Queen Elizabeth I portrait

The background shows two different stages in the defeat of the Spanish Armada/ɑːˈmɑːdə/ in 1588. On the left, English fireships threaten the Spanish fleet, and on the right the ships are driven onto a rocky coast amid stormy seas.

The queen's hand rests on a globe below the crown of England, her fingers covering the Americas, indicating England's dominion of the seas and plans for imperialist expansion in the New World.

The contrast of the imperial figure of the Virgin Queen wearing the large pearl symbolizes chastity/ˈtʃastɪti/ the state or practice of refraining from sexual intercourse and the mermaid carved on the chair of state, represents female cunning strategies luring sailors to their doom. The crown also symbolizes the English monarch.

With this growth in the wealth and political importance of the nation, London developed in size and importance as the nation’s capital. The increasing population could not normally read or write, but did go to the theatre. Hence, from the foundation of the first public theatre in 1576, the stage became the forum for debate, spectacle, and entertainment. It was the place where the writer took his work to an audience which might include the Queen herself and the lowliest of her subjects. Hand in hand with the growth in theatrical expression goes the growth of modern English as a national language.

During the period of the Renaissance, the English language changed very swiftly in keeping with rapid social, economic and political changes. However, writers in particular soon came to realise that the vocabulary of the English language did not always allow them to talk and write accurately about the new concepts, techniques and inventions which were emerging in Europe. At the same time a period of increasing exploration and trade across the whole world introduced new words, many of which had their origin in other languages. Historians of the language have suggested that between 1500 and 1650 around 12,000 new words were introduced into English. Words came into English from over fifty different languages, although by far the majority were derived from Latin. Here are one or two further examples of words which entered the English language during the Renaissance:

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banana, embargo, tobacco (Spanish and Portuguese); balcony, design, stanza (Italian); bizarre, detail, vogue, volunteer (French); yacht (Dutch); caravan (Persian); coffee (Turkish); appropriate, contradictory, utopia, vacuum (Latin and Greek).

RENAISSANCE PROSE

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SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS 'UTOPIA.'

One of the most attractive and finest spirits of the reign of Henry VIII was Sir Thomas More. Thomas More was born in London in 1478 in the family of a prominent judge. More went on to study at Oxford. During this time, he wrote comedies and studied Greek and Latin literature. Around 1494 More returned to London to study law and became a barrister in 1501. Yet More did not automatically follow in his father's footsteps. He was torn between a monastic calling and a life of civil service. He determined to become a monk and lived at a nearby monastery and took part of the monastic life. The prayer, fasting, and penance habits stayed with him for the rest of his life. More's desire for monasticism was finally overcome by his sense of duty to serve his country in the field of politics. He entered Parliament in 1504, and married for the first time in 1504 or 1505. More became a close friend with Erasmus during the latter's first visit to England in 1499. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and correspondence. One of More's first acts in Parliament had been to urge a decrease in a proposed appropriation for King Henry VII. In revenge, the King had imprisoned More's father and not released him until a fine was paid and More himself had withdrawn from public life. After the death of the King in 1509, More became active once more. In 1510, he was appointed one of the two undersheriffs of London. In this capacity, he gained a reputation for being impartial, and a patron to the poor. In 1511, More's first wife died in childbirth. More was soon married again, to Dame Alice.

During the next decade, More attracted the attention of King Henry VIII. In 1518 he became a member of the Privy Council, and was knighted in 1521. More was made Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523 and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1525. As Speaker, More helped establish the parliamentary privilege of free speech. In 1529, More became Lord Chancellor, the first layman yet to hold the post. While his work in the law courts was exemplary, his fall came quickly. He resigned in 1532, citing ill health, but the reason was probably his disapproval of Henry's stance toward the church. He refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn in June 1533, a matter which did not escape the King's notice. In 1534 he was one of the people accused of complicity with Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent who opposed Henry's break with Rome, but was not attainted due to protection from the Lords who refused to pass the bill until More's name was off the list of names.¹ In April, 1534, More refused to swear to the Act of Succession and the Oath of Supremacy, and was committed to the Tower of London on April 17. More was found guilty of treason and was beheaded alongside Bishop Fisher on July 6, 1535. More's final words on the scaffold were: "The King's good servant, but God's First." More was beatified in 1886 and canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint by Pope Pius XI in 1935.

