Renaissance

Renaissance was a period of transition in European history from the dark middle ages to one of enlightenment and modernity. The names Renaissance and Humanism are often applied to the same movement. The term renaissance, which was first used in England, only as late as the nineteenth century, etymologically means “rebirth”. It began in Florence, Italy in the 14th century. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople. However, the seeds of the Renaissance reached England through France during the late 15th century and the movement had some great implications.

Firstly, the Renaissance meant the death of medieval scholasticism which had for long been keeping human thoughts in bondage. The schoolmen got themselves entangled in useless controversies and tried to apply the principles of Aristotelian philosophy to the doctrines of Christianity, thus giving birth to vast literature.

Secondly, it signaled a revolt against the spiritual authority – the authority of the Pope. The Reformation though not a part of the revival of learning, was yet a companion movement in England. This defiance, of spiritual authority went hand and hand with that of intellectual authority, Renaissance intellectuals distinguished themselves by their flagrant anti-authoritarianism.

Thirdly, the Renaissance implied a greater perception of beauty and polish in the Greek and Latin scholars. This beauty and this polish were sought by Renaissance men of letters to be incorporated into their native literature. Further, it meant the birth of a kind of imitative tendency implied in the term “classicism”.

Lastly, the Renaissance marked a change from the theocentric to the homocentric conception of the universe. Human values came to be recognized as permanent values, and they were sought to be enriched and illuminated by the heritage of antiquity. This brought a new kind of Paganism and marked the rise of humanism and also by implication, materialism.

Difference between English and Italian Renaissance

The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. England had a strong tradition in literature and it got stronger in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period.

Impact on Society

Social conditions

In this period England’s population doubled; prices rocketed, old social loyalties dissolved, and new industrial, agricultural, and commercial veins were first tapped. Real wages hit an all-time low in the 1620s, and social relations were plunged into a state of fluidity from which the merchant and the ambitious lesser gentleman profited at the expense of the aristocrat and the laborer, as satires and comedies current from the 1590s complain. The position of the crown, politically dominant yet financially insecure, had always been potentially unstable, and, when Charles I lost the confidence of his greater subjects in the 1640s, his authority crumbled. Meanwhile, the huge body of the poor fell even further behind the rich.

The intellectual and religious revolution

The barely disguised condition of social unrest was accompanied by an intellectual revolution, as the medieval elements collapsed before the new science, new religion, and new humanism. The majority of people were more immediately affected by the religious revolutions of the 16th century. A person in early adulthood at the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 would, by her death in 1603, have been vouchsafed an unusually disillusioning insight into the duty owed by private conscience to the needs of the state. The Tudor church hierarchy was an instrument of social and political control, yet the mid-century controversies over the faith had already wrecked any easy confidence in the authority of doctrines and forms and had taught people to inquire carefully into the rationale of their own beliefs. The Elizabethan ecclesiastical compromise was the object of continual criticism, from radicals both within (who desired progressive reforms, such as the abolition of bishops) and without (who desired the return of England to the Roman Catholic fold), but the incipient liberalism of individuals such as John Milton and the scholar and churchman William Chillingworth was held in check by the majority’s unwillingness to tolerate a plurality of religions in a
supposedly unitary state.

The race for cultural development

The third complicating factor was the race to catch up with Continental developments in arts and philosophy. The Tudors needed to create a class of educated diplomats, statesmen, and officials and to dignify their court by making it a fount of cultural as well as political patronage. The new learning, widely disseminated through the Erasmian (after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus) educational programs of such men as John Colet and Sir Thomas Elyot, proposed to use systematic schooling in Latin authors and some Greek to encourage in the social elites a flexibility of mind and civilized serviceableness that would allow enlightened princely government to walk hand in hand with responsible scholarship. Humanism fostered an intimate familiarity with the classics that was a powerful incentive for the creation of an English literature of answerable dignity. It fostered as well a practical, secular piety that left its impress everywhere on Elizabethan writing.

