THE RENAISSANCE

background
the tudor

1485-1509: King Henry VII

Emblem: the Tudor rose – a combination of the red rose of
Lancaster with the white rose of York; the symbol can still be
seen in churches, castles and palaces across England.
Taxes and plots: The King introduced high taxes and he had
to face several Yorkist plots against him, often helped by the
Kings of Scotland or the Irish.

Achiements: However, during his reign, England saw a period

of FINANCIAL AND GOVERNMENTAL STABILITY. He created a
new class of NOBLE LANDOWNERS who were directly
dependent on the crown. He encouraged trade and the cloth
industry. He also laid the foundations of English NAVAL
POWER by spending money on the building of ships so that
England could have its own merchant fleet as well as increase
its military strength.

As well as promoting English trade, his purpose was to

prevent FRANCE and SPAIN, the two major European powers
of the time, from gaining total control over trade routes. The
discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus (1492),
Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe and the voyage of
Vasco da Gama to the Indies had all opened up vast new
possibilities for economic expansion. This led to a struggle in
Europe for imperial domination of the waterways and the
establishment of COLONIES to exploit the natural resources
of these “new” continents – a process which also resulted in
the massacre of indigenous populations.
John Cabot was sponsored by the king to explore eastern
America in 1496 and to start a journey from Bristol in 1497
which led to the discovery of the North American mainland.

When he died, he left England economically stable and at

peace with France and Scotland.

1509-1547:

King Henry VIII

He succeeded his father at the age of 18; he was good-looking

and skilled at sports, music and poetry; he himself was a
musician and linguist. He was called the Golden prince for his
looks and scholarly interests.
His first wife was Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow.

Separation from the Church of Rome and Act of Supremacy:

Henry asked the Pope to declare his marriage invalid, as

Catherine had given him a daughter, Mary, but failed to
deliver a MALE heir. The Pope refused, so the king broke with
Rome and divorced Catherine. He set up the Church of
England and was excommunicated by the Pope. Then, in 1534,
with the Act of Supremacy, he declared himself “the HEAD of
the Church of England”, extending his religious revolution to
Wales and Ireland. Sir Thomas More, who was the King’s
Chancellor, was executed because of his opposition. The
break from Rome was legitimised by Parliament, which also
suppressed orders of monks and friars and established the
supremacy of the State over the Church even in spiritual
matters. The king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, dissolved the
monasteries and seized their wealth. Temporal and religious
powers were now joined in the figure of the [Link]
Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, persuaded
Henry to strengthen the English Church by authorizing a new
translation of the Bible. The new Anglican Church was born.
However, though independent, it still remained faithful to the
dogma of Rome.

The Reformation: In breaking with the Church, Henry VIII

partly allied himself with the wider movement of the
Reformation, even though, when Martin Luther nailed his 95
anti-Catholic theses to the door of his church in Wittenberg in
1517 (thus giving birth to the PROTESTANT CHURCH), Henry
wrote a pamphlet against him, thanks to which the king even
received the title of “Defender of the Faith” from the Pope. In
the following years, however, Henry VIII decided to distance
himself from the Roman Church for his own personal interests.

His second wife was Anne Boleyn, who gave birth to a girl,
Elizabeth. She was imprisoned on charges of treason and
executed in 1536.

His third wife was Jane Seymour, who gave him a child,
Edward, but died in childbirth. Henry then married three more
times.

His sixth wife was Catherine Parr, who had great intellectual
influence on Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth, whose
upbringing she supervised.
1547-1553:

King Edward VI

Protestant Reformation:
When Henry VIII died, his heir, Edward VI, was only ten. In his
name the country was ruled by A COUNCIL OF ADVISORS
composed of the new nobles, ardent supporters of the
Reformation, who used their position to continue to take the
Church’s former FORMER LANDS AND TREASURES.
During his reign, the Anglican Church became truly
protestant. As a consequence of it, religious services were
held in English instead of Latin, and the Book of Common
Prayer, mainly prepared by the Archbishop Thomas Cranmer,
became compulsory with the Act of Uniformity (1549). This
helped develop the English language.

