SOURCE: “The Phoenix and Turtle (Cambridge),” in Shakespeare in His Context: The Constellated Globe: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. IV, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 74-91.

In the following essay, Bradbrook examines the literary and biographical themes in The Phoenix and Turtle.

Only after the revived taste for Donne and the Metaphysicals did this strangely neglected masterpiece receive its due. Some have called it frigid, a trifle. Middleton Murry in the early 1920s was one of the first to recognise its power, built on paradox yet cunningly avoiding oxymoron. It is exceptionally well attested; it was signed and printed at first in Vatum Chorus (Marston Chapman and Jonson formed the quartet). This issued as with separate title page, in appendix to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr or Rosalin's Complaint, Allegorically shadowing the truth of love in the constant fate of the Phoenix and Turtle, published by Edward Blount in...