Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare

Policy in Love contributes to a new understanding of European love poetry. Christopher Martin engages in close readings of three major texts -- Ovid's Amores, Petrarch's Canzonier and Shakespeare's Sonnets -- highlighting textual indications that these lyric poets are aware of a public audience for love poems that have often been characterized as primarily personal and private. Martin explores the ways in which the poet negotiates the competing demands of intimacy and audience. In contrast to traditional historical critics who stress authorial expressiveness and to reader-response critics who highlight affective stylistics, Martins's approach generates a theory of interpretation that accounts for the interaction of author and multiple audiences. By fashioning this more comprehensive critical paradigm, Martin raises numerous interpretive possibilities. Among these is his revolutionary arguments that love lyrics are indeed public documents. In accordance with this paradigm, the speaker in a love lyric becomes a multifarious personality, involved not only with examining self but also in addressing individual readers and interpretive communities of one's own era and thereafter. The impact of this methodological approach on our understanding of the tonal range and rhetorical versatility of love lyrics cannot be underestimated.