THE HEIGHT OF THE RENAISSANCE

Under Elizabeth I /1558-1603/, the next monarch, order was restored and England entered upon its most glorious age. Only twenty-five when she assumed the throne, Elizabeth, who never married, was to rule wisely and well for forty-five years. Through her policy of middle-of-the-road Protestantism, she held in check throughout her reign the proponents of Catholicism on one hand and the growing number of Puritan extremists on the other. A master politician, wise in the choice of her councillors, Elizabeth established a strong central government that received the strong support of her subjects.

During her reign, England began to gain supremacy on the seas. Threatened by invasion by her long-time enemy, the king of Spain, Elizabeth sent Hawkins and Drake out to destroy the Spanish Armada.  

England’s increasing population created new markets and brought about the exploitation of new sources of raw materials, among them those of the New World. The commercial ventures of the Virginia Company in North America and of the East India Company in the Orient were aspects of this expansion. Riches also came from such ventures like the pirate-patriot Sir Francis Drake, whom Elizabeth commissioned to intercept Spanish treasure ships on the high seas and relieve them of the heavy burden of gold they had stolen from the Indians of South America. Such ventures generated as much as 5,000 percent return, which went to swell the royal treasury.

Elizabeth’s reign was the age of courtiers. Educated in both the classical and modern languages, the queen was a poet of no mean ability and a great lover of music and dancing. Some of the men of her court lived up to the Renaissance ideal of courtier, soldier and scholar. Most famous of courtier poets were Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney. Edmund Spenser, unsuccessfully seeking court preferment, wrote The Faerie Queen, a long allegorical epic in which Gloriana represented Elizabeth.

During her reign, the popularity of the sonnet led to the writing of sonnet sequences, usually telling the story of unrequited love. Sir Philip Sidney set the vogue for these with “Astrophel and Stella”. Among his more famous followers were Edmund Spenser with “Amoretti” and W. Shakespeare with an untitled enigmatic series of 154 sonnets.

Lyric poetry and song also flourished an outlet for the exuberant Renaissance spirit. Songs were sung with lute accompaniment and made available in print to all social classes. Another source of popular music was the drama. Songs were an integral part not only of comedies, but on occasion also of tragedies.

Beyond question the Elizabethan period was the golden age of English drama. Among a dozen of first-rate dramatists three talents shine brightly like stars in a constellation-Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. Under the skilful handling of these dramatists, blank verse, introduced into the language by Surrey, became the main vehicle for comedy and tragedy.

Native English drama from medieval times was the wellspring of Elizabethan drama. The initial influence of classical drama came in the 1560’s with the translation of Latin drama, especially the revenge tragedies of Seneca and the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Somehow everything coalesced and the theatre soared to an unprecedented height. The plays of the great dramatists contained something for everyone: low comedy for the groundlings, elevated philosophical concepts for the educated and strong story lines to engage the attention of everyone. Public theatres competed with each other to attract large audiences of all levels of society. The private theatres, offering more sophisticated entertainment, provided further competition. Theatres were occasionally closed in time of plague and due to Puritan complaints of “ungodliness”.

Renaissance exuberance was the exuberance of youth, and as Elizabethan poets warned, youth cannot last forever. Queen Elizabeth’s moderate Protestantism and her powerful personal presence had maintained England’s domestic stability. When the new century began, she was an aging queen, not in the best of health. Not until she was on her deathbed did she name her successor, King James of Scotland.

Thomas Kyd was a forerunner of the High Renaissance who adopted Roman models of tragedy of revenge and transformed the themes and structure to suit native tradition and sensibility. Christopher Marlowe/1564-93/ developed further Kyd's achievements chiefly on the imaginative and poetic side. In the first tragedies Marlowe projected his passionate belief in man’s power over fate while in major work where he recreated the myth about Dr Faustus, he put forward a more ambiguous and complex vision. He is still fascinated by the idea of an extraordinary man who allows no scruples to stand in his way and sells his soul to the devil for the sake of unlimited power. Finally, the hero reaches a poignant spiritual crisis and is reluctant to repent ends in damnation. The main power of the play is concentrated in the poetry, mainly in the long speeches, which is true to a certain extent for all Elizabethan dramatists. Marlowe is a representative of the University Wits who were a great factor in the development of English literature. They absorbed what was best in the courtly tradition of E. Spenser and J. Lyly and infuse a more realistic vigour into the artificial vision of the courtly tradition.

The man who most completely synthesized the achievements of the University Wits, who combined the tendencies of Kyd and Marlowe and brought them to perfection was William Shakespeare/1564-1616/. He had an artistic genius that was versatile and prolific which produced masterpieces in every genre he touched. His development as a playwright can be roughly divided into five stages. At first, he was involved into elaborating the genre of the historical chronicle which re-enacted major events from English history. In the first half of the 1590's he created powerful dramatic versions of the dichotomy between the vision of a strong individual and the inevitable impact of historical necessity. The crowning achievement of this period is the sophisticated tragedy of “Richard III”/1593/.  During this intensive period of artistic endeavour Shakespeare created also some memorable comedies like “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”. Most works of this period were characterized by end-stopped blank verse, quite a lot of rhymed lines and no great complexity of imagery.

The second stage of Shakespeare’s artistic endeavour /1595-1600/ is marked by a wide scope of achievements in the genre of romantic comedy, “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Twelfth Night” among many others. He crowned the end of this prolific period with his brilliant interpretation of Roman history in “Julius Caesar”/1600/. This stage of artistic experimentation is marked by a more mature style with a more flexible syntax and rhythm, a more striking imagery and a more forceful characterization. Again it was a mixture of various genres, mainly comedies and a few history plays.

The third stage is artistic development sets a sombre ambiguous tone whose crowning sublimation is “Hamlet” /1601/. It is one of the most complex and all-embracing philosophical tragedies ever written. The style is distinguished by a rich and sophisticated means of expression to suit the complex and profound interpretation of the problem play. Shakespeare brings to a brilliant mastery the Renaissance conceit, which is a powerful elaboration of images. There are models of the soliloquy form which are an unsurpassed expression of the highlights of existential introspection. As in Julius Caesar, the tragic conflict stems from the faults of the character rather than from “outrageous fortune”.

The next stage explores further the complexities of tragedy in its various projections in “Othello”, “Macbeth’ and “King Lear”/1604-1606/. They bear the mark of a fully developed style of his dramatic genius.

The last stage is devoted to an elaboration of the romance genre where tragedy is transformed in a reconciliation of opposing elements exploiting the possibilities of the phantasy convention/1608-1612/. “The Tempest” is a brilliant exuberant evocation, only one among many.

Another genre of poetic form where Shakespeare left the indelible mark of a genius is the sonnet. He enriched the Spenserian sonnet infusing it with sensuous imagery, melodic richness of rhythm and rhyme and existential insight. His achievement in the sonnet form influenced a great number of English poets such as Milton, Keats and Tennyson.

One of the major representatives of the revolt period, which marks a transition to a decline of Renaissance intoxication, is Ben Jonson/ 1572-1637/. His name is associated with the humour comedy which he brought to artistic perfection. Behind it lay the psychological theory of the humours and the Renaissance interest in personality.  “Volpone’ and “The Alchemist” are among his best and most enduring creations.         

Under the Stuarts, James I and his son Charles I the religious balance was lost. Both monarchs persecuted the Puritans and struggled with parliament over their divine right to rule absolutely. The increasing strength of the predominantly Puritan middle class in the House of Commons made the confrontation inevitable. Charles I was defeated and executed in 1649. England was declared a commonwealth under the jurisdiction of Parliament.

At the beginning of the Stuart period, poetry was less exuberant, more cynical and introspective than the previous Elizabethan period. A major development was the group of metaphysical poets, led by John Donne. For emphasis, they used harsh lines and overriding regular meter. They employed the Renaissance conceit to achieve the effect of paradox and irony. They were intellectual rather than romantic in their love poetry. The lyrics of Ben Jonson, spanning the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, show the gradual movement toward the metaphysical.

Literature polarised with the outbreak of the Puritan revolution. A number of young cavaliers, loyal to the king, wrote lyrics about love and loyalty. But even in the love poems it is evident that the freshness of the Elizabethan era had passed. King James performed a great service to literature as well as to the Protestant cause when he commissioned a new English translation of the Bible. Completed in 1611, the King James Bible influence English prose for generations.

A major accomplishment of English prose occurred with the publication, over a period of years, of the essays of Francis Bacon. Their insights into human nature and their clear style made them popular to this day.

Drama continued to flourish in England under the Stuarts. Shakespeare’s great tragedies were written under the reign of James I, and Shakespeare’s acting company, taken under the patronage of the King, became known as the King's’Men. The theatre did remain a popular form of entertainment until the Puritan government closed all playhouses in 1649.

The greatest of the Puritan poets was John Milton. Sightless, he composed “Paradise Lost” /1667/, the only successful English epic whose subject is the fall of man and the inscrutable ways of God.  Although Milton’s epic was written after the fall of the Puritan commonwealth, he is related to the Renaissance because he did his early work during that period, and because his output looks back toward the Renaissance rather than ahead to the Age of Reason.

           

One of the series of lectures, delivered in an optional course at the Theatre Department of NBU, 1998