Universitat de València Departament Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya

 



Sixteenth-century English Literature


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 Elizabethan Critical Essays (bartleby) | 

Essays on 16th-century English Literature (from Luminarium)

POETRY | PROSE | THEATRE


English Renaissance Poetry


The Petrarchan tradition and the English sonnet. Renaissance Neoplatonism.

Petrarchism : glossary entry  

English sonnet: as a form, "the 'English' sonnet has three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The individuation of its quatrains and couplet, in conjunction with its scheme of alternating rhymes, encourages parallelism and antithesis." (Cousins )

Renaissance Neoplatonism: glossary entry ; the Platonic Academy in Florence (1426-1475) ; Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier (Il cortigiano, 1528), English trans. in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby (EB).

Siegel, Paul N. "The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neo-Platonic Love." Studies in Philology 42, no. 2 (1945): 164-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172694.

Audio Readings of poems: WWNorton



Thomas Wyatt (1503 - 1542)

EB entry

sonnets "Who so list to hunt…" and "The long love…" (pr. 1595)   in Representative Poetry Online (Univ. Toronto)  

Practical criticism essay on "They flee from me…"



Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517 - 1547)

EB entry

sonnets "Alas! so all things now…" and "Love, that doth love and reign…" (pr. 1595)   in Representative Poetry Online (Univ. Toronto)  



Tottell's Miscellany

Songes and sonettes, written by Henry Haward late earle of Surrey, and other. London, 1557. STC 13860. Modern edition: H. E. Rollins, ed. Tottell's Miscellany 2 vols., 2nd edn. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.



Spenser, Edmund (1552? - 1599)

EB entry

The Faerie Queene  (pr. 1590 and 1596)  EB 

Spenserian stanza: "eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a ninth line of six iambic feet (an alexandrine); the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc." (EB)

sonnets in Amoretti & Epithalamion (pr. 1595)   Spenser in RPO (Univ. Toronto)     | EB

Sonnet 67 "Like as a huntsman…"; Sonnet 75 "One day I wrote her name…"

"Spenser amalgamated neo-Platonic love with the Calvinistic ideal of marriage." (Siegel p. 165)

Spenserian sonnet: "follows the English quatrain and couplet pattern but resembles the Italian in using a linked rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee" ("sonnet" EB)


Sidney, Philip (1554 - 1586)

EB entry

Astrophel and Stella (pr. 1591 [STC 22536]), sonnet sequence Sidney in RPO (Univ. Toronto)  - facsimile -   EB entry

Sonnet 1 Loving in truth,…; Sonnet 37 My mouth doth water…; Sonnet 72 Desires, though thou my old companion …

Sonnet 31 <online scansion tool (University of Virginia)


Shakespeare, William (1564 - 1616)

Venus and Adonis (pr. 1593), The Rape of Lucrece (pr. 1594),

Shakespeare's Sonnets (pr. 1609)

Shakespeare Folger Digital Texts  | Shakespeare in RPO (Univ. Toronto) 

Sonnet 29 "When in disgrace...", version by Rufus Wainwright




Bibliography on Shakespeare's sonnets

Booth, Stephen, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Cousins, A. D. "Shakespeare's Sonnets." The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, Cambridge. Eds. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 125-144. [UV online]

Duncan Jones, Katherine, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets, The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson, 1997.

Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) (on sonnet 94)

Jakobson, Roman and Lawrence Jones, Shakespeare's Verbal Art and Th'Expense of Spirit (1970) (on sonnet 129)

Kerringan, John, ed. The Sonnets and a Love's Complaint. Penguin, 1986.

Schiffer, James, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 2000.

Schoenfeldt, Michael. A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Schoenfeldt, Michael. "The Sonnets." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 125-143. [UV online]

 

 


Marlowe, Christopher (1564 - 1593)

  Hero and Leander (epyllion) (pr. 1598)  Marlowe in RPO (Univ. Toronto)



Early Modern English Theatre to 1600

Early Modern Engish Theatre webpage

 

 Timeline of plays:  1580-1642   and   950s- 1580s


1586-1642:  Theatre companies and playhouses (from G. K. Hunter)  


Theatre spaces

Hodges' conjectural reconstruction of The Globe theatre (Folger

Interactive 3D reconstruction of The Globe theatre (ACMEDIN project, UV)

The Globe theatre as reconstructed in the film Henry V directed by L. Olivier, 1944  (6 first min.  clip  )  ; in virtual tour of Shakespeare's Globe

The Rose theatre as reconstructed in the film Shakespeare in Love directed by John Madden, 1998 ( beginning of Romeo and Juliet clip ) 

The Rose Theatre: a virtual model by ORTELIA

The Boar’s Head Theatre; a 3-D virtual building, by ORTELIA

A modern reconstruction of an indoor, ‘private’ playhouse: The Sam Wanamaker’s Theatre (photos)

