Renaissance Writers William Shakespeare

Renaissance Writers

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was the greatest writer of the era born in 1564. He was an actor and a poet but is best known for his plays. He also wrote tragedies and comedies, and Shakespeare became one of the most well-known playwrights in England. Some plays he is well known for are Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Henry V.

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel was a Spanish influential writer during the Renaissance. He wrote numerous plays and works of fiction, including Novelas ejemplares in 1613. Cervantes was not widely known, however, until the publication of his most influential piece, Don Quixote de la Mancha. This novel was published in 1604 and made Cervantes extremely popular in Spain, and this novel tells of a country gentleman who searches for adventure in life.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli was a diplomat in Florence who tried to answer how could a ruler guarantee that he would stay in power by writing The Prince in 1513. Machiavelli claimed that people were greedy and self-centered. He argued that rulers should not be good, and that rulers should do whatever is necessary to keep power and protect their city, including killing and lying. Today, when someone is called a Machiavellian, it means that they are acting tricky and not thinking about the good.

Francesco Petrarch

Francesco Petrarch was a poet and scholar that lived in the 1300s. He was known for his Italian poetry and wrote many famous poems, such as the Canzoniere and the Triofi. He was also a vey enthusiastic Latin scholar and wrote most of his poems in this language. He died in 1374, but he would influence later writers such as Boccaccio and Shakespeare.

Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri, often simply referred to as Dante, was a famous Italian poet during the Renaissance. The Divine Comedy is the most famous of his works, and is often considered the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are often considered the best Italian writers in history. He often wrote his poems in the Italian vernacular rather than Latin, a choice that would later influence literary development all over Europe.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer, usually referred to as simply Chaucer, is a famous Italian writer that wrote in the English vernacular. His is widely recognized for his book The Canterbury Tales, but he also many other books, including The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame. He is an important figure in developing the English vernacular we use today because he English he used in his writing is the ancestor of today’s everyday English language.