Cheney's work covers both the poetry and the drama of early-modern England, Cheney's work focuses on genre and literary authorship, the sublime, classical reception, nationhood, and republicanism. He has been called “one of the leading practitioners of career criticism.” His published monographs include Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, and English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson. His first book, Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career, considers how Spenser's literary career changes the usual Virgilian career model to include the Petrarchan love lyric and Christian hymns. Cheney argues that Spenser's four-phase career aligns Virgilian fame with Christian glory as the highest ideal of poetry. In Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood, , Cheney discusses Christopher Marlowe's work in light of Ovid's literary career model from love elegy, to tragedy, to epic, seeing this Ovidian career model to rival the Spenser's Virgilian model. Cheney argues that by countering Spenser's more overt nationalism, Marlowe asserts the liberty of the poet as a national authority against the crown. Brian Striar writes that this book "represents an important step forward in Marlowe criticism, and it paves the way for the much needed engagement of Marlowe the scholar and translator in the construction of his entire oeuvre. It also finally redeems Marlowe from the shadow of Shakespeare and situates him, properly, as an independently prominent figure of Renaissance letters." Cheney extends his work on Marlowe's political and poetic dissidence in Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime, defining liberty in light of early modern republican thought and the aesthetic category of the sublime. He argues that Marlowe places the freedom-loving poet at the center of a new form of republican art by building on the anti-monarchical work of the Roman poet Lucan. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright and Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship focus on Shakespeare's non-dramatic works. Cheney discusses Shakespeare as an exceptionally capable poet as well as a playwright, modeling his poetry on the works of Ovid and Virgil. According to Lukas Erne, “Cheney’s work convincingly establishes that Shakespeare was not simply a playwright who occasionally happened to write poems, but that he was a poet and a dramatist throughout his career, writing poetry that could be lyric, narrative, or dramatic, and drama that could function as poems on the page or be adapted and abridged to function as plays onstage.” Richard Dutton calls Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright “an important book, one which requires us to revisit some long-cherished constructions of Shakespeare’s career and of what we mean when we call him an “author.”
Editing and editions
Cheney is currently serving as the general editor of the fourteen volume The Oxford History of Poetry in English and is one of the general editors of The Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser along with Elizabeth Fowler, Joseph Loewenstein, David Lee Miller, and Andrew Zurcher. He has also contributed to other scholarly editions: "Shakespeare’s Poems": Venus Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, "The Phoenix and Turtle", The Passionate Pilgrim, and "Attributed Poems" in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe.. Cheney has edited 1558-1660, Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, in addition to nine edited collections of critical essays: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, and Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry. Cheney sits on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature,Oxford Bibliographies: British and Irish Literature, Authorship, and Spenser Studies.