More's most important work was his 'Utopia,' published in 1516. The name, which is Greek, means No-Place, and the book is one of the most famous of that series of attempts to outline an imaginary ideal condition of society which begins with Plato's 'Republic' and has continued to our own time. 'Utopia,' broadly considered, deals primarily with the question which is common to most of these books and in which both ancient Greece and Europe of the Renaissance took a special interest, namely the question of the relation of the State and the individual. It consists of two parts. In the first there is a vivid picture of the terrible evils which England was suffering through war, lawlessness, the wholesale and foolish application of the death penalty, the misery of the peasants, the absorption of the

land by the rich, and the other distressing corruptions in Church and State. In the second part, in contrast to all this, a certain imaginary Raphael Hythlodaye describes the customs of Utopia, a remote island in the New World, to which chance has carried him. To some of the ideals thus set forth More can scarcely have expected the world ever to attain; and some of them will hardly appeal to the majority of readers of any period; but in the main he lays down an admirable program for human progress, no small part of which has been actually realized in the four centuries which have since elapsed.

The controlling purpose in the life of the Utopians is to secure both the welfare of the State and the full development of the individual under the ascendancy of his higher faculties. The State is democratic, socialistic, and communistic, and the will of the individual is subordinated to the advantage of all, but the real interests of each and all are recognized as

identical. A secret ballot of the officals decides the Prince, who stays for life unless he is deposed or removed for suspicion of tyranny. There is no private ownership on Utopia, with goods being stored in warehouses and people requesting what they need. There are also no locks on the doors of the houses, which are rotated between the citizens every ten years. All able-bodied citizens must work; thus unemployment is eradicated, and the length of the working day can be minimised: the people only have to work six hours a day (although many willingly work for longer). The rest of the time is free, but with plentiful provision of lectures and other aids for the education of mind and spirit. All the citizens are taught the fundamental art, that of agriculture, and in addition each has a particular trade or profession of his own. There is no glut, excess, or showiness. Clothing is made for durability, and every one's garments are precisely like those of every one else, except that there is a difference between those of men and women and those of married and unmarried persons. The sick are carefully tended, but the victims of hopeless or painful disease are mercifully put to death if they so desire. Crime is naturally at a minimum, but those who persist in it are made slaves (not executed, for why should the State be deprived of their services?). Detesting war, the Utopians make a practice of hiring certain barbarians who, conveniently, are their neighbors, to do whatever fighting is necessary for their defense, and they win if possible, not by the revolting slaughter of pitched battles, but by the assassination of their enemies' generals. In especial, there is complete religious toleration, except for atheism, and except for those who urge their opinions with offensive violence.

'Utopia' was written and published in Latin; among the multitude of translations into many languages the earliest in English, in which it is often reprinted, is that of Ralph Robinson, made in 1551.

Utopia is an account of a journey which had enormous influence on subsequent fiction – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-four, and Lord of the Flies to name a few – as well as on the strange mixture of fact and fantasy in Renaissance writing.

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD.

The earlier half of Elizabeth's reign, also, though not lacking in literary effort, produced no

work of permanent importance. After the religious convulsions of half a century time was required for the development of the internal quiet and confidence from which a great literature could spring. At length, however, the hour grew ripe and there came the greatest outburst of creative energy in the whole history of English literature. The great literary period is taken by common consent to begin with the publication of Spenser's 'Shepherd's Calendar' in 1579, and to end in some sense at the death of Elizabeth in 1603, though in the drama, at least, it really continues many years longer.

Several general characteristics of Elizabethan literature and writers should be indicated at the outset.

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1. The period has the great variety of almost unlimited creative force; it includes works of many kinds in both verse and prose, and ranges in spirit from the loftiest Platonic idealism

or the most delightful romance to the level of very repulsive realism.

