Renaissance Literature PDF

Lecture 7: Renaissance Literature ! $Poetry $Prose $Bible Translations  Renaissance Poetry 1. Genres and Conventions in Poetry: ! Literary convention = a device, principle, procedure or form which is generally accepted and t...

Lecture 7: Renaissance Literature ! $Poetry $Prose $Bible Translations  Renaissance Poetry 1. Genres and Conventions in Poetry: ! Literary convention = a device, principle, procedure or form which is generally accepted and through which there is an agreement between writer and reader/audience which allows various freedoms and restrictions (e.g. the sonnet has 14 lines, the epic begins in medias res, a play has characters, monologues, dialogues, etc.) - the PASTORAL: presented a simple and idealized world, inhabited by shepherds and shepherdesses, concerned with the pursuit of humble contentment rather than fame or fortune, with the everyday joys and pleasures of pastoral life rather than war, politics or commerce. E.g.:Edmund Sir PhilipSpenser Sidney’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579) – a collection of 12 eclogues* representing the 12 months of the year. *eclogue = a short poem (often a pastoral) in the form of a dialogue or a soliloquy, modelled on Virgil’s pastorals or bucolic poems (The Eclogues). - the EPYLLION (little epic) = erotic treatment of a mythological narrative, derived from Ovid – a poetic form which appealed to courtly taste, asserting the primacy of physical beauty and the imagination. E.g. Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander ! William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis - the SONNET = 14-line poem (It. sonetto = little sound/song) in iambic pentameter, of varying rhyme schemes – poetic form established by Petrarch. Typical themes: unrequited love, change, mutability, infidelity, transience, sleep, absence, renunciation, etc. In the tradition established by Petrarch, the poet complains of his lady’s coldness, describes the contrary states of feeling the lover experiences, idealizes the woman, and almost always suffers, as a disappointed, ill-treated lover. earliest sonnets in English: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (in Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557) – upper-class, courtly, highly formal, imported form modelled on Petrarch’s Canzoniere; Wyatt: praised for his “intensity of feeling, unaffectedness of phrase, and directness of tone” (Blamires, 35):  They flee from me that sometime did me seek, With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild, and do not remember ! That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand, and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. (Sir Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me) Surrey – earned the reputation of having invented blank verse (translating Books II and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid in unrhymed iambic pentameter) - Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (w.1582/p.1591); - Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates fulfilled sexual love achieved within marriage; - William Shakespeare’s Sonnets (p. 1609) – the form’s conventional limits are exploded (the loved one is a man, the lady is dark and treacherous; the form’s usual concern with correctness and politeness gives way to more urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness and highly charged ironies). - the HEROIC EPIC: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96) – brings together English myth and the glorification of the monarch (typical of the Tudor era) to make a poem of praise and critique – “the most ambitious single contribution to Elizabethan poetry and the single most important work in the history of English poetry since The Canterbury Tales.” (Carter & McRae, 66). - ! celebrates the court of Elizabeth I (Gloriana) drawing a parallel with King Arthur’s legendary court; its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic epic. - the Spenserian Stanza: an innovation, the form he used in The Faerie Queene, consisting of 8 lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcbc + an additional line of 12 syllables (an Alexandrine) rhyming with the preceding line: Upon a great adventure he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gave, The greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond, To winne him worship, and her grace to have, Which all of earthly things he most did crave; And ever as he rode, his hart did earne To prove his puissance in battell brave Upon his foe, and his new force to learne; Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne. Other poetic forms: - the complaint poem (tragic and moral); - the epigram; - satire; - poetry for music (madrigal, ayre) Prothalamion) ! - epithalamia (= marriage hymns; e.g. Spenser’s Epithalamion and - lyrics (Thomas Campion, Book of Airs) 2. Major Renaissance Poets: %Edmund Spenser Sir Philip Sidney# Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586): epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: courtier, diplomat, soldier, poet, friend and patron of the arts; - His reputation as a writer rests on three major works: " Arcadia (1590) – a long pastoral romance in prose, interspersed with many poems and songs: “the most important original work of English ! prose fiction produced before the 18th century” (W. Ringler); " Astrophel and Stella (1591) – the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet sequences (108 sonnets and 11 songs, relying heavily on the sonnet conventions established by Petrarch); " An Apologie for Poetrie (The Defense of Poesy) (1595) – the first important work of literary criticism in English: it defends literature against the Puritans’ attacks, on the ground of its unique power to teach and to delight (emphasizing its ability to depict the world not as it is, but as it ought