In April, I am doing a side by side reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets (which I have read more times than I can count) and Amoretti by Spenser. I find the comparison of a good BBQ recipe to be appropriate when doing this. Someone comes up with some great idea for BBQ and it's good. Then someone else tweaks it and makes it a little better. This continues until it is essentially perfected. That is how I feel when reading Spenser next to Shakespeare (yes, Shakespeare and not Oxford or Bacon or any other dude you may want to tell me was really Shakespeare - we can have that conversation as well if anyone is interested.) Amoretti just seems like that first attempt at the BBQ while Shakespeare feels to me like the perfected, final product.

I just finished with my first COMPLETE read through of Giordano Bruno's The Heroic Frenzies (De Gli Eroici Furori) which I had read piecemeal up until recently. I won't lie, it is hard to get through because Bruno likes to write in a very Plato-inspired dialogue fashion and so it sometimes feels like he is thinking in circles. But he was a genius. He interspersed English sonnets (an influence of his time with Sidney) which are at least as well done as Shakespeare's. And that is coming from a Shakespeare fan. I really recommend reading through that and most of his other work if you are at all interested in astronomy and philosophy. I actually have written an essay on the influence of Bruno on Shakespeare and uploaded it on academia in case anyone is interested. Yes, that was a shameless pimping of my essay. ;-)

https://uccs.academia.edu/MikeShumaker