SOURCE: "Love's Martyr's: Shakespeare's 'Phoenix and Turtle' and the Sacrificial Sonnets," in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, edited by Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 188-208.

In the following essay, McCoy studies the combination sacred and earthly elements in The Phoenix and Turtle and suggests the term "relic" to describe the blending of mortality and continued spiritual power.

In its paradoxical intensity and cryptic brevity, "The Phoenix and Turtle" is one of Shakespeare's most enigmatic works. I. A. Richards calls it "the most mysterious poem in English," and, for him and many others, its mysteries are profoundly cosmic: "there is a religious quality in its movement, a feeling in it as though wè were being related through it to something far beyond any individuals. This Phoenix and Turtle have a mythic scale to them, as though through them we were to become participants in...