About

Patrick Cheney is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He specializes in English Renaissance literature, with interests including authorship, influence and intertextuality, literary careers, genre, classical reception, nationhood, republicanism, the sublime, and the relation between poetry and drama. Cheney has published twenty-three books, including monographs, scholarly editions, collections of essays, and Oxford Histories. His recent work includes the publication of Placing Elysium in Renaissance Britain: Poetry, Politics, Theology, Eros (2025), and the forthcoming Golden Age Elysium: Shakespeare, Jonson, the Cavaliers, Milton, Marvell. Other notable publications include books on the early modern sublime, classical reception, and literary careers, as well as editing significant scholarly editions and serving as General Editor of the Oxford History of Poetry in English. Cheney has also contributed extensively to the field through articles, essays, and book chapters, many focusing on Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. He is actively involved in editorial boards and has received numerous grants and awards for his research, including invitations to lecture internationally and fellowships at prestigious institutions such as Merton College, Oxford, and All Souls College, Oxford.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Literature
• Art
• Economics
• History
• Natural resource economics
• Environmental resource management
• Business
• Classics
• Linguistics
• Visual arts
• Art history
• Finance
• Environmental economics

Selected publications

• <i>Two Pastoralls</i>

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter argues that Two Pastoralls gravitates towards the centre of the Sidney canon: rather than being a backwater-work, Two Pastoralls constructs a Sidneian model of the Renaissance as a period concept. Sidney’s use of friendship-poetry to suture classical pastoral to Reformation theology and Elizabethan politics serves as the foundation of this period project. To date, Sidney studies has not produced a single chapter on Two Pastoralls. To advance criticism, the chapter looks at provenance, the history of criticism, poetics, and the two poems, which feature Sidney’s friendship with Greville and Dyer as a form of authorial liberty. The chapter concludes by examining Sidney’s relation with Spenser in co-founding the ‘New Poetry’ during the English ‘Renaissance’. Uniquely, Two Pastoralls locates an individuating collectivity in a ‘Trinitie’ of ‘fellow Poets’. Two Pastoralls commands attention as a singular Sidneian poem autographing the literary, political, religious, and erotic energies of the ‘Renaissance’ itself.

  PublisherDOI

• The Muses Elysium

  2025-09-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The final chapter discusses two major disciples of Spenser, Chapman and Drayton, both of whom follow their master in making Elysium central to ‘laureate’ authorship. Especially important in Drayton is The Muses Elizium, which he writes under Charles I, rehearsing the Spenserian idea of the Elysian place of poetry as a ‘golden’ legacy of the English Renaissance in response to Caroline decadence. Important to my story, Drayton writes a commendatory verse to Chapman’s translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days that presents Chapman as an Elysian poet. Taking Drayton’s cue, the chapter then examines Chapman’s Golden Age Elysium works. Not merely does Chapman translate the originary work in the Elysian tradition, Homer’s Odyssey, but he also translates Hesiod’s Works and Days, with its vital combination of the Golden Age and the Isles of the Blessed. The chapter concludes with two short units that serve as an Afterword to the book: the first recalls the Elysian centre of John Keats’ famous poem ‘On Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; and the second sees Chapman joining Drayton in a long line of English Renaissance poets, stretching from Spenser to Milton, who use Golden Age Elysium as a premier laureate strategy for combating disaffection. Throughout, the book aims to recover the Elysian place of the English Renaissance in the current conversation about literary geography. Altogether, Placing Elysium in Renaissance Britain: Poetry, Politics, Theology, Eros argues for classifying the Western abode of the blessed as one of the nation’s most valuable, yet most neglected, plots of literary ground.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2025-09-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The Introduction offers a detailed orientation to the project. In particular, it identifies the aim of the book as the recovery of the Elysian place of the English Renaissance in the current conversation about literary geography. Altogether, the book argues for classifying the Western abode of the blessed as one of Britain’s most valuable, yet most neglected, plots of literary ground. The idea traces to Plutarch, and becomes important to sixteenth-century antiquarians, especially Camden, and, subsequently, to poets like Spenser. The Introduction includes a detailed description of the book methodology, a review of the available scholarship, a concluding summary, and an outline of the chapter structure.

