English Renaissance Poetry and Prose

The growing city of London was a major influence on the literature of the English Renaissance. The printers and booksellers were mostly situated in London, and the majority of the middle-class with their decisive taste for literature written for ordinary people was also in London. That class had its own writers, such as Thomas Deloney (ca 1543-1600), with their favorite books — instruction and conduct books, romances, plays, religious tracts, and sensational ballads.

Literary norms made Elizabethans search for appropriate forms of expression. Several important literary modes in the period are pastoral, heroic, lyric, satiric, elegiac, tragic, and comic. Other canons — for instance, keeping not only to subject-matter and attitude but also to formal structure, metre, style, size, and occasion — characterize such leading Elizabethan genres as epic, tragedy, sonnet, verse epistle, epigram, hymn, masque, and funeral elegy.

Another principle of Elizabethan aesthetics was that Renaissance writers looked to classical and continental works as models to learn from, follow, change, and, if possible, to excel. The essential models for epic were Homer (before 700 BC) and Virgil (70-19 BC), for pastoral Theocritus (3^rd— 2^nd centuries BC) and Virgil, for rhetoric and prose style Cicero (106-43 BC), for comedy Plautus (254-184 BC) and Terence (ca 190 — 159 BC), for tragedy Seneca (ca 4 BC — 65 AD), for the sonnet Petrarch (1304-1374), for the romantic epic Ariosto (1474-1533) and Tasso (1544- 1595), and Ovid (43 BC — ca 17 AD) for love poetry and mythological narratives. The noblest lyric genres were considered hymns of praises to God and odes celebrating worthy persons and exceptional occasions. An important variety of a 16^thcentury ode was the epithalamium, a poem celebrating marriage. The most famous example is Spenser's Epithalamion, whose long irregular stanzas display a bewildering metrical complexity, the summit of Elizabethan verse craft.

Early in the Elizabethan period appeared famous collections of verse by various writers. Songs and Sonnets was first published by Richard Tottel in 1557, with new poems in new editions continually added up to 1587. It is generally known as Tottel's Miscellany. It summed up the lyrical achievement of its age, most notably that of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (ca 1517-1547), who introduced the sonnet into English literature. Established by Petrarch, the sonnet became the most important lyric genre in 16^,h-century England. The Petrarchan sonnet sequence is a series of fourteen-line sonnets (with songs in between) describing the feeling of a lover as he desires and idolizes the beauty of an unattainable lady. Some sonnet sequences dealt with religious devotion, or might address any topic. More than any other genre, the sonnet stood out by its rigid formal structure, a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, in three principal rhyming patterns. The most common Italian form, which Wyatt, Sidney and others imitated, was divided structurally into eight and six lines, rhymed abba abba cdecde. The English sonnet, introduced by Surrey and practised by later poets, especially by Shakespeare, consists of three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. Spenser, the most experimental prosodist of the century, preferred a harder and richer form: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Outstanding achievements of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence are Sidney's Astrophil and Stella (publ. 1591), Spenser's Amoretti (publ. 1595) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (publ. 1609).

Among the popular genres was also the epic, a long poem in high style, with a heroic story from the nation's distant past. 16^th-century England witnessed the success of Spenser's Faerie Queene (publ. 1590; 1596; 1609), for which he invented an intricate nine-line "Spenserian stanza" (eight lines of iambic pentameter, rhymed ababbcbc, concluding with a line of twelve syllables, an Alexandrine, which rhymes with the previous line).

Two other important types of poetry came to their full expression in the 1590s, the epyllion, and the verse satire. The epyllion, which celebrated a famous erotic story from long ago, was derived from Ovid. The most magnificent example of all was Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, completed by Chapman (publ. 1598). But Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (both ca 1593) made a splendid contribution to this genre.

In genres other than the lyric, John Skelton (ca 1460-1529) was the most original poet of the period. He held an academic degree of poet laureate in Latin rhetoric and served as tutor to young Henry VIII. Skelton's English satirical verse — Speak, Parrot, his Colin Clout, and Why Come Ye Not to Court? — are bitter attacks on the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. Many of his poems are in "Skeltonics", a careless succession of irregular short rhymed lines.

With the exception of the essayist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and the critic Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), prose was not yet of literary quality, beauty or interest. Later the Bible translation under King James I (r. 1603-1625) would improve the low estate of prose writing. But so far only some examples definitely stood out, such as Sidney's Arcadia (publ. 1590). Fully developed in thought, captivating and imaginative in narrative, it rose above its thematic pastoral sphere. John Lyly's (1554-1606) Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), an elaborate and ornate love story, later gave name to a style known as Euphuism. Among other fiction writers were Robert Greene (1558-1592), whose Pandosto (1588) was used for Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, and Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), with his Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Yet, Sidney's Defence of Poesy remains the only major work of literary criticism in 16^th century England.

The language choice in writers' works was an issue of great seriousness. Two opposing trends, reverence for the classics and pride in the vernacular language, prompted many distinguished translations. The most appropriate classical poems for the Elizabethans were the version of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1565) by Arthur Golding (ca 1536 — ca 1605) and the translation of Iliad (1598) by George Chapman (ca 1559-1634). Collections of stories from the Continent were also popular at that time, since Elizabethan dramatists resorted to them for plots. The most notable was The Palace of Pleasure (1566-1575) compiled by William Painter (ca 1540-1594).

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