What queen wouldn't want an epic poem written about her? Especially one that's filled with nights of yore and some truly crazy antics? Find out in The Faerie Queene.

One of Shakespeare's earliest and bloodiest plays. Seriously dark stuff, kiddos. Check it out.

Stay in and do homework, or go out and party? That, my friends, is the real question. Find out what these young scholars do with that quandary in Love's Labour's Lost.

Julius Caesar may be about ancient Rome, but it's a staple of English Renaissance literature.

It's hard not to love when a rough-and-tumble playwright veers into the pastoral.

To be or not to be? Read on to find out. Or, you know, just go on living your lives, we guess.

Some serious business here. If you want a taste of the darker side of human nature that humanism may not always be willing to cop to, take a looksee at King Lear.

"Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble." ...Sorry, we just love doing that. Macbeth gets less of a kick out of it though.

Another story about star-crossed lovers? Nope. This one's about the perils of imperialism. It's a nice change of pace, actually. Thanks, Willy.

Ever wonder what it would be like for a piece of art to come to life? What if that art was your dead husband or wife? Creepy. That's what. But also kind of cool.

Where there's a ship-tossing storm, family drama is never far away. In this case, there's also a witch-devil baby. Well, he's a grown-up. Sort of. It's all very complicated.

We're just itching to read this one again. Har har.

Celia: we don't know her, but she must have been something special. Ben Jonson wrote about her all the time. We promise we wouldn't mind if you wrote a "Song to Shmoop."

It's not everyday that Death gets a talking-to. Get it, Donne.

He may have been blind. He may have been imprisoned. And he may have batted for the losing team of religious philosophies. But nobody can stop Milty from getting this epic poem out there.

It takes a certain amount of gumption to compare the power of the poet to the power of a divine maker. But hey, we'll take it.

The English Renaissance was a crazy time. Luckily, good ole Erasmus was around to set everyone straight about their masques and their fairies and their other funny business.

Need more of the Bard in your life? Want to know what made him tick? Read on.

According to Greenblatt, the world did a 180 when the ancient Roman philosophy of Lucretius was discovered and disseminated. That's a pretty big claim, no? But he makes a good argument for it. What do you think?