Lady Jane Grey

was Edward’s Protestant cousin and, before dying, Edward

named her his successor, but after nine days and still
uncrowned, she was taken prisoner to the Tower of London
thanks to a Catholic plot (since a large part of the population
was still Catholic).
1553-1558:

Queen Mary I

Counter-Reformation: Edward’s successor, Mary I, tried in fact

to overthrow the REFORMATION and restore the religion of
her mother, CATHERINE OF ARAGON . She brought
Catholicism back to England, with the restoration of Catholic
rituals and heresy laws.

Her husband was Philip II of Spain, the most FANATICALLY

CATHOLIC sovereign in Europe; this made England an ally of
Spain against France. Her marriage proved unpopular.
“Bloody Mary”: Mary earned this nickname because she gave
the Protestant Church about 300 martyrs by BURNING them at
stake for heresy.
1558-1603:

Queen Elizabeth I

Golden Age: Mary I died childless in 1558 and was succeeded by her

HALF-SISTER, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth came to the throne at the age of 25 and

she became England’s most popular ruler. She was clever and determined, well
educated and cultured. She surrounded herself with intelligent councillors who
became part of her PRIVY COUNCIL, formed by about twenty members,
including her chief advisers William Cecil and FRANCIS WALSINGHAM.

Her reign was an age of stability, religious toleration, and

victory at sea. It was the time of entertainment and the rising
star of Shakespeare.

Reformation: Elizabeth restored a more diluted form of

PROTESTANTISM. In 1559 she re-introduced the Acts of
Supremacy and Uniformity. Church doctrine was Protestant
and culminated in the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglican faith of
1562. However, she avoided the extremes of Catholics and
Protestants. She was supreme “Governor” of the Church, not
“Head”.
In 1570, Pope Pius V EXCOMMUNICATED Elizabeth and urged
loyal Catholics to depose her. This led to several PLOTS
against her, the most famous of which was centred on the
Catholic queen of Scotland, Mary Stuart.

Mary Stuart: When the Scots forced her to abdicate in favour

of her one-year-old son, she went to England hoping to
receive help from her cousin Elizabeth. However, she was
arrested and kept prisoner in Sheffield Castle, where she
became the centre of conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth.
She was eventually EXECUTED for treason in 1587.

Overseas exploration: Elizabeth encouraged her sea captains

to explore new lands and look for treasures. Sir Walter Raleigh
sailed to South America to hunt for gold; Sir John Hawkins
brought African slaves to America, and Sir Francis Drake was
the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world.
Explorations and overseas trade made England a commercial
and seafaring power.

The Spanish Armada: Britain was engaged in an

EMPIRE-BUILDING RACE with its more powerful rival, Spain.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, the naval war with Spain
began with a series of PIRATE RAIDS by English adventurers
against Spanish ships carrying gold, silver and other precious
metals back from the Americas. Unofficially, Elizabeth
supported and sponsored FRANCIS DRAKE’s raids against the
Spaniards. Eventually she knighted him, an act that was more
or less an open declaration of war on Spain. Spain prepared
an Armada to invade Britain. The Spanish Armada set sail in
1588: it was the first serious naval attack on England since the
Vikings, with about 130 ships. However, the English ships were
faster and better armed than the Spanish ones and, in a
historic battle, the English navy DEFEATED the Spanish
Armada. The outcome of the failed invasion confirmed
England’s supremacy at sea. England became the greatest
naval power in the world, creating the conditions for the
development of the BRITISH EMPIRE.

“Virgin Queen”: Elizabeth received many proposals, but

regarded marriage as dangerous. She thought that a foreign
husband would subject England to overseas rule, while an
English one would create factions and plots. When Parliament
pressed her to marry and produce an heir, she replied that
she would “rule and die a virgin”. She used her chastity as a
POLITICAL WEAPON to maintain THE STABILITY of the
country.

Elizabeth’s popularity and greatness: With her charisma,

Elizabeth captured the imagination of poets and writers who
were part of her court. A famous example is EDMUND
SPENSER, whose epic poem, The Faerie Queen (1590-96), was
partly an attempt to flatter Elizabeth.

The figure of Elizabeth, or at least the iconographic and

poetic representation of her, still refers to the idealised
woman of medieval courtly love. Elizabeth was regarded as
the centre around which everything revolved.

