Elizabethan literature
In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels.
Elizabeth I presided over a vigorous culture that saw notable accomplishments in the arts, voyages of discovery, the "Elizabethan Settlement" that created the Church of England, and the defeat of military threats from Spain.
English playwrights combined the influence of the Medieval theatre with the Renaissance's rediscovery of the Roman dramatists, Seneca, for tragedy, and Plautus and Terence, for comedy.
He was responsible for many innovations in English poetry, and alongside Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/1517–47), introduced the sonnet from Italy into England in the early 16th century.
Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as "On Monsieur's Departure" and "The Doubt of Future Foes".
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99) was one of the most important poets of this period, author of The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I.
Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion (1567–1620), became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households.
There have been few attempts to change this long established list because the cultural importance of these five is so great that even re-evaluations on grounds of literary merit have not dared to dislodge them from the curriculum.
A fairly representative idea of the "Victorian canon" is also given by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse (1919).
Some poems, such as Thomas Sackville's Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, were highly regarded (and therefore "in the canon") but they were omitted from the anthology as non-lyric.
[13] The most underrated member of this movement he deems to have been George Gascoigne (1525–1577), who "deserves to be ranked ... among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".
Winters characterised such anti-Petrarchan poems as having "broad, simple, and obvious" themes that border on "proverbial" as well as a restrained, aphoristic style; such a poet would "stat[e] his matter as economically as possible, and not, as are the Petrarchans, in the pleasures of rhetoric for its own sake".
The Italians were inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and by Plautus (whose comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier, had a powerful influence during the Renaissance and thereafter).
During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and then James I (1603–25), in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a London-centred culture, that was both courtly and popular, produced great poetry and drama.
The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to, or parodied, in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe.
After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which introduced a new kind of drama.
[21] In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
Drawing on German folklore, Marlowe introduced the story of Faust to England in his play Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), about a scientist and magician who, obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits, sells his soul to the Devil.
