Analysis of Italian Renaissance Literature
Analysis of Italian Renaissance Literature
The Italian Renaissance began around the fifteenth century, affecting all fields of human endeavor-literature; these included the arts, sciences, religion and politics: This time was also known as prosperity and expansion that displayed a new mood of confidence.
The Early Renaissance in England:
The first Tudor monarch started with Henry VII, during this decade and a half of the fifteenth century was mostly concerned with healing the wound of political dissension and economic depression after the War of the Roses; The next Tudor began with Henry VII, the country did begin to prosper once more and the Protestant Reformation finally appeared emergence of the Anglican church headed by Henry and in the growth of a more radical sect, the Puritans.
During his reign, only slight stirrings of Renaissance activities can be seen: Sir Thomas More, a Tudor statesman whom Henry beheaded for his disobedience; emphasized classical learning; Erasmus, a scholar of the new humanism, began to lecture at Cambridge in 1509, he emphasized human reasoning.
Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, began writing the first poetry in modern English sometime in the late 1520’s; although their poems did not see print until 1557 when they were published in Tottel’s Miscellany fifteen years after Wyatt’s death, as well as 20 years after Surrey’s beheading.
Wyatt wrote the first sonnets in Modern English in a form that he adapted for English from Patriarch, Italy’s great sonneteer during the fourteenth century: Surrey “invented” blank verse for modern English, getting the five beats flowing again in a language that had undergone much change since the time when Chaucer, more then a century before, had solved a similar problem for middle English.
Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spencer not only took up the example of Wyatt and Surrey, they also went further in typically Renaissance direction then any poets before them had ventured; The famous Faerie Queen of Spencer is the first attempt to write an epic in English that would be modeled along classical lines: Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, though influenced by Patriarch and by Wheat, is one of the few great sonnet sequences in English history.
The High Renaissance-Elizabethan Drama
In the Drama that English Renaissance attains greatness and finds its own individual voice and vision, it was both iconoclastic and popular; this drama acted out in the open sun...