The aim of the official portraits of Elizabeth I was to exalt the

queen as an untouchable icon of power and majesty.
Elizabeth had enjoyed her people’s love and consent. She had
managed to create a popular and majestic image of a
sovereign who appeared as the defender of the nation and
the preserver of peace. She had brought England unity and
glory.

The Stuarts
1603-1625:

King James I
Before dying, Elizabeth said that the Protestant King of
Scotland, James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, should
succeed her. James VI, king of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth
to the throne as James I, becoming the first Stuart king of
England. He had been brought up by Protestant lords, who
had forced his Catholic mother into exile and he was a
learned man who wrote treatises in English and Latin but
believed in witchcraft.
“Divine right of kings”: Less politically astute than Elizabeth,
he based his rule on the theory of the “divine right of kings”, a
doctrine that dated back to ancient times when many rulers
believed that they were descended from gods, and therefore
had absolute poer. being the representatives of God on earth.
James ignored Parliament and summoned it only to ask for
money.

Great Britain: He joined Scotland to England and Wales as

one kingdom (Great Britain) with separate Parliaments; he
introduced a distinctive flag, called the “Union Jack”, and
common coinage.

He took under royal patronage Shakespeare’s company,

which became the “king’s Men”, and poets like John Donne
and George Herbert.

He ordered a new translation of the Bible. Nearly 50 scholars,

influenced by humanists, worked on it for seven years. It was
published in 1611 and would be used by the Church of England
for more than 300 years. It is considered one of the
masterpieces of English literature.

The Gunpowder Plot: Religion was still a critical issue. Dissent

to the Church of England was treated as treason and
Catholics were barred from public life. On 5th November 1605,
a group of radical Catholics, led by Guy Fawkes, organised the
Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament (using gunpowder), but
the conspiracy was found out and the plot was stopped. Guy
Fawkes was imprisoned in the Tower of London and then
executed with other conspirators. The failure of the plot
became an annual event still commemorated in England as
Bonfire Night every 5th November with fireworks and figures
representing Guy Fawkes (called “guys”), which are burnt on
bonfires.

The Pilgrim Fathers: Along with Catholics, also Puritans

(extreme Protestants with a high sense of morality and duty,
who disapproved of the moral decline they though England
was falling into) were forbidden to practice their religion. A
direct consequence was the emigration of many dissenters to
the new World. On 16th September 1620 a group of Puritans,
later known as the “Pilgrim Fathers”, left England for America
aboard the Mayflower. They left from Plymouth and, in
November, they landed in Massachusetts. They named their
landfall Plymouth Rock and established a colony with its own
government. They were among the pioneers of the
subsequent colonisation of North America.

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

The Renaissance, literally "rebirth", was a cultural and artistic
movement that began in Italy in the late 14th century.
Although the Renaissance is often considered the beginning
of the modern age, the spirit of intellectual curiosity it
promoted was essentially directed towards the past, in
particular towards the ideas and civilizations of ancient Rome
and Greece. This culture had partly been suppressed by the
Catholic Church during the Middle Ages because of its
supposed paganism and spirit of free enquiry. The study of
classical cultures, which for centuries had been neglected,
was reborn and it is from this “rebirth” that the Renaissance
takes its name.

Therefore, the Renaissance was a mixed age, where old

medieval beliefs and practices co-existed with new
progressive ideas to be found in science and philosophy.
There is no doubt that many preconceptions of the medieval
mind – the idea of fixed destiny and the idea of the benign or
malign influence of stars and planets, for example – were
reinterpreted in ways which promoted a new vision of man as
a potentially autonomous being possessing free will, as an
operator on and master of nature, and as the maker of his
own destiny.

During the Renaissance, the human figure and human

thought and action began to take precedence over the divine
sphere which had dominated the medieval period, giving rise
to a cultural movement called Humanism, since the human
being became the centre of artistic, cultural and moral
enquiry: he was exalted as the centre of the universe.

Humanism was a movement that led to a renovation of

contemporary thinking in all fields of art and knowledge and
that was based on the study and translation of the classics. A
key figure of Humanism in Northern Europe was Erasmus of
Rotterdam, who published a new Latin version of the Greek
Bible in 1516 and stressed the importance for the Christian
student of studying Greek and Latin. Therefore, “New
Learning”, as Humanism was also called, was established in
the grammar schools all over the country and in the two
universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which had been
founded during the 14th century and expanded greatly during
the Renaissance.