Development of the English language

The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate inferiority to the eloquent Classical languages, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even archery argued in favor of unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward linguistic borrowings. A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address as comprehensive an audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plow, as William Tyndale put it—produced the first true classics of English prose.

In verse, Tottel’s much-reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the tastes of the early Tudor court. The modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets, who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic themes and favoring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy, restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson, to outlive the cult of elegance.

Renaissance and literature

(1558-1625)
The Elizabethan and early Stuart periods have been said to represent the most brilliant century of all English literature. The reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603; she was succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland, who took the title James I of England as well. English literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625, is properly called Jacobean. These years produced a gallery of authors of genius, some of whom have never been surpassed, and conferred on scores of lesser talents the enviable ability to write with fluency, imagination, and verve.

Non-creative Literature

Naturally enough, the first impact of the Renaissance in England was registered by the universities, being the repositories of all learning. Some English scholars, becoming aware of the revival of learning in Italy, went to that country to benefit from it and to examine personally the manuscripts brought there by the fleeing Greek scholars of Constantinople. Prominent among these scholars were William Grocyn (14467-1519), Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), and John Colet (14677-1519). After returning from Italy they organised the teaching of Greek in Oxford. They were such learned and reputed scholars of Greece that Erasmus came from Holland to learn Greek from them. Apart from scholars, the impact of the Renaissance is also; in a measure, to be seen in the work of the educationists of the age. Sir Thomas Elyot (14907-1546) wrote: “The Governour” (1531) which is a treatise on moral philosophy modeled on Italian works and full of the spirit of Roman antiquity. Other educationists were Sir John Cheke (1514-57), Sir Thomas Wilson (1525-81), and Sir Roger Ascham (1515-68). Out of all the educationists, the last named is the most important, on account of his Scholemaster published two years after his death. Therein he puts forward his views on the teaching of the classics. His style is too obviously based upon the ancient Roman writers. “By turns”, remarks Legouis, “he imitates Cicero’s periods and Seneca’s nervous conciseness”. In addition to these well-known educationists, must be mentioned a sizable number of now obscure ones—”those many unacknowledged, unknown guides who, in school and University, were teaching men to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity” (Legouis).

Prose

The most important prose writers who exhibited well the influence of the Renaissance on English prose are Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Lyly, and Sidney. The first named was a Dutchman who, as we have already said, came to Oxford to learn Greek. His chief work was The Praise of Folly which is the English translation of his most important work written in England. It is, according to Tucker Brook, “the best expression in literature of the attack that the Oxford reformers were making upon the medieval system.” Erasmus wrote this work in 1510 at the house of his friend Sir Thomas More who was executed at the bidding of Henry VIII for his refusal to give up his allegiance to the ‘ Pope. More’s famous prose romance Utopia was, in the words of Legouis, a “true prologue to the Renaissance.'” It was the first book written by an Englishman who achieved European fame, but it was written in Latin (1516) and only later (1555) was translated into English. Curiously enough, the next work by an English man again to acquire European fame is Bacon’s Novum Organwn-was also written originally in Latin.

Passing on to the prose writers of the Elizabethan age-the age of the flowering of the Renaissance-we find them markedly influenced both in their style and thought content by the revival of the antique classical learning. Sidney in Arcadia, Lyly in Euphues, and Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity write an English which is away from the language of common speech, and is either too heavily laden—as in the case of Sidney and Lyly-with bits of classical finery, or modeled on Latin syntax, as in the case of Hooker. Cicero seemed to these writers a very obvious and respectable model. Bacon, however, in his sententiousness and cogency comes near Tacitus and turns away from the prolixity, diffuseness, and ornamentation associated with Ciceronian prose. Further, in his own career and his Essays, Bacon stands as a representative of the materialistic, Machiavellian facet of the Renaissance, particularly of Renaissance Italy. He combines in himself the dispassionate pursuit of truth and the keen desire for material advancement.

