Renaissance Lyrics and Their Situations

This essay proposes a way of incorporating contextual perspectives, such as have dominated interpretation in the last quarter century, into the formal analysis of lyric poems of the English Renaissance. Following Kenneth Burke's formulation, that poems adopt "various strategies for the encompassing of situations," the discussion centers on George Gascoigne's "Gascoigne's Woodmanship" and Andrew Marvell's "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." While a reasonably complete interpretation of each poem is offered, the emphasis is equally on the ways in which Burke's ideas are productive for understanding the rhetoric of these and other Renaissance lyrics.