Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
The Renaissance in England 
 
During the Renaissance period (particularly 1485-1603) Middle English began to develop into 
Modern English. By the late 1500’s the English people were speaking and writing English in a 
form much like that used today.
The Renaissance in England is usually studied by dividing it into three parts: the rise of the 
Renaissance under the early Tudor monarchs (1500-1558), the height of the Renaissance under 
Elizabeth I (1558-1603), and the decline of the Renaissance under the Stuart monarchs (1603-
1649). 
 
The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip 
Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the 
mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior), the lover (the man of passion), and the 
scholar (the man of learning). His death in 1586, after the Battle of Zutphen, sacrificing the last 
of his water supply to a wounded soldier, made him a hero. His great sonnet sequence Astrophel 
and Stella is one of the key texts of the time, distilling the author’s virtues and beliefs into the 
first of the Renaissance love masterpieces. His other great work, Arcadia, is a prose romance 
interspersed with many poems and songs. Its own history is complicated: Sidney finished what is 

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known as The Old Arcadia by about 1580. He then started rewriting it. The New Arcadia, 
unfinished, was published in 1590, and later versions added parts of The Old Arcadia, thereby 
creating textual problems for generations of Sidney scholars. Arcadia is a complex and still 
controversial mixture of pastoral romance, narrative intrigue, and evocative poetry of love and 
nature. It is a work which has no equivalent in English literature.
The direct literary influence on the English Renaissance love sonnet was the Italian
Francesco Petrarca – known in English as Petrarch – who wrote sonnets to his ideal woman, 
Laura. This idealisation is very much a feature of early Renaissance verse. Classical allusions, 
Italian Renaissance references, and contemporary concerns make the poetry of the sixteenth 
century noticeably different in tone and content from the poetry of the early seventeenth century, 
when Elizabeth was no longer the monarch. There is a universalisation of personal feeling and a 
concern with praise in the earlier verse. This becomes more directly personal and more 
anguished as the sixteenth century comes to a close.
The earliest sonnets of the period are found in an anthology, Tottel’s Miscellany,
published in 1557. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (who both died in the 
1540s), transposed Petrarch directly into English, finding a formal expressiveness which native 
English poetry had not enjoyed for two centuries. Howard’s sonnets are the first to use the 
rhyme-scheme which is found in Shakespeare’s sonnets (see page 90). The native rhythms of the 
Skeltonics of the turn of the century gave way almost completely to the upper-class, courtly, 
highly formal, imported form. Poetry became the pastime of educated high society. It is poetry of 
love and of loss, of solitude and change. The theme
of transience, which was to feature strongly in all Shakespeare’s work, began to appear with 
greater frequency through the 1570s and 1580s.
A number of contrasts, or binaries, begin to emerge; these, from the Renaissance 
onwards, will be found again and again to express the contrasts, the extremes, and the 
ambiguities of the modern world.
The self-conscious awareness that they were producing a new English literature gave 
some Elizabethan poets their true ambition. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queene (1590–96), 
brings together English myth and topical adulation of the monarch to make a poem of praise and 
critique – the most ambitious single contribution to Elizabethan poetry and the single most 
important work in the history of English poetry since The Canterbury Tales. Indeed, Chaucer 
was Spenser’s favourite English poet and, in constructing his ‘allegory, or darke conceit’, 
Spenser was acutely alive to the traditions on which he was building. Following Malory, he 
chose the ‘history of king Arthure, as most fitter for the excellency of his person’, and it was the 
imaginative freedom of King Arthur’s adventures which provided Spenser with the narrative 
licence of the poem. Yet beyond these two Englishmen, Chaucer and Malory, Spenser was 
looking back tothe ‘antique Poets historicall’, by which he chiefly meant Homer, Virgil and 
Ariosto. In particular, he modelled much of his poetic career on Virgil’s pastoral. This enabled 
Spenser in The Faerie Queene to look back to a golden age of pastoral harmony but also to 
celebrate the court of Elizabeth I, through drawing a parallel with King Arthur’s legendary court. 
The poem absorbs and reflects a vast range of myth, legend, superstition and magic, and explores 
both history and contemporary politics. The section entitled‘Justice’, for instance, features the 
suppression of the Irish rebellion in which Spenser himself was implicated as a civil servant as 
well as covering religion and philosophy, andattitudes to women and sexuality.
The Faerie Queene is Elizabeth, seen abstractly as Glory, and appearing in various guises. 
In a deliberate echo of the Arthurian legends, twelve of her knights undertake:
I find no peace and all my war is done;
I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise,
And naught I have and all the world I seize on … 

