The Elizabethan Age(1485-1625) ?English renaissance
?English poetry in the Renaissance period ?English prose in the Renaissance Period ?English drama in the Renaissance period The Elizabethan Age ?Background:
Henry VII(1485-1509), a Tudor, ended the Wars of the Roses.
Henry VIII(1509-1547), broke with the Roman Catholic Church, became the Supreme Head of the Anglican Church. Edward VI(1547-1553)
Mary I(1553-1558)
Elizabeth I (1558-1603):the English navy defeated the Spanish Armada.
James I (1603-1625), the Stuart king, the first monarch to unite Scotland, England and Ireland into Great Britain.
?The Enclosure Movement
?Overseas commerce, colonization
?The The Elizabethan Age was a time of scientific, historical, religious and artistic exploration.
?English Renaissance: The Renaissance began in Italy. It was the rebirth of classical Greek and Latin learning, and caused the prosperity of arts and sciences and learning among lay people.
?Humanism was the pivotal philosophy. Humanism:a moral and political view based on the worldly existence of man, his all-round development, his worldly life and happiness.
?Nationalism was rising. ?Religious revolution
?England enjoyed stability and prosperity. English literature in the Period ?The highlight in the history
?The English renaissance period was an age of poetry and drama. ?The greatest and most distinctive achievement is the drama.
?The University wits: John lily,Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe.
?William Shakespeare ?Ben Jonson
?Elizabethan poetry is remarkable for its variety, its freshness, its youthfulness and its romantic feeling.
?Writing poetry became a fashion. England became ―a nest of singing birds‖.
?Famous poets:Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Philip Sidney, Edmund spenser.
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?Prose writers: Francis Bacon, Thomas More ?The translation of the Bible
Poetry
?Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542): a forerunner of the Elizabethan poetry. ?a courtier and diplomat for Henry VIII. ?He introduced to England the Sonnet.
?His poems are characterized by the directness, simplicity and the emotion toward nature. ?Poems: Farewell, Love
I Find no Peace They Flee from Me
?Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)
?He changed the Italian form of sonnet into a form of three quatrains plus a couplet, which is later called the English sonnet.
?He introduced blank verse to English literature in his translations of Virgil’s Aeneid.
?Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter, a verse form that flourished in the succeeding 4 centuries.Marlowe’s famous ―mighty line‖ is blank verse. Shakespeare improved on it. Milton made blank verse the regular meter of epic.
?Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) ?A poet and a critic of poetry. ?Three principal works:
Arcadia: a long prose-verse romance.
Astrophel and Stella: the first of the greatest Elizabethan sonnet sequences. the 108 sonnets and 11 songs develop a single subject, love.
?Defense of Poetry (An Apology for Poetry): one of the earliest English literary essays. An literary criticism to counterattack an attack on poetry and drama.
Poetry was a superiority over philosophy and history.philosopher is concerned with the abstract and general, and the historian is concerned with what is and not with what should be, while the poet can better the function of both.
?Famous for his beauty and courage, his wit and his noble character.
?Sidney initiated two kinds of writing in English: the long sonnet sequence and essay in literary criticism.
Edmund Spenser(1552-1559)— ―the Poets’ poet‖(by John Keats), the greatest non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan Age.
The Shepheards Calendar, his first major work, establishing him as the national poet.
It comprises 12 eclogues(田园诗) that follow the months of year. Love, poetry and religion are the three main themes of the poem.
?Amoretti . A sequence of 88 sonnets, recounting his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. An optimistic
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look at love.
?Prothalamium. “sweet Thames run softly till I end my song”
?Epithalamion, a beautiful and complex wedding poem about the joy of his marriage
?The Faerie Queene: his masterpiece, a long allegory of Christian belief, set in mythical world of King Arthur and his knights. It consists of 6 books. The plan:12 books
The Faerie Queene, Gloriana,
Knights,each representing a different moral virtue:holiness,temperance, chastity, justice, courtesy , friendship, and so on.
?The dominating thoughts of the poem are nationalism, humanism and puritanism .
?The greatness of the work is not in its thought or in its story. It is in the magic feeling in the air, the wonderful music of the verse, the beauty of the sound. ?Written in a special verse form, ―Spenserian Stanza‖
?Spenserian stanza: a verse that consists of 8 iambic pentameter lines followed by a ninth line of six iambic feet with the rhyme plan ababbcbcc.
?The sonnet form he invented is based on an intricate pattern of interlocking rhymes. Abab bcbc cdcd ee
?Characteristics of Spenser’s Poetry: a perfect melody a rare sense of beauty a splendid imagination
a lofty moral purity and seriousness a delicate realism.
?Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh ?The Passionate Shepherd to His Love Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dales and fields Woods or steepy mountain yield.
?The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd If all the world and love were young And truth in every shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. drama
?University wits
?Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) the Spanish tragedy
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?Christopher Marlowe: the greatest playwright before Shakespeare.
His best plays:Tamburlaine the Great The Jew of Malta The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
?Social significance of Marlowe’s plays
?His plays show the spirit of the rising bourgeoisie, its eager curiosity for knowledge, its towering pride, its insatiable appetite for power. The heroes of his plays are generally distinguished by a resolute character, a scorn of orthodox creeds and an overpowering passion: ambition, desire for knowledge, greed for wealth.
?The theme of his plays is the praise of individuality freed from the restraints of medieval dogmas and law and the conviction of the boundless possibility of human efforts in conquering the universe.
?Marlowe first made blank verse the principal instrument of English drama. Shakespeare ?Life
?Periods of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Composition ?The great comedies ?The great tragedies ?The later comedies ?The poems ?Sonnet 18
The life
?Born on April 23,1564 in Stratford-on –Avon.
?At the age of 14, he left school and became a country school master ?1582,married to Anne Hathaway
?Left home for London in 1586/1587,took many odd jobs and became an actor ?1611,retired to his hometown ?Died on April 23,1616
Periods of Dramatic Composition ?The first period(1590—1594) ?The second period(1595--1600) ?The third period (1601– 1607) ?The fourth period (1608– 1612)
The first period
?A period of early experiment
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