MA Orals Reading List ‑‑ Seventeenth Century
Revised October 2007
Choose at least ten works of literature (including Paradise Lost),
and at least two works of criticism.
A. Shorter
Verse (at least two):
1)
Donne: Good Morrow, Sun Rising, Valediction of Weeping, Valediction
Forbidding Mourning, Canonization, Flea, Ecstasy, Relic, Funeral, Twickenham
Garden, Anniversary, Nocturnal, four or five of the Divine Meditations, Good
Friday, Hymn to God My God in My Sickness.
2)
Jonson: On My First Daughter, On My First Son, On Lucy, Epitaph on S.P., To
Penshurst, A celebration of Charis, My Picture Left in Scotland, Epistle to
Master John Selden, Cary‑Morrison Ode, the two Odes to Himself, the two Songs
to Celia (Forest 5 and 9), one masque.
3)
Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,
and Lanyer, Salve Rex Judaeorum.
4)
Herbert: The Altar, The Sacrifice, Thanksgiving, Agony, Redemption,
Affliction I, Prayer I, Temper I and II, Jordan I and II, The Flower, A True Hymn,
The Forerunners, Elixir, Love III. Vaughan: Regeneration, The World, They Are
All Gone, Night.
5)
Herrick: The Argument of His Book, the various poems to Julia, The Vine, To
the Rev. Shade, Delight in Disorder, Corinna's Going‑a‑Maying, To
the Virgins, His Age, His Prayer to Ben Jonson, Thanksgiving to God for His House. Carew:
Elegy on Dr. Donne, To Ben Jonson, Mediocrity in Love Rejected, Persuasions to
Enjoy, Ingrateful Beauty, A Rapture, Ask Me No More. Suckling: Ballad upon a
Wedding, Why So Pale, Out upon It.
6)
Marvell: On a Drop of Dew, The Definition of Love, To His Coy Mistress,
Nymph Complaining, the Mower poems, The Garden, Upon Appleton House, A Horatian
Ode.
7)
Milton (not to be taken with C4): Nativity Ode, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso,
How Soon Hath Time, Avenge O Lord, When I Consider, Methought I Saw, Lycidas. Paradise Lost (without exception)
C.
Intellectual Prose (at least two):
1)
Bacon, Essays or Advancement of Learning.
2)
Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy: To the Reader, Love of Learning,
Digression on Air.
3)
Browne, Religio Medici or (both) Urn Burial and Garden of
Cyrus.
4)
Milton (not to be taken with A6), Areopagitica and Reason of
Church Government.
5)
Hobbes, Leviathan I or II.
6)
Walton, Lives of Donne and Herbert or The Complete Angler.
7)
Donne, Prebend Sermons.
D. Drama, non‑Shakespearean (at least three by three
different authors):
1)
Jonson, Volpone
2)
Jonson, Alchemist
3)
Jonson, Bartholomew Fair
4)
Jonson, Silent Woman
5)
Jonson, Sejanus
6)
Webster, Duchess of Malfi
7)
Webster, White Devil
8)
Revenger's Tragedy.
9)
10)
Marston, Malcontent.
11)
Chapman, Bussy D'Ambois.
12)
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy.
13)
Ford, Broken Heart
14)
Ford, Tis Pity She's a Whore.
15)
Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts.
16)
Middleton, Women Beware Women
17)
Middleton, The Changeling.
18)
Masques (not to be taken with A2 or C4): Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to
Virtue; Milton, Comus.
E. Shakespeare (at least three):
1) Hamlet
2) Othello
3) King Lear
4) Macbeth
5) Antony and Cleopatra
6) Coriolanus
7) Measure for Measure
8) Troilus and Cressida
9) Winter's Tale
10) The Tempest
Critical works (exemplorum gratiā;
may be supplemented from the Ph.D. critical readings
list):
1)
Julia Briggs, The Stage Play World
2)
Stanley Fish, Self‑Consuming Artifacts
3)
Margaret Ferguson, et al., Rewriting the Renaissance
4)
William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance
5)
Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth‑Century Lyric
6)
Katharine Maus, Inwardness and
Theater.