A History of English Literature

Overview

The hopes of the humanists and the writers of the early Renaissance were cut

short by the turmoil of the Reformation and the despotism of Henry VIII. A

literary Renaissance was triumphantly relaunched in the late 1570s by Sidney

and Spenser, and the 1590s produced – besides the drama – an unprece-

dented abundance of non-dramatic poets and translators. This literary golden

age also saw a variety of prose, artful, lively and dignified.

Medieval and Modern: a caution

As the first two chapters of this book will have demonstrated, the popular notion
that English literature really begins with Shakespeare is a mistake. The educated
notion that it begins with the Renaissance is also a mistake. These are inherited
mistakes, arising from pride in England becoming an independent nation-state after
Henry VIII broke with Rome and with Europe. A nationalist pride is a constant
theme in Protestant and Whig projections of national history, projections which
went uncorrected until the 20th century. But even in the vernacular, and even if we
omit the literary achievements of the Anglo-Saxons, the text of this Historyso far
will have shown that English literature is not the same as modern English literature.
Drama goes back long before Chaucer. Poetry reached the highest international
standards in the late 14th century. Prose reached maturity in the works of Julian of
Norwich and Sir Thomas Malory. Modern English literature was therefore in full
swing long before the reign of Henry VIII.

nRenaissance and Reformation

The Renaissance

In 1550, the painter Georgio Vasari wrote of a rinascità in the arts in his native
Florence and in Italy in the 15th century, a ‘rebirth’. The French 19th-century histo-
rian Jules Michelet extended this idea of a ‘renaissance’ from the Italian 15th century,
the Quattrocento, to a general cultural renewal in western Europe beginning earlier.

Contents

Renaissance and

Reformation 77

The Renaissance 77

Expectations 79

Investigations 79

England’s place in the

world 80

The Reformation 81

Sir Thomas More

The Courtier 83

Sir Thomas Wyatt 84

The Earl of Surrey 86

Religious prose 87

Bible translation 87

Instructive prose 89

Drama 90

Elizabethan liter ature 92

Verse 92

Sir Philip Sidney 92

Edmund Spenser 97

Sir Walter Raleigh

Elizabethan and

Jacobean 103

Christopher Marlowe 103

Song 104

Thomas Campion 105

Prose 105

John Lyly 105

Thomas Nashe 106

Richard Hooker 106

Further reading 107

77

Tudor Literature:

1500–1603

3

CHAPTER