First published in 1601, Love’s Martyr is usually read in parts. One part in particular, William Shakespeare’s poem on the phoenix and the turtle-dove, has won the book its lasting reputation–but at the cost of consigning the rest of it to obscurity. Only over recent decades, with the revival of interest in Shakespeare’s poetry, have scholars found more to say about the collection as a whole. Thanks to them, Shakespeare’s untitled poem–usually known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’–has increasingly been read in the context of the volume’s ‘Poeticall Essaies’, where Shakespeare features alongside John Marston, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman. But even this approach risks isolating these essays and their authors from the poem that occupies most of Love’s Martyr: ‘Rosalins Complaint’, by Robert Chester, an experiment in allegorical poetry which gave Shakespeare and his colleagues their poetic theme.
Reading Love’s Martyr sets out to reread Love’s Martyr from start to finish. It will shed new light on a miscellany whose origins, motives, and contents remain mysterious. It will draw attention to the non-Shakespearean parts of the collection, as a corrective to the Shakespeare-centric premises of previous investigations. But in decentring Shakespeare’s poem, it also seeks to reveal ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ as a more experimental piece of writing, written in conversation – and competition – with the poets Love’s Martyr calls ‘the best and chiefest of our moderne writers’.
This two-day conference will take place in Christ Church, Oxford, on 4th–5th January 2024. Keynote lectures will be given by Colin Burrow (All Souls, Oxford) and Harriet Archer (St Andrews). There will also be an exhibition of manuscripts relating to Love’s Martyr and its patron Sir John Salusbury in the Christ Church Upper Library. For full details of the conference programme, visit our website.
Registration is now open: to register, follow this link. Attendance is free, but places are limited, so we advise registering sooner rather than later. Thanks to the Society for Renaissance Studies, we are able to offer a limited number of bursaries for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers, to subsidise the costs of attending. For details of how to apply, visit our website here. The deadline for applications is Monday 13th November, with decisions to be relayed shortly afterwards.