THE RENAISSANCE

(Beginning of the “Modern period”)

The Renaissance, literally “rebirth” in French, refers to the rebirth of art and learning in
Europe in the sixteenth century. Models from the classical civilisations of Greece and
Rome were used. The poetic forms of the sixteenth century drew their inspiration
directly from classical examples. For example, John Donne’s elegies, in the 1590s, were
influenced by the Roman poet Ovid’s Amores, while Ben Jonson used elements and
details from the comedies of Terence and Plautus in his own plays. Legends from
classical literature, with complete detail, were used in English poetry, such as the
legends of Orpheus and Eurydice, used in four of Milton’s poems. The medieval
Christian suspicion of ‘pagan’ culture was gradually replaced by the rise of humanistic
values. In society, the emphasis of Catholicism of the Middle Ages, which highlighted
the world to come after death, began to be overtaken by a new humanistic emphasis
on individualism and a concentration on the things of this world.

These revolutions in thought and sensibility were not completed in the Renaissance,
which includes the Protestant Reformation (dated usually from 1517, when the
German friar, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses in criticism of Catholicism to
the church door in Wittenberg). This Reformation was a remarkable expression of the
shift from communality to individuality. It repudiated medieval ecclesiastical authority,
especially the figure of a priest mediating between God and people, and it emphasized
each Cristian’s personal access to God’s grace. But the Humanism of the Renaissance
exalted individuality within the context of religion as the absolute authority of
Scripture, showing that the Humanism of this period has to be placed in the larger
context of a God-centred world picture.

The Renaissance was a period of complex tensions. A time of tension is favourable for
artistic creativity. One of the most famous expressions in English literature of the
ambiguities of Renaissance thought is the famous soliloquy, in blank verse, of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a character whose individualism contains a tragic fault, yet who
is totally aware of the spiritual dimension in which his little world of experience must
ultimately be placed:

To be, or not to be, that is the question—

Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely,
The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make [quietus=release from life]
With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardels bear, [bodkin=dagger; fardels= burden]
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in all thy Orisons
Be thou all my sins remembered

Hamlet’s juxtaposition here of the microcosm of his intensely experienced humanity

and the macrocosm of the great world, including the ‘undiscovered country’ of
eternity, was a favourite Renaissance idea or conceit (eg. John Donne wrote ‘I am a
little world made cunningly’, expressing delight in his individuality even as he assesses
it in terms of its littleness).
Through Hamlet’s speech, at the centre of his tragedy, Shakespeare typically questions
the new conceptions of his age, such as uncertainty about the eternal nature of the
individual’s destiny, as he formulates a dilemma which not only reveals to the
audience the psychological torment of the character, but a society torn between two
worlds.

The ‘rebirth’ of classical civilization and literature in the Renaissance is evident in the
poetry of the period. There was the imitation of formal modes, such as the elegy, the
epithalamion (or marriage-song), the satire, the ode (as derived from the Greek poet
Pindar, by Dryden for example) etc. Many literary conventions were also appropriated,
such as the carpe diem (‘sieze the day’) address in love poetry from the Roman poet
Horace.

In the sixteenth century, English poetry was principally an amateur’s and a courtier’s
art. The poets of the court, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, wrote
poetry as well as taking part in statecraft, diplomacy and warfare. Writing poetry was
just one of the several amateur skills, like horsemanship and musicianship, which
presented the model of behavior for Renaissance courtiers. There was no conception
of the ‘professional’ poet.

However, in the literary activities of Sidney, we uncover the emergence of the ‘man of
letters’ as he was not only a prolific poet, but the author of the most important work of
prose-fiction of the Elizabethan age, the Arcadia, and of its only significant essay in
literary criticism, The Defence of Poesy.

Poems in this period were often circulated in manuscript than published. Many were
written to be sung to the accompaniment of the lute, such as Wyatt’s ‘My Lute,
Awake!’

My lute awake! perform the last

Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute be still, for I have done.

Very few of Wyatt’s poems were published in his lifetime (he died in 1542). However,
in the second half of the sixteenth century, as the transition began slowly to take place
from the amateur to the professional role of the poet, several collections of poems
appeared- most notably in 1577, a ‘miscellany’ by several writers (including Wyatt)
collected by the printer Richard Tottel (Tottel’s Miscelany).
As well as Wyatt’s poems, the miscellany included forty by Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey. These two poets were responsible for introducing the sonnet into English. They
imitated the principal Italian sonneteer Petrarch (1304-74), who in his classical literary
scholarship, was a precursor of the European Renaissance. The influence of Petrarch
on English poetry remained powerful for a century, and is a sign of the preeminence of
Italy as the source of Renaissance culture. Artistry and learning were thought to flower
in cities such as Florence, but in English minds, this idea coexisted with the view that
Italy was debauched and decadent. E.g. Ben Jonson’s dramatic study of corruption,
Volpone, is set in Venice.

The Italian sonnet provided the model for the formal, fourteen-line structure of the
sonnet, with the division into octave and sestet. Its subject matter and attitudes and
references also came from the Italian sonnet: the address to the idealized woman
(Laura, in Petrarch’s case; Stella in Sidney’s) and the presentation of the extreme
qualities of the speaker’s passion. This passion was restrained by the formalities of the
sonnet’s strict literary arrangement and, eventually, the predictability of those very
attitudes.

The Petrarchan form of the sonnet was succeeded, in the sonnets of Shakespeare, for
example, by the so-called English form, which varied the octave+sestet structure with
three quatrains and a concluding couplet, and which would satirically overturn the
idealization of the typical Petrarchan speaker, most famously in Shakespeare’s ‘My
mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’.