to be). Edmund Spenser (1552-1599): not a “real courtier” by birth (the son of a merchant) but he received a thorough education at Cambridge; the great poet of the Renaissance, who followed and enlarged upon the tradition of Chaucer. " The Shepheardes Calender (1579) – dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney (his patron, at that time) – an excellent collection of pastoral eclogues " marriage poems: Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596) – reveal his exquisite lyric gift; " The Faerie Queene (1590-96) – the central poem of the Elizabethan period (an epic of Protestant nationalism, a mythical romance, and an allegory – ! moral, religious, and political); a public poem, addressed to the queen; - it celebrates the achievements of heroes and heroines of history and myth, affirming nation and values (Truth, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy – the virtues embodied by the queen’s Knights); - the Faerie Queene (Gloriana) = Elizabeth I; - Arthur – in quest for Gloriana’s love, exemplifies Magnificence, the complete man; - the original plan = 12 books, focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana; only 6 books were completed; “Spenser made a radical attempt to relocate and reintroduce the epic form for England and the Elizabethan age by inventing the Spenserian stanza as the new form for his poem. […] He wanted to make himself the laureate of a generation, and in his formal, linguistic, and imaginative invention he is generally considered to have surpassed all earlier poetic achievements.” (Carter and McRae, 68).  Renaissance Prose Prose = the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, but most prose writing manifested in contexts not conventionally considered “imaginative” or “literary” (e.g. tracts, pamphlets, treatises, histories); - ! a fascination with books of courtly manners, such as The Courtier by Castiglione – translated from Italian in 1561; many “how-to” books catering to all social strata were published: Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governour (1531); Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook (1609) - a growth in travel writing – more exotic and imaginative texts than the book which had established the tradition, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (written in Latin - 1516, translated into English – 1551): Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589-1600); William Harrison, Description of England (1577), Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of Guiana (1596) - treatises on education – the influence of the classics, the philosophical and social emphasis on order: Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus (1545), The Schoolmaster (1570) - autobiographies – Robert Greene’s A Groats-Worth of Wit (1592) – here we find a slighting reference to Shakespeare (the first time his name is mentioned by another writer), described as “an upstart Crow, beautified with Our Feathers, who is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” “Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” (Robert Greene, A Groats-Worth of Wit, 1592) - works of prose fiction: - Sidney’s Arcadia; - John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and the sequel, Euphues and His England (1580) – set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism, a flowery, overelaborate style that came to be known as euphuism: ! “Gentlewoman, my acquaintance being so little I am afraid my credit will be less, for they commonly are soonest believed that are best beloved, and they liked best whom we have known longest. Nevertheless, the noble mind suspecteth no guile without cause, neither condemneth any wight without proof. Having therefore notice of your heroical heart I am the better persuaded of my good hap …” (Lyly, Euphues) - Thomas Nashe, credited by some critics as having “invented modern narrative,” particularly with The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) – a mixture of genres and styles from picaresque to mock-historical, from parody to character comedy; - the philosophical essay: Sir Francis Bacon – “no English intellectual symbolizes the idea of Renaissance more than Bacon” (Carter and McRae, 79); in many respects, he can be regarded as one of the leading figures in the development of English thinking; - his style is more economical, yet rhetorical; his subjects range from law to politics, from government to ethics, from religion to colonialism; - he perfected the essay form in English, on the French model of Montaigne; ! - key works: Essays (1597), The Advancement of Learning (1605) - his essays raise issues fundamental to the era and give a remarkable insight into the thought of the period (e.g. “Of Revenge” explores the notion of revenge which was dominant in Elizabethan drama: Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, etc.): “What is Truth; said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer … The knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it; is the sovereign good of human nature.” (Bacon, “Of Truth”) “Man fear death, as children fear to go in the dark: and, as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy, and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due onto nature, is weak.” (Bacon, “Of Death”)  Bible Translations $ The Reformation of the Church provided a strong stimulus for the “art of translation,” as reformers wanted to address as wide an audience as possible – “the bishop as well as the boy who follows the plough”; ! $ William Tyndale produced, in 1526, an English version of the New Testament, based on a Greek text established by Erasmus, and used a Hebrew text for his translations from the Old Testament (fragments); $ Miles Coverdale, based his translation on Tyndale’s version and on German Bibles, and published, in 1535, the first complete translation of