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2. It was mainly dominated, however, by the spirit of romance.

3. It was full also of the spirit of dramatic action, as befitted an age whose restless enterprise was eagerly extending itself to every quarter of the globe.

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4. In style it often exhibits romantic luxuriance.

5. It was in part a period of experimentation, when the proper material and limits of literary forms were being determined, oftentimes by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, or to the geography of all England.

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6. It continued to be largely influenced by the literature of Italy, and to a less degree by those of France and Spain.

7. The literary spirit was all-pervasive, and the authors were men (not yet women) of almost every class, from distinguished courtiers, like Ralegh and Sidney, to the company of hack writers, who starved in garrets and hung about the outskirts of the bustling taverns.

RENAISSANCE POETRY

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EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599. The first really commanding figure in the Elizabethan period, and one of the chief of all English poets, is Edmund Spenser. Born in London in 1552, the son of a clothmaker, Spenser past from the newly established Merchant Taylors' school to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar [ˈsaɪzə], or poor student, and during the customary seven years of residence took the degrees of B. A. and, in 1576, of M. A. At Cambridge he assimilated two of the controlling forces of his life, the moderate Puritanism of his college and Platonic idealism. Next, after a year or two with his kinspeople in Lancashire, in the North of England, he came to London, hoping through literature to win high political place, and attached himself to the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's worthless favorite.

Spenser was for a while a member of a little group of students who, like occasional other experimenters of the later Renaissance period, attempted to make over English versification by substituting for rime and accentual meter the Greek and Latin system based on exact quantity of syllables. Spenser, however, soon outgrew this folly and in 1579 published the collection of poems which, as we have already said, is commonly taken as marking the beginning of the great Elizabethan literary period, namely 'The Shepherd's Calendar.'

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This is a series of pastoral pieces twelve in number, artificially assigned one to each month in the year. The subjects are various--the conventionalized love of the poet for a certain Rosalind; current religious controversies in allegory; moral questions; the state of poetry in England; and the praises of Queen Elizabeth, whose almost incredible vanity exacted the most fulsome flattery from every writer who hoped to win a name at her court. The significance of 'The Shepherd's Calendar' lies partly in its genuine feeling for external Nature, which contrasts strongly with the hollow conventional phrases of the poetry of the previous decade, and especially in the vigor, the originality, and, in some of the poems, the beauty, of the language and of the varied verse. It was at once evident that here a real poet had appeared. An interesting innovation, diversely judged at the time and since, was Spenser's deliberate employment of rustic and archaic words, especially of the Northern dialect, which he introduced partly because of their appropriateness to the imaginary characters, partly for the sake of freshness of expression. They, like other features of the work, point forward to 'The Faerie Queene.'

In the uncertainties of court intrigue literary success did not gain for Spenser the political rewards which he was seeking, and he was obliged to content himself, the next year, with an appointment, which he viewed as substantially a sentence of exile, as secretary to Lord Grey, the governor of Ireland. In Ireland, therefore, the remaining twenty years of Spenser's short life were for the most part spent, amid distressing scenes of English oppression and chronic insurrection among the native Irish. After various activities during several years Spenser secured a permanent home in Kilcolman, a fortified tower and estate in the southern part of the island, where the romantic scenery furnished fit environment for a poet's imagination. And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge in his art from the disgusting realities of life, now produced many poems, some of them short, but among the others the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books of this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under enthusiastic encouragement from Ralegh, brought to London and published in 1590. The dedication is to Queen Elizabeth, to whom, indeed, as its heroine, the poem pays perhaps the most splendid compliment ever offered to any human being in verse. She responded with an uncertain pension of £50 (equivalent to perhaps $1500 at the present time), but not with the gift of political preferment which was still Spenser's hope; and in some bitterness of spirit he retired to Ireland, where in satirical poems he proceeded to attack the vanity of the world and the fickleness of men. His courtship and, in 1594, his marriage produced his sonnet sequence (88 sonnets), called 'Amoretti' (Italian for 'Love-poems'), and his 'Epithalamium,' [ˌɛpɪθəˈleɪmɪəm] the most magnificent of marriage hymns in English and probably in world-literature; though his 'Prothalamium,' in honor of the marriage of two noble sisters, is a near rival to it.