Humanism encouraged confidence in the power of human

reason to interpret Man and nature, in the value of literature
as an instrument of reason, and in the dignity of modern
English as a literary medium. In fact, English humanists,
though considering Latin of primary importance, used
English in their writings, thus improving its vocabulary and
syntax.
Time Machines: p. 74

The English Renaissance developed later than its European

equivalents and distinguished itself as an original, typically
English movement. If, on the one hand, the influence of Italy
was immense in every sphere, from literature to fashion, on
the other hand, England struggled to free itself from this
foreign force, which it identified with Rome and the papacy.

The first thing to characterize the movement was its strong

Protestant, and in some aspects, Puritan basis, influenced by
the Reformation. The English literature of the period lacked
the pagan serenity of the Italian Renaissance and was less
committed to the visual arts.

If the Italian Renaissance produced numerous artistic

geniuses, the English Renaissance produced a huge
expansion of knowledge in a wide variety of fields:
philosophical, literary, social, scientific and religious.
The English Renaissance witnessed the discovery and
exploration of new continents, while the old order of ideas was
seriously questioned by cultural influences, such as the
theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, who created a new
heliocentric model of the solar system in which the earth no
longer held the central place it had in the Ptolemaic system.

SONNETS
The Renaissance is considered the golden age of poetry
because of the flourishing of love songs and sonnets. the
sonnet was invented by Giacomo da Lentini in the 13th
century, and it was later experimented with and refined by
Dante and Petrarch. It was introduced into England by Sir
Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542). Petrarch's collection of poems, the
Canzoniere, became the model for all European Renaissance
poets.

Among the central concerns of the sonneteers were love,

friendship, beauty, the destructive effect of time; but the most
traditional theme was the desire for a woman who is
unattainable and cannot return the poet’s love. The lady is an
idealized figure - the embodiment of physical and ideal
perfection. The sonneteer expects no physical consummation:
his love must remain pure and sometimes it turns into love for
God. We are given no real insight into her feelings, but only
learn about the poet’s interior world, characterized by a
series of contrasting, even paradoxical feelings which range
from great happiness to absolute despair, from delight to
pain and jealousy and which are frequently expressed
through the use of oxymoron, a figure of speech that
combines two contradictory terms. In fact, the lover begs for
the lady’s love yet does not wish her to surrender; the lady is
beautiful yet cruel, desirable but chaste; the lover suffers yet
he does not want the end of suffering; he wants his lady to
mourn his absence yet he does not want her to suffer.

Christopher Marlowe
His birth and his studies

Christopher Malowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, two

months before William Shakespeare. Despite his humble
origins, he had the chance to study at the University of
Cambridge, where he established a reputation for free
thinking and atheism. His Cambridge years made him familiar
with classical literature, music and poetry, and allowed him to
be part of a group of young intellectuals called “University
Wits”.

His life in London

In 1587 he moved to London, where he rapidly established

himself as the most important playwright of the period. He led
a dissolute, wild life. He was often involved in duels and was
imprisoned at least twice, accused of murder and atheism.
According to some documents, he was a very important
secret agent of the queen. He was fascinated by extremes, like
excessive ambition, unlimited desire and a restless willingness
to overcome human limits. Such were the passions that made
Marlowe able, in the six short years between 1587 and 1593
(when he died), to transform the English theatre. Such are also
the passions that drive Faustus, his most famous character,
to sell his soul to Lucifer in exchange for knowledge and
power.
His death

Marlowe was killed in a London tavern in 1593, at the age of 29,

in mysterious circumstances. The truth behind his death, in
fact, still remains unresolved.
His plays, themes and characters, stylistic features