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(Sir Thomas Wyatt, I find no peace) 
They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand, and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change. (Sir Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me) 
series of adventures. The work is highly symbolic, and allusive, and is inevitably episodic in its 
effects. ‘A Gentle Knight’ (recalling Chaucer’s Knight; see page 33), with a red cross on his 
breast, is on a quest. He is Saint George, the symbolic saint of England. He had seen Gloriana 
(the Faerie Queene) in a vision, and would go in search of her.
His adventures in trying to find her would form the poem’s story. The Faerie Queene has 
an annual twelve-day feast, on each day of which one of her courtiers leaves the court to set right 
a wrong. Each journey would involve a different virtue and the hero would be involved in each, 
while still seeking Gloriana.
Spenser only completed just over half of the planned twelve books of The Faerie Queene, 
but some of his writings – notably the early The Shepherds Calender (1579) and the marriage 
hymn Epithalamion (1595–96) – are particularly interesting for their relation of poetry to time: 
twelve eclogues representing the twelve months of the year in the former, and the twenty-four 
stanzas representing the hours of Midsummer’s Day in the latter. The last line of Epithalamion 
embodies the transience that we have seen emerging: one day becomes eternity.
And for short time an endless monument.
Spenser has divided critical opinion more than any other major poet. He is seen variously 
as the great poet of the Renaissance, as ‘a pen pusher in the service of imperialism’, as following 
and enlarging upon the tradition of Chaucer, or as ‘a colonial administrator’ who ‘had difficulty 
making ends meet’. He wrote a male adventure for a male readership, celebrating a female 
virgin, affirming an ideal, in order, like most Renaissance writers, to shore himself up against the 
flawed realities of economic and colonial power and rule. He wanted to make himself the 
laureate of a generation, and in his formal, linguistic and imaginative invention he is generally 
considered to have surpassed all earlier poetic achievements.
Spenser made a radical attempt to relocate and reintroduce the epic form for England and the 
Elizabethan age by inventing the Spenserian stanza as the new form for his poem. 
The epic, as in Beowulf, celebrates the achievements of heroes or heroines of history and 
myth, affirming nation and values. Perfection of the virtues, and the affirmation of truth(and true 
religion) are expressed through the adventures of the queen’s Knights: Truth, Temperance, 
Chastity, Friendship, Justice and Courtesy are the themes of the six 
completed books.
The poet actively sought advancement from the monarch he eulogized but, in fact, his 
career was spent largely away from the court, in Dublin, where most of The Faerie Queen was 
written. Despite his qualities of formal invention and his concern with some of the deepest 
preoccupations of the time – notably in the Mutability Cantos fragment –for some critics he 
stands somewhat outside the era’s main intellectual and emotional debate. 
The move from self-conscious literary awareness to a broader-based popular appeal is in 
part due to the work of the ‘university wits’: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George 
Peele, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge, the generation educated at Oxford and Cambridge 
universities who used their poetry to make theatre, breathed new life into classical models and 
brought a new audience to the issues and conflicts which the stage could dramatise.

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The earliest plays of the period, in the 1550s and 1560s, establish comedy and tragedy as 
the types of drama. Both were derived from Latin sources: comedies from the works of Terence 
and Plautus, tragedies largely from Seneca, with echoes from Greek antecedent sin both cases. 
The mediaeval miracle and mystery plays, and the kind of court ‘interludes’ played for the 
monarch, also contributed to the development of Renaissance drama. Its broad humour, its use of 
ballad, poetry, dance and music, its tendency towards allegory and symbolism flow from this 
native English source. Thus, although drama went through rapid changes in the period, its 
historical credentials were rich and varied as indeed were its range and impact. It was an age 
when the need for a social demonstration of an English nationalism and Protestantism climaxed 
in the public arena of a diverse and energetic theatre. This was the golden age of English drama. 
The range of his interests was vast. No single English intellectual symbolises the idea of 
Renaissance man more than Bacon. He wrote on aspects of law, science, history, government, 
politics, ethics, religion and colonialism, as well as gardens, parents, children and health. The 
key work for appreciating the width of his interests is his Essays, originally published in 1597, 
and enlarged twice before his death. These meditations, often only a page long, give a 
remarkable insight into the thought of the period. On occasion this coincides with modern-day 
sensibilities, as when he advises that negotiation is generally better conducted face to face than 
by letter (Essay 47); at other times one might not agree with the assumptions on which his 
judgments are made but within the constraints of the period they are sensibly tolerant – when 
establishing a ‘plantation’ or colony, for instance, he suggests treating the ‘savages’ with justice 
(Essay 33). Of Death is a good example of how Bacon handles a vast subject in an accessible 
way:
Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark: and, as that natural fear in children is 
increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, 
and passage to another world, is holy, and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto 
nature, is weak.
Many of Bacon’s essays raise issues fundamental to the era. For example, Of Revenge 
explores the notion of revenge which frequently featured in the period and is dominant in 
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice’, he begins. The Old 
Testament had apparently sanctioned revenge but, as Bacon shows, if justice is to be redefined, 
the wildness of revenge becomes dangerous. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy(1592), the pre-eminent 
revenge tragedy before Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), uses the personification of revenge as a 
‘Chorus in this Tragedy’, a visible presence motivating character and action. Where Kyd’s play 
uses revenge as a motif for passion and bloodshed, Hamlet uses it as a starting point for a new 
kind of hero. Rather like the character Hamlet, Bacon was at the forefront of an endless 
questioning and ‘perpetual renovation’ which characterized the Renaissance. Bacon, 
incidentally, has been seen by a few literary historians as the author of the plays attributed to 
Shakespeare. 
While this is highly unlikely, it is a reminder of how much the two writers share the 
concerns of the age. Bacon regarded the pursuit of knowledge, irrespective of politics or religion, 
as useful to the individual and beneficial to society. He recognized the need for laws and rules to 
proceed from the observation of the human and natural world rather than attempting to fit these 
phenomena into preconceived, abstract structures. In many respects he can thus be regarded as 
one of the leading figures in the development of English thinking.
The issues of the time are also reflected in the writings of Richard Hooker, who wrote 
one of the first major prose classics in modern English, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie, 
published in 1593 and 1597, with posthumous additions more than half a century later.