English 225. Shakespearean Romances: Love Poems, Sonnets, and Sonnets on Stage
Autumn Quarter 2025
Image credit: Venus and Adonis (c. 1574–88, Cologne), by Hans von Aachen. Harvard Art Museums.
Course description
You probably know Shakespeare as a playwright and have likely read at least one of his plays previously in your life as a reader of literature, either here at the University of Washington or in your English classes in high school. But did you know that Shakespeare also wrote poetry across a number of lyric genres and traditions? In this class, we’ll explore Shakespeare’s legacy as a love poet as we investigate how the Renaissance lyric tradition imagined an astonishing range of human experiences borne from erotic desire. We’ll read Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as well as his longer love poems about erotic longing: his epyllion (or little epic) Venus and Adonis, the narrative poem The Lover’s Complaint, the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, and selections from The Passionate Pilgrim (which Shakespeare likely contributed to as an author). We’ll also explore how Shakespeare imagined the conventions of love poetry in his dramatic art—in the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and in the romance A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
To help us understand Shakespeare’s sources of inspiration and his literary contexts, we’ll also read short selections from Shakespeare’s classical sources—including Arthur Golding’s early modern English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We’ll also read Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the context of earlier Italian and English sonneteers—from Petrarch to Wyatt to Sidney—whose poetic forms and innovations Shakespeare both emulated and active sought to reimagine for his own age. We’ll also read love poems by Shakespeare’s English contemporaries: Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and Francis Beaumont.
Finally, we’ll consider the varied cultural afterlives of the tradition of the love poem—in contemporary Hollywood depictions of Shakespeare’s artistic legacy, and in the love songs that we listen to (and sing along to) by musicians such as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Rihanna, or the K-pop group BTS. We’ll consider how the contemporary poetry that we sing might operate—culturally and in our own lives—in ways similar to what a good Renaissance poem could do for its readers. “A good sonnet,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “was like a good public prayer…. Love poetry of this sort is transferable.” What can Shakespeare’s love poems tell us about how the musical “poems” of Taylor Swift or BTS enable so many kinds of listeners to join in their own voices in a collective chorus of erotic lamentation or praise?