1. Period of transition.

Naturally it is impossible to say when the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began; scholars long ago abandoned any attempt at an exact or even approximate demarcation of boundaries. Franco Simone, writing on the impact of Italian literary influence on French fifteenth and sixteenth-century writing, observes that the process is a slow and gradual one, and underlines the diverse tendencies that were already apparent in the earlier, Medieval period (The French Renaissance, p. 24). A bid has indeed made, with some plausibility, for a kind of “Medieval Renaissance” (Haskins). Notwithstanding, for all the difficulty in placing it chronologically, a significant change did occur between the two periods, and it is this question, among others, that will be addressed here. The Renaissance took a full two centuries to realise the extent of its impact; it occurred irregularly, at different times and in different countries, its progress and character being determined by a variety of factors, the most prominent being the blend of religious and political culture.

We need, however, to pause a moment over the very term “Renaissance”, the validity of which was called into question some time ago, indeed at more or less the moment when C. S. Lewis poured mild scorn over it, observing that most periods of literary history acquire labels after the event, which would have made little sense at the time. Men of the Middle Ages didn’t think of themselves as “middle”. Speaking of the humanist movement, with which the Renaissance is closely identified, Lewis pronounced, “[if] the earlier modern scholars had not themselves been bred in the humanist tradition, it may be doubted whether they would ever have chosen so lofty a name as “rebirth “to describe the humanist achievement” (Lewis, p. 56.) The advantage—following Lewis’s suggestion—of calling the post-Medieval period “Early Modern” is that it covers the sequence of time adequately, if rather vaguely, and springs no false leads or illusory connections. On the other hand, as a term, it is prosaic and unexciting, and does scant justice to the sense that something truly happened during the time of transition.

One of the humanists of the period certainly seemed to think something of moment had occurred: this is the art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), whose monumental summary Lives of the Artists was published, rather late in the day for the Italian Renaissance, in 1550 (considerably revised in1568). Vasari speaks of a “rinascità” or rebirth in the arts, and makes close comparison between the achievements of the ancients and those of the modern age, the important point being that modern sculptors and painters had rediscovered the ancient art of imitating nature closely (Vasari, “Proem to the Second Part”). This observation, in terms of its applicability to poetry, takes us on—or back—to Petrarca (Petrarch in English; 1304-1374) and humanism.

2. Petrarch and Humanism

We can say roughly, then, that the Renaissance period falls between the mid-fourteenth century and the end of the sixteenth, though we may have to extend the latter date a little for the English Renaissance. The great instigator of the Renaissance is commonly held to be Petrarch, who was thoroughly conscious of the difference between antiquity and the modern age. Petrarch’s poetry and his scholarship together make him the first true humanist of the period. As a trained notary, and eminent scholar, and through family connections (his father being one of those exiled from Florence along with Dante [1265-1321] in the previous generation), Petrarch developed an ambassadorial career, representing the interests of one court to another, journeying from one state (including city-states) or country to another, all the while enjoying royal hospitality as a result of his growing literary eminence in both Latin and the vernacular. In what lies his humanism? A humanist is held to be one who examines documents in a disinterested, critical light, trying to establish meaning objectively. Petrarch visited numerous libraries in search of manuscripts of the writings of antiquity, and when he discovered them puzzled over variants, establishing which had greater claim to authenticity, which was more or less interfered with or subject to later scribal interpolation, always with a view to recovering the original significance and expression as nearly as possible. More generally a humanist, in the period of the Renaissance, pursues the study of the humanities, or studia humanitatis, to give the Latin phrase. This is most clearly evidenced in the all-important matter of style, especially that of antiquity: “it [humanism] was characterised throughout by a desire to imitate ancient authors and to emulate them in the elegance of their style, vocabulary, and literary composition” (Kristeller, p. 126). The humanists began by writing strictly and almost exclusively in Latin but, as we shall see, their principles and practices were to be extended to the vernacular language.

