Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright

Patrick Cheney is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (1997) and Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (1993) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Marlowe (2004).

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on texts; Proem: Shakespeare's 'Plaies and Poems'; Part I. The Imprint of Shakespearean Authorship: Prelude: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Petrarch; 1. The sixteenth-century poet-playwright; 2. Francis Meres, the Ovidian poet-playwright, and Shakespeare criticism; Part II. 1593–1594: The Print Author Presents Himself: Play Scene: 'Two Gentlemen' to 'Richard III'; 3. Authorship and acting: plotting Venus and Adonis along the Virgilian path; 4. Publishing the show: The Rape of Lucrece as Lucanian counter-epic of empire; Part III. 1599–1601: The Author Brought Into Print: Play Scene: 'Love's Labor's Lost' to 'Troilus and Cressida'; 5. 'Tales … coined': 'W. Shakespeare' in Jaggard's The Passionate Pilgrim; 6. 'Threne' and 'scene': the author's relics of immortality in 'The Phoenix and Turtle'; Part IV. 1609: Imprinting the Question of Authorship: Play Scene: 'Measure for Measure' to 'Coriolanus'; 7. 'O, let my books be … dumb presagers': poetry and theatre in the sonnets; 8. 'Deep-brain'd sonnets' and 'tragic shows': Shakespeare's late Ovidian art in A Lover's Complaint; Epilogue. Ariel and Autolycus: Shakespeare's counter-laureate authorship; Works cited; Index.

'Cheney's impressive familiarity with the wide range of English Renaissance poetry and drama as well as an immense body of scholarship and criticism commands unreserved respect and makes Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright a particularly important and stimulating contribution to a more complete, less fragmented evaluation of Shakespeare's literary status.' Archiv