Scenario Literature

The Renaissance and the Puritan Age (1485-1660)

A brave new world

Johann Füssli, Titania and Bottom with the Ass' Head (1788)
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
1485-1625 English Renaissance
• cultural and artistic movement in England under the Tudors and James I
• greatest height reached during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603)
• associated with the European Renaissance (Italy, late 14th century)
• flourishing of literature and of all the arts
• complex and sometimes exuberant vitality of court life and drama

New Learning and Humanism

• Protestant reading of the Bible in the vernacular New Learning: philological study of a refined and classical
Latin style in prose and poetry, and translations from Latin and Greek into the vernacular

• Renaissance Humanism
- 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Turks Greek refugees brought the masterpieces of Greek literature (Plato,
Homer, Sophocles) to Italy
- revival of interest in classical culture, first in Italy and then in Europe
- pedagogical value of antiquity

Main representatives
• Erasmus von Rotterdam (1466?-1536), Dutch philosopher and Catholic priest who prepared important new Latin
and Greek editions of the New Testament
• Michel de Montaigne, France (1533-92): Essays
- scepticism after the radical transformation brought to France by the Calvinist Reformation, religious persecution
and the Wars of Religion (1562-98)
• Sir Thomas More England (1478-1535) most influential Humanist in England
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THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
Renaissance prose
• Sir Thomas More: refined Humanist and lawyer against Protestant theology and the
separation from the Catholic Church
- 1529 appointed Lord High Chancellor of England
- 1535 accusation of high treason and execution due to his refusal to take the oath of
loyalty

• Utopia, published in Latin in 1516 and first translated into English in 1551
- perfect government of Utopia, an imaginary island whose name means ‘nowhere’, that
promoted harmony and hierarchical order
- satirical attack on existing European governments Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas More (1527)
- model for satirical works in the Age of the Enlightenment
- founding work for utopian and dystopian literature

• John Lyly (ca. 1554-1606): Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)

- love story
- most popular with the aristocracy and Queen Elizabeth
- ‘Euphemism’ – enriched rhythmic prose characterised by elaborate sentences, witty
plays on words and an incredible rhetorical wealth

• William Tyndale (ca. 1494-1538): translation of the Bible (1525)

- immense popularity due to religious ferment of the Reformation
Map of the island of Utopia
- first to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts and in printed form from the 1518 edition of
More's Utopia

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RENAISSANCE POETRY
The sonnet
Origin of the sonnet
• early medieval times from a popular short poem, sung to musical accompaniment
• Italian Guittone d’Arezzo (1235-94) established form lines of eleven syllables an
octave (two quatrains rhyming ABBA/ABBA, or ABBA/CDCD)

+
<<<<

a sestet (two tercets rhyming CDE/CDE or CDC/DCD)

• greatest model: Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) sonnet collection Canzoniere
- dedicated to a young lady called Laura Francesco Petrarca
- Petrarch torn between his love for her and his sense of guilt for not dedicating
himself to God
- core conventions concerning courtly love
- love relationship in terms of vassalage
- mistress beautiful and cruel without any justification
- without a return of love from the mistress
- lover into conflict with himself, torn between revolt and acceptation

A page from Petrarch's

collection Canzoniere
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RENAISSANCE POETRY
The sonnet
England

• 1526-27 Sir Thomas Wyatt’s voyages to Italy introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into
England
• first phase of development of the sonnet tradition: imitation through translation of <<<<
Italian sonnets into English – 1557 Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-47): Tottel’s Miscellany
- modified version of the original Petrarchan model, the
Elizabethan/Shakespearean scheme
William Scrots, Henry Howard,
iambic pentameters Earl of Surrey (1546)
three quatrains (rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF)

+
final couplet rhyming GG

Main practitioners

• Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86): 1580s, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, sonnet sequence
presenting love for Stella
• Edmund Spenser (1552-99): Amoretti (1595), dedicated to his own wife –
Petrarchan ideal of an angelic woman to be adored
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Sonnets (1609) – significant innovations in
themes and codification of the Shakespearean sonnet Edmund Spenser

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RENAISSANCE DRAMA
The models for Renaissance drama
Main features
• fusion of traditional and classical elements
• mixture of tragic and comic elements in the same play (Interludes and
Moralities)
• divine order of the universe (the macrocosm), with man (the microcosm)
inside it

Influence of the ‘Classics’ <<<<

• Plautus’comedy – the Miles Gloriosus, the bombastic soldier, lost orphans,
misunderstandings and mistaken identities
• Seneca's revenge tragedy – revenge theme, sanguinary plots, horror,
ghosts, tragic declamations, long monologues, three unities of time, place and
action
• Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527): Il Principe (1532, in Italian, never
translated), a political treatise government in the hands of a Prince –
corruption and greed for power popular Christopher Marlowe

First dramatists
• The Spanish Tragedy (1582-92): first bloodthirsty revenge tragedy by Thomas Kyd (1558?-94?)
- Senecan ingredients of murder, the supernatural and other horrors
- Machiavellian ingredients such as villains, intrigues and corruption
• University Wits – playwrights who had attended either Oxford or Cambridge, and among them Christopher
Marlowe (1564-93) the outstanding figure
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RENAISSANCE DRAMA
Elizabethan drama
Golden Age of the Elizabethan Theatre with
• The University Wits: Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), Robert Greene, and
Thomas Nashe from Cambridge, and John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, and George
Peele from Oxford – tragedies (Lyly only comedies)
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616) <<<<

