Renaissance Literature (1500-1603)

In 1476 a merchant named William Caxton set up a printing press at Westminster. Until then a book was a rare and costly thing, copied slowly by hand, and only the rich or the learned could own one. The press changed this. Within a few decades ideas could travel across the country faster than any rider, and ordinary readers began to ask for books in their own language.

By 1500 England was ready for a fresh start. The Wars of the Roses, a long struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster, had ended in 1485, when Henry Tudor won the battle of Bosworth and became Henry VII. A tired country wanted peace and order. At the same time, a wave of excitement was reaching England from Italy. Italian scholars, led long before by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, had been hunting out the forgotten writings of ancient Greece and Rome and reading them with new eyes. They felt that a golden age of learning had been lost and was now being born again. The movement came to be called the Renaissance, a French word that means "rebirth".

The century that followed, from 1500 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, began with scholars reading Latin and Greek in quiet rooms. It ended with crowds pushing into open-air theatres on the south bank of the Thames. Between those two scenes came a king who quarrelled with the Pope, a Bible in English, a queen who never married, a sea battle against Spain, and a generation of poets and playwrights who turned English into a language that could carry anything.

The world of this age

Political life

Henry VII ruled from 1485 to 1509, and he spent those years making the crown safe. The Wars of the Roses had shown how dangerous great lords with private armies could be, so Henry kept them in check and filled the royal treasury. He left his son a calm and wealthy kingdom.

That son, Henry VIII, became king in 1509 at the age of seventeen. He was clever, loved music and learning, and wanted to be seen as a great ruler in Europe. But one worry grew in him every year. His wife, Catherine of Aragon, had given him a daughter, Mary, but no living son, and he feared that a kingdom without a male heir might fall back into civil war. He asked the Pope to end the marriage. The Pope, who was then under the power of Catherine's nephew, the Emperor Charles V, refused.

Henry's answer changed England. In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which made the king, and not the Pope, the Supreme Head of the Church of England. By then Henry had married Anne Boleyn. Between 1536 and 1540 he closed the monasteries and took their lands and wealth. Anyone who refused to accept his new position was in danger. One of them was Thomas More, a former Lord Chancellor and once the king's friend, who was beheaded in 1535.

Henry died in 1547. His son Edward VI came to the throne as a boy, ruled for six years under Protestant advisers, and died at fifteen in 1553. The crown then passed to Mary I, Catherine's daughter. Mary was a devout Catholic who wished to bring back the Pope's authority. She had hundreds of Protestants burned as heretics, and her marriage to Philip II of Spain was disliked by many of her subjects. She died childless in 1558.

Elizabeth I, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, became queen at twenty-five. She inherited a divided and nervous country and ruled it for forty-four years. She chose her advisers well, above all William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and she never married, though princes from across Europe asked for her hand. Her single life became part of her public image as the Virgin Queen, and poems, portraits and pageants grew up around it.

Her dangers were real. In 1570 the Pope declared her excommunicated, which encouraged Catholic plots against her. Many of these plots gathered around her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic who had fled to England in 1568 and had a claim to the English crown. After long years in captivity Mary was executed in 1587. Philip II of Spain, who had once been Elizabeth's brother-in-law and was now her enemy, answered in 1588 by sending a great fleet, the Armada, to invade England. The English ships, helped by storms, drove it off. The victory did not make England a great power overnight, but it gave the country a new pride in itself, and writers soon made use of that pride.

Social life

English society was pictured as a ladder. At the top stood the monarch, then the great nobles, then the gentry who owned land and held local offices, then yeomen farmers, merchants and craftsmen, and at the bottom the labourers and the poor. People were taught that this order came from God. Thinkers liked to imagine it as a great chain reaching from God through angels, kings, men and animals down to plants and stones. Every link had its place, and to pull at one link was to shake all the rest. This idea, the Great Chain of Being, appears again and again in the plays and poems of the age, usually at moments when something has gone wrong in the order of things.