 

The Spanish Tragedy attributed to Thomas Kyd

Text : Craik’s modern edition reproduced in EMOTHE collection

Questions

Other resources
 Script reading (Tod Davies, with Derek Jacobi as Hieronimo) Part 1

Explore the site on The Spanish Tragedy at the Center for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick


Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

   excerpts from plays

Tamburlaine : Part One [1587], Part Two [1588]

Michael Pennington reciting "Black is the beauty of the brightest day" (Part II, 2.4.1): YouTubeclip -- [text]

Doctor Faustus : [1588-89]

Text(s):  Roma Gill's edition of A-Text in N9 ;  A-Text and  B-Text edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen for EMOTHE

Productions:

Questions on Doctor Faustus:

    1) What conventions from classical and native drama are put into service in the play?
    2) How would you explain the statement that Faustus is "the 'mankind' figure of his own morality play" (Bevington and Rasmussen, xiii)
    3) How is the following humanist tenet enacted in the play? "so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thout mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer" (Pico de la Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486) [p. 535 in Norton Anthology]
    4) How are the characters with authority (Pope, Holy Roman Emperor, Duke and Duchess) portrayed?  What is the function of the scenes showing these characters?
    5) Considering confliction notions of salvation (Protestant by faith or grace alone, and Catholic by grace and good works or merit) how are these doctrines dealt with in the play?
    6) How conventions and devices in Doctor Faustus fit the stagecraft implied in an Elizabethan playhouse, as explained by Styan?


 The Jew of Malta [1589-90]

Barabas

Edward II [1591-03]

Productions:

 

The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage

 

The Massacre at Paris

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 Chronology and genre classification of Shakespeare’s works

 

 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

Text :  Mowat and Werstine’s modern edition at Folger Digital Texts  ; reproduced in EMOTHE collection

Productions:

 

 

Sixteenth-century prose

Humanism

Education was a prime concern of English Humanists - > writing of treatises on education to promote the kind of learning they regarded as the most suitable preparation for public service" (Norton) : John Colet, Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham

To provide the future servants of the state with a proper and liberal education "to counteract the effects of an aristocracy that despised learning and of a legal-administrative social unit whose training was too narrowly confined to the financially profitable technicalities of the law (O 79)

The Instrument of Prose (O 10)

The humanist programme required a new sort of language:
– vernacular: it moved from Latin and Greek to a rebuilding of the vernacular
– modes of eloquence: prose and verse: there was no clear distinction between prose as plain, universal and ordinary, and verse as special, ornate, idiosyncratic, until the end of the 17th c.

Sir Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, Sir Thomas Hoby chose to write in English, for his countrymen, not in Latin for the educated world of Europe: (O 79)
Their task: "to apply the civilizing influence of humanisn to English life, so that England would be worthy to take her place at the head of nations" (O 79)

Styles of prose (O 10):
– Ciceronian: elaborate, balanced, ornate, many dependent clauses and rounded periods -> Euphuistic prose, from John Lyly’s Euphues (1578)
– Senecan: livelier, jumpier, short sentences and sudden terns and variations of pace-> for sermons, treatises, tracts, translations of foreign authors, favored by Bacon


Sir Thomas Hoby, (1530-66), The Book of the Courtier (1554, pub. 1561), a translation of B. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1508-1516, pub. 1528) - text in Luminarium / Renascence Editions -

= a treatise or essay on the ideal courtier, written in the form of four fictitious dialogues among real people

 One of the most influential books of the century.

A summary of humanistic thought.

It "embodies the highest moral ideals of the Renaissance" ("romance" Encyclopaedia Britannica)

"Its main themes include the nature of graceful behaviour, especially the impression of effortlessness (sprezzatura); the essence of humour; the best form of Italian to speak and write; the relation between the courtier and his prince (stressing the need to speak frankly and not to flatter); the qualities of the ideal court lady (notably “a discreet modesty”); and the definition of honourable love." ("Baldassare Castiglione" Encyclopaedia Britannica)

"a philosophically organized pattern of conflicting viewpoints in which various positions—Platonist and Aristotelian, idealist and cynic, monarchist and republican, traditional and revolutionary—are given eloquent expression. Unlike most of his humanistic forebears, Castiglione is neither missionary nor polemical. His work is not an effort at systematic knowledge but rather an essay in higher discretion, a powerful reminder that every virtue (moral or intellectual) suggests a concomitant weakness and that extreme postures tend to generate their own opposites. " ("humanism" Encyclopaedia Britannica) 

Neoplatonism in its view of love and harmony (in Book IV)

