The period of Renaissance in English literature content s

CHAPTER I W. Shakespeare’s life and career
This chapter aimed at studying W. Shakespeare’s autobiography and literary career. This chapter begins with the general characteristics of English literature at the end of XVI ^th and the beginning of XVII ^th century, the period in which the writer lived and created his works. Shakespeare lived in the Renaissance period. It was a cultural artistic movement in England. XVI^th century marks the flowering of the renaissance. Major representatives of renaissance period are the following Francis Bacon, John Donne, Thomas More, Shakespeare and others. A poet and playwright William Shakespeare is the favorite author of millions of readers all over the world. No other writer's plays have been produced so often and read so widely in so many different countries. He had a greater influence on the world literature than any other author.¹
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the XVI^th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the XIX^th century. In the XX^th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
1.1. The Renaissance period in English literature
The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late XV^th to the early XVII^th century². It is associated with the pan – European renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late XIV^th century. Like most of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken, as a convenience, to be 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow to penetrate England, were slow to penetrate England and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the XVI^th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. England had a strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as English use of the printing press became common by the mid XVI^th century.
By the time of Elizabethan literature a vigorous literary culture in both drama and poetry included poets such as Edmund Spenser whose verse epic the Faerie Queene had a strong influence on English literature but was eventually overshadowed by the lyrics of William Shakespeare Thomas Wyatt and others. The English poetry was exactly at the right stage of development for this transplantation to occur, since forms such as the sonnet were uniquely adapted to setting as madrigals: indeed, the sonnet was already well developed in Italy. Composers such as Thomas Morley, the only contemporary composer to set Shakespeare and whose work survives. The major literary figures in the English Renaissance include Francis Bacon, John Donne, Ben Johnson, Thomas More, William Shakespeare and others. Renaissance was a great cultural movement that began in Italy during the early 1330's. It spread to England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and other countries in the late 1400's and ended early in the XVII^th century. The word "Renaissance" comes from the Latin word "rinascere" and means rebirth. The Renaissance was the period when European culture was at its height. At that time great importance was assigned to intellect, experience, scientific researches. The new ideology proclaimed the value of human individuality. This new outlook was called Humanism. The humanists were scholars and artists who studied subjects that they believed would help them better understand the problems of humanity. These subjects included literature and philosophy. The humanists considered that the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome had excelled in such subjects and could serve as models.
During the Middle Ages the most important branch of learning was theology. Renaissance thinkers paid greater attention to the study of humanity. During the Renaissance period (particularly 1485-1603) Middle English began to develop into Modern English. By the late 1500's the English people were speaking and writing English in a form much like that used today.
The Renaissance in England is usually studied by dividing it into three parts: the rise of the Renaissance under the early Tudor monarchs (1500-1558), the height of the Renaissance under Elizabeth 1 (1558-1603), and the decline of the Renaissance under the Stuart monarchs (1603-1649).³ The invention of printing press and improved methods of manufacturing paper made possible the rapid spread of knowledge.
In 1476, during the Wars of the Roses, William Caxton set up the first printing press in London. Before that time, books and other literary works were slowly and laboriously copied by hand. Printing made it possible to produce far more books at lower costs. By 1640 Caxton's and other presses had printed more than 216,000 different works and editions. It is estimated that by 1530 more than half the population of England was literate. Learning at that time flourished not only at Oxford and Cambridge, but at the lower educational levels too.
At that period new types of literature were imported from the European continent. Chief among these were the sonnet, imported by Wyatt and Surrey from Italy, where it had been perfected by Francis Petrarch; and the essay, imported by Sir Francis Bacon from France.
Other verse forms were also borrowed from Italian and French. The native drama continued to develop and gain popularity. Under the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), order was restored, and England entered upon her most glorious age. Elizabeth was only twenty-five when she assumed the throne, never married, and ruled wisely and well for forty-five years.
Interested in education, Queen Elizabeth established one hundred free grammar schools in all parts of the country. These schools were open to both sexes of all ranks. In 1579, Gresham College was founded in London to cater to the needs of the middle class. Unlike the classical curriculum offered by Oxford and Cambridge, its curriculum included law, medicine and other practical courses. As the children of the middle class grew better educated, the middle class itself grew in power.
During Elizabeth's reign, England began to gain supremacy on the seas. The Elizabethan Age is the age of poetry. Except perhaps for the essayist Francis Bacon and the critic Christopher Marlowe, people were not yet writing prose of literary quality. Some Elizabethan writers dealt exclusively in lyric poetry, but many were also playwrights writing their plays in verse.
The Elizabethan period was the golden age of English drama. In 1576, James
Burbage built England's first playhouse, called theatre, in a suburb of London. Until this time, drama had been performed in the streets, at homes and palaces, and at English universities. After Burbage built The Theatre, other playhouses were constructed, which rapidly increased the popularity of drama.
A group of leading Elizabethan playwrights was known as the "University Wits" because they had attended the famous English universities at Oxford and Cambridge. These playwrights included Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and George Peele. Marlowe was the most important dramatist among the Wits. William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other more than a dozen first-rate playwrights also created their skillful dramas at that period. Blank verse, introduced into the language by Surrey, became the main form for writing tragedies and comedies.
In 1600, when the new century began, Elizabeth was an aging queen not in the best of health. She was childless. After her death, in 1603, King James of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, became the king of England. 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.
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.
Narrative poetry. A narrative poem tells a story. Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" are the examples of narrative poetry.At that period new types of literature were imported from the European continent. Chief among these were the sonnet, imported by Wyatt and Surrey from Italy, where it had been perfected by Francis Petrarch; and the essay, imported by Sir Francis Bacon from France. Other verse forms were also borrowed from Italian and French. The native drama continued to develop and gain popularity.
Interested in education, Queen Elizabeth established one hundred free grammar schools in all parts of the country. These schools were open to both sexes of all ranks. In 1579, Gresham College was founded in London to cater to the needs of the middle class. Unlike the classical curriculum offered by Oxford and Cambridge, its curriculum included law, medicine and other practical courses. As the children of the middle class grew better educated, the middle class itself grew in power.
During Elizabeth's reign, England began to gain supremacy on the seas. The Elizabethan Age is the age of poetry. Except perhaps for the essayist Francis Bacon and the critic Christopher Marlowe, people were not yet writing prose of literary quality. Some Elizabethan writers dealt exclusively in lyric poetry, but many were also playwrights writing their plays in verse.
A group of leading Elizabethan playwrights was known as the "University Wits" because they had attended the famous English universities at Oxford and Cambridge. These playwrights included Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and George Peele. Marlowe was the most important dramatist among the Wits. William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other more than a dozen first-rate playwrights also created their skillful dramas at that period. Blank verse, introduced into the language by Surrey, became the main form for writing tragedies and comedies.
1.2. The General facts of writer’s life
William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and the «Bard of Avon»⁴ His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some uncertain William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day. This date, which can be traced back to an XVIII^th century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553,about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence 27 November 1582. The next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times, and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. According to professor Nicholas Roweview-point, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him. Another XVIII^th century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some XX^th century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the "university wits"). The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene's target. Here Johannes Factotum"Jack of all trades" means a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius". Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks. From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of the information.⁵
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
After 1606, 1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna. The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.