Namangan davlat universiteti ingliz filologiyasi fakulteti amaliy ingliz tili kafedrasi

The Decline of the Renaissance 
James I, the first Stuart king, had little first-hand knowledge of England. Elizabeth had 
managed to maintain religious balance between Protestants and Catholics, but under the Stuarts that 
balance was lost. Religious and political unrest was growing.
At that period a number of young Cavaliers, loyal to the king, wrote about love and loyalty, 
but even in the love poems it is evident that the freshness of the Elizabethan era had passed. Among 
the best of these poets were Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick.
Drama continued to flourish in England under the Stuarts. Shakespeare’s great tragedies 
were written during the reign of King James, and Shakespeare’s acting company, taken under the 
patronage of the king, became known as the 
King’s Men
. The theatre in fact remained a popular 
form of entertainment until the puritan government closed all playhouses in 1649.
The greatest of the Puritan poets, and one of the greatest English poets was John Milton, 
Latin secretary to the Puritan Commonwealth. While in this position his sight began to fail ; 
eventually he became blind. He composed “Paradise Lost”, his greatest work and the most 
successful English epic, sightless. 
Supplement 
Three chief forms of poetry flourished during the Elizabethan Age. They were the lyric, the 
sonnet, and narrative poetry. 
The lyric
is a short poem that expresses a poet’s personal emotions and thoughts in a 
songlike style. 
The sonnet
is a 14-line poem with a certain pattern of rhyme and rhythm. Elizabethan poets 
wrote two types of sonnets, the Italian sonnet and the English sonnet. The two types differed in the 
arrangement of the rhymes. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet from Italy into English 
literature in the early 1500’s. William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser wrote sonnet sequences.