3. The Renaissance

(1485-1625)

What is the Renaissance? The word literally means rebirth, a rebirth in this context from the decadence and corruption of the Middle Ages and a return to the achievements of classical antiquity (ancient Greece and Rome). The term was invented by humanist writers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and, although to modern eyes it may seem rather too dismissive (given the splendid monuments of medieval art, literature and architecture), it was taken seriously at the time, and the idea had a far-reaching influence on all aspects of culture. The Protestant Reformation provided a parallel concept of rebirth: the corrupt and superstitious world of the medieval church was swept aside, and the new construct in some sense recovered the purity of the early church.

Renaissance literature in England is in fact full of influences from classical models. Even an author so quintessential^ English as Shakespeare based the structure of his plays on the five acts prevalent in Ancient Rome; the very terms 'comedy' and 'tragedy' reflect an influence from the past One may even cite Romeo and Juliet's suicide as an example of classical values rather than those of the Elizabethan church (which would clearly condemn suicide). The literature of the period is full of mythological references to the gods and myths of antiquity.

Of course, English literature developed along its own lines, absorbing classical influences, but also drawing on native tradition and gradually moving away from a rigid classical basis. A character such as Hamlet is certainly more introspective than any figure from ancient drama. The use of ghosts in Renaissance drama evolved from rather solid figures in early plays to the sophisticated psychological devices populating Shakespeare's tragedies. «Tragedy, understood as the fall of a single great person due to a fatal flaw, developed into Webster's totally corrupt and brutal world. For English writers the model for their vernacular literature was often the literature of Italy, perhaps discovered through translations into French. The major influence on the English literature of the Renaissance was surprisingly not Dante but Petrarch, who established the language of love, that dominated the Renaissance in England and more generally in Europe.

It is perhaps difficult for modern readers to realize just what a revolutionary step this was: romantic love has become part of life in the Western tradition and it is hard to imagine a time when this language had not yet been conceived or formulated. It is also difficult to dissociate our modern ideas of love from its rather different counterpart in the Petrarchan tradition, based on the veneration of the lady as a symbol of purity and virtue, and the concept of love as something transcending mere physical attraction and thus ennobling it. Translations of Ovid towards the end of the century led to a rather franker erotic component in literature (e.g. Donne). But love was still essentially courtly, and for the upper classes only. In fact, in Renaissance comedy lower class people in love was a stock comic situation designed to make people laugh. Another characteristic of Renaissance literature, which may elude the modem reader, is decorum and elegance. Since the Romantic period, more emphasis has been placed on sincerity and naturalness, but this was alien to Renaissance literature, which thus may sometimes seem artificial to modern eyes. Shakespeare's comedies are the dramatic working out of a simple theme: love conquers all; they are not intended to be realistic or plausible visions of human relationships.

Attitudes to religion were funda­mentally different too. The religious influence was all-pervasive in Re­naissance literature, and there is nothing blasphemous in Donne's image (in the holy sonnet Batter my heart three personed God) of God ravishing the poet as a Petrarchan lover might ravish a lady. In Elizabethan times shorter life expectancy (plagues and other diseases), death in childbirth, infant mortality, violent deaths and public executions all combined to make death an everyday occurrence, something always present in a way which is no longer conceivable. This explains the preoccupation with time as a destructive force, or with living for the moment ('carpe diem') in many works of the period.