroth (1587?-1651?), selections from The Countess of Montgomery’s

Urania (1621)
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), “The Answer to Davenant’s Preface before Gondibert”
(1650; including Davenant’s preface proper)

Robert Herrick (1591-1674), poems from Hesperides (1648): “The Argument of His
Book,” “Delight In Disorder,” “Corinna’s Going A-Maying,” “To the Virgins, to
Make Much of Time,” “His Return to London,” “To His Conscience,” “The Bad
Season Makes the Poet Sad”

Thomas Carew (1595-1640), poems: “An Elegy Upon the Death of the Dean of St.
Paul’s, Dr. John Donne,” “To Ben Jonson”

George Herbert (1593-1633), poems from The Temple (1633): “The Altar,”
“Redemption,” “Affliction (1),” “Jordan (1),” “The Windows,” “Man,” “Jordan
(2),” “The Bunch of Grapes,” “The Collar,” “The Pulley,” “The Forerunners,”
“Love (3)”

Rachel Speght (b. 1597), A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), and Hic-Mulier and Haec-
Vir pamphlets (1620)

John Milton (1608-1674), Lycidas (1637)

———, sonnets: “How Soon Hath Time,” “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” “When
I Consider How My Light is Spent,” “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,”
“Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint”
———, Areopagitica (1644), The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)
———, Paradise Lost (1667), books 1, 2, 9 and 12

Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), poems: “Song (Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?),”
“Loving and Beloved,” “Out Upon It”

Richard Crashaw (1613-1649), poems: “On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord,” “In the
Holy Nativity of Our Lord God,” “The Flaming Heart”

Richard Lovelace (1618-1657), poems: “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,” “To Althea,
from Prison,” “Love Made in the First Age: To Chloris”

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), poems: “Regeneration,” “The Retreat,” “Corruption,”

“The World,” “They Are All Gone into the World of Light!” “The Waterfall”

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), poems: “The Coronet,” “Bermudas,” “A Dialogue

Between the Soul and Body,” “To His Coy Mistress,” “The Definition of Love,”
“The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” the Mower Poems (“The
Mower Against Gardens,” “Damon the Mower,” “The Mower to the Glow-
Worms,” “The Mower’s Song”), “The Garden,” “An Horation Ode,” “Upon
Appleton House”

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73), poems: “All Things Are Governed by Atoms,” “Of
Many Worlds in This World,” “The Ruin of This Island”
———, The Blazing World (1666)

Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), poems: “Wonder,” “My Spirit,” “The Return,” “On
Leaping over the Moon”