renaissance

• Elizabethan Period


  Period of the great revival of art, literature, and learning in Europe beginning in the 14th century and extending to the 17th century
• Key figures of the Elizabethan Period


  • William Shakespeare
  • Edmund Spenser
  • Christopher Marlowe
  • Thomas More
  • Philip Sidney
  • John Donne
  • Andrew Marvell
  • Ben Jonson
  • John Milton
• Printing press


  • Introduced to England in 1476 by William Caxton
• Humanism


  Two primary goals: perfection of individual human character and reform of public evils, in church and state; encouraged greater care in the study of the literature of classical antiquity and reformed education in such a way as to make literary expression of paramount importance for the cultured person
• Utopia


  Distant nation organized on purely reasonable principles, described by Thomas More in 1516
• Philip Sidney


  • Ideal courtly poet of the Elizabethan Age; inaugurated the vogue of the sonnet cycle
  • Wrote Astrophel and Stella, Arcadia, and Defence of Poesie
• Edmund Spenser


  • Bridged the medieval and Elizabethan periods; invented the Spenserian stanza
  • Best known for The Faerie Queene
• Christopher Marlowe


  • First great English dramatist and most important Elizabethan dramatist before William Shakespeare
  • Masterpiece is The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
• Metaphysical Poetry


  Inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration; a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or "wit"; less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness
• John Donne


  • Considered the greatest of the metaphysical poets and one of the greatest writers of love poetry
  • Wrote A Valediction: Of Weeping, Holy Sonnet # 10, and Satires
• Andrew Marvell


  • English poet and satirist
  • Wrote The Garden, To His Coy Mistress, The Definition of Love, and other poems
• William Shakespeare


  • Recognized as the greatest dramatist; produced perhaps the most varied and powerful body of work any author has ever written
  • Wrote 154 sonnets between 1595 and 1599
  • Wrote plays such as The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth
• Ben Jonson

  • English dramatist and poet, with classical learning, gift for satire, and brilliant style
  • Best comedies: Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicene, or the Silent Woman, and Bartholomew Fair
• John Milton

  • English poet, whose rich, dense verse was a powerful influence on succeeding English poets, and whose prose was devoted to the defense of civil and religious liberty
  • Wrote the epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, as well as other works like Lycidas and Samson Agonistes