  PublisherDOI

• Literary Author

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-09-23

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  Abstract Shakespeare is not merely a ‘man of the theatre’: he is also a literary author. Specifically, he is a theatrical man who is simultaneously a literary author. Hence, he writes two sets of works: not merely plays for both the theatre and the printshop, but also poems for the printshop. This hybrid model of authorship sets the highwater mark in English, for Shakespeare is the first individual fully to wear the mantle of the literary author in this form, succeeded by Jonson. As You Like It dramatizes the specific form that Shakespeare’s literary authorship takes: he is England’s first truly sublime literary author. Shakespeare’s sublime literary authorship is historically important because it powerfully activates the work that his poems and plays perform in the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Epic and Elysium

  2025-09-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 3 focuses on the presence of the Elysian tradition in a single genre, epic, to demonstrate how the high genre of the Renaissance features the place of the blessed. The chapter argues that the Elysian Fields form a special place that takes us to the heart of an epicist’s version of the heroic form. In particular, the chapter argues that Elysium proves vital as a place of relaxation and repose in a genre featuring warfare. More specifically, the chapter argues that Elysium is the place in the epic landscape where the hero finds a divine sanctuary—sometimes in the afterlife, but more often in a place set apart on earth: the very place where earth becomes heavenly. Elysium is that special place in the epic cosmos where the hero can maximize his identity as a ‘godlike’ man. The chapter looks into recent models of epic to discuss the role of Elysium in the heightened genre, and next settles on a select array of classical, medieval, and continental Renaissance epics: Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. The chapter closes by focusing on Renaissance epics written in England: Spenser’s Bower of Bliss episode in book 2 of The Faerie Queene; Chapman’s Elysian passage in the Odyssey and, surprisingly, the appearance of the blessed place in his Iliad; and finally book 3 of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  PublisherDOI

• Abbreviations

  2025-09-05

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Spenser, Britain, and the Place of Golden Age Elysian Poetry

  2025-09-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 4 features the leadership role of Spenser in the making of British Elysium/Elysian Britain, including its Elizabethan Golden Age dynamic. I recall the tradition of key source texts for ‘Eliza and Elizium’, examine Spenser’s first published poem, The Shepheardes Calender, look at the 1590 Faerie Queene (taking the cue of Harvey, who first links the Faeryland of the Redcrosse Knight with Elysium), and turn to Copley’s revision of book 1’s landscape of Faeryland and Eden as ‘Elizium’, before looking into the Elysian origins of the Gardens of Adonis in book 3. Next, I discuss one work in the 1590 Complaints volume: The Ruines of Time. In the following section, I turn to the 1596 Faerie Queene, featuring the Temple of Venus episode in book 4 (the challenging ‘core episode’ of the Legend of Friendship), but also attending to the Proem to book 5, with its structuring dilation on the Golden Age, and finally to the Mt Acidale episode in book 6, with its crowning Elysian place in the canon of Britain’s national poet. I conclude with a brief discussion of Spenser’s last published poem, Prothalamion.

  PublisherDOI

• Note on Texts and References

  2025-09-05

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Marvell, Spenser, and Civil War Epic in <i>Upon Appleton House</i>

  The Review of English Studies · 2025-04-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In Upon Appleton House, Marvell imitates Spenser’s Faerie Queene to turn a country house poem of political retirement into a mini-national epic. Marvell invents his model of epic retirement as a form of leadership at a challenging time in England’s history. For Marvell’s employer, Thomas Fairfax, had resigned his command of the Parliamentary forces during the Second Civil War, devoting himself to managing his Nun Appleton estate. During Marvell’s residence at Nun Appleton, he turns his poetry of retirement into an epic enterprise through an imitatio of Spenser that is more deep-seated than criticism allows. Rather than writing an epic along the lines of The Faerie Queene, Marvell composes Upon Appleton House as an English Renaissance epic in the lyric key of a country house poem. To accomplish this generic feat, he innovatively presents retirement as an epic action. Spenser is instrumental to Marvell’s meditation upon an epic poetry of retirement that places a country-house garden at its centre.

  PublisherDOI

• Authorship and Literary Career

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23 · 13 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter argues that Sidney serves as a historic catalyst in the formation of English authorship underwriting a literary career. To frame this argument, the chapter first looks into what we mean by ‘authorship’ and ‘literary career’. The chapter then cites three pieces of supporting evidence: early printed editions; Sidney’s contemporary afterlife; and his practice, which provides unexamined detail about his authorship of four genres—those practised first by Surrey and subsequently by Spenser: pastoral, sonneteering, epic, and divine poetry. In forming a bridge between Surrey and Spenser, Sidney consolidates a historic invention: the English national poet. Since Sidney does not publish his works, he may not qualify as a ‘laureate’; but we need not classify Sidney as the most ‘laureate’ of the ‘amateurs’. That classification puts history backward. Perhaps it is time to give Sidney a central place in the advent of English authorship underwriting a literary career.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Schoenfeldt

  5 shared

• Emma Depledge

  British Library

  5 shared

• Elizabeth Jane Bellamy

  3 shared

• Andrew Hadfield

  University of Sussex

  3 shared

• Ward W. Briggs

  2 shared

• Garrett A. Sullivan

  Tulane University

  2 shared

• David Schleicher

  2 shared

• P. J. Klemp

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Roma Gill Award from the Marlowe Society of America
• Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Montana (2…
• Faculty Scholar Medal from Penn State for research in the ar…
• Christensen Fellowship at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford (2…