MA Orals List -- 17th Century

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. Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam.
  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 gratiâ; may be supplemented from the Ph.D. critical readings list):

  1. Julia Briggs, The Stage Play World, 2nd ed. (1997)
  2. Stanley Fish, Self‑Consuming Artifacts (1972)
  3. Margaret Ferguson, et al., Rewriting the Renaissance (1986)
  4. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (1989)
  5. Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth‑Century Lyric (1979)
  6. Katharine Maus,  Inwardness and Theater (1995)