Chapter Two
The English Renaissance
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The English Renaissance
Chaucer's death starts the
transition period in England
full of significant changes.
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The King of England, after
the Wars of Roses,
assumed greater power
than before.
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Henry VII (1485 ～ 1509)
He founded the Tudor dynasty which was
a centralized monarchy and met the needs
of the rising bourgeoisie and so won its
support.
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Henry VIII (1509 ～ 1547)
Declaring the separation from the
Roman Catholic Church, implementing
a large-scale suppression of the
monasteries and confiscating the
property of the Church to enrich the
new bourgeois, he started the
movement called the Reformation, the
essence of which is the fight of the
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bourgeois for power.
Queen Mary (1553 ～ 1558)
She carried out the CounterReformation by put an end to the
Reformation and caused the bloody
religious persecution.
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Elizabeth I (1558 ～ 1603)
The reign of Elizabeth I was a period of
political and religious stability on the one hand
and economic prosperity on the other. The
Church of England was re-established, ending
the long time religious strife; commerce and
industry forged ahead as a result of the
enclosure movement at home and the opening
of new sea routes in the world. In the
meantime, the rise of the bourgeoisie also
showed its influence in the sphere of cultural
life.
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The English Renaissance
The word “ Renaissance ” means revival,
specifically between the 14th and mid
17th century, revival of interest in
ancient Greek and Roman culture.
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The English Renaissance
Renaissance, therefore, in essence, was a
historical period in which the European
humanist thinkers and scholars made
attempts to get rid of conservatism in
feudalist Europe and introduce new ideas
that expressed the interests of the rising
bourgeoisie, to lift the restrictions in all
areas placed by the Roman church
authorities
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The English Renaissance
Roman Catholic Church
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The English Renaissance
During the period of Renaissance, old sciences
revived and new sciences emerged, national
languages and national cultures free from the
absolute control of the Papal authority in Rome
took shape and art and literature flourished as
never before. With a thirsting curiosity and great
love for classical literature, the authority of the
Roman Catholic Church was shaken and people
came to a new awareness.
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The English Renaissance
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The English Renaissance
Renaissance started in Florence and Venice and went
to embrace the rest of Europe .
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The English Renaissance
Renaissance came later in England than other European
countries. When it did come, it was to produce some
towering figures in world literary heritage.
Florence of Italy
Venice
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London in Britain13
The English Renaissance
Humanism is both the keynote of the
Renaissance and the intellectual liberation
movement, associated with new attitudes
to ancient Greek and Latin literature. The
humanists began by criticizing and
evaluating the Latin and Greek authors in
the light of what they believed to be
Roman and Greek standards of civilization.
They took interest in human life and human
activities and gave expression to the new
feeling of admiration for human beauty,
human achievement.
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The English Renaissance
Ancient Greek writers
Plato
Homer
Aeschylus
The English Renaissance was an exciting time for
literature which experienced a burst of ideas and
literary brilliance.
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The English Renaissance
Human beauty
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The English Renaissance
Thomas More (1477 ～ 1535)
was the leading humanist of his day.
Scholar
thinker
statesman
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The English Renaissance
Among his writings the best known is Utopia
(1516) which tells of a journey to an imaginary
island named Utopia, where an ideal form of
society exists.
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Utopia
Its title comes from the Greek word meaning
“ nowhere ” and was adopted by More as the name of
his ideal commonwealth.
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The English Renaissance
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 ～ 1599)
was the most influential poet and the
dominating literary intellect in the late 16th
century in England .
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The Shepherd's Calendar (1597)
A poem in the traditional pastoral form and
his first important work, established his
poetic reputation. The union of line and
meter in the poem is more harmonious,
more supple, and richer than that in the
works of Chaucer. His sonnet Amoretti is
one of the most famous sonnet sequences
of the Elizabethan Age.
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The Shepherd's Calendar
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The Faerie Queene
In Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie
Queene he devised a verse form called the
Spenserian Stanza, which consists of eight
ten -syllable lines, plus a ninth line of 12
syllables, an iambic rhythm and a rhyme
scheme as follows: abab bcbc c.
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The Faerie Queene
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The English Renaissance
Francis Bacon (1561 ～ 1626)
He showed his great intellectual
energy in his day.
politician
philosopher
essayist
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The English Renaissance
While being the founder of English
materialist philosophy and the founder
of modern science in England , he is also
the first great English essayist.
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Francis Bacon
In 1597 Francis Bacon
published his first
collection of essays,
which made popular in
English a literary form
widely practiced
afterward. It is the
most informal and casual
of his works, the Essays,
that is read most often.
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His major works
The Advancement of
Learning and New
Instrument.
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The English Renaissance
Based on the miracle play, the morality
play, the interlude and the classical
drama, drama flourished in this age
more than any other form of literature.
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miracle play
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morality play
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The English Renaissance
Christopher Marlowe
(1564 ～ 1595)
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Christopher Marlowe
He was the greatest of the pioneers of
English drama. His importance is due to
the energy with which he endowed the
blank verse line (unrhymed iambic
pentameter), which in his hands developed
an unprecedented suppleness and power.
His plays have great intensity, but
sometimes they show a genius which is epic
rather than dramatic.
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Christopher Marlowe
His acknowledged
masterpieces are:
Tamburlaine
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Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus
Edward II is his best
constructed piece of theatre
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Christopher Marlowe
The final scene of Doctor
Faustus is one of the most
intensely dramatic in
English literature. It shows
his musical handling and
control of the ten-syllable
line.
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The English Renaissance
Marlowe's works paved the route for the
greatest dramatist—William
Shakespeare—whose accomplishments
were the monument of the English
Renaissance and whose works gave the
fullest expression to humanist ideals.
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