Petrarch would not have exercised the influence he did had he not been a wonderful lyric poet in the Italian language. Interestingly, he thought that his claim to poetry would lie in his epic achievements, and these (in fitting humanist fashion) found inspiration in ancient Roman example. Emulating Virgil he wrote the epic poem Africa in Latin—not only considered to be much superior to the vernacular tongue but also the lingua franca of the time—on the life and heroic exploits of Scipio Africanus, who drove Hannibal out of Italy and continued the conflict successfully in North Africa. While recognizing that the past was different from the present, and that it could only be understood by careful scholarship, Petrarch did not feel remote from it; on the contrary, the sense of visiting another place only increased his feeling of intimacy with antiquity. He even wrote letters to the “illustrious dead”, such as Cicero and Virgil, in which he “debated” with them matters of style, culture and ethics. The imaginary recipients of this correspondence feel just as present to the reader as such contemporaries as his friend Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75). However, the Africa was doomed to fail, not so much by its form (for epic, as we shall see, underwent a great revival in the Renaissance) but by Petrarch’s insistence on writing in Latin, which was out of touch with modern life and sensibility. Dante, some of whose prose works were in Latin, had considered composing the Divina Commedia in the ancient tongue, but had wisely abandoned the idea as inappropriate.

Petrarch never finished the Africa. It lies as an albatross of noble intentions around the neck of his poetic achievements. What made his name is his collection of lyric poems, sonnets and canzoni (extended lyrics), known usually as the Canzoniere, but to which he gave the Latin title Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (which may be translated as “bits of things in the vernacular’)—a modest, self-deprecating description couched in elevated diction. With his humanist cap on, he professed that it was the least of his accomplishments, but he took great editorial care over this collection, writing it out successively and altering and adding to it all the time. The full work, which he completed in the last year of his life, added up to 366 poems of various lyric categories, including along with those just mentioned madrigals and ballate (short lyrics like epigrams or mini-sonnets). This meant one poem for every day of the year plus a final poem, to the Virgin Mary, as a kind of summation of the whole.

Despite the prominence of the Virgin in the last poem, it should not be thought that the Canzoniere is an especially religious work. Petrarch is always conscious, as a man rooted in the Middle Ages would inevitably be, of spiritual questions, and problems of the soul find themselves being constantly addressed in the process of the poetry. In the very first poem he announces that his lifelong devotion to love has been an error for which he hopes to be pardoned. None the less, this is the subject for which he is justly famous, and had he not written of that love, the love for the woman eternally known as Laura, then his name would have been long forgotten with hers, and quite possibly the sonnet tradition, which he inspired, might never have been established. What then does he say of her? How does she appear in the poems? Let us take a famous sonnet, in which he evokes her in his memory, whether this is after her death (according to the narrative she dies in the black death of 1348) or whether it is a memory of her during a period in which she is absent from him:

Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi
che ’n molti dolci nodi gli avolgea,
e ’l vago lume oltra misura ardea
di quei begli occhi ch’or ne son sì scarsi.

(Upon the breeze she spread her golden hair
that in a thousand knots was turned,
and the sweet light beyond all measure burned
in eyes where now that radiance is rare.)
(Canz. No. 90; Mortimer, pp. 42-3)

Here, as in so many of his sonnets, Petrarch plays on the name of his beloved: “l’aura” means the air or breeze and is no different in Italian pronunciation from the name Laura. How substantial, then, is this vision? Is she no more than a deception, illusory, an indication of something, whether of his own making or not, designed to lead him astray? This is what a sceptic such as St. Augustine (of whom see more below) would say. Petrarch, however, staunchly defended her reality in his letters, and, though he would not reveal her identity, insisted that she was a living woman. The words Laura and “l’aura” contain also the sound of laurel (in Italian “lauro”), which takes us back to one of Petrarch’s key mythological sources, Book I of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. There the god Apollo chases the nymph Daphne who appeals to other gods, including her father, to save her. Her father Peneus intercedes by turning her into a laurel bush: she takes root in the earth and her hair turns into leaves which are brushed by the wind; Apollo, who happens to be the god of poetry, though frustrated in love worships her and makes her an emblem of the poetic craft. The deity, in a carefully designed piece of homage to Ovid’s emperor Augustus, decrees that the laurel wreath shall adorn the heads of victorious Roman generals, but the association with poetic excellence was also affirmed in the passage’s later reception. Indeed, in a deliberate reference to Ovid, King Robert of Naples crowned Petrarch with the laurel wreath in 1341. Daphne’s metamorphosis has been rendered by countless artists, in the Renaissance and beyond, all following the example of Petrarch; but possibly nobody in the plastic arts has surpassed the example of Bernini whose wonderful sculpture can be observed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. All of this shows how a single source can be the channel for so much inspiration, and that in turn demonstrates the extraordinary capacity of the period we call the Renaissance to expand and intensify artistic expression in so many divers ways and in such a short extent of time.

