Table of Contents

Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
1: Sir Thomas Elyot
2: Henry Howard
3: Thomas Wilson
4: Alexander Neville
5: William Baldwin
6: Roger Ascham
7: George Gascoigne
8: George Whetstone
9: Edmund Spenser and E.K.
10: George Puttenham
11: Edmund Spenser
12: Sir John Harrington
13: William Shakespeare
14: Gabriel Harvey
15: Sir Philip Sidney
16: George Chapman
17: Robert Southwell
18: John Hoskyns
19: Thomas Campion
20: Samuel Daniel
21: Ben Jonson, Rhymes against rhyme
22: Francis Bacon
23: Ben Jonson, The moral function of poetry
24: Thomas Heywood
25: John Fletcher
26: Dudley North
27: George Chapman
28: Ben Jonson, The faults of contemporary drama
29: William Drummond
30: Ben Jonson, A tribute to Shakespeare
31: John Ford
32: Philip Massinger
33: Thomas Carew
34: Ben Jonson, Notes on literature
35: John Milton
36: Thomas Hobbes
Glossary
List of Rhetorical Figures
Index

About the Author

Brian Vickers is Chair of English Language and Literature, ETH Zürich.

Reviews

`Review from previous edition English Renaissance Literary Criticism may well become the standard reference collection ... the greatest coup is John Ford's elegy on John Fletcher, discovered by the late Jeremy Maule and printed here for the first time.'
Alastair Fowler, TLS 9/6/00.
`In addition to the usual suspects (Spenser, Harvey, Sidney, Jonson, Milton, et al), he includes long selections from rhetoricians Wilson and Puttenham; several hard-to-find pieces; thoughtfully edited passages from Shakespeare, Chapman, and Champion; and John Ford's never-before-printed 'Elegy for John Fletcher'. What makes this selection so insightful and useful is Vickers' recognition of the rhetorical and prescriptive character of early modern English
criticism...[one] of the most distinguished publications in Renaissance literary studies to have appeared in many years.'
N.Lukacher, Choice, Jul/Aug. 2000.