"Castiglione's Courtier presents through its interlocutors the principal Renaissance attitudes towards love. Lord Gaspar is the proponent of the practices of chivalric love, just as he expresses the contempt of feudal chivalry for literary pursuits. Opposing his views are Cardinal Bembo and Lord Magnifico, who speak for the new Renaissance doctrine of neo-Platonic love. Whereas chivalric love has as its very centre sexual intercourse outside of marriage and is an overwhelming passioin which ignores the dictates of reason, that unheeded counselor of the medieval love allegories, neo-Platonic love is governed by reason and is in one of its aspects an idealization of marriage" (Siegel p.164)

"Peter Bembo's elegant restatement, Christianized and heterosexualized, of an ideal of love that ultimately derives from Plato's Symposium. Bembo declares that love is not the mere gratificacion of the sense by is the yearning of the soul after beauty, which is finally identical with the eternal good. Love properly understood is, therefore, a kind of ladder by which the shoul progresses from lower to higher things. ... One of the spirited ladies in the court, Emilia Pia, plucks his garment and gently reminds him that he has a body" (N9 704)


It introduced the idea that the individual can fashion themselves into an identity of their own, influencing Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning)

Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490-1546) The Governor (pub. 1531)

= a conduct book explaining the humanist ideal of a monarch (in line with Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, and Machiavelli's The Prince) 

 

Roger Ascham (1515–68), The Schoolmaster (pub. 1570)

= an educational manual; explains the humanist ideal of an individual. Addressed to tutors or teachers of the social elite (Wynne-Davies Bloomsbury Guide)


Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)

History of King Richard III (pub. 1513), a contribution to the "Tudor myth"


Thomas More's Utopia (1516)

Utopia: reading text: translation by Ralph Robinson 1551 (PDF in Aula Virtual).

Original text in Latin, published in 1516: De optimo reipublica statu deque nova insula Utopia.

Duncombe's Introduction in The Open Utopia 

On Thomas More (Center for Thomas More Studies). Sitemap. See also its Library section

Bibliography on Utopia


Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy (pub. 1595)

Also titled An Apology for Poetry. Probably written in the winter of 1579-80.

"an eloquent argument for the dignity, social efficacy, and moral value of imaginative literature in verse or prose" (N9 1044)

Text in bartleby.com (from Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. by G. Gregory Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904)

Structured as a "classical oration" defending poetry against charges of irresponsibility and unreality (at that time voiced by Puritan moralists)

- freedom of poets: they do not depend on nature as their object (like astronomy, music, medicine) but on their own "invention", their own poetic imagination

- poets are superior to philosophers and historians because they are free to show virtues and vices in a livelier, delighting and moving manner while teaching readers.

- against Plato's accusation that poets are liars and that poetry arouses base desires: a poet "nothing affirm, and therefore never lieth";

- against the drama written during his time because it mixes "kings and clowns" and "it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. For where the stage should always be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day, there is both many days, and many places, inartificially imagined" (N9 1077)


John Lyly's prose romances Euphues (1578 and 1580)

Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), Euphues and his England (1580).  Euphues is the protagonist in these prose romances.

Text of Lyly's 1578 Euphues in Luminarium

Euphuistic style : "an elegant Elizabethan literary style marked by excessive use of balance, antithesis, and alliteration and by frequent use of similes drawn from mythology and nature. The word is also used to denote artificial elegance" ("euphuism" EB), "extreme rhetorical mannerism" ("English literature" EB)

"Though the camomile, the more it is trodden and pressed down, the more it spreadeth, yet the violet the oftner it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decayeth" (Euphues 1578, 1.196)

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627)

Text of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis :  pdf  Ed. G. B. Wegemer (2020) 


 

Anthology

 Siegel, Paul N. "The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neo-Platonic Love." (1942)

By " Petrarchan" sonnets, I mean those sonnets, written in imitation of Petrarch, in which the main themes are the lover's sufferings, the lady's physical beauty, and her heartless disdain and cruelty, and in which love is described as a passion which sweeps aside reason. (p. 165)

The exaggerated laudation of the mistress and the complete humility of the lover in the Petrarchan sonnet do not represent an idealization of womanhood. Rather do they represent a degradation of women, for the literary and social convention which gave them this spurious elevation sprang from a point of view in which they were so many conquests to be gained. (p. 170)

 

 * * *

Diella certaine sonnets, adioyned to the amorous poeme of Dom Diego and Gineura. By Richard Linche, Gentleman.  London, 1596.


Sonnet III.
SWift-footed Time, looke back & here mark well
those rare-shapt parts my pen shal now declare
My mistres snow-white skinne doth much excell
the pure-soft woll Arcadyan sheepe doe beare;
Her hayre exceedes gold forc'd in smallest wyre,
in smaller threds then those Arachne spun;
Her eyes are christall fountaines, yet dart fire,
more glorious to behold then Mid-day sun;
Her Iuory front, (though soft as purest silke)
lookes like the table of Olympick Ioue,
Her cheekes are like ripe cherries layd in milke,
her Alablaster neck the throne of Loue;
Her other parts so farre excell the rest,
That wanting words, they cannot be exprest.


Bibliography