- Title
- Shakespeare, Webster and the Moriturus Lyric in Renaissance England
- Creator
- Gouws, John S
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 1989
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/457869
- Identifier
- vital:75686
- Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_75
- Description
- It is perhaps a commonplace that the dying will register their experience as a lingering on a threshold, but it is remarkable, in the first place, to record that awareness in a poem, and, in the second place, to insist that the poem be placed at the end of the book. As I hope to show in the course of this discussion, the notion of writing a poem in the face of imminent death is not uncommon in the Renaissance; in fact, the act of doing so is one of the manifestations of a" good death", a mode of" self-fashioning" not restricted to poets. What is unusual and innovative about the Waller example is the inauguration of the self-consciously placed poem in the collected works of a poet, an act which leads inevi-tably to the most famous instance, Tennyson's" Crossing the Bar". Two Emily Dickinson poems suggest that in the nineteenth century the genre was sufficiently established to invite variant forms. In" I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-", the speaker recounts the experience of diminishing consciousness, and in" Because I could not stop for Death-" she crosses the threshold into the next world.'The latler poem of course al-so makes use of the" Death and the Maiden"(the rape of Persephone) motif, and so goes well beyond what can be regarded as a true moritu-rus lyric.
- Format
- 13 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Shakespeare in Southern Africa, Gouws, J., 1989. Shakespeare, Webster and the Moriturus Lyric in Renaissance England. Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 3(1), pp.45-57, Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 3 number 1 45 57 1989 2071-7504
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Shakespeare in Southern Africa Statement (https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sisa/about)
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Gouws, John Stephen (Prof)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details | SOURCE1 | Shakespeare, Webster and the Moriturus Lyric in Renaissance England.pdf | 429 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |