Chapter Two

The English Renaissance

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 The English Renaissance
Chaucer's death starts the
transition period in England
full of significant changes.

The King of England,

after the Wars of Roses,
assumed greater power
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 Henry VII (1485 ～ 1509)

He founded the Tudor dynasty which

was a centralized monarchy and met
the needs of the rising bourgeoisie and
so won its support.

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 Henry VIII (1509 ～ 1547)

Declaring the separation from the

Roman Catholic Church,
implementing a large-scale
suppression of the monasteries
and confiscating the property of
the Church to enrich the new
bourgeois, he started the
movement called the Reformation,
the essence of which is the fight of
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the bourgeois for power.
 Queen Mary (1553 ～ 1558)

She carried out the Counter-

Reformation by put an end to the
Reformation and caused the bloody
religious persecution.

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 Elizabeth I (1558 ～ 1603)

The reign of Elizabeth I was a period of

political and religious stability on the one
hand and economic prosperity on the
other. The Church of England was re-
established, ending the long time religious
strife; commerce and industry forged
ahead as a result of the enclosure
movement at home and the opening of
new sea routes in the world. In the
meantime, the rise of the bourgeoisie also
showed its influence in the sphere of
cultural life.
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 The English Renaissance
The word “ Renaissance ” means
revival, specifically between the 14th
and mid 17th century, revival of
interest in ancient Greek and Roman
culture.

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The English Renaissance
Renaissance, therefore, in essence, was
a historical period in which the
European humanist thinkers and
scholars made attempts to get rid of
conservatism in feudalist Europe and
introduce new ideas that expressed the
interests of the rising bourgeoisie, to lift
the restrictions in all areas placed by
the Roman church authorities

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 The English Renaissance
Roman Catholic Church

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The English Renaissance

During the period of Renaissance, old

sciences revived and new sciences emerged,
national languages and national cultures free
from the absolute control of the Papal
authority in Rome took shape and art and
literature flourished as never before. With a
thirsting curiosity and great love for classical
literature, the authority of the Roman Catholic
Church was shaken and people came to a
new awareness.

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 The English Renaissance

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 The English Renaissance
Renaissance started in Florence and Venice and
went to embrace the rest of Europe .

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 The English Renaissance
Renaissance came later in England than other
European countries. When it did come, it was to
produce some towering figures in world literary
heritage.

Florence of Italy

Venice
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The English Renaissance
Humanism is both the keynote of the
Renaissance and the intellectual
liberation movement, associated with
new attitudes to ancient Greek and Latin
literature. The humanists began by
criticizing and evaluating the Latin and
Greek authors in the light of what they
believed to be Roman and Greek
standards of civilization. They took
interest in human life and human
activities and gave expression to the new
feeling of admiration for human beauty,
human achievement.
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 The English Renaissance
Ancient Greek writers

Plato Homer
Aeschylus

The English Renaissance was an exciting time

for literature which experienced a burst of
ideas and literary brilliance.
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 The English Renaissance
Human beauty

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 The English Renaissance

Thomas More (1477 ～ 1535)

was the leading humanist of his day.

Scholar
thinker
statesman

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 The English Renaissance
Among his writings the best known is
Utopia (1516) which tells of a journey to
an imaginary island named Utopia, where
an ideal form of society exists.

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 Utopia
Its title comes from the Greek word meaning “
nowhere ” and was adopted by More as the name
of his ideal commonwealth.

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 The English Renaissance

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 ～

1599)

was the most influential poet and

the dominating literary intellect in the
late 16th century in England .

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The Shepherd's Calendar
(1597)
A poem in the traditional pastoral form
and his first important work,
established his poetic reputation. The
union of line and meter in the poem is
more harmonious, more supple, and
richer than that in the works of
Chaucer. His sonnet Amoretti is one of
the most famous sonnet sequences of
the Elizabethan Age.

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 The Shepherd's Calendar

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The Faerie Queene

In Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie

Queene he devised a verse form called
the Spenserian Stanza, which consists
of eight ten -syllable lines, plus a ninth
line of 12 syllables, an iambic rhythm
and a rhyme scheme as follows: abab
bcbc c.

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 The Faerie Queene

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 The English Renaissance

Francis Bacon (1561 ～ 1626)

He showed his great

intellectual
energy in his day.
politician
philosopher
essayist
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 The English Renaissance
While being the founder of English
materialist philosophy and the
founder of modern science in
England , he is also the first great
English essayist.

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 Francis Bacon
In 1597 Francis Bacon
published his first
collection of essays,
which made popular in
English a literary form
widely practiced
afterward. It is the most
informal and casual of
his works, the Essays,
that is read most often.

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 His major works
The Advancement
of Learning and
New Instrument.

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 The English Renaissance
Based on the miracle play, the
morality play, the interlude and the
classical drama, drama flourished in
this age more than any other form of
literature.

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 miracle play

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 morality play

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 The English Renaissance

Christopher Marlowe
(1564 ～ 1595)

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Christopher Marlowe

He was the greatest of the pioneers of

English drama. His importance is due to
the energy with which he endowed the
blank verse line (unrhymed iambic
pentameter), which in his hands
developed an unprecedented
suppleness and power. His plays have
great intensity, but sometimes they
show a genius which is epic rather than
dramatic.
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 Christopher Marlowe
His
acknowledged
masterpieces
are:

Tamburlaine

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 Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus

Edward II is his best

constructed piece of
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theatre 35
 Christopher Marlowe
The final scene of Doctor
Faustus is one of the
most intensely dramatic
in English literature. It
shows his musical
handling and control of
the ten-syllable line.

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The English Renaissance

Marlowe's works paved the route for the

greatest dramatist—William
Shakespeare—whose accomplishments
were the monument of the English
Renaissance and whose works gave the
fullest expression to humanist ideals.

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