A truly national experience

Factors that contributed to its incredible success with London audiences
• theatres open to everybody and admission prices were relatively low
William Shakespeare
• theatre-going habit
• plays could be understood even by people who were unable to read
and write
• Moralities and Interludes, the plays of medieval tradition
• new interest in classical drama
• talented playwrights
• commercial potential of the theatre was great, as it was the place for
entertainment for all classes
• theatre patronised by the court and the aristocracy
• shape of the theatre and stage dramatically functional – no scenery
• rhetorically powerful language – in verse, full of imagery
• the audience personally involved in the performance – use of their
imagination to picture what was not provided by the scenery The First Folio

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RENAISSANCE DRAMA
Public and private theatres
• Public theatres: large outdoor playhouses, with companies of
professional actors – larger capacity (The Swan 3,000 spectators)
- each associated with a company of actors
- strict censorship by the Master of Revels
- outside the walls of the city of London, on the South Bank of the <<<<
Thames, in the Southwark area out of the control of the civic
authority
- formally under the protectorate of a noble to avoid the accusation
of vagrancy – Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s The Globe theatre
Men, later to become the King’s Men in 1603 under James I
- an increasingly remunerative business: 1576 James Burbage’s
The Theatre – first public playhouse. The Curtain (1577), The
Swan (1595) and The Globe (1598)

• Private theatres: smaller indoors playhouses, with companies of

boys – smaller capacity (The Blackfriars 700 spectators)

• 1609: distinction abolished when the King’s Men, in residence at

The Globe in the summer, began using The Blackfriars in winter

The Tempest at Blackriars as imagined by Walter C. Hodges

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RENAISSANCE DRAMA
Actors and audience
Actors
• very well trained professionals, able to play more than one role,
skilled in dancing and fencing
• clowns as the great headliners of the Elizabethan stage until late
1580s – Shakespeare’s clowns William Kempe and then Robin <<<<
Armin
• late 1580s rise of the tragedians, such as Edward (Ned) Alleyn
and Richard Burbage
• sometimes also shareholders in companies and make a good Shakespeare performing before Queen Elizabeth and her court
living (Shakespeare’s supposedly double role of actor and
playwright)
• women not allowed on stage, and replaced by boy-actors
• wonderful and expensive 16th-century clothes as costumes

Performances
• in the afternoon, at two o’clock, two hour-long
• intense communal experience shared by all classes (roaring,
clapping and commenting aloud during the performances)

English Elizabethan clown William Kempe dancing a jig (1600)

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NEW FORMS OF POETRY AND DRAMA IN THE 17TH CENTURY
The Jacobean Age
The scientific revolution
• Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler
(1571-1630)
- the Sun at the centre of the universe
- Aristotelian method of investigation of nature (based on deduction and
reasoning) questioned
- new method based on induction and observation
• <<<<
Empiricism initiated by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in his Novum
Organum (1620)
- man knows only what he can learn through his senses and experience
- experimental method in his seminal work

Galileo Galilei displaying his telescope to the Doge of Venice in 1609

- feeling of dislocation, mistrust and uncertainty

- sense of pessimism

Jacobean drama
• Tragedies
- obsession with violent stories of revenge and moral corruption (incest, perversion, lust and ambition)
- peculiar taste for the Machiavellian villain

• Masques, dramas with music, elaborate costumes and sets, and mythological characters with Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
- extremely expensive shows appreciated by the court mostly in private playhouses
- waste and self-indulgent excess refused by the middle classes and the Puritans
- decline of theatre attendance
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NEW FORMS OF POETRY AND DRAMA IN THE 17TH CENTURY
Jacobean poetry: the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-
1631)
Sense of uneasiness and anxiety best represented by the Metaphysical
poets
• school condemned for its ‘metaphysical’ complications (hence the
name) during the Augustan Age
• Thomas S. Eliot’s The Metaphysical Poets (1921) revaluated the
school: modern fusion of thought and feeling

Main features
• ‘wit’ – intellectual ingenuity as the way to evoke emotions
• ‘conceits’ – extended metaphors that violently bring together ideas
and things that seem to have no connection at first sight – often <<<<
interlocked – drawn from all fields of knowledge: astronomy, politics,
astrology and religion
• unconventional and unexpected ground of the metaphor
• new facets of one’s emotional life are revealed and explored
• poems deliberately conversational in tone and language
• often ironic
• intended effect: to startle readers out of their complacency
• persuasion: the poet engaged in a ‘dialogue’ with a silent listener John Donne

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NEW FORMS OF POETRY AND DRAMA IN THE 17TH CENTURY
The Puritan Age: the closing of the theatres
• Puritans’ attitude to religion and culture
- more simplicity among the clergy
- abolition of traditional rituals considered too close to Roman Catholicism
- war on sin and refusal of any sort of amusement
- work for work’s sake, material success considered a sign of God’s grace <<<<

• Actors, who did not work and only acted, immoral and their art licentious

• 1642 Puritan revolution: the theatres were closed John Milton

The Christian epic poem

John Milton (1608-74) capable of representing and expressing the spirit of the
Puritan Age
• immense classical culture and love of beauty
• strong moral earnestness of the Puritans
• first Christian primary epic, Paradise Lost (1667)
- events of the Genesis with the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel
Satan
- grand style full of Latinisms, long periphrasis and a complex syntax
- Milton’s style deeply influential on the poets of the Augustan Age
William Blake, Satan Arousing the
Rebel Angels (1808)

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