Later an Elizabethan poet, Christopher Marlowe, invoked the Daphne-Apollo myth in a manner which owes something to Petrarch when he describes Hero in his famous erotic narrative Hero and Leander (prob. 1592-3; publ’d 1598):

At Sestos Hero dwelt, Hero the fair,
Whom young Apollo courted for her hair,
And offered as a dower his burning throne,
Where she should sit for men to gaze upon. (ll. 5-8)

As well as being the god of poetry, Apollo is the sun-god. These lines recall Petrarch’s image of the “capei d’oro” (hair of gold), and shows how physical description subtly acquires a mythological resonance. Marlowe, typical of the great poets of the Renaissance who followed Petrarch, can assemble a set of different perspectives and possibilities in a single image. Ovid’s theme of metamorphosis, which in his poem signifies the alteration of a human being into animal, plant or mineral form, comes to stand for the capacity of poetry to manipulate our sense of reality through its deployment of the imagination.

Another key aspect of Petrarch’s poetry, indeed of the majority of his writings, is its introspectiveness. Petrarch searches into his soul and examines his conscience, constantly asking himself variations on the same question: is he following the correct path, above all in his love for Laura. Laura remains elusive, resistant to his appeals, and is commended by the poet for her chastity, though this is an accolade he voices with regret and often bitterness. Why must she deny him? On the other hand, why must he persist? Often his lyrics suggest that his devotion to a futile and unrequited love constitutes an act of self-betrayal. He would be better off pursuing a more spiritual life: along with his literary and ambassadorial tasks, Petrarch had the duties of a canon of the church, though he appears not to have taken these very seriously. Petrarch identifies closely in mind and temperament with St. Augustine, whose Confessions made a lasting impression on him. Restlessness of soul characterizes the poetry of the Canzoniere just as it does Augustine’s prose-narrative act of penitence. However, as we have hinted above, delight in the world’s secular appeal persists more in Petrarch than it does in the saint, as becomes clear from a brief comparison of the Confessions with the book it directly inspired, Petrarch’s Secretum (“My Secret”), which takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between the poet and the saint—a form which had been made popular from the early Middle Ages.

Petrarch wrote the Secretum (a Latin work) in 1342, at a time of personal crisis, especially regarding his obsession with Laura. In the dialogue the saint gives voice to the many anxieties and forebodings that Petrarch has already begun to express in the lyric poems. Is it worthy, or indeed even sensible, of a man to seek literary fame by spreading the notoriety of a cruel mistress rather showing God’s mercy and justice?

The spiritual dilemma of Petrarch expresses a quandary that lies at the heart of the Renaissance and which can be found in writers who give a less overtly religious colouring to their concerns. For them, as well as indeed for him, this might be re-defined as a dilemma of ‘consciousness’. As Kristeller points out, “an air of subjectivity pervades all humanist literature from Petrarch to Erasmus and Montaigne that is absent from most classical literature” (p. 126). The greatest of all the English poets seems to recall Petrarch’s combination of marvellous expansiveness and harrowing personal doubt when in his most ‘Renaissance’ play he gives his hero these lines:

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth…indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. (Hamlet 2.2.277-84)

This combination of imaginative expansiveness and brooding introspection, leading in turn to a marked development in subjectivity, appears to be what chiefly characterizes Renaissance literary expression.

