"Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and the Turtle' and the Defunctive Music of Ecstasy," Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. VIII, 1975, pp. 311-31.

In the essay that follows, Petronella discusses the structuring trope of ecstasy, which does not effect the separation of the immortal soul from the body, but the state of "love-in-death."

Twenty years after G. Wilson Knight declared that The Phoenix and the Turtle had been "unjustly" and "too long" neglected, Muriel Bradbrook observed that "very little has been written upon this poem."¹ Another twenty years passed. During that interim a different note was sounded when Robert Ellrodt announced that The Phoenix and the Turtle would have become smothered in "the dust of scholarly debate" if it were not for the clarifying commentary of scholars like Heinrich Straumann, A. Alvarez, G. Wilson Knight, F. T. Prince, and C. S. Lewis.² Although the poem...