Tracing the development of narrative verse in London's literary circles during the 1590s, this volume puts Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece into conversation with poems by a wide variety of contemporary writers, including Thomas Lodge, Francis Beaumont, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion and Edmund Spenser. Chapters investigate the complexities of this literary conversation and contribute for the current, vigorous reassessment of humanism's intended consequences by drawing attention to the highly diverse forms of early modern classicism as well as the complex connection between Latin pedagogy and vernacular poetic invention.Key themes and topics include:-Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality-Classicism and commerce-Genre and mimesis-Rhetoric and aesthetics

Series PrefaceNotes on ContributorsLynn Enterline, Introduction: On 'Schoolmen's Cunning Notes'Part One. Reckoning with Rhetoric1. Jenny C. Mann, 'Reck'ning' with Shakespeare's Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece2. Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry at the Limits of Rhetoric in Shakespeare's The Rape of LucrecePart Two. Debating Mimesis3. Joseph M. Ortiz, Epic Oenone, Pastoral Paris: Undoing the Virgilian rota in Thomas Heywood's Oenone and Paris4. Andrew Fleck, 'Arte with her contending, doth aspire T'excell the naturall': Contending for Representation in the Elizabethan Epyllion5. Catherine Nicholson, Learning to Read with LucrecePart Three. Epyllia, Masculinity and Sexuality6. Jessica Winston, From Discontent to Disdain: Thomas Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis and Inns of Court7. John S. Garrison, Love Will Tear Us Apart: Campion's Umbra and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis8. Stephen Guy-Bray, Love Loves: Venus and Adonis, Venus and AnchisesPart Four. Classicism and Mercantile Capital9. Jane Raisch, Crossing the Hellespont: The Erotics of the Everyday in Marlowe's Hero and Leander10. Barbara Correll, 'Unthriftie waste': Epyllia, Idleness, and General EconomyAppendixNotesIndex