Lecture 4 Literature of the 16th century. The Renaissance

THE DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE 
James I, the first Stuart king, had little first-hand knowledge of England. Elizabeth 
had managed to maintain religious balance between Protestants and Catholics, but 
under the Stuarts that balance was lost. Religious and political unrest was growing. 
At that period a number of young Cavaliers, loyal to the king, wrote about love 
and loyalty, but even in the love poems it was evident that the freshness of the 
Elizabethan era had passed. Among the best of these poets were Richard Lovelace 
and Robert Herrick. 
Drama continued to flourish in England under the Stuarts. Shakespeare's great 
tragedies were written during the reign of King James, and Shakespeare's acting 
company, taken under the patronage of the king, became known as the King's Men. 
The theatre in fact remained a popular form of entertainment until the puritan 
government closed all playhouses in 1649. 
The greatest of the Puritan poets, and one of the greatest English poets was John 
Milton, Latin secretary to the Puritan Commonwealth. While in this position his 
sight began to fail ; 
eventually he became blind. He composed "Paradise Lost", his greatest work and the 
most successful English epic, sightless. 
SUPPLEMENT 
Three chief forms of poetry flourished during the Elizabethan Age. They were the 
lyric, the sonnet, and narrative poetry. 
The lyric is a short poem that expresses a poet's personal emotions and thoughts 
in a songlike style. 
The sonnet is a 14-line poem with a certain pattern of rhyme and rhythm. 
Elizabethan poets wrote two types of sonnets, the Italian sonnet and the English 
sonnet. The two types differed in the arrangement of the rhymes. Sir Thomas Wyatt 
introduced the sonnet from Italy into English literature in the early 1500's. William 
Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser wrote sonnet sequences. A sonnet sequence is a 
group of sonnets based on a single theme or about one person.