The Italian Renaissance began around the fifteenth century, affecting all fields of human endeavor-literature; these included the arts, sciences, religion and politics: This time was also known as prosperity and expansion that displayed a new mood of confidence.
The Early Renaissance in England:
The first Tudor monarch started with Henry VII, during this decade and a half of the fifteenth century was mostly concerned with healing the wound of political dissension and economic depression after the War of the Roses; The next Tudor began with Henry VII, the country did begin to prosper once more and the Protestant Reformation finally appeared emergence of the Anglican church headed by Henry and in the growth of a more radical sect, the Puritans.
During his reign, only slight stirrings of Renaissance activities can be seen: Sir Thomas More, a Tudor statesman whom Henry beheaded for his disobedience; emphasized classical learning; Erasmus, a scholar of the new humanism, began to lecture at Cambridge in 1509, he emphasized human reasoning.
Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, began writing the first poetry in modern English sometime in the late 1520’s; although their poems did not see print until 1557 when they were published in Tottel’s Miscellany fifteen years after Wyatt’s death, as well as 20 years after Surrey’s beheading.
Wyatt wrote the first sonnets in Modern English in a form that he adapted for English from Patriarch, Italy’s great sonneteer during the fourteenth century: Surrey “invented” blank verse for modern English, getting the five beats flowing again in a language that had undergone much change since the time when Chaucer, more then a century before, had solved a similar problem for middle English.
The Essay on Assess the Significance of Henry Viii as a Renaissance Monarch
Henry Viii was crowned in the early 16th century, during the renaissance period. The renaissance period reflects back on the 15th century Florence, Italy where the rise of religious philosophy, nationalism and interest in the arts, humanities and architecture was dominated in pop culture. Henry Viii reflected these aspects as a renaissance monarch. However his significance to the world today was ...
Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spencer not only took up the example of Wyatt and Surrey, they also went further in typically Renaissance direction then any poets before them had ventured; The famous Faerie Queen of Spencer is the first attempt to write an epic in English that would be modeled along classical lines: Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, though influenced by Patriarch and by Wheat, is one of the few great sonnet sequences in English history.
The High Renaissance-Elizabethan Drama
In the Drama that English Renaissance attains greatness and finds its own individual voice and vision, it was both iconoclastic and popular; this drama acted out in the open sun came from all walks of life, from nobles and commoners, men and women alike: “penny Groundlings” were the discriminating ear into which the new English language uttered its first dramatic masterpieces in long speeches of bright images and vivid rhetoric.
Unlike classical theater, violence in Elizabethan drama took place right before the audience’s eyes rather then off stage, other classical rules also were abandoned: most plays did not occur on one day in one place only or in any other way “obey the unties”, instead they moved through time and geography freely, much as a movie camera is free to move around in the movies of out own time.
Christopher Marlowe
The last public celebration of miracle plays on England was at Coventry in 1580; At that time, James Burbage’s first theater had already been open for years in London and there had been, even earlier: The Fourteener, is a set of seven beat lines too long for a single breath and broke it up naturally into hymn-tune.
In 1587 this is a precisely what happened when the lord Admiral’s men, a realtively new acting company, presented their brilliant and famous leading actor, Edward Alleyn in a new play called Tamburlaine by Marlowe: The English theatre has never heard suck a powerful use of blank verse; After all the theaters had to complete for attain with such bloodcurdling real life entertainment’s as bearbaiting and public executions.
The Term Paper on Troubled Years
When William Shakespeare first started writing, He had problems with two fires that almost wiped out his house. He was forced to get married quickly.He had problems finding good actors, and later experienced writer's block. Even though Shakespeare was a great writer, he had many problems, which got in the way of his writing. William and his family have had problems with fires and other disasters. ...
In the play Tamburlaine alone, a captive is a transported in a cage and used as the hero’s footstool, another captive is chained on a wall and shot at by enemy troops: Another point the hero, whip in hand, makes his entrance riding a chariot pulled by two conquered kings with bits in their mouths, as he whips them he cries “Holla, ya pampered jades of Asia! / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?”
An instrument the English dramatist had never possessed before in such a highly developed form, one open to all sorts of subtle tinkering to suit dramatic changes of mood or pace: seven more years, the poetry – intoxicated public swarmed to listen as Marlowe gave them most populate plays England had ever seen performed any where.
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare had written six plays in four years, three of them were history plays so heavily influenced by Marlowe that some later scholars would insist that Marlowe must have written them: Both men being twenty-nine at the high of the plague in 1593.
When Shakespeare leaves behind Marlowe’ might line with its strong but simple end-stopped music; at the end of his writing career, in a string of sentences, the early plays are relatively bright-colored affairs, as he matures, the shadows deepen.
He also published two long narrative poems, Venus and Asonis, and The Rape of Lucerne, as well as a famous sequence of sonnets: These narrative works assured any other poet a measure of fame as an important minor Elizabethan poet, and the sonnet sequence unquestionably contains flashes of greatness.
The Renaissance in the Seventeenth Century
For two decades an Elizabethan would vier had coalesced which, in its trembling perfection, held the promise of utterly new recognition’s that might be made as easily as discovering new walks that lie beyond all known maps.
Ben Johnson, ten years younger then his friend Shakespeare, was also a dramatist though a classically educated one who was made uneasy by Shakespeare’s popular appeal: Johnson’s influence in the Stuart age: the tone of voice is always light and soft, the music song-like, the subject matter recalling the medieval cult of “courtly love,” These poems were often written as elaborate compliments to a lovely lady, they were called Cavaliers.
The Essay on Compare/Contrast Shakespeare And Marlowe
Compare/Contrast Shakespeare and Marlowe William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe were both writers of the Elizabethan stage, living in the same town of London, at the same time, and they wrote plays while working with the same people. Their strongest similarity was in their work. They both had an innate ability to write about love, great tragedies, comedies, drama and poetry with a similar ...
John Donne, a leading metaphysical poet, wrote some of the greatest love poems in English during his wild and reckless youth as a Catholic in danger of the martyrdom his own brother did not escape.
He had similarly bewitched the readers of his early love lyrics, which he now of course abjured, though they floated in wider manuscript circulation then ever, a thing he could fortunately do nothing about; at the same time he can he can be said to have been one of the most effective forces in delaying the Puritan revolution with his vigorous preaching.
The best-known metaphysical conceit comes from catholic poet Richard Carashaw; in addressing the naked and bloody body of Christ on the cross, he sees that the blood is in fact a kind of clothing.
George Herbert an Anglican minister wrote strictly religious verse, and while he shows the same tendency as Donne toward complicated imagery and agitated states of mind, he is like the sons of directness imagery and agitated states of mind: His best work presents psychological portraits of the paradoxes and passions by which faith is tempered: Andrew Marvel is quiet a departure from both Donne and Herbert and poles apart from Crashaw:
John Milton
John Milton’s early poems show him to be a competent metaphysical apprentice, though like the younger Marvel, he was also a Puritan and also an uncompromising one: Like Marvel and unlike other Puritans, he loved the theater: Again like the marvel, he was a learned classicist consciously using classical models for his pastoral verse, for his one masque, his epic poems, and his one tragedy; in midlife he set poetry aside and became an ardent pamphleteer for the Puritan cause.
Renaissance Prose
If Marvell and Milton both present us with a contradiction in combining their dazzling imagery with their plans-spun Puritans political sympathies, John Bunyan present us with no such tension: He is plain-spun all through and almost free from contradictions of any kind: Jailed by royalists for his fervent preaching, he wrote his masterpiece there: The intense spirituality and the direct style both help to explain why American pioneers classically carried three books across the American Continent.
The Term Paper on How John Donne Showed His Love
How John Donne Showed his Love John Donne's poetry has been both ridiculed and praised. One reason for the ridicule is due to the fact that many people believe his work is vulgar, and his discussion of sex may seem improper to some people. Even in this modern age some people may find it a bit offensive. You can imagine what people thought of it in the sixteenth century. His discussion of sex in ...
Sir Francis Bacon’s achievements is perhaps the scientific and philosophical work that led to the creation of the royal society in 1660, thought he died long before in 1626: yet be belongs to literature as well, if only for those short prose works he wrote that allow one to credit him with being the first writer of the familiar essay in English.
