"Shakespearean or Renaissance or Elizabethan Age."


The Elizabethan era was a time associated with Queen Elizabeth's reign (1558–1603) and is often considered to be the golden age in English history. It was the height of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of English poetry, music and literature . This was also the time during which Elizabethan theater flourished, and William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of theatre. It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the protestant reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repulsed. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century. The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan English settlement , and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.



William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born into an age of experiment, invention, discovery, and revolution. It was an age in which scientists overthrew long-held axioms, philosophers promoted universal education, and seafarers expanded the boundaries of the known world.A major catalyst of advancements was the invention of movable type (individual letters that could be arranged by hand to form words) by German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) in the mid-15th Century. Due to Gutenberg’s invention, the common folk of England had access for the first time to books and the power of the printed word. They could learn scripture from the printed word instead of the painted picture or the sculpted statue. Or they could study history, peruse classic literature, explore the sciences, or read controversial foreign-language books such as Il Principe (The Prince), by Italian political theorist and statesman Nicolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), published in 1532. The book tells how a leader–a prince, for example–has the right to win and keep political power through intrigue, intimidation, and trickery...During this time, Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), a Dutch Roman Catholic priest, popularized humanism in Europe.Elizabethan England also became a leading sea power after explorer and adventurer Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596) defeated arch rival Spain and its armada of ships in 1588. This triumph boosted the British ego and British prosperity to new heights at the threshold of a new century.Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) who promulgated this theory and Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), inventor of the astronomical telescope, who confirmed it. The Copernican theory was revolutionary–affecting not only science but also theology and philosophy–for it impeached the egocentric view that the earth and its people were the center of the universe. Earth, in fact, was just another planet orbiting the sun. In 1609, German mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) published another revolutionary finding: that the path of the orbiting planets was elliptical, not circular.The unsettling findings of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler appeared within little more than a century after Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) accidentally discovered the Americas (1492), an event that expanded the known world, encouraged further exploration, and increased the importation to England of ideas, peoples, and cultures. Africa, that far-off Dark Continent, was opening up after Portuguese sailors established trading posts in its coastal regions...



Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603) was Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty . The daughter of Henry VI, she was born a princess, but her mother, Anne Bolyen was executed two and a half years after her birth, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate. It was expected that Elizabeth would marry, but despite several petitions from parliament and numerous courtships, she never did. The reasons for this outcome have been much debated. As she grew older, Elizabeth became famous for her virginity, and a cult grew up around her which was celebrated in the portraits, pageants, and literature of the day.The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a man," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors.


Era covering Elizabethan England provides the History, Facts and Information about the Religion, Laws, Tortures and Punishments including executions in the Elizabethan Era.

• Crimes and Punishments
• Executions
• Tortures
• Religion
• Politics, spies and intrigue
• The Law - the Poor Law
• The Tower of London

The Famous Elizabethan Women of the era and the famous men. There are Biographies, Pictures and Timelines about the life of famous Explorers, Courtiers, Politicians, Dramatists and Poets who lived during the Elizabethan era.

• Sir Francis Drake
• Sir Walter Raleigh
• Mary Queen of Scots
• Sir Francis Walsingham
• William Shakespeare
• Christopher Marlowe
• John Dee
  
• Lord Robert Dudley
  
  

But in considering the literature of Elizabeth's reign it will be convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's career to its close (1599) we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose. This was John Lyly's Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book, has received the name of Euphuism.Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the Monastery, but the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shaft on is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history.Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakespeare's comic dialogue.That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one.In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote,for her pleasure, the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, which remained in manuscript till 1590.The Arcadia, like Euphues, was a lady's book. It was the favorite court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are thought to have been dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.Another typical Englishman of Elizabeth's reign was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical enterprise that marked, the times. He fought against the queen's enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot army against the League in France.Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588.He took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia,and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe.America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, "the Devonshire Skipper," had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, after his voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation, worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets. We see the influence of this literature of travel in the Tempest, written undoubtedly after Shakespeare had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers's shipwreck on the Bermudas or "Isles of Devils.


The strictly literary prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented—outside of the Arcadia and Euphues already mentioned—chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian novelle. George Turberville's Tragical Tales (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter'sPalace of Pleasure (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio's Decameron and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge's Rosalind and Robert Greene's Pandosto, the sources respectively of Shakespeare's As You Like It and Winter's Tale, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against "Martin Marprelate," an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were Nash's Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil, Lyly's Pap with a Hatchet, and Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit. Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the Chronicle of England, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was Shakespeare's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakespeare in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakespeare followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot.

The life of Francis Bacon, "the father of inductive philosophy," as he has been called—better, the founder of inductive logic—belongs to English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to the history of English philosophy. But his volume of Essays was a contribution to general literature. In their completed form they belong to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims—the text for an essay—than that developed treatment of a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were, said their author, "as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays, so called, in the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the thing is ancient." The word he took from the French essais of Montaigne, the first two books of which had been published in 1592. Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they "came home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate title explains their character: Counsels Civil and Moral, that is, pieces of advice touching the conduct of life, "of a nature whereof men shall find much in experience, little in books." The essays contain the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice." "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination, and his noble English rises now and then, as in his essay On Death, into eloquence—the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is thatlumen siccum which he loved to commend, "not drenched or bloodied by the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was a dry wine.

But the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of immortal thought and passion. Such was in England the fortune of the stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible, and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history and additions to the church service on feasts and saints' days.Masques and interludes—the latter a species of short farce—were popular at the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was often entertained at the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto. Original comedies and tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence and Seneca, and chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings. There was a master of the revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays to be performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children of the Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral. These early plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakespeare's; but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary value.Accordingly, shortly after 1580, a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a career. These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in wretchedness. Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring, and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl.
The most important of the dramatists who were Shakespeare's forerunners, or early contemporaries, was Christopher or—as he was familiarly called—Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakespeare (1564), he died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays, except the Comedy of Errors and Love's Labours Lost. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his Tamburlaine, written before 1587, and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakespeare to do but to take it as he found it. Tamburlainewas a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, in hisDiscoveries, the "scenical strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakespeare put a quotation from Tamburlaine into the mouth of his ranting Pistol. Marlowe's Edward II. was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays. It was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakespeare, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has provoked with the latter's Richard II. But the most interesting of Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is theTragical History of Doctor Faustus. The subject is the same as in Goethe's Faust, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's Faustus is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdermain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in witchcraft. The greatest part of the English Faustus is the last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn.
O, lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike....
O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!

Of the life of William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatic poet of the world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious persons to construct a theory—and support it with some show of reason—that the plays which pass under his name were really written by Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and fifty years after the event.

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"Wa tu izzu man-ta shaa, wa tu zillu man-ta shaa"