3. After Petrarch

Material Forms of Literature: Print and Manuscript

The Renaissance extends over different periods and places, as we have observed, one country following another in its era of major development. Complicating matters is the fact that literature and the visual arts developed in significantly different ways. Buildings, sculpture, and paintings were instantly visible, once people knew where to find them. Literature was slower of access: not only was translation from language to language a necessary part of the process of European-wide imitation, but manuscripts took time to produce, circulate, and digest. Until the end of the fifteenth century manuscript was still the principal means of recording and disseminating literary texts. Medieval illuminated manuscripts show the height of art to which such a process could aspire. Petrarch carefully transcribed his poems and scribes copied them out; enough of these circulated to guarantee him fame in his lifetime. However, in 1439 Gutenberg invented the printing press, which led to the gradual development of the process in Italy, culminating in the achievement of Aldus Manutius (the inventor of italic print script); all of this brought about a major change (Eisenstein). Texts could now be disseminated much more rapidly and over a far wider range, and this new state of affairs was to have a remarkable impact on the posthumous fortunes of Petrarch. Although active almost a century and a half earlier, Petrarch was adopted as the model of Italian lyric poetry, as a result of the efforts and intervention of his great admirer the poet Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). Bembo collaborated with Aldus (c. 1449-1515) to bring out the first printed version of the Canzoniere in 1501; Petrarch’s name quickly became known not only in Italy but throughout the Europe continent, and Petrarchism became the dominant lyric form.

Manuscript did not disappear straightaway, however, and there are various reasons for its continuance. For one thing it was a thriving industry, which for a period could hold its own against new developments, especially when it came to producing limited copies of a text to be distributed among a small, intimate circle. A number of humanists, indeed, took at first a lofty, aristocratic view towards print, as they did not relish their cherished texts falling into the grubby hands of the multitude. At an amateur level, people simply enjoyed copying out favourite poems and putting them in their commonplace books. At a more serious level, some texts could not risk being printed because they were personally libellous or politically dangerous, or offended against religious orthodoxy (see also section 4). The stir caused by certain texts that achieved print testifies to this fear. A famous case of a text that was both printed and apparently not printed in England is The Prince of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). This was issued in London in Italian in 1584, but the printer pretended that it was an import from Italy (the place of publication is given as Palermo). English translations were made immediately but these circulated in manuscript. The first publication of a printed English version did not occur till 1640, a year in which censorship temporarily broke down.

Vernacular language and the persistence of Latin

Another feature which made continuity difficult was the nature of language itself. Each country had its own vernacular, and this in turn strove for supremacy with Latin, which remained the lingua franca for dialogue at the political, theological, and diplomatic level until the seventeenth century. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) engaged in a Latin correspondence with his humanist tutor, the French Huguenot Hubert Languet (1518-81). Although we now celebrate the emergence and final triumph of the various vernaculars of the European Renaissance, the Latin language, just as in Petrarch’s time, held sway (Binns). Not just minor or forgotten authors tried their hand at composing in Latin; even great poets wrote such verse before they attempted to write in English. Seventeenth-century poets such as John Milton (1608-74) and Andrew Marvell (1621-78) composed some of their most memorable poems first in Latin: in Milton’s case, for example, Lycidas, and in Marvell’s The Garden. Literature, on the other hand, while it knew no boundaries, came up against the problems of translation, as well as having to face other tricky matters, such as the relative slowness with which some modern vernaculars (English being a prime example) developed the requisite degree of sophistication or expressive complexity. Again there was the difficulty of political conditions, to which we have already partly referred, such as the capacity for survival that a text (and indeed its author!) might hope for in inimical political circumstances. As observed, in terms of language alone, Latin continued to present a major obstacle to the development of a vernacular poetry.

Genre - The Epic

Notwithstanding, the vernacular continued to make inexorable progress. As far back as Dante, the vernacular triumphed over Latin, as the linguistic medium chosen for the Divina Commedia. Aesthetically, of course, judgment (helped considerably by Bembo’s intervention) preferred Petrarch’s Canzoniere as the vernacular poetic model; none the less, what Dante began at particular level later poets were to resume and continue. By the sixteenth century in Italy, indeed, Dante’s great poem, written as a journey of the spiritual life, had come to be regarded as an epic, as the Renaissance sought to renew this most ancient genre. The epic had a further particular importance for, as the examples of Virgil and Ovid showed, it was the poetry of national identity. Virgil and Ovid had both paid tribute to the Emperor Augustus, under whose reign they regarded Italian destiny as having reached its point of culmination, following the ancient establishment of Rome by a small migrant tribe, led by Aeneas, in flight after the destruction of Troy. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, first Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441-94), and then Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533) showed the lead with their epics on Charlemagne’s encounters with the Saracens, deriving from the old French Song of Roland (c. 1140-70), and adding to them mainly humorous accounts of amorous eastern adventures: Boiardo’s poem is Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). The latter is the more polished poem, as it reflects its author’s characteristically humanist ambition to bring to vernacular expression the elegance of the Latin classics, but like its predecessor it mingles irony, fantasy, and love into its theme, while paying tribute in courtly fashion to the poet’s patrons, the Este family. Their princely lineage, as depicted by Ariosto, emulates that of Virgil’s Aeneas, though on a reduced scale, as reflects the fortunes of Italian city-states in an Italy prey to incessant internal division and, increasingly after 1494, foreign intrusion and influence. Wit and sophistication, and a fine sense of the unreality of all human enterprise, dominate the heroic in these narratives, where the authors deliberately mingle epic with romance, so much so that the term romance epic is a more appropriate description. The English reader who has no Italian can get a good sense of such poetry by reading Byron’s Don Juan, which was directly inspired by the Orlando Furioso, and which uses the Italian epic’s classic stanza form of ottava rima. Courtliness is given further sophisticated expression by a member of the court of Urbino, and a contemporary of Ariosto’s, Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), whose Book of the Courtier received a timely translation into English in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby (1530-66). Torquato Tasso (1544-95), on the other hand, a poet of the later sixteenth century and period of the counter-Reformation, gave a more serious character to the Italian epic, choosing as his theme the story of the First Crusade and the decisive victory of Godfrey of Boulogne over the infidel Saracens. The title is fittingly Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered).

4. The Renaissance in England

Finding a Poetic Identity

Two figures in particular come to mind as we embark on the English Renaissance: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser (1552?-99). Spenser continues the epic in England with his magisterial The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), which though unfinished (six books rather than the projected twelve) manages to be the longest epic poem of the Renaissance. Sidney produced the most readable document of critical analysis of the period, his treatise An Apology for Poetry (c. 1581, publ. 1595). It is also known by the title A Defence of Poesie. The two texts are nearly identical, apart from a few accidentals: two different publishers managed to get hold of copies of the manuscript, which in turn illustrates the point made above about the care with which manuscripts were transcribed. Sidney argues the moral force of poetry against its detractors. In order to achieve this, Sidney quite deliberately prefers or promotes some forms of poetry over others. The epic because of the seriousness with which Aristotle in his theory, and Virgil by his practice, treated it, holds pride of place, followed by tragedy. Sidney tactfully pays less attention to erotic poetry, especially the form of the lyric, as this would give the opponents of poetry too great a chance of denouncing it as an incitement to immorality. This point holds a particular interest, since Sidney himself treated fully of love in his famous sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (naturally in the Petrarchan mode), written around 1580, and published posthumously, and unofficially, in1591. It was this sequence that launched the sonnet vogue in the Elizabethan 1590s.

Spenser’s contribution to poetic theory took the form of his bucolic sequence The Shepheardes Calendar, published in 1579, at about the same time as Sidney was writing, though not putting into print, his sonnets and criticism. A distinction, often debated but none the less evident, existed between the professional, who lived and sought patronage by his pen, and the gentleman for whom print was an undignified, even treacherous medium. When Sidney wrote A Letter to Queen Elizabeth – as part of a campaign orchestrated by his uncle, the earl of Leicester, to dissuade Elizabeth from marrying her French suitor, the duc d’Alençon – he allowed numerous manuscript copies to circulate but kept it from achieving print. The printer John Stubbes, who published a companion piece, The discoverie of a gaping gulf, designed for the mass market, was rewarded by having his right hand cut off (Woudhuysen 151). This was unlikely to have been the aristocratic Sidney’s fate, if he had abandoned the preserve of manuscript, but it stood as the clearest indication of what was regarded as the stigma of print.

Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender contains a number of religious and political readings; however, these are not very precise, and critics even now find it difficult to agree on how much emphasis to give a particular interpretation. Spenser was careful not to rock the boat too hard, though his eclogues do give some sense of the theological-political context (Norbrook). What is beyond doubt is that the sequence was printed in order to promote the vernacular poetic language, and to bring the national achievement to a par with that of the Continent. What fascinates about the collection is the language, the number of old words recovered and new ones coined. Spenser is aware that English still showed poorly against the sophisticated Continental tongues, and he was doing his utmost to bring it into contention. The figure called E. K., a commentator of unknown identity (he may even have been the poet himself), draws attention to the novelty of the poet’s language, the felicity of his expression, and his classical learning. The Shepheardes Calendar, with its woodcut illustrations and extensive and detailed annotation, pretends to be a sophisticated production, equal to any book of the Renaissance, and in particular those handsome Italian editions of poetry, including of course volumes of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which had been appearing throughout the sixteenth century. England was striving to come up to date.

Continuing the Epic

Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene is unlike any that had preceded it. Drawing upon his recent Italian predecessors, especially Tasso, he too looks back to the achievements of Virgil. Following the established mode, Spenser concerns himself with the court and the national identity, the figure of Elizabeth clearly guiding the poet’s ambitions. The poem, both in its printing of 1590, and then in the expanded version of 1596, carries a fulsome dedication to the queen. Patronage is one of the great features of the Renaissance, in all forms of art. However, the spiritual dimension of the poem is more complex than that of any previous epic, not excepting that of Tasso, in whose writing Counter-Reformation sensibility makes itself strongly felt. Whereas the other epics had, for all their digressions, followed a discernible narrative, The Faerie Queene consists of six discrete books (with two cantos of a seventh), which tell of the adventures of completely different knights, representing different virtues. The queen remains in the background to all this, emerging occasionally and inspirationally as the figure of Gloriana, acting as tutelary deity to her own nation; but she is hardly involved in the action. The same is true of other great personages from earlier epics: their role is to preside rather than to be involved. However, there is a difference to Spenser’s procedure. Elizabeth has more than one identity, and in Book III, the Legend of Chastity, she clearly lends herself to the depiction of the female warrior knight Britomart, who not only triumphs over the agents of darkness and temptation, be they male, female, or devilish, but also finds that her destiny is to marry the principle of Justice, personified by the knight Artegall, who roots out barbarism (which he identifies notoriously with Irish rebels) in Book V.

Spenser adds to the development of the epic by making special use of allegory. That is to say, he contrives to create not only the semblance of a real world, of characters and happenings, but also, and more significantly, a world of inwardness, a depth of human consciousness and conscience. Spenser revives an earlier, medieval form, the allegorical, and imbues it with greater complexity; the knights do battle not only with external foes but also with themselves, in the form of a psychomachia (or battle for the soul). This greater concentration on individual conflict accounts for the poem’s relative abandonment of an overarching narrative. The sense of personal foreboding, of being plunged in error and uncertainty, which so characterizes Petrarch’s poetry, applies itself to Spenser’s heroes as they go about their quests. Nothing on the Spenserian terrain can be taken for granted, not just at the Ariostan level of irony and whimsy, but at the very depths of being, the ontological level. Petrarchan consciousness has entered the epic, and this is given further development by Protestant Reformation sensibility. It would, however, be misleading to imply that the Faerie Queene is a poem that emphasizes anxiety and moral uncertainty exclusively. In his famous “Letter to Ralegh” (Sir Walter Ralegh [1552?-1618], his patron and ministerial superior during his time serving the Crown in Ireland), Spenser explains his allegorical purpose and declares his intention “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline”. Whatever doubts assail them, the knights fulfil this pledge on the part of their author; they remain answerable to a strong and transparent sense of moral obligation. This, in addition to the extraordinary spaciousness of his imagination (as well as those examples of political allegory that we have touched upon), gives the epic that expansiveness which we associate with works of the Renaissance. Following Italian precedent, Britomart sees, in a mirror held up by the magician Merlin, a vision prophesying the glories of Elizabeth’s court (Book 3, canto iii).

Drama

The greatest achievement of the Elizabethan age of the Renaissance lies in its drama. Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) are names that naturally spring to mind, while their contemporaries and successors included Ben Jonson (1573-1637), John Webster (1580?-1635?), Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), John Ford (1586-1639?), and others. Marlowe was Shakespeare’s exact age but was his predecessor, if ever so slightly, in terms of the impact he made on the stage. He is, as we have seen, the author of the great epyllion (‘amatory narrative’) Hero and Leander, in which he develops lyrical language in a wonderful, highly resourceful manner. Poetic virtuosity correspondingly suffuses his dramatic works. Marlowe’s two most famous plays are Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta. The latter furnishes a spectacular example of Machiavellism as applied by the Elizabethan drama, and shows a theatre that was unafraid to push the bounds of acceptability, even in an age in which conventional morality still exerted its power. Marlowe always seems an outlaw in his literary productions, and this no doubt was a role he coveted for himself. Dr Faustus is in some respects even more notorious than The Jew in so far as the hero’s antagonist is God. The plot suggests otherwise, and names Mephastophilis, the Devil’s advocate, as Faustus’s tempter and adversary, yet what Faustus attempts to do, very much by his own will, brings him quickly into conflict with the divine. Faustus dabbles in magic, and is bent on knowing as much as possible of the secrets of creation. He conjures forth the devil to help him, which he obligingly does in the person of Mephastophilis. The plot would indicate a man literally hell-bent on his own undoing, and the trajectory of the play does indeed propel Faustus to destruction as a result of his not heeding the warnings of heaven (represented in the form of a Good Angel). There is something of the medieval morality play in the dramatist’s conception, which in turn reminds us that the Renaissance is looking backwards as well as forwards. In such a play, however, the hero is saved by divine intervention, as his conscience at last responds to the heavenly summons. Everyman is a typical example. In Dr Faustus the reverse occurs, as the hero remains unremittingly on the path to doom. Far from issuing a warning not to go wrong (its ostensible message), Marlowe’s work concentrates rather on evoking great pathos for its hero, who suffers in the denouement like any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and gives Faustus a heroic language characterized by that imaginative expansiveness which we have commented on already. One of the great figures of antiquity which magic is able to conjure forth for Faustus is Helen of Troy, to whom the hero addresses the following famous, much anthologized lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless Towers of Ilium?
……
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked.
…….
O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appeared to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms.
(5.1. 97-8, 104-5, 110-15)

On the one hand, the content of these lines suggests the outlook of an adventurer, one dangerously transgressive in moral terms, and who is bound inevitably to have his comeuppance. Yet on the other, misguided or not, the lines have great beauty and human appeal, and it is this that audiences respond to more than anything. The moral lessons of Dr Faustus, which appear in virtually every speech of the drama pale into insignificance next to this. Either Marlowe is deliberately subverting conventional morality in the name of a greater artistic freedom, or despite himself he is making discoveries about the nature of art, which expand the concept and indeed activity of writing, even as he treats of a subject which should make him do the opposite. On the matter of style, note the characteristic, elegiac repeated cadence in the proper names he chooses, each ending with a stress on the prepenultimate syllable: Ilium, Jupiter, Semele, paramour—all words that bring the line to completion. Neither is it insignificant that these are classical references, evoking a whole mythology in a few well-chosen sentences. The momentary recall of Helen of Troy as well as being breath-taking as a visitation also stands for the earnest recovery of antiquity, which characterizes the Renaissance and for which it is named.

Shakespeare

The speech delighting in the beauty of Helen of Troy finds parallels in the early works of Shakespeare, not least these lines where Romeo catches his first glimpse of Juliet:

Romeo. What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
Serving man. I know not, sir.
Romeo. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight.
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. (1.5.41-52)

