The English Renaissance

The English Renaissance is the name for the flowering of English literature between the early sixteenth century and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 — a period that runs through the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I and ends in civil war. It arrived late compared with the Italian Renaissance, which had begun in the fourteenth century with Petrarch, and it was as much a revolution in religion as in learning. But in the last two decades of the sixteenth century and the first two of the seventeenth it produced an explosion of genius rarely matched in any literature: Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Francis Bacon and the translators of the King James Bible all worked within about forty years of each other. The age ends with John Milton, its last and most learned voice.

Humanism and the Reformation

The Renaissance reached England through humanism: the return ad fontes, to the original sources — classical Latin and Greek literature and the Bible in its original languages — as the basis of education and of a renewed Christian life. Its English centre was the circle of Thomas More (1478–1535), whose friend the Dutch scholar Erasmus lived in England and taught Greek at Cambridge. More’s Utopia (1516, in Latin) describes an imaginary island-commonwealth where property is held in common and religion is tolerant, as a mirror for the injustices of Europe; it gave the world a word and a genre. More, Lord Chancellor, refused to accept Henry VIII as head of the English Church and was beheaded in 1535.

Henry’s break with Rome (1534) began the English Reformation, which transformed literature through the English Bible. William Tyndale, working in exile and burned as a heretic in 1536, translated the New Testament from Greek into plain, powerful English (“Let there be light”, “the powers that be”, “the salt of the earth”, “fight the good fight”). Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) gave the English Church a liturgy of great beauty (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, “till death us do part”). The culmination was the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible (1611), produced by about fifty scholars and drawing heavily on Tyndale; for three centuries it was the book that every English speaker knew, and its cadences shaped English prose from Bunyan to Lincoln.

Education changed. The new grammar schools drilled boys in Latin rhetoric — Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, the art of argument on both sides of a question. Shakespeare at the King’s New School in Stratford received exactly this training. Translations brought the classics and the Continent into English: North’s Plutarch (Shakespeare’s source for the Roman plays), Golding’s Ovid, Florio’s Montaigne, Chapman’s Homer.

Poetry: the sonnet and the epic

Under Henry VIII, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey brought the Italian sonnet of Petrarch into English — Wyatt with a rough, personal intensity (“They flee from me that sometime did me seek”), Surrey creating the “English” sonnet form of three quatrains and a couplet that Shakespeare would make his own. Surrey also invented English blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in translating Virgil.

The Elizabethan golden age of poetry began in the 1580s. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) — courtier, soldier, ideal Renaissance man, killed at thirty-one fighting in the Netherlands — wrote the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, which launched a sonnet craze, the prose romance Arcadia, and The Defence of Poesy, the first great work of English criticism, arguing that poetry is superior to philosophy and history because it moves us to virtue by delightful example (“the poet… nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth”).

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99), “the poets’ poet”, set out to write England’s national epic. The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), unfinished at six books of a planned twelve, is a vast allegorical romance in which each book follows a knight embodying a virtue — the Redcrosse Knight (Holiness), Guyon (Temperance), Britomart (Chastity) — through a dreamlike landscape of monsters, enchantresses, castles and caves, all in honour of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, who figures Elizabeth I. He invented the nine-line Spenserian stanza (later used by Keats, Byron and Shelley) and wrote the marriage poem Epithalamion.

The great sonnet sequences followed — Spenser’s Amoretti, Drayton’s Idea, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (published 1609), 154 poems to a beautiful young man and a “dark lady” on love, time, beauty, death and the power of poetry to outlast them all.

The theatre

The most extraordinary achievement of the age was its drama. In 1576 the actor James Burbage built The Theatre in Shoreditch, just outside the City of London’s jurisdiction — the first purpose-built public playhouse in England since Roman times. The Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe (1599) and the Fortune followed. For a penny anyone could stand in the yard; thousands came each day. Companies of players, under noble patrons to avoid being treated as vagabonds, needed a constant supply of new plays. Women’s parts were played by boys.

The first great generation were the University Wits — educated young men who wrote for the stage: John Lyly, Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587) created the revenge tragedy, with its ghost, madness, play-within-a-play and bloodbath — the model for Hamlet.

Above them all stood Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), a shoemaker’s son, Cambridge scholar, government spy and reputed atheist, killed in a tavern brawl at Deptford at twenty-nine. Marlowe made blank verse thunder — Ben Jonson called it “Marlowe’s mighty line” — and created heroes of limitless desire: Tamburlaine, the Scythian shepherd who conquers the world; The Jew of Malta; Edward II; and Doctor Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of knowledge and power, and in his last hour cries “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!”

Then came William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who began in Marlowe’s shadow and outgrew everything: the histories, the comedies, the great tragedies — Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth — and the late romances.

Ben Jonson (1572–1637), bricklayer, soldier, scholar, twice imprisoned and once nearly hanged for killing an actor in a duel, was Shakespeare’s friend and rival. His city comedies — Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair — are savage satires of greed and gullibility built on classical rules. In 1616 he published his Works in folio, the first time an English playwright treated plays as serious literature; his tribute in Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) says “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

The Jacobean stage (under James I, 1603–25) grew darker. John Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi (1613) are tragedies of corruption, cruelty and courage in Italian courts (“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young”). Thomas Middleton (The Changeling, Women Beware Women), John Ford (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore) and Beaumont and Fletcher continued until Parliament closed the theatres in 1642.

The metaphysical poets

Early in the seventeenth century a new kind of poetry appeared, later dubbed “metaphysical” by Samuel Johnson, who disapproved: “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Its master, John Donne (1572–1631), was a Catholic-born rake who became Dean of St Paul’s and the greatest preacher of his age. His love poems (Songs and Sonnets) are dramatic, colloquial, argumentative and erotic: “Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows and through curtains call on us?” They are built on startling conceits — extended, ingenious comparisons, like the lovers’ souls as the two legs of a pair of compasses in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”. His Holy Sonnets turn the same violence on God: “Batter my heart, three-personed God”; “Death, be not proud”. His prose Devotions contain “No man is an island, entire of itself… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

George Herbert (1593–1633), a country parson, wrote The Temple, the finest devotional lyrics in English — quieter, intimate dialogues with God (“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back”). Andrew Marvell (1621–78), politician and Milton’s colleague, wrote “To His Coy Mistress” (“Had we but world enough and time… But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”) and “The Garden”. Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan continued the devotional line.

Alongside them were the Cavalier poets — Robert Herrick (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), Richard Lovelace (“Stone walls do not a prison make”), Sir John Suckling — elegant royalists writing graceful lyrics of love and wine.

Prose

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Lord Chancellor and philosopher of the new science, wrote the Essays (1597–1625) — the first in English, compressed and aphoristic (“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”). Robert Burton’s encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Urn Burial, and the sermons of Donne and Lancelot Andrewes are the glories of baroque prose. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) belongs to philosophy, but its prose is among the period’s finest.

The end of the age

The Civil War (1642–51), the execution of Charles I (1649) and the Puritan republic brought the theatre to an end and divided writers. John Milton served the republic; after its fall he wrote Paradise Lost (1667), the epic in which the Renaissance’s classical learning and the Reformation’s Protestant faith meet for the last time. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought a new age with new tastes — wit, reason, French manners — and a new theatre with actresses.

In conversation

• “Marlowe’s mighty line” — Jonson’s phrase for the thunder of Elizabethan blank verse; used of any grand, sweeping style.
• A conceit — in the metaphysical sense, a daring, elaborately argued comparison (Donne’s compasses).
• “Not of an age, but for all time” — Jonson on Shakespeare; the standard way to praise a timeless writer.