Despite his short, turbulent life, Marlowe wrote significant

dramatic masterpieces: Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor
Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Dido, Queen of
Carthage. His plays were the first to embody the true spirit of
the Renaissance, concentrating on man as opposed to God.
The most important themes of these works are: the lust for
power, the desire to break free from the restrictions of the
Church, the attempt to overcome human limitations and the
demands of unlimited ambition unrestricted by any sense of
morality.
Marlowe’s works also represent a departure from the didactic
spirit of medieval Morality plays (despite still having many
elements in common with them). His heroes no longer
personify virtues or vices but are instead enriched by man’s
passions and faults. Theyare Renaissance overreachers
doomed to inevitable failure by their own ambitious and
immoral choices. They are dominated by one ambition (power,
knowledge, wealth) that rules all their lives and finally destroys
them, and they are also overcome by a final sense of utter
solitude.
Marlowe employs a sophisticated poetic language. His plays
are full of quotations in Latin and Greek from classical
authors and the style of speech is usually very cultivated.
Another important aspect of Marlowe’s style is his use of
blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). Before him, plays
used strictly rhymed verse. Finding it too stiff and formal,
Marlowe used blank verse to create a more varied, less
monotonous and emotionally more accessible verse, which
will deeply influence Shakespeare.

Doctor Faustus
Legend and plot

The play is a poetic re-working of the old German legend of a

man who sells his soul to the devil in order to gain ultimate
knowledge and have power in this life. In the same way,
Marlowe’s Faustus agrees to give his soul to the devil’s agent,
Mephistopheles, in return for twenty-four years of the
unlimited power of knowledge. His punishment will be to
spend the rest of eternity in hell.

Prototype of the “overreacher”

This character is related to both Prometheus’s and Icarus’s

myths and is the prototype of the overreacher, a man who
wants to overcome human limits to gain absolute power. In
the first act, Doctor Faustus is presented as an acclaimed
and respected scholar. However, that isn’t enough for Faustus,
who wants to govern nature and death through the power of
necromancy, thus achieving supreme knowledge – something
forbidden to human beings and belonging only to God. The
devil tempts him and tells him he will give him absolute
knowledge for twenty-four years in exchange for his soul.
During these years the devil will serve him and give him what
he wants but, at the end of that period, the devil will take
Faustus’s soul to Hell. Faustus challenges God and signs the
pact with Lucifer. He is willing to sacrifice both the road to
honest knowledge and his soul in favour of more power. And
yet, the knowledge Faustus acquires will turn out to be rather
illusory and disappointing. As time passes, he becomes more
and more aware of the emptiness of his bargain. By the time
the devil comes to take his soul, Faustus will have repented,
but his repentance will not prevent his soul from being
dragged to hell and be damned forever.

Similarities with Morality plays

Historically, the play looks both back to the past and ahead
to the future. Doctor Faustus has many elements in common
with the tradition of English morality plays. In fact, the play
shows the fight over man's soul by the forces of good and evil
and it is centred around a symbolic character, who acquires a
universal status and becomes a model of misconduct for the
audience. Furthermore, there are a lot of allegorical
characters such as the Good and Bad Angels, who appear to
warn Faustus exactly like allegories in a morality play; they are
counselors whose purpose is to persuade the doctor to
choose either salvation or damnation.

Differences with Morality plays

However, there are also some important distinctive features

that differentiate it from the medieval Everyman.

First of all, the play is conceived as a tragedy, in which the

arrogance of its protagonist leads him to damnation and
self-destruction. The perspective of salvation that was the
typical trait of a morality play like Everyman does not exist in
Marlowe’s play: even though the Good Angel of Medieval
tradition visits Faustus many times and Faustus himself
repents his sins at the very end of the play, there is no
salvation for him. In depriving Faustus of the possibility of
being forgiven, Marlowe seems to abandon the orthodox
Christian belief in God's infinite mercy.

Another important element is Faustus’s name. Doctor Faustus

is not Everyman. His name suggests he is an individual with a
personal history and a precise identity. His title, too, makes it
clear that he is a learned man, an individual who has
obtained the title of “doctor” at university (he studied at
Wittenberg, the same university as Luther). He is, just like
Marlowe himself, a recently graduated young man with lots of
aspirations: the knowledge he has gained at university has
fed his desire to know more, to go beyond the boundaries of
the known, to reach absolute power. In many ways, Faustus is
a complex and ambiguous character. Although portrayed as
arrogant, greedy and self-interested, he is at the same time
brilliant and charismatic.