Life was changing all the same. The population grew, and many people moved from villages into towns, above all into London, which by 1600 was by far the largest city in the country. Schools spread too. Grammar schools, many of them founded or refounded under Henry VIII and Edward VI, taught boys Latin through Roman authors such as Cicero, Virgil and Ovid. Behind this teaching stood a movement called humanism. The humanists studied the ancient writers not only for their beauty but as guides to living well in this world, and they believed that education could make better citizens and better rulers. Their English leaders included Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn, Thomas More, and John Colet, who founded St Paul's School in London in 1509. The Dutch scholar Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the age, visited England several times and wrote his satire In Praise of Folly (1511) while staying in More's house.

Girls from rich families could be well taught. Elizabeth herself read several languages, and More made sure that his daughters learned Latin and Greek. Most girls, however, did not go to school, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge took only men.

Not everyone shared in the new learning or the growing wealth. Many people were poor, and plague came back to London again and again. In 1601 Parliament passed a Poor Law that made each parish responsible for its own poor.

Economic life

In 1500 England was mainly a farming country that earned its money from wool. Raw wool and woollen cloth were its chief exports, and much of the cloth went through the great port of Antwerp. When landlords found that sheep paid better than crops, they fenced off their fields, a practice called enclosure, and turned farmland into pasture. The families who had worked that land lost their living and took to the roads. Thomas More saw this misery and wrote in Utopia that the sheep, once so gentle, had begun to eat up men.

Prices rose through the century. Henry VIII paid for his wars by putting less silver into the coins, and later, silver from Spanish America poured into Europe. Wages did not rise as fast as prices, so many ordinary people grew poorer.

Merchants, meanwhile, grew rich and bold. Sir Thomas Gresham founded the Royal Exchange in London in the 1560s as a meeting place for traders. Joint-stock companies, in which many investors shared the cost and the risk, were formed to trade with distant lands: the Muscovy Company in 1555, and the East India Company, which received its charter in 1600. Sailors went further than ever before. Francis Drake sailed round the world between 1577 and 1580, and Sir Walter Raleigh sent settlers to Virginia in the 1580s. Richard Hakluyt gathered the sailors' accounts into a great book, The Principal Navigations, in 1589. People who had never left their parish now read about the Arctic, Africa and America, and the wider world began to appear in their literature.

Religion

Religion in this age was never a private matter. It decided who could rule, whom a king could marry, and sometimes who lived. In 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther began to attack the Pope's power and the sale of pardons, and his protest grew into the Reformation, which split Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant. Henry VIII at first opposed Luther. He wrote a book against him in 1521, and the Pope thanked him with the title Defender of the Faith. Only a few years later Henry broke with the Pope himself, for his own reasons. But once the Pope's authority was gone, Protestant ideas flowed in.

Reformers argued that every Christian should read the Bible in a language he understood. William Tyndale, a scholar who worked abroad because the English authorities were against him, printed an English New Testament in 1526, and copies were smuggled into England. He was strangled and burnt as a heretic in 1536. Yet in 1539 the Great Bible, built largely on the work of Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, was placed in the parish churches by order of the king. In 1549 Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, produced the Book of Common Prayer, a book of services in English whose rhythms entered the memory of the whole nation.

Mary's reign reversed all this. Many Protestants fled abroad, and a group of exiles in Geneva produced the Geneva Bible in 1560, with study notes in the margins. It became the favourite Bible of English households. John Foxe, another exile, published a long history of the Protestant martyrs, Acts and Monuments, in English in 1563. It was read for generations and is often called the Book of Martyrs.

Elizabeth wanted peace. Her Religious Settlement of 1559 made England officially Protestant but kept some of the old forms of worship, and the Prayer Book returned. It pleased most people but not all. Puritans wanted the Church purified of everything that seemed Catholic, while Catholics wanted the old faith back, and priests who came secretly to England from abroad were treated as traitors.

Literature in this age

Three forces shaped the writing of the century: the new learning from the ancient world, the printing press, and a growing pride in the English language itself. The first gave writers their models, the second gave them readers, and the third gave them the nerve to write in English rather than Latin.

