William Shakespeare and John Donne

Angelika Zirker is Assistant Professor of English Philology (English Literature and Culture) at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany

• Introduction: stages of the soul and drama in poetry Part I William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and the drama of the soul1 Motivating the myth: allegory and psychology 2 ‘Thou art not what thou seem’st’: Tarquin’s inner stage and outer action 3 ‘But with my body my poor soul’s pollution’: Lucrece, her body, and soul 4 Lust-breathed Tarquin – Lucrece, the name of chaste: antagonism, parallelism, and chiasmus Part II John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and the so(u)le-talk of the soul5 Divine comedies: the speaker, his soul, and the poem as stage 6 The sonnet as miniature drama: Donne’s Holy Sonnet ‘Oh my black Soule’ 7 Sole-talk and soul-talk: Donne’s so(u)liloquies in the Holy Sonnets 8 The speaker on the stage of the poem: Holy Sonnet ‘This is my Playes last Scene’ 9 Dialogue and antagonism in Donne’s theatre of the soul Part III Conclusion10 So(u)le-talk, self, and stages of the soul Bibliography Index

'The book is very carefully composed and attractively presented, and quite free from typographical error or misprint.'Seventeenth-Century News