For educated poets and readers in the Renaissance, classical literature was as familiar and accessible as the work of their compatriots and contemporaries - often more so. This volume seeks to recapture that sense of intimacy and immediacy, as scholars from both sides of the modern disciplinary divide come together to eavesdrop on the conversations conducted through allusion and intertextual play in works from Petrarch to Milton and beyond. The essays include discussions of Ariosto, Spenser, Du Bellay, Marlowe, the anonymous drama Caesars Revenge, Shakespeare and Marvell, and look forward to the grand retrospect of Shelley's Adonais. Together, they help us to understand how poets across the ages have thought about their relation to their predecessors, and about their own contributions to what Shelley would call 'that great poem, which all poets.have built up since the beginning of the world'.

Reviews

'This illuminating book...will be of fundamental interest to students and scholars both of renaissance and early modern literature and of their classical interactions. It mixes well-known texts and authors with less-known but equally revealing examples, laudably looks to Italian and French as well as English, has a keen eye for political significance, and indubitably demonstrates that important literary effects can be derived from considering the intertextual conversations of poets through extended chains of reception stretching from the ancient world to the Romantics.'
Stephen Harrison. International Journal of the Classical Tradition

'These critics take that time and have that patience; editor, contributors, and press are all to be commended for some impressive resistance to the academic logic of the Minimum Publishable Unit ... The guest at this intellectual feast leaves nourished by a strong sense of where the most exciting parts of the critical conversation between Classical and Renaissance Studies are heading.'
David Currell, Translation and Literature

'The classical tradition as discussed in this volume is a highly productive series of conversations that continues to this day as we talk back to the past, and listen to the many overlapping conversations already had. The essays in this volume, taken as a whole, suggest that in some ways this tradition is self-reflexive and concerned with its own existence, constantly arguing for the power of words to create immortality via this ever-evolving literary tradition ... The book will surely invigorate scholars of the ancient world and of Renaissance English literature ... The contributors have each been given the space and freedom to explore their topics in great depth, and the overall effect must surely come close to capturing the enlivening twenty-first century conversations from which the book derives.'
Katie Reid, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

'This illuminating book... will be of fundamental interest to students and scholars both of renaissance and early modern literature and of their classical interactions. It mixes well-known texts and authors with less-known but equally revealing examples, laudably looks to Italian and French as well as English, has a keen eye for political significance, and indubitably demonstrates that important literary effects can be derived from considering the intertextual conversations of poets through extended chains of reception stretching from the ancient world to the Romantics.'
International Journal of the Classical Tradition

1 Introduction - Syrithe Pugh
2 Flying with the Immortals: Reaching for the Sky in Classical and Renaissance Poetics - Philip Hardie
3 In and Out of Latin: Diptych and Virtual Diptych in Marvell, Milton, Du Bellay and Others - Stephen Hinds
4 Reviving Lucan: Marloew, Tamburlaine, and Lucans First Booke - Emma Buckley
5 Citizenship and Suicide: Shakespeare's Roman Plays, Republicanism and Identity in Samson Agonistes - Helen Lynch
6 Adonis and Literary Immortality in Pastoral Elegy - Syrithe Pugh
Bibliography
Index