The language

The English of 1500 was already far from the English of Chaucer, who had died a century earlier. A long change in the sound of vowels, called the Great Vowel Shift, had begun around 1400 and was now settling down, and the printing press was slowly fixing spelling. The language that scholars call Early Modern English was taking shape.

It was also a hungry language. Humanists and translators were bringing ideas from Latin, Greek, Italian and French into English, and English did not always have words for them. Writers borrowed freely, and some borrowed too freely. Critics mocked the showy new words as inkhorn terms, after the pots in which scholars kept their ink. Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), made fun of a letter stuffed with such words. Others defended plain English. Richard Mulcaster, a headmaster, wrote in Elementarie (1582) that he loved Rome but loved London better, and honoured Latin but worshipped English.

One small word shows how the language felt. English had two words for "you". Thou was used to children, close friends and people of lower rank, and you to superiors and strangers. A writer could show a change of feeling between two characters by a change from one word to the other.

How the writing reached its readers

After Caxton, printers such as Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson built up a book trade in London. The government watched it closely. In 1557 Mary I gave a royal charter to the Stationers' Company, and from then on only its members could print books, which made it easier for the crown to control what was published. Plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels, an officer who read them for anything dangerous in politics or religion.

Writing was a poor way to earn a living. A poet who wanted money or protection looked for a patron, a rich noble who would accept a dedication and reward the writer. Shakespeare dedicated his first poems to the Earl of Southampton, and Spenser received a pension from the queen after The Faerie Queene appeared. Many gentlemen also thought it unbecoming to print their poems at all, so verses passed from hand to hand in manuscript. Few of Wyatt's poems were printed in his lifetime, and Sidney's best-known sonnets appeared only after his death.

Poetry

The first notable poet of the century looked back as much as forward. John Skelton, once tutor to the boy who became Henry VIII, wrote short, jerky lines that rush from rhyme to rhyme, a style later called Skeltonic verse. He could be tender, as in Philip Sparrow, a girl's lament for her pet bird killed by a cat, and he could be fierce, as in Colin Clout, which attacked the faults of the clergy.

The real change came through two courtiers who had read Italian. Sir Thomas Wyatt visited Italy in 1527 on the king's business and found the poems of Petrarch, whose love sonnets had been admired across Europe for almost two centuries. English had no sonnets at that time. Wyatt began to translate and imitate them, fitting the fourteen-line Italian form into English. His verse can be rough, because English was still settling after the loss of many sounded word endings, but it often carries real feeling, as in "They flee from me" and "Whoso list to hunt", a poem adapted from Petrarch.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a younger nobleman and soldier, took the next step. He smoothed the rhythm and shaped the English sonnet: three four-line stanzas with alternate rhymes and a closing couplet, the pattern Shakespeare would later use. In translating two books of Virgil's Aeneid, Surrey also became the first English poet to use blank verse, which means unrhymed lines of ten syllables. Both men died young. Wyatt died of a fever in 1542, aged about thirty-nine, and Surrey was beheaded for treason in 1547, when he was about thirty.

Few of their poems had been printed in their lifetimes. In 1557 the printer Richard Tottel gathered them in Songes and Sonettes, now called Tottel's Miscellany, the first printed anthology of English courtly poetry. Two years later A Mirror for Magistrates (1559) told in verse the sad falls of famous men, each speaking from the grave, and showed writers how a tragedy might be built. After that, little of lasting beauty appeared for some years. Many poets wrote heavy, jogging lines such as poulter's measure, alternating lines of twelve and fourteen syllables, and packed them with moral lessons.

A fresh start came in 1579. Edmund Spenser, born in London around 1552 and educated at Cambridge, had joined the circle of the Earl of Leicester, where he met Sir Philip Sidney. In that year he published The Shepheardes Calender, twelve poems, one for each month, in which shepherds talk about love, poets and the Church. He signed it Immerito, which means "unworthy", and a friend who called himself E. K. added notes. Spenser used some deliberately old-fashioned words, and the book showed that English could handle many kinds of verse.

