The Phoenix and Turtle (Vol. 64) | T. W. Baldwin (essay date 1950)

T. W. Baldwin (essay date 1950)

SOURCE: “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” in On the Literary Genetics of Shakespere's Poems & Sonnets, University of Illinois Press, 1950, pp. 363-77.

[In the following essay, Baldwin examines the various sources that Shakespeare drew from in his The Phoenix and Turtle.]

In The Phoenix and the Turtle, Shakspere has taken his pattern from Ovid, Amores II, 6, some material eventually from Lactantius, and has put the whole into the setting of a contemporary funeral.1 We know, of course, of Lesbia's sparrow. But Dominicus assures us,

Psitaci, quem sibi ab orientalibus oris missum, puellae suae donarat Ouidius, interitum deflet: quemadmodum et Catullus Lesbiae suae passerem mortuum deplorauit. Est autē haec dubio procul elegia pulcherrima, et in qua plures poeticae artis uirtutes enitent.2

So Shakspere takes this “most...

[The entire page is 6364 words long]

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