Finally, what differentiates Marlowe’s play from the tradition

of morality plays is not just the tragic end (damnation instead
of salvation) and its dramatic quality (the play is a tragedy,
not a morality play), but also – and most importantly – its
language. The play is written in blank verse, an unrhyming
verse written in iambic pentameters. Marlowe was the first
English author to use it extensively and he transformed it into
the main verse of Elizabethan drama. The language used by
Marlowe also deserves attention: it is full of hyperboles which
perfectly coincide with the overreaching passions of his hero.
Renaissance spirit

Faustus' aspiration to infinite knowledge and total control

over nature is typically modern, and the story of Faustus has
become one of the few lasting modern myths.
Doctor Faustus can thus be considered one of the first
examples of early modern plays and its protagonist reflects
the ambition and restlessness of the Renaissance man. It is
still linked to medieval culture (which placed God at the centre
of the universe) but embodies the new spirit of adventure,
quest, freedom and human potential that began with the
Renaissance (which placed the individual at the centre): the
sense that man could be the maker of his own destiny. His
desire for knowledge and control of the ultimate secrets of
the universe announces the birth of the modern age.

“Faustus’ last soliloquy”

Faustus’ final speech is the most powerful scene in the play. It

occurs just one hour before Faustus’ damnation. Faustus
knows his death is imminent and the price of his contract with
the devil has to be paid; so he is waiting in anguish for the
Devil to come and take him off to Hell.

He is alone onstage and he is using the dramatic convention

of the soliloquy, which emphasizes the solitude of the tragic
hero, gives insight into what is going on in his mind and
builds up tension.

This soliloquy is marked by the passing of time, which Faustus

fails to dominate, and which inevitably leads to damnation.
This precious time left is dramatically flowing and the clock
which strikes 11, and will then strike 11.30 and finally 12 –
midnight – is torturing Faustus, whose despairing mind
rushes from one idea to another in order to find a possible
way out or at least just a little relief from the tormenting and
frightening perspective of eternal damnation.
This soliloquy features important elements thanks to which
the play can be defined as a tragedy:

1) the inevitable ending;

2) the downfall of the hero, due to an overreaching

passion;

3) the representation of the protagonist as a complex

human being, as opposed to the abstract
personifications of Medieval drama. In fact, if at the
beginning of the play Faustus appeared extremely
self-confident, determined, excited, ambitious, now he
has radically changed: he is humble, anxious, desperate,
and he has lost confidence in the power of knowledge.

William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s sonnets – 154 altogether – consist of 14 lines
structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The rhyme
scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. The third quatrain generally
introduces an unexpected change of image or tone. This
feature is called “volta” or “turn”. The final couplet usually
presents a conclusion, often surprising or unexpected. The
typical verse is the iambic pentameter.
Not only did Shakespeare modify the structure of the sonnet,
he also played with the conventions of Elizabethan love
poetry, challenging them and providing a complex
exploration of gender and sexuality.

The sonnets are divided into two different sections.

The first section (Sonnets 1 - 126) is addressed to a young man,

the “fair youth”. The first 17 poems, traditionally called the
“procreation sonnets”, urge the young man to marry and have
children in order to ensure that his beauty will remain
immortal. With Sonnet 18 the tone changes: the speaker
praises his friend’s beauty, expresses love or passionate
concern for him. A variety of themes is explored: beauty and
its decay; competition with a rival poet; despair due to the
absence of the lover; the destructive power of time; the
permanence of poetry.

The second, smaller group of sonnets (127 – 154) revolves

around the relationship with a dark lady, so called because
the poems make it clear that she has black hair and
dun-coloured skin; the beloved lady’s physical features
distinguish her from the fair, angelic woman typical of the
Petrarchan sonnets. In spite of the defects in her
appearance, the lady is described as very attractive and
seductive. The speaker’s feelings fluctuate between love and
hate. Several sonnets speculate about the unpleasant
sensations caused by love, such as fear, alienation, despair;
others investigate the nature of love itself, comparing the
idealized love found in Petrarchan poems with the messy,
complicated love found in real life.
Shakespeare’s sonnets subvert the classic, traditional themes
typical of the Petrarchan tradition. First of all, his poems in
praise of the lover’s beauty are written to a man, which was
unique in Elizabethan England. In addition, while
conventional sonnets are addressed to an idealized woman,
his “dark lady” is very different from the angelic ideal of the
courtly poems. Moreover, in conventional sonnets love is
platonic, while Shakespeare also speaks about sexual desire.
So he consciously distances himself from the canons of
poetic tradition, creating a more complex portrayal of human
love.