Sidney, meanwhile, was writing something new. Born in 1554 into a noble family, he was the model of a courtier: educated at Oxford, travelled in Europe, a favourite at Elizabeth's court. Around 1582 he wrote Astrophil and Stella, a sequence of 108 sonnets and eleven songs. Astrophil, whose name means "star-lover", adores Stella, "star", a lady who does not return his love, and readers have often linked her with Penelope Devereux. Sidney refused to copy Petrarch's stale phrases. In the first sonnet his Muse tells him to look in his heart and write. The sequence was printed in 1591, after his death, and began a craze for sonnets. Samuel Daniel's Delia followed in 1592, Spenser's Amoretti in 1595, and Shakespeare's sonnets circulated among his friends in the 1590s, though they were printed only in 1609.

Spenser himself had gone to Ireland in 1580 as secretary to the Lord Deputy, Lord Grey, and settled on land at Kilcolman. There he worked on a great poem for Elizabeth. In 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh visited him and urged him to bring it to London, and in 1590 the first three books of The Faerie Queene were printed, with three more in 1596. Spenser planned twelve books, each following a knight who stands for one virtue, but he finished only six. In the first, the Red Cross Knight, who stands for Holiness, travels with Una, who stands for Truth, to free her parents from a dragon. He is deceived on the way by the wizard Archimago and the false lady Duessa, and nearly loses himself before he wins. The poem is an allegory, a story in which characters and events stand for ideas, and the Faerie Queene, Gloriana, who sends the knights on their quests, stands for Elizabeth. Spenser invented a new nine-line stanza for it, now called the Spenserian stanza. In 1594 he married Elizabeth Boyle and wrote for her the sonnets of Amoretti and the wedding hymn Epithalamion (1595). In 1598 Irish rebels burned his castle, and he died in London in January 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer.

The plague of 1592 and 1593 closed the London theatres, and writers who depended on them found no work. A young playwright named William Shakespeare turned to poetry and in 1593 published Venus and Adonis, a story from Ovid about a goddess who loves a boy who rejects her, dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. The Rape of Lucrece followed in 1594. Short narrative poems on classical, usually love, themes were the fashion, and are called epyllia. Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, left unfinished at his death and completed by George Chapman, is the finest of them. Marlowe also wrote a famous shepherd's love song, which Raleigh answered with a poem in the voice of the nymph, and both appeared in the anthology England's Helicon (1600).

Drama

The English theatre of 1500 was still medieval. Towns put on cycles of mystery plays, which told Bible stories, and morality plays, in which characters stood for virtues and vices. The early Tudors added interludes, short and often funny plays acted in noble halls, the best known by John Heywood. Meanwhile the humanists had brought back the Roman playwrights. Schoolboys acted Plautus and Terence in Latin, and scholars read the bloody tragedies of Seneca, full of ghosts, murders and long speeches. When English writers began to imitate these models, a new drama began.

Two plays mark the start. Nicholas Udall, a schoolmaster who wrote plays for the boys in his charge, composed Ralph Roister Doister (about 1552) on the pattern of Plautus and Terence, and it is often called the first English comedy. Around 1561 two lawyers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, wrote Gorboduc, the first English tragedy in blank verse. It was first acted by the students of the Inner Temple, one of the law schools of London, in January 1562, and a few days later before the queen herself. It copied Seneca's five-act form.

For plays to grow, players needed a home. Companies of actors had long travelled from town to town, acting in inn yards. A law of 1572 declared that wandering players without a noble patron would be treated as vagabonds, so companies took the names of great men: Leicester's Men, the Lord Admiral's Men, and from 1594 the Lord Chamberlain's Men. But the city authorities of London disliked plays, because crowds spread plague and caused trouble, and Puritan preachers said that plays taught sin. So the first playhouses were built just outside the city's control. In 1576 James Burbage built The Theatre at Shoreditch, north of the city. Others followed, including the Rose on the south bank of the Thames in 1587. In 1599 Burbage's sons and their company, with Shakespeare as one of the shareholders, took down the old Theatre and carried its timbers across the river to build the Globe.

