Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry

Teaching Elizabethan poems, Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott tell us in their preface to this book, "can provide pleasure and insight, but it can also be a challenge: modern students, and even modern teachers, sometimes find shorter Elizabethan poems aesthetically or emotionally engaging but culturally remote and intellectually difficult." This collection of essays presents materials and strategies for helping students and teachers share in the enjoyment of Elizabethan poetry, including verse by authors such as Thomas Campion, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Elizabeth I, George Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Ralegh, Mary Sidney, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, the earl of Surrey, Mary Wroth, and Thomas Wyatt. Like other books in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Materials," suggests texts and anthologies for use in the classroom and identifies important background resources and critical studies for the instructor. From this profusion of information, the coeditor, Patrick Cheney, recommends a convenient list of items for the instructor in a hurry. Part 2, "Approaches," contains thirty-seven essays on teaching individual poems and authors or a selection of poems, as well as developing an entire course using a coherent critical narrative.