Think about, and be prepared to discuss these questions. Check any word you don't understand in a dictionary or glossary of literary terms.

In terms of background reading, focus particularly on the sonnet and its importance in Renaissance literature, and the introductions to each poet.  Treat this tutorial as research for your first assignment.

1. What is the extended metaphor Wyatt adopts in "They Flee from Me" and "Whoso List to Hunt"? What is strange about the power relation expressed through this metaphor?
   
   
2. What is paradoxical about the title of Wyatt's "My Lute, Awake!"?  Paradox is a convention of the sonnets of the period. Find two other examples in this week's reading programme.
   
   
3. Would you classify "Whoso List to Hunt" as a Shakespearean (English) sonnet, or is it Petrarchan (Italian)? List the poetic conventions that allow you to distinguish it as one or the other.
   
   
4. Who or what is Sidney's muse ("Loving in Truth")? What does this sonnet say about artificiality in writing poetry?
   
   
5. Each quatrain in Shakespeare's "My mistress's eyes" contains a separate idea or thought, and the ideas are summed up, with a perhaps surprising twist, in the final couplet. Paraphrase each quatrain and the couplet in four short sentences. Do the same with Sidney's "When Nature made her chief work Stella's eyes" and Wroth's "My pain, still smothered". (This will be useful practice for the first essay.)
   
   
6. If we didn't know that Lady Mary Wroth's poetic speaker, Pamphilia, is a woman, do you think it would be possible to tell from a reading of, say, sonnet 40 or sonnet 68? Provide evidence from the text to support your view.
   
7. What would seem to be the Renaissance (literary) attitude to sexual love? What  examples would you use to support your view?.
   
8. Compare the version of "They Flee from Me" published in the Egerton manuscript and that published in Tottel's Miscellany. Which do you prefer, and why? (It may help to read them aloud.)