Poetry

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and the Earl of Surrey (15177-47) were pioneers of the new poetry in England. After Chaucer, the spirit of English poetry had slumbered for almost a century. The change in pronunciation in the fifteenth century had created a lot of confusion in prosody which in the practice of such important poets as Lydgate and Skelton had been reduced to a mockery. “The revival”, as Legoius says, “was an uphill task; verse had to be drawn from the languor to which it had sunk in Stephen Hawes, and from the disorder in which Skelton had plunged it; all had to be done anew”. It was Wyatt and Surrey who came forward to do it.

As Mair puts it, it is with “these two courtiers that the modern English poetry begins.” Though they wrote much earlier, it was only in 1557, a year before Elizabeth’s coronation, that their work was published in Tottel’s Miscellany which is, according to G. H. Mair, “one of the landmarks of English literature.” Of the two, Wyatt had traveled extensively in Italy and France and had come under the spell of the Italian Renaissance. It must be remembered that the work of Wyatt and Surrey does not reflect the impact of the Rome of antiquity alone, but also that of modern Italy. So far as versification is concerned, Wyatt and Surrey imported into England various new Italian metrical patterns. Moreover, they gave English poetry a new sense of grace, dignity, delicacy, and harmony which was found lacking in the works of Chaucer and the Chaucerians alike. Further, they Were highly influenced by the love poetry of Petrarch and they did their best to imitate it. There is much idealism, if not downright artificiality, in Petrarch’s kind of love poetry.

It goes to the credit of Wyatt to have introduced the sonnet into English literature, and of Surrey to have first written blank verse. Both the sonnet and blank verse were later to be practiced by a vast number of the best English poets. According to David Daiches, “Wyatt’s sonnets represent one of the most interesting movements toward metrical discipline to be found in English literary history.” Though in his sonnets he did not employ regular iambic pentameters, he created a sense of discipline among the poets of his times. Surrey’s work is characterized by exquisite grace and tenderness which we find missing from that of Wyatt. Moreover, he is a better craftsman and gives greater harmony to his poetry. Surrey employed blank verse in his translation of the fourth book of The Aeneid, the work which was first translated into English verse by Gavin Douglas a generation earlier, but in heroic couplets.

Drama

The revival of ancient classical learning scored its first clear impact on English drama in the middle of the sixteenth century. Previous to this impact there had been a pretty vigorous native tradition of drama, particularly comedy. This tradition had its origin in the liturgical drama and had progressed through the miracle and the mystery, and later the morality, to the interlude. John Heywood had written quite a few vigorous interludes, but they were altogether different in tone, spirit, and purpose from the Greek and Roman drama of antiquity. The first English regular tragedy Gorboduc (written by Sackville and Norton, and first acted in 1562), and the comedy Ralph Roister Doister (written about 1550 by Nicholas Udall) were very much imitations of classical tragedy and comedy. It is interesting to note that English dramatists came not under the spell of the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the tragedy writers, and Aristophanes, the comedy writer but the Roman dramatists Seneca, the tragedy writer, and Plautus and. Terence! the comedy writers. It was indeed unfortunate as Greek drama is vastly superior to Roman drama. Gorboduc is a slavish imitation of Senecan tragedy and has all its features without much of its life. Ralph Roister Doister is modeled upon Plautus and Terence. It is based on the stupid endeavors of the hero to win the love of a married woman.

Later on, the “University Wits” struck a note of independence in their dramatic work. They refused to copy Roman drama as slavishly as the writers of Gorboduc and Ralph Roister Doister. Even so, their plays are not free from the impact of the Renaissance; rather they show it amply, though not in the same way. In their imagination, they were all fired by the new literature which showed them new dimensions of human capability. They were humanists through and through. All of them—Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge, Marlowe, and Kyd-show in their dramatic work not, of course, a slavish tendency to ape the ancients but a chemical action of Renaissance learning on the native genius fired by the enthusiasm of discovery and aspiration so typical of the Elizabethan age. In this respect, Marlowe stands in the forefront of the University Wits. Rightly has he been called “the true child of the Renaissance”.

Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as a poet and intellect, but he remains elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part, Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society. The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully realized.