It is the star to every wandering bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

He introduced new contents into the traditional form of fourteen lines. His sonnets were all built on the contrast which best reflects the struggle of conflicting emotions in the poet's soul, His sonnets are devoted to the struggle between Good and Evil, love that brings man great joy and great sorrow. Unlike other poets who used to draw idealised portraits of women, Shakespeare spoke of his beloved - the Dark Lady - as of a real, common woman, who is dear to him and worthy of his praise and love. In many of his sonnets, Shakespeare meditates on Life and Death. He believed that Beauty and Life are able to conquer Death because they continue to live in new generations (sonnet 11) and in the works of art (sonnet 65). Shakespeare considered the Poet and Poetry to play an important role in making people understand life (sonnet 76).

The subject matter of the sonnet is invariably an aspect of love in one or several of its manifestations. Inevitably, since the matter of sonnets tends to be much the same, it leaves only the manner of expression to be varied. Such motifs as that of the melancholic lover and his recalcitrant mistress, of the destroyer and of the consequent need to gather rosebuds tend to be endlessly repeated, but some distinct poetic voices emerge from the many examples. They are of the dramatic projection of a character (Sidney), of the introduction of audaciously novel language (Drayton), of the employing of wide range of emotional states and subtle melodic expression (Shakespeare), and of the psychological intensity (Donne).

During the last period of English Renaissance literature (poetry) (the early decades of the seventeenth century) showed no sharp break with the late Elizabethans. Three lines of development had their origins in writers who bridged the two periods either by literary impact or by chronology. There is, first, the Spenserian tradition which continues in writers fusing Christian and mythological resources and employing mellifluous rhythms and lush (or grotesque) imagery (Drayton, Nicholas Breton, William Browne and some others). Though a number of minor writers and a major one like Milton show something of the Spenserian quality, others found the style too diffuse, too soft, too feminine. These became the 'sons of Ben' (Marlowe and later Drayton), influenced by the classical restraint and tautness of Jonson's writing, and they represent the second line of literary development and the closure of English Renaissance. In his works Jonson reveals his humanistic orientation - concern for moral truth and artful presentation. The third line of development is provided by John Donne, whose 'masculine' voice influenced some of the same peots influenced by Jonson. If compared with Edmund Spenser, John Donne is found at the other end of the scale: where Spenser is gentle, or 'mild' (as Wordsworth called him), Donne is fiery; where Spenser is smooth, Donne is rough.

Donne had two sides of his character. He started off as 'Jack Donne', the soldier, lover, drinker,writer of passionate amorous verses. He ended as Doctor John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, great preacher of sermons, devoutest of men. And yet the two extremes were in him all his life. As the passionate lover he was always analytic, thoughtful, trying to dissect and explain his passion almost scientifically. As the divine, he approached God with the passion he had formerly shown to women: he addresses Christ with the fierceness of a lover. Just as his character seems made up of opposites, so does his verse. His poems show a brain that works as hard as an engine. In him, as in Shakespeare, thought goes on all the time, getting mixed with emotion and sensation, and producing strange and wonderful results. In his work there is a kind of violence of expression that we do not find in Spenser, so that he startles us by beginning a love poem in a very extraordinary way:

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me move!

Or he will take the stranger images and produce something like this:

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past dreams are

Or who cleft the devil's foot.

Teach me to hear mermaids singing

Or to keep off envy's stinging,

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

Though late Elizabethan poets (Chapman and Shakespeare) show elements of the so-called metaphysical style of poetry, it is Donne who is its exemplar. It is a style, which is characterised as the one that yokes heterogeneous ideas and images together, straining after novelty, and exploiting arcane learning in witty and abstract images. Carew in 'An Elegy upon the Death of ... Donne' sums up Donne's contribution in the following terms:

The muses' garden with pedantic weeds

O'erspread, was purg'd by thee, the lazy seeds

Of servile imitation thrown away;

And fresh invention planted.