Shakespeare has Romeo salute the almost transcendental power of female beauty, just as Marlowe does with Faustus in the vision of Helen. She is heavenly, not a person of the ordinary world. Had the serving man, who ought surely to have known her identity, told him plainly that she was Capulet’s daughter, then that would have brought her down to earth. It is important poetically that he too should be unable to say who she is: in this way her marvellous strangeness within a nonetheless familiar setting is ensured. Shakespeare also alludes to Petrarch in the couplet beginning, “Did my heart love till now?” The Italians call this moment the innamoramento (awkwardly translated into English as “enamourment”), the instant at which the beauty of the loved one overwhelms the lover as he stands and gazes at her. Petrarch falls in love with Laura in precisely this way as he catches sight of her in the church in Avignon on Good Friday (a moment which is celebrated in several of his early sonnets). Shakespeare, then, incorporates the spirit and power of Petrarch into a tragedy of love, maintaining passion at an ideal level while playing out the drama it occasions. Renaissance poetry thus encompasses various forms, in an allusive or comprehensive manner, not just the mythological writings of ancient example but also those of more recent times, first Petrarch, the originator of the Renaissance, and then Marlowe, Shakespeare’s fellow and contemporary.

Earlier, as he and his fellow Montagues make their way to the Capulets’ ball, Romeo muses on the uncertainty that lies ahead:

Benvolio. This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves:
Supper is done and we shall come too late.
Romeo. I fear too early, for my mind misgives
Some consequences yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life clos’d in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
(1.4.104-11)

Even as the play prepares Romeo for the lovely, moving, unexpected encounter with Juliet, the aftermath of which will give the Renaissance its greatest tragedy of youthful love, it also develops a sub-current of foreboding, in turn evoking that anxiety which so often, and characteristically, accompanies the most confident of poetic utterances. Romeo and Juliet sounds the death-knell to love in the very moment that the lovers’ spirits soar irrepressibly, providing an example of that paradox or antithesis, which is Petrarchan in substance as well as style. A definite hint of Petrarchan introspectiveness comes in this play, but because it careers unstoppably to its fatal yet beautiful conclusion, it is left to a slightly later work, Hamlet, to develop that hint fully. As we have seen already, in the lines quoted from Hamlet’s conversation with his treacherous friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Shakespeare at the height of his dramatic power develops and combines a troubling subjectivity with an imagination that is seemingly boundless (“a king of infinite space”), and this fusion in one way or another continues to manifest itself in the great tragedies, in particular King Lear, which along with Hamlet ranks as Shakespeare’s most compelling drama. With these plays Renaissance theatre scales the greatest heights.

5. Conclusion

The Renaissance might finally be characterised as the literary expression of a period experiencing a slow but profound shift in the individual’s relationship to traditional and local society and orthodox beliefs, a new sense of the power of individual thought, love and creativity which leads necessarily to differences with political and religious convention; all of this is further animated by an expansion of trade, improvements in travel, the discovery of new technologies and new worlds in the Americas. All these aspects can be sensed in the drama of Shakespeare, especially in a play such as Hamlet, which even in the development of its own fascinating plot seems simultaneously to be addressing a world, if not worlds, beyond itself.

With Shakespeare the Renaissance achieves its finish, if not quite its end, and with him it is therefore fitting to stop. The subject is vast, and there is so much more to say, not least about Shakespeare himself, who of course wrote much more than the few key works chosen for comment. His prolific output in many genres, comedies, history plays, as well as various poetic kinds outside the poetry of his dramas, shows how a single great writer reflects in turn the diversity of the age in which he lived. We have not had time to do more than glance at the work of his contemporaries, and there are many more names, in England alone, which could have been summoned to the discussion. However, we have taken as our model that other great figure of the Renaissance, regarded as its initiator or prime mover, Petrarch, and it has been partly our intention to demonstrate how much that derives from Petrarch bears his stamp while inevitably—and especially in the case of Shakespeare—going beyond him.

Works Cited

Binns, J. W. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the Latin Writings of the Age, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge: CUP, 1979.
Haskins, C. H. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP, 1927.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. ‘Humanism’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: CUP, 1988, pp. 113-37.
Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954 (later re-titled as Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century)
Norbrook, D. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. Oxford: OUP (revised edition), 2002.
Mortimer, Anthony (tr.). Petrarch, Francesco: Canzoniere: Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 2002.
Simone, Franco. The French Renaissance (tr. H. Gaston Hall). London: Macmillan, 1970.
Woudhuysen, H. R. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996

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Citation: Roe, J A. "The Renaissance in Literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 September 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1238, accessed 02 May 2025.]

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