Renaissance (1485 -1625)
• Rebirth from the decadence of the MA and return to the achievements of classical antiquity – ancient Greece and Rome. Authors used the classical literary conventions (an established technique, practice or device used while writing literary works)
• in Britain coincided with Protestant Reformation (rebirth of the purity of the early church)
• ideas of Renaissance spread due to the introduction of printing (W. Caxton, 1476) and the increase of literacy
The philosophy of Renaissance – “humanism” • emphasized dignity and potential of the individual and the worth of life in the world; Man – the centre of the Universe; Sir Thomas More “Utopia”, “History of Richard III”
Humanism: • The belief that human problems can be solved through science rather than religion.
Latin English
1558 -1603 Elizabethan Age Sir Philip Sidney-Elizabethan Aesthetics • art should imitate ideal nature • using classical works as models • levels of style (high, middle and low) • the use of allegory to teach moral truths • abundance of words
Genres: • epic (Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”); • pastoral poem (a work presenting a simple and idealized world inhabited by shepherds and shepherdesses who tend their flocks, fall in love and engage in friendly poetry contests);
• hymns (Gods); • odes (worthy people, notable occasions) - both noble, elevated in tone and language • ballads; • madrigals; - varieties of song –
• tragicomedy; • sonnet (established by Petrarch, introduced into England by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517 -1547) is a 14 -line poem in iambic pentameter with three principal rhyming patterns.
Modes: • mythologic-erotic (Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” • heroic.
• 1598 – a folio containing his major works • 1590, 1593 – “Arcadia” – a long pastoral romance in prose • 1595 – “The Defense of Poetry or An Apology for Poetry” (critical prose) • 1582 – “Astrophil and Stella” – the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles (108 sonnets and 11 songs)
• 1579 – “Shepherd’s Calendar” (pastoral poem in twelve eclogues) – 13 different meters
• 1590 – “Faerie Queene”, books I, III (vast allegorical romantic epic) • 1596 – books IV, V, VI (each has 12 cantos)
“Amoretti and Epithalamion” – sonnet sequence (“Spenserian stanza”)
Tragedies: l“Hamlet” l“Othello” l“Macbeth” l“King Lear” l“Anthony and Cleopatra”
l 37 plays l 152 sonnets l 2 narrative poems “Venus and Adonis”, “The Rape of Lucrece”