the Bible into Modern English = “the Great Bible”; $ The Geneva Bible (1560) is the version that became most popular (used by Shakespeare, Donne, Oliver Cromwell, John Bunyan, among many others) and remained so until well into the 17th century – includes illustrations and annotations (glosses); $ The Bishop’s Bible (1568) – a rival version that returned to translating from the Latin Vulgate; $ The King James Version (the Authorized Version) - based on the previous 2, the result of collaborative work of 54 scholars, published in 1611 – effectively replaced the Geneva Bible in popularity and became “the single most influential work in the English language.” Lecture 8: Elizabethan Drama ! " The Elizabethan Theatre " Main dramatic genres of the Renaissance " Major Elizabethan Dramatists: - the University Wits - William Shakespeare The Elizabethan Theatre ! London: South Bank with Elizabethan Playhouses, 1616 just outside the city walls. Burbage was an actor with the drink. So people already went there for entertainment. Earl of Leicester’s Men, who played in the Theatre for This map shows the outdoor theatres and inns where plays were regularly performed in Shakespeare’s London.  although the first Rose theatre (1587-92) may not have a tiring house behind the stage with a backstage area, where actors dressed and waited to come on. Above this were lords’ rooms, rooms for storage, and a room level with ‘the heavens’ to work the special effects from; galleried seating all around the yard, on several levels, What did the outdoor playhouses look like? All outdoor playhouses had: a central yard that was open to the sky; Playhouses were sometimes built by businessmen who athe saw raised stage rising sticking out popularity into touring of the the yard;acting companies a roof over the stage, which was called ‘the heavens’, although the first Rose theatre (1587-92) may not have had one; a tiring house behind the stage with a backstage area, where actors dressed and waited to come on. Above companies for a set number of years. The company paid this were lords’ rooms, rooms for storage, and a room the playhouse owner a share of the takings; usually half level with ‘the heavens’ to work the special effects from; galleried seating all around the yard, on several levels, which was roofed. A 1595 sketch of a performance in progress at the Swan, by Johannes de Witt.  covered in nutshells. Some visitors complained that the pit smelled of garlic and beer and no good citizen would show his face there. So paying more got the AUDIENCES wealthy a seat under cover, and perhaps a cushioned seat. The groundlings stand in the yard very close to the stage during performances, with more expensive seating in the galleries surrounding them. How did the audience behave? Some of the audience went to the theatre to be seen and admired, dressed in their best clothes. But these people were not necessarily well behaved. Most didn’t sit and watch in silence like today. They clapped the heroes and booed the villains, and cheered the special effects. Pickpockets sometimes joined the audience and in 1612,magistrates banned music at the end of plays at the Fortune, saying the crowd had caused ‘tumults and outrages’ with their dances. We have very few accounts of how the audience behaved, and most of them are about ‘bad’ behaviour. This probably tells us more about what was ‘news’ than how audiences behaved all the time. Did you know? Today, the place where you buy your theatre tickets is called the Box Offi ce. In Shakespeare’s day, as peop le came into the theatre or climbed the step s to their seats, audiences had to put their m oney in a box. So the place where audiences pay became known as the box office.  Renaissance Drama 1. The beginnings of Modern Drama: - Everyman (morality play) marks the end of the Middle Ages - ! Interludes: (= short dramatic entertainments for a small cast, performed indoors at court or in colleges): - Henry Medwall: Nature, Fulgens and Lucrece (1497) - John Heywood: The Four P’s (1522), A Merry Play between Johan Johan, the Husband, Tyb his Wife, and Sir Johan the Priest (p. 1533), The Play of the Weather (p. 1533) - First comedies: (classical in form – modelled on Plautus and Terrence – but English in content) - Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552) = the 1st English comedy - Gammer Gurton’s Needle (anonymous/William Stevenson?) “lively, vivid, native English material put into the regular form of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence: this was the fortunate combination that looked forward to the comedies of Shakespeare.” (Abrams, 423) - First tragedies: (influenced by Seneca – violent and bloody plots, resounding rhetorical speeches, ghosts, references to Fortune’s wheel, etc.) - Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc (1561) = the 1st English tragedy (an interesting fusion of classical form with native legendary history and features of medieval dramatic presentation; modelled on Seneca, ! influenced by the morality play, written in blank verse); - Thomas Gascoigne, Jocasta (an English version of Euripides’s Phoenissae) = the first English tragedy from the Greek; - Thomas Preston, Cambises, King of Persia (1560) – half morality play, half tragedy with a heavily moralistic action. Other genres: courtly revels, masques (at court, often played by schoolboy troupes of choristers, magnificent displays of song, dance, scenery, costume glorifying the monarch – apogee under James I). The influence of the classics: the presence of classical writers – Greek and Latin – somewhere in the background of all English literature (from Chaucer up to the 20th century) cannot be ignored and their influence cannot be overvalued. But English drama was in fact moving away from these models and establishing its own style and form. (Carter & McRae 71). – the essential Englishness of