Donne's 'fresh invention' is stylistic since his subjects are amatory or religious; his means are equally rhetorical - the employing of irony, paradox, and hyperbole. The use of the conceit had been popular since the time of Petrarch; what Donne and his followers did was to seek for ever more striking and ingenious analogies.

Though the great glory of the Renaissance period was the drama, the other forms of literature were flourishing as well. In the field of prose, translation seems to come first. A prose literature can only grow by taking nourishment, and this nourishment can only be obtained from foreign sources. Thus translations from the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian make up much of the first Tudor prose, and, of course, pre-eminent among all Tudor translations is one from Hebrew as well as the Greek - the English Bible.

One of the precursors of the Renaissance, the New Learning - a man of bold imagination and vision. More's most imaginative work was written in Latin - Utopia, which is Greek for 'nowhere', a book which depicts an imaginary island where everything is nearly perfect. More's point is contained in the title: his perfect island does not exist and never can - it is nowhere.

Secular translations of the Elizabethan age include Sir Thomas North's version of the Lives of Plutarch, made in 1579. Shakespeare was devoted to this translation and frequently borrows his plots from those terse biographies of the great Greeks and Romans, and he was not even averse to 'lifting' whole sentences and paragraphs from North. The famous description of Cleopatra on the Nile in Antony and Cleopatra is little more than a skilful versifying of North's own words. The Elizabethans were interested in biography, especially of the ancients, and to this was allied an interest in history, especially of their own country. We may note here that Sir Thomas More was a pioneer in the field of historical writing, and his Life and Reign of Edward V is a model of clear, objective documentation.

An important Elizabethan translation from French was Florio's rendering of the Essais of Montaigne. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 - 92) was its inventor, and he conceived of it as a brief loose composition in which he could informally chat of subjects that interested him. Florio renders Montaigne into fluid English prose, catching the gentleness, the humour, and the charm of the great Frenchman's personality.

The first English essayist was Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626). Bacon wrote in Latin as he believed that English would not last long. In his Novum Organum he lays the foundations for modern scientific study. The Essays have kept his name alive more than any of his weighter achievements. These essays are simple, strong, admirably clear and concise, and many statements are as memorable as lines of poetry. We can never forget these openings: 'Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark'; 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice'; 'Good Almighty first planted a garden', etc.

Spoken English - is the key to understanding the peculiar virtues of Elizabethan prose. The Elizabethans addressed themselves to the ear rather than the eye, and this explains the sensation of warmth and intimacy we get from even the most scholarly Elizabethan writing. The prose stories of the Elizabethan age (stories for entertainment) are interesting. In them we see the beginnings of what, very soon, is to be our most popular literary form - the Novel. A great Spaniard - Miguel de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote - died on the same day as Shakespeare. This, perhaps, is the first true novel. We expect a novel to be fairly long, and Don Quixote is very long. The first English novels are more like long short stories, but the writers of long novels - Smollett and Fielding and Dickens - are not likely to learn much from them from the point of view of construction. But as stories they are good, and though incident is more important than character, yet they contain a robust flavour which reminds us of Tom Jones and Oliver Twist.

A very popular, and novel, genre was that of the 'character', a sharp portrayal of a social type (the courtier, the gull), or of a scene (a tavern, a bowling green), or of a virtue, but more often of a vice. It was a form which could lend itself to wit, to realism, to satire, or to moral adumbration. The first characters (1608) were those of Joseph Hall, who in 1597 had claimed to be the earliest of the satirists. Entitled Characters of Virtues and Vices, his volume tends toward abstractions in a pithy antithetical style. Some others writers of 'characters' were Sir Thomas Overbury, John Stevens, and Nicholas Breton. When related genres are taken into account, the increasing tendency to prose writing in the seventeenth century becomes clear. There is, first, the essay, which shows an affinity with the 'character' writing, the difference being that the essay writer tends to personal moral statement without the witty play of ideas or of language. Second it shows an affinity with biography which was given an impressive nudge by the translation