Spenser, a zealous Protestant as well as a fine-spirited idealist, was in entire sympathy with Lord Grey's policy of stern repression of the Catholic Irish, to whom, therefore, he must have appeared merely as one of the hated crew of their pitiless tyrants. In 1598 he was appointed sheriff of the county of Cork; but a rebellion which broke out proved too strong for him, and he and his family barely escaped from the sack and destruction of his

tower. He was sent with despatches to the English Court and died in London in January, 1599, no doubt in part as a result of the hardships that he had suffered. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' is not only one of the longest but one of the greatest of English poems; it is also very characteristically Elizabethan. Spenser in The Faerie Queene looks back to a golden age of pastoral harmony and celebrates the court of Elizabeth I, through drawing a parallel with King Arthur’s legendary court. The poem absorbs and reflects a vast range of myth, legend, superstition and magic, and explores both history and contemporary politics. The Faerie Queene is Elizabeth, seen abstractly as Glory, and appearing in various guises. In a deliberate echo of the Arthurian legends, twelve of her knights undertake a series of adventures. The work is highly symbolic, and allusive, and is inevitably episodic in its effects. ‘A Gentle Knight’, with a red cross on his breast, is on a quest. He is Saint George, the symbolic saint of England. He had seen Gloriana (the Faerie Queene) in a vision, and would go in search of her. His adventures in trying to find her would form the poem’s story. The Faerie Queene has an annual twelve-day feast, on each day of which one of her courtiers leaves the court to set right a wrong. Each journey would involve a different virtue and the hero would be involved in each, while still seeking Gloriana.

Spenser only completed just over half of the planned twelve books of The Faerie Queene.

In general style and spirit Spenser has been one of the most powerful influences on all succeeding English romantic poetry. Spenser is a prominent lyric poet. In that respect he is one among a throng of melodists who made the Elizabethan age in many respects the greatest lyric period in the history of English or perhaps of any literature.

The qualities which especially distinguish the Elizabethan lyrics are fluency, sweetness, melody, and an enthusiastic joy in life, all spontaneous, direct, and exquisite. Uniting the genuineness of the popular ballad with the finer sense of conscious artistic poetry, these poems possess a charm different, though in an only half definable way, from that of any other lyrics. In subjects they display the usual lyric variety. There are songs of delight in Nature; a multitude of love poems of all moods; many pastorals, in which, generally, the pastoral conventions sit lightly on the genuine poetical feeling; occasional patriotic outbursts; and some reflective and religious poems. In stanza structure the number of forms is unusually great, but in most cases stanzas are internally varied and have a large admixture of short, ringing or musing, lines. The lyrics were published sometimes in collections by single authors, sometimes in the series of anthologies. Some of these anthologies were books of songs with the accompanying music; for music, brought with all the other cultural influences from Italy and France, was now enthusiastically cultivated, and the soft melody of many of the best Elizabethan lyrics is that of accomplished composers.

THE SONNETS.

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In the last decade, especially, of the century, no other lyric form compared in popularity with the sonnet. Here England was still following in the footsteps of Italy and France; it has been estimated that in the course of the century over 300,000 sonnets were written in Western Europe.

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By far the finest of all the sonnets are the best ones of Shakspere's one hundred and fifty-four, which were not published until 1609 but may have been mostly written before 1600.

Poetry became the pastime of educated high society. It is poetry of love and of loss, of solitude and change. The theme of transience, which was to feature strongly in all Shakespeare’s work, began to appear with greater frequency through the 1570s and 1580s.

A number of contrasts, or binaries, begin to emerge; these, from the Renaissance onwards, will be found again and again to express the contrasts, the extremes, and the ambiguities of the modern world. Time past and time present will be a constant source of contrast in literature: change, mutability, infidelity, and transience will be found in many texts.

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