the characters, of settings, of themes, and gradually of the style as well. 2. Shakespeare’s Predecessors/Contemporaries: The University Wits: * University Wits = a group of young writers at the beginning of the Elizabethan period who, after studying at Oxford or Cambridge, moved ! to London to take up writing professionally (the first generation of professional playwrights in England): John Lyly, Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe. $ John Lyly (c. 1554 – 1606): - prose comedy, Campaspe (1583) – source = Pliny (the story of Alexander the Great and his Theban prisoner, beautiful Campaspe); Midas (1592) and Endimion (1591) – both based on classical legend, shrewdly allegorized so as to point to contemporary affairs. $ George Peele (1556-1597?): - less original than Lyly, more prolific; The Arraignment of Paris (1583) – tone and atmosphere of the romantic pastoral (song, dance, spectacle); The Battle of Alcazar (1594) – verse tragedy dealing with recent history (too extravagant in rhetoric); The Old Wives’ Tale (a complex synthesis of fairytale material). $ Robert Greene (1560-92) – better known for his disparagement of Shakespeare in his autobiography (A Groatsworth of Wit), wrote plays characterized by “a craftsmanlike plotting, a skillful mixture of a realistic native background and an atmosphere of romance” (Daiches ! 229): The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, a comedy that combines legendary stories of necromancy with colloquial humour and a love idyll; A Looking Glass for London, a satire whose lesson for Londoners is pressed home in a series of extravagant spectacled requiring elaborate stage machinery; The Scottish History of James IV, not a history play but a “serious comedy.” $ Thomas Lodge (c.1557-1625) – his most interesting work his prose romance Rosalynde, the source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It; he collaborated with Greene on A Looking Glass for London; one known play that is certainly his and wholly original: The Wounds of Civil War (dealing with Roman history). $ Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) – collaborated on a number of plays; his only complete extant play is Summer’s Last Will and Testament (an allegorical play about the seasons, mixed with satire and courtly compliment); most important work = The Unfortunate Traveller (a picaresque tale). $ Thomas Kyd (1558-94): credited with having launched the revenge tragedy on its course – The Spanish Tragedy = the first of a series of revenge plays that so captured the Elizabethan and Jacobean imagination: violence, passion, intrigue, horror, cruelty, love, murder, ! long rhetorical outbursts, morbid sententiousness, tremendous speed of the action, etc. – make it one of the great successes of the Elizabethan stage, the first truly popular English tragedy and one of the most influential (Daiches, 233-34). Shakespeare took many devices from it (i.e. the revenge theme, the play within a play, the feigned madness, etc. – Hamlet): “The Spanish Tragedy is the great property-room of Elizabethan tragic devices … Time and time again later Elizabethan plays use or refer to something in The Spanish Tragedy.” (Daiches, 233) $ Christopher Marlowe (1564-93): “the most striking personality and the most impressive dramatist among the University Wits” (Daiches, 235) – Tamburlaine the Great (two parts 1587-88), “brought a new life to the English theater” (ibid.): a study of lust for power and military ! achievement; in it “Marlowe’s mighty line” first comes into Elizabethan drama, establishing blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing; - The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588-89): - full of the spirit of the Renaissance, but also retaining a specifically Christian background: “the pact with the Devil with its resultant damnation effectively sets against the Renaissance zeal for limitless understanding the popular ! Christian notion of forbidden knowledge, all the dark ideas of witchcraft and black magic, which had haunted the mind of Europe for centuries.” (Daiches 241) - also, it retains elements of the old morality play (a good angel and an evil angel, the seven deadly sins, Lucifer and Mephistopheles) - its “passionate, highly charged blank verse … is as far as dramatic verse was to go before Shakespeare.” - The Jew of Malta (1590?) – a dramatic presentation of a Machiavellian man, full of greed and cunning, who will stop at nothing to attain his ends (Barabas, the Jew of Malta, another power-hungry figure – the man of business who shows no scruple in self-advancement) - Edward the Second (1591?) – a historical tragedy, a study of weakness ! rather than of strength (Edward II = “the sentimental weakling betrayed and done to death by the forces of ambition and cruelty,” Daiches 244) = Marlowe’s great contribution to Elizabethan drama on historical themes: “Marlowe is gaining a greater control over his dramatic material, and is moving toward a new subtlety in character portrayal … As a work of sustained dramatic invention this is the best of Marlowe’s plays.” (Daiches 245); - The Massacre at Paris (1593) (a dramatic presentation of incidents from contemporary French history, including the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day). “Marlowe’s heroes are larger than life, exaggerated both in their faults and their qualities. They want to conquer the whole world (Tamburlaine), to attain limitless wealth (Barabas), to possess all knowledge (Doctor Faustus). The verse they speak is correspondingly powerful, rhetorical, rich in metaphor and effect.” (Carter & McRae 73) “his early death by violence in 1593 cut short a career which might, if spared to develop, have rivaled Shakespeare’s … his dramatic debut was one of the most remarkable in English literary history, and one which has left a lasting impression.” (Daiches 245)