SOURCE: "An Anatomy of The Phoenix and the Turtle," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 15, 1962, pp. 99-110.

In the following essay, Ellrodt examines Elizabethan and Renaissance sources of phoenix imagery and explores the symbolic importance of this mythic bird in Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle.

I

'The Phoenix and the Turtle' had been nearly smothered in the dust of scholarly debate when a series of brilliant essays succeeded in rescuing it from a sadder fate than its heroes' eternal rest, 'enclos'd in cinders'. What radiance might have been lost in the controversy about biography, authenticity and sources the latest critics have fully recaptured.¹ Nevertheless the symbolical birds, to misquote Marvell, still wave in their plumes various light in different eyes. Thus A. Alvarez discovers in Shakespeare's argument 'a stringent logic' while F. T. Prince declares Shakespeare's use of analytic terminology 'free and...