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Literary Overview
A golden age of English literature started in 1485 and lasted
until 1660. There are some social changes that promoted the prosperity of
literature in the age.
William Caxton’s introduction of printing press to
England in 1476 multiplied the readership. The growth of the middle class,
the continuing development of trade, the spreading education for laypeople
and not only clergy, the centralization of power and of much intellectual
life in the court of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and the widening
horizons of exploration gave a fundamental new impetus and direction to
literature.
However, the new literature nevertheless did not fully
flourish until the last 20 years of the 1500s, during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I because of the religious struggle between the Roman Catholic
Church and the Church of England, a product of the Reformation.
The English part in the European movement known as humanism also
belongs to this time. Humanism encouraged greater care in the study of the
literature of classical antiquity and reformed education in such a way as to
make literary expression of supreme importance for the cultured persons.
Literary style, in part modeled on that of the ancients, soon became a
self-conscious preoccupation of English poets and prose writers. Thus, the
richness and metaphorical profusion of style at the end of the century
indirectly owed much to the educational force of this movement. The most
immediate effect of humanism lay, however, in the dissemination of the
cultivated, clear, and sensible attitude of its classically educated
adherents, who rejected medieval theological superstition. Of these writers,
Sir Thomas More is the most remarkable. His Latin prose narrative Utopia
(1516) satirizes the irrationality of inherited assumptions about private
property and money and follows Plato in deploring the failure of kings to
make use of the wisdom of philosophers. More’s book describes a distant
nation organized on purely reasonable principles and named Utopia (Greek for
“nowhere”).
English literature of the Renaissance may be divided into
three stages of development, and the two chief literary trends running
through the three distinct stages are on one hand court literature mainly
representing the interests of the Monarch and the old and the new
aristocracy, and on the other hand bourgeois literature reflecting chiefly
the thoughts and feelings of the rising bourgeoisie.
The three stages are:
A. From the last years of the 15th century to the first half of the 16th
century,
from the introduction of the first printing press in England by William
Caxton in 1476 through the Group of the so-called Oxford Reformers down to
the prose of Thomas More and the poetry of Skelton and Wyatt and Surrey;
B. The so-called Elizabethan Age, covering the second half of the 16th
century, but especially the last two decades:
a) In poetry, from the influence of Wyatt and Surrey, through the sonnets
and longer poetical works, but chiefly lyrical poetry, of Sidney and
Spenser to Shakespeare and Ben Johnson and John Donne.
b) In drama, from the influences of the church, classic drama through the
University Wits, chiefly Lyly,
Greene,
Kyd and Marlowe, to the
more mature comedies and the early tragedies of Shakespeare;
c) In a prose fiction, from Lyly’s Euphues and the prose romances of
Sydney and
Lodge and Greene to The Unfortunate Traveler of
Nashe and
more realistic narratives of
Deloney’s about labouring people;
C. The first quarter of the 17th century:
a) In drama, from the great tragedies of William Shakespeare to his later
tragic-comedies and from the comedies of the humors of Ben Johnson’s and the
tragic comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, through the blood-and-thunder
plays of Webster and Ford and the realistic dramas of Dekker, Thomas
Heywood, to the decadent comedies of James Shirley;
b) In poetry, from Ben Jonson and Donne to their followers and the
imitators of Spenser;
c) In prose, from the essays and the scientific and utopian writings of
Francis Bacon and the King James Bible of 1611 to the pseudo-scientific
Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton.
The Renaissance witnessed its greatest literary achievements in poetry,
drama and prose, which are hard to surpass by those of the late generation.
In poetry, John Skelton served as a transition because his
poetry showed both the medieval and Renaissance influences in the earlier
part of the 16th century. Then two greatest Renaissance poets appeared in
the last quarter of the 16th century: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser,
both of whom educated Elizabethan courtiers.
Sidney was recognized as the model Renaissance nobleman, with
his “Astrophel and Stella”. In this sonnet, he celebrated his idealized love
for Penelope Devereux, the daughter of Walter Devereux, first earl of
Essex. The lyric tends to show an ideal of womanhood, which leads to a
perception of good, true, and divine. In the late 16th century, the
idealization of the beloved is a major theme both in poetry and in drama.
The greatest work to that idealism, including all features of the
moral life, is Spenser’s uncompleted epic, Faerie Queene (Books I-III,
1590; Books IV-VI, 1596), the most famous work of the period. In the six
completed books it depicts a hero that points toward the ideal form of a
certain virtue, and at the same time it looks forward to the marriage of
Arthur, who is a combination of all the virtues, and Gloriana, who is the
ideal form of womanhood and the embodiment of Queen Elizabeth. It is a
typical example of English Renaissance and Spenser tried to create a noble
epic from Arthurian romance in an archaic medieval style. A noble epic would
make the English national literature equal to ancient Greek and Roman
literature. The poetic and narrative qualities of Faerie Queene suffer from
the various theoretical requirements that Spenser forced the work to meet.
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