The playhouse itself was simple. The Globe was open to the sky, with a stage that jutted into a yard where common people, the groundlings, stood for a penny. Wealthier people sat in covered galleries around the walls. Plays were acted in the afternoon by daylight with hardly any scenery, so the words had to paint the forest or the battlefield. Women did not act on the public stage, and boys played the women's parts.

The first great dramatists were young men from the universities, known as the University Wits: John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge and Christopher Marlowe. Thomas Kyd, who did not go to university, is often named with them. Lyly wrote witty comedies for the court. Greene wrote romantic comedies such as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and in 1592, dying in poverty, he warned his fellow writers against an "upstart crow", usually taken to mean Shakespeare.

Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, from the late 1580s, set the pattern for revenge tragedy. A father, Hieronimo, hunts for justice for his murdered son, goes half mad, and takes his revenge through a play staged within the play, while a ghost watches the whole action. Audiences loved it, and later writers, Shakespeare among them, borrowed its devices.

Marlowe changed what a play could sound like. He was born in Canterbury in 1564, the son of a shoemaker, and won a scholarship to Cambridge. His Tamburlaine the Great (about 1587) told how a shepherd from Central Asia became a world conqueror, and its proud, thundering blank verse showed what the form could do on the public stage. Ben Jonson later praised "Marlowe's mighty line". In Doctor Faustus a learned man, bored with ordinary knowledge, sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power, and cannot repent when the time comes. The play borrows from the old morality plays, with its Good and Bad Angels, but its hero is a Renaissance man whose hunger for knowledge and power leads to his ruin. Marlowe also wrote The Jew of Malta and Edward II. In May 1593 the Privy Council questioned him, and ten days later he was stabbed to death in a quarrel at Deptford, aged twenty-nine.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glove-maker and town official. He probably attended the local grammar school, and he married Anne Hathaway in 1582. By 1592 he was in London, working as an actor and writer. When the plague closed the theatres that year he wrote poems, and when they reopened he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594, and stayed with the company for the rest of his career. He was actor, playwright and shareholder, so the company's success was his own. His early plays learned from Marlowe: the history plays Henry VI and Richard III, and the tragedy Titus Andronicus. Soon he showed a range that no other writer had, with comedies such as The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, the tragedy Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and, around 1600, Hamlet. For his histories he used the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed (1577), and for Julius Caesar Thomas North's English version of Plutarch (1579). By 1598 Francis Meres could name twelve of his plays in print and rank him the best English writer of both comedy and tragedy. His greatest tragedies, however, belong to the next age.

Ben Jonson was a different kind of writer. A learned man who respected the rules of the ancients, he wrote Every Man in His Humour (1598), acted by Shakespeare's company with Shakespeare in the cast. It is a comedy of humours: each character is built around one dominant trait, which in the old medical theory came from too much of one of the four fluids of the body. In 1599 Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday gave London a cheerful comedy about ordinary tradesmen.

Prose

English prose was still young. For centuries serious writers had used Latin, and the first great English prose came from the Bible and the Prayer Book.

Thomas More's Utopia, written in Latin and printed in 1516, was one of the first great works of the age. It describes an imaginary island, found by a traveller, where property is shared and greed has no place, and uses it to criticise the harshness and injustice of England. The name comes from Greek words meaning "no place". Ralph Robinson's English translation followed in 1551. More's unfinished History of King Richard III, written in the 1510s, painted the king as a monster and later gave Shakespeare his villain.

Scholars began to write in English for English readers. Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (1531) explained how to educate the sons of the ruling class. Roger Ascham, who had taught the young Elizabeth, wrote Toxophilus (1545), a dialogue on archery, deliberately in English, and The Scholemaster, printed in 1570 after his death. The second grew out of a dinner at which William Cecil and others discussed boys who ran away from school to escape beatings, and Ascham argued that kindness taught better than the rod. In 1561 Thomas Hoby translated Castiglione's The Courtier from Italian, giving England a picture of the perfect gentleman, graceful, learned and modest.

History and travel also found readers. Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) told the story of England, Scotland and Ireland, and became a storehouse of plots for dramatists. Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations (1589) gathered the stories of sailors.

Prose fiction began in this age. John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) followed a young Athenian in a style packed with balanced phrases, wordplay and long comparisons, soon called euphuism. For a few years it was the fashion at court. Sidney's Arcadia, a long romance of princes, shepherds, disguises and wars, which he wrote for his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, was printed in 1590 and in a fuller form in 1593, and was read for a century. Robert Greene wrote romances such as Pandosto (1588), and exposed the tricks of London thieves in lively pamphlets. Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), the adventures of a rogue named Jack Wilton, is often called the first English novel of roguery.

Prose was also a tool of argument. Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593) defended the Church of England in calm, stately prose. Under the name Martin Marprelate, Puritan writers secretly printed comic attacks on the bishops in 1588 and 1589. And in 1597 Francis Bacon published the first ten of his Essays, short and tightly packed pieces on the practical business of life.

English criticism began too. Stephen Gosson, a former playwright turned Puritan, attacked poets and actors in The School of Abuse (1579) and dedicated it to Sidney. Sidney's reply, The Defence of Poesy, written in the early 1580s and printed in 1595, argued that poetry teaches and delights, that the poet does not copy nature but makes a golden world where nature gives only a brazen one, and that poetry moves people towards virtue. George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesy (1589) was a handbook for court poets on verse and figures of speech.

Criticism and scholarship

Even the name of the age has a history. The Italian writer Giorgio Vasari used the word rinascita, "rebirth", in 1550 for the revival of art in Italy. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt made the idea famous in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), where the Renaissance is the time when people began to see themselves as individuals and to value this world. Later historians argued that the break with the Middle Ages was less sharp, and that the Middle Ages were not "dark". Many scholars now prefer the label "early modern".

The writers of the age also judged themselves. Sidney's Defence of Poesy and Puttenham's Arte (1589) are the first landmarks. In Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602) Thomas Campion argued that English verse should be free of rhyme, and Samuel Daniel replied with a Defence of Rhyme.

In the twentieth century E. M. W. Tillyard, in The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), described the age as one that believed in order and in the Great Chain of Being. Later critics thought this picture too neat, since the plays and poems of the age often question order as much as they praise it. Harry Levin's The Overreacher (1952) studied Marlowe's heroes, who push beyond every limit. C. S. Lewis, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), called the middle of the century "drab" and the end of it "golden". Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) became a founding book of new historicism, showing how writers from More to Shakespeare shaped their identities under the pressures of court, Church and state. Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy (1984), a leading work of cultural materialism, argued that the tragedies of the age often questioned authority instead of supporting it.

How the age ends

By the 1590s the mood was changing. Harvests failed, the war with Spain dragged on, prices climbed, and the queen grew old with no heir named. To speak of who would rule after her was dangerous. The strain broke in February 1601, when the Earl of Essex, once the queen's favourite, tried to raise London against her court. On the day before the rising, some of his followers paid the Lord Chamberlain's Men to stage a play about the removal of a king, Shakespeare's Richard II. The rising failed, and Essex was beheaded on 25 February. The actors were questioned but not punished. Elizabeth died at Richmond on 24 March 1603.

The crown passed without a fight to James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who became James I of England. The two countries shared a king but kept separate parliaments. James liked plays, and within weeks the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men. The plague of 1603 shut the theatres for months, however. In 1604 James held a conference at Hampton Court, at which he agreed to a new translation of the Bible, which appeared in 1611.

A new age was opening, and its mood was darker. Shakespeare's great tragedies, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, were written in the first years of James's reign. John Donne, who had written sharp love poems and satires in the 1590s, and Ben Jonson, whose Volpone appeared in 1606, belong to that next age as well. The Elizabethan years, as later readers called them, had given English literature its greatest poet and playwright and shown that English could carry any thought.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed., Cengage Learning, 2015.
• Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. First published 1860.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Harvester Press, 1984.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Harvard University Press, 1952.
• Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Clarendon Press, 1954.
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed., edited by Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Chatto and Windus, 1943.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English