Patrick Gerard Cheney (born July 24, 1949) is an American scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. [1]
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Patrick Gerard Cheney (born July 24, 1949) is an American scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. [1]
Cheney received his BA degree from the University of Montana (1972) and his MA and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto (MA: 1974, PhD: 1979). [2] He has taught at the Pennsylvania State University since 1980. [3]
Cheney's work covers both the poetry and the drama of early-modern England, Cheney's work focuses on genre and literary authorship, the sublime, classical reception (particularly of Virgil and Ovid), nationhood, and republicanism. He has been called “one of the leading practitioners of career criticism.” [4] His published monographs include Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (1993), [5] Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (1997), [6] Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (2004), [7] Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (2008), [8] Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (2009), [9] Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (2011), [10] and English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson (2018). [11]
His first book, Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (1993), considers how Spenser's literary career changes the usual Virgilian career model (from pastoral to epic) to include the Petrarchan love lyric and Christian hymns. Cheney argues that Spenser's four-phase career aligns Virgilian fame with Christian glory as the highest ideal of poetry.
In Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood, (1997), Cheney discusses Christopher Marlowe's work in light of Ovid's literary career model from love elegy, to tragedy, to epic, seeing this Ovidian career model to rival the Spenser's Virgilian model. Cheney argues that by countering Spenser's more overt nationalism, Marlowe asserts the liberty of the poet as a national authority against the crown. Brian Striar writes that this book "represents an important step forward in Marlowe criticism, and it paves the way for the much needed engagement of Marlowe the scholar and translator in the construction of his entire oeuvre. It also finally redeems Marlowe from the shadow of Shakespeare and situates him, properly, as an independently prominent figure of Renaissance letters." [12] Cheney extends his work on Marlowe's political and poetic dissidence in Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (2009), defining liberty in light of early modern republican thought and the aesthetic category of the sublime. He argues that Marlowe places the freedom-loving poet at the center of a new form of republican art by building on the anti-monarchical work of the Roman poet Lucan.
Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (2004) and Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (2008) focus on Shakespeare's non-dramatic works. Cheney discusses Shakespeare as an exceptionally capable poet as well as a playwright, modeling his poetry on the works of Ovid and Virgil. According to Lukas Erne, “Cheney’s work convincingly establishes that Shakespeare was not simply a playwright who occasionally happened to write poems, but that he was a poet and a dramatist throughout his career, writing poetry that could be lyric, narrative, or dramatic, and drama that could function as poems on the page or be adapted and abridged to function as plays onstage.” [13] Richard Dutton calls Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright “an important book, one which requires us to revisit some long-cherished constructions of Shakespeare’s career and of what we mean when we call him an “author.” [14]
Cheney is currently serving as the general editor of the fourteen volume The Oxford History of Poetry in English (forthcoming) and is one of the general editors of The Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser along with Elizabeth Fowler, Joseph Loewenstein, David Lee Miller, and Andrew Zurcher. [15]
He has also contributed to other scholarly editions: "Shakespeare’s Poems": Venus Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, "The Phoenix and Turtle", The Passionate Pilgrim, and "Attributed Poems" in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (General Editor, Stephen Greenblatt, 2016), The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe (co-edited with Brian J. Striar, 2006). [16]
Cheney has edited 1558-1660, Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Co-Editor with Philip Hardie, 2015), [17] in addition to nine edited collections of critical essays: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2007), [18] Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (Co-Editor, with Andrew Hadfield and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., 2007), [19] Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion (Co-Editor, with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., and Andrew Hadfield, 2006), [20] The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), [21] Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton (Co-Editor, with Elizabeth Jane Bellamy and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, 2003), [22] Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual (Co-Editor with Theresa M. Krier and John Watkins, 2003), [23] European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Co-Editor, with Frederick A. de Armas, 2002), [24] Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (Co-Editor, with Lauren Silberman, 2000), [25] and Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry (Co-Editor, with Anne Lake Prescott, 2000). [26]
Cheney sits on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Quarterly , [27] Studies in English Literature, [28] Oxford Bibliographies: British and Irish Literature, [29] Authorship, [30] and Spenser Studies. [31]
Cheney has received awards and fellowships from Pennsylvania State University the American Philosophical Society, visiting fellowships at All Souls College (2015) and Merton College (2001, 2015) at the University of Oxford, Marlowe Society of America, the Scholarly Editions Program at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bibliographical Society of America, and a Mellon fellow at the Harry Ransom Center. [2]
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical reputation for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era. His plays are distinguished by their overreaching protagonists. Themes found within Marlowe's literary works have been noted as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's "anti-intellectualism" and his catering to the prurient tastes of his Elizabethan audiences for generous displays of extreme physical violence, cruelty, and bloodshed.
The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship contends that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. While historians and literary scholars overwhelmingly reject alternative authorship candidates, including Oxford, public interest in the Oxfordian theory continues. Since the 1920s, the Oxfordian theory has been the most popular alternative Shakespeare authorship theory.
Philomela or Philomel is a minor figure in Greek mythology who is frequently invoked as a direct and figurative symbol in literary and artistic works in the Western canon.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his magnum opus. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar in a mythico-historical framework comprising over 250 myths, 15 books, and 11,995 lines.
The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England from the early 16th century to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. As in most of the rest of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. However, many scholars see its beginnings in the early 16th century, during the reign of Henry VIII.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, poet, playwright, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education.
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney, and Thomas Kyd.
Sonnet 19 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is considered by some to be the final sonnet of the initial procreation sequence. The sonnet addresses time directly, as it allows time its great power to destroy all things in nature, but the poem forbids time to erode the young man's fair appearance. The poem casts time in the role of a poet holding an “antique pen”. The theme is redemption, through poetry, of time's inevitable decay. Though there is compunction in the implication that the young man himself will not survive time's effects, because redemption brought by the granting of everlasting youth is not actual, but rather ideal or poetic.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Sonnet 54 is one of 154 sonnets published in 1609 by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is considered one of the Fair Youth sequence. This sonnet is a continuation of the theme of inner substance versus outward show by noting the distinction between roses and canker blooms; only roses can preserve their inner essence by being distilled into perfume. The young man's essence or substance can be preserved by verse.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
MacDonald Pairman Jackson FNZAH is a New Zealand scholar of English literature. Most of his work is on English Renaissance drama; he specializes in authorship attribution. He is also internationally recognized for his work on Shakespeare's texts.
Clifford Leech (1909–1977) was a prolifically published British-born professor of English at University College at the University of Toronto 1963-74. In The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), Patrick Cheney, its editor, describes Leech's contribution to Christopher Marlowe studies "historically important." His publications mainly concerned Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, including William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Ford. He also wrote a book on American playwright Eugene O'Neill.
The Shakespeare authorship question is the argument that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him. Anti-Stratfordians—a collective term for adherents of the various alternative-authorship theories—believe that Shakespeare of Stratford was a front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who for some reason—usually social rank, state security, or gender—did not want or could not accept public credit. Although the idea has attracted much public interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory, and for the most part acknowledge it only to rebut or disparage the claims.
Steven W. May is an American academic and author specializing in English Renaissance poetry.
Jeffrey A. Masten is an American academic specializing in Renaissance English literature and culture and the history of sexuality. He is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles. Masten's book Queer Philologies was awarded the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book in the field of early modern drama by the journal SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in English Literature for 2022.
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