¹² For recent commentary on this version of the canon, see Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006), 1.

¹³ For details on this typological principle, see Cheney, ‘“Novells of his devise”: Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Paths in Spenser’s Februarie Eclogue’, in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002), 231–67.

¹⁴ As Colin Burrow explains in his edition of Shakespeare’s poems, this title ‘was first used in 1807, and has no connection with Shakespeare’ (William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 82). Even though Burrow prefers to title the poem after its first line, ‘Let the bird of loudest lay’, I use the more conventional title here. For Middleton Murray, see A New Variorum Shakespeare: The Poems, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), 566; for Richards, see Poetries: Their Media and Ends, ed. Trevor Eaton (The Netherlands: Mouton, 1974), 50.

¹⁵ Long ago, Arthur H. R. Fairchild, in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle: A Critical and Historical Interpretation’, Englishche Studien 33 (1904), 337–84, detailed the similarities between the two poems, but more recent critics like Thompson dismiss them, since they provide only ‘a valuable illustration of one of the ways in which [Shakespeare’s work] is deeper and richer than other writers: his powers of association are complex and daring’ (Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer, 218).