The English Renaissance: Celebrating Humanity (1485 to 1625)
The Rise of the Drama in a Dramatic Age
Through mystery plays, plays that revealed religious mysteries, illiterate people saw reenactments of Christianity’s most important events. They were performed by medieval guilds, whose roles in the play usually pertained to their occupations. The stage was done either in a roving wagon or in the center of the town. The performances gave people great pleasure and allowed them to temporarily forget about their hard and serious lives. The plays often had humor and down-to-earth dialogue. William Shakespeare’s 1564 birth coincided with the end of mystery plays.
Morality Plays
Morality plays were based on religion but focused on the choices and temptations of an individual Christian’s life. It represented its characters by using allegory and showed the roles different characteristics played in a Christian’s journey to salvation. Shorter morality plays called interludes were also popular in the early Renaissance.
Classical Roots
The Renaissance movement revived interest in ancient Greek and Latin authors, and many of these authors influenced Elizabethan playwright and the tradition of mystery and morality plays. Playwright used ancient tragedies as models. The Elizabethan audiences were concerned with the bloodier the better. The theme of revenge was common in Renaissance plays.
Vagabonds and Actors
Actors were considered to be in the same class as vagabonds and Elizabeth I was concerned that these men could turn into a mob. Acting companies often tried to gain the protection of a nobleman. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, built the Globe Theater in the 1590’s to be far away from the London government, but close enough to the crowds of London. The spectators who watched the plays were the very image of people that Elizabethan rulers feared.
Hard-Working Words
Plays were performed in the middle of the afternoon, outdoors, and with no special lighting effects. There were trapdoors and beautiful columns and facades. Shakespeare’s words packed the theater and satisfied the patrons. Christopher Marlowe fashioned unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, into a powerful means for portraying character on stage. Shakespeare wrote 38 plays that included dramas about English history and its conflicts; comedies that explore love, imagination, and transformation; tragedies that depict the downfall of highly placed men and women; and romances that deal with the theme of reconciliation. His history plays are not just entertaining telling of old events, but reflect the concerns and conflicts of Shakespeare’s own time.
Patriotism
Shakespeare used prologues to reflect the influence of both classical drama and the mystery and morality plays. All these types of drama used prologues to tell the audience certain facts they should know before the play begins. They are used to rally the audience’s support.
Magnificent Words
Shakespeare used plays-within-a-play to create mini dramas. He equated life with theater and also suggests the illusory quality of life. His language is the source of true reality in the plays.
Celebrating Humanity: The English Renaissance (1485–1625); The Story of the Times (1485–1625)
Historical Background
The War of the Roses and the founding of the Tudor dynasty in 1485 brought in new stability through the increasing powers of kings and the lessening strength of nobles. They transformed England’s religious practices and transformed it from a small nation to a world power.
The Tudors
By the time he died in 1509, Henry VII had restored the prestige of the monarchy by rebuilding the nation’s treasury and establishing law and order. He was succeeded by his son Henry VIII. He had a good relationship with the Pope before he tried to get an annulment from his sterile wife Catherine of Aragon. The Pope refused, but Henry remarried Anne Boleyn anyway, breaking England from the Roman Catholic Church. Henry seized the Catholic Church’s English property, dissolved the powerful monasteries, and executed rebels. Henry married six times and produced two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, and one son, Edward, by the time he died in 1547.
Religious Turmoil
Henry’s son Edward VI became king at age nine and died at age fifteen. During his reign, English replaced Latin in church ritual, and the Anglican prayer book, the Book of Common Prayer, became required in public worship. By Edward’s death in 1553, England was well Protestant. Edward’s Catholic half-sister Mary I took the throne and restored Roman practices to the Church of England, restored the authority of the Pope over the English Church, and executed 300 Protestants.
Elizabeth I
When Mary I died after ruling for five years, her half-sister Elizabeth I became queen. She received a Renaissance educated, read in the Greek and Latin classics, and was a great patron of the arts. She reestablished the monarch’s supremacy in the Church of England, restored the Book of Common Prayer, and instituted a policy of religious moderation. Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland by birth and next in line to the throne of England, was imprisoned by Elizabeth for nineteen years before she was executed in 1587.
Stuarts and Puritans
The Stuart dynasty began after Elizabeth died in 1603. Elizabeth had named Protestant King James VI of Scotland as her successor so as to avoid a dispute over the throne and a return of civil strife. James was a strong supporter of the arts and worldwide power, leading to the establishment of Jamestown in Virginia. James I treated Parliament with contempt, and they fought over taxes and foreign wars. He persecuted the Puritans, who would later go on to form the Plymouth Colony in America in 1620.
Philosophy
The Renaissance occurred first in the Italian city-states (1350–1550), where commerce and a wealthy middle class supported learning and the arts, and later spread to England (1485–1625). During the Renaissance, there was a rebirth of civilization that included the revival of the leanings of ancient Greece and Rome.
The Age of Exploration
The Renaissance prompted a burst of exploration by sea that was aided by the development of the compass and advances in astronomy. England began in the Age of Exploration in 1497, five years after Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, when John Cabot found Newfoundland.
Religion
The Renaissance and nationalism led many Europeans to question the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Many people had grievances against the Church, others thought the officials were corrupt, and others questioned the teachings and hierarchy. Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus’s (1466–1536) edition of the New Testaments questioned the interpretations of the Bible by focusing attention on issues of morality and religion. German monk Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed a list of dissenting beliefs to the door of a German church, dividing the Church and creating the Protestant Reformation.
Literature of the Period
Narratives, poetry, dramas, and comedies reflected the ideas of the times and provided a forum for subtly and satirical criticisms of social institutions.
Elizabethan Poetry
Elizabethan poets favored lyric poetry rather than the narrative poems and perfected the sonnet and other poetic forms. The sonnet cycle was a popular form of poetry that involved a series of sonnets that fit loosely together to form a story. Shakespeare changed the pattern and rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet and introduced a new form known as the English or Shakespearean sonnet.
Elizabethan Drama
Using the classical models of ancient Greece and Rome, playwrights turned from religious subjects and began to write more complex and sophisticated plays based on tragedies and dramas. Shakespeare’s powerful and beautiful language displayed his understanding of human nature and allowed them to retain their popularity.
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose
Prose was not as important as poetry and drama in the English Renaissance, as scholars still preferred to write in Latin. Fifty-four scholars worked for seven years translated the Bible into English.
The Changing English Language: “A Man of Fire—New Words” by Richard Lederer
The Ageless Bard
From 1590 to 1613, Shakespeare wrote plays that have been in constant production since their creation because of the universal truths and conflicts in human nature.
Word-Maker Supreme
Of the 20,138 different words that Shakespeare used in his plays, sonnets, and other poems, his is the first known use of more than 1,700 of them. He made up more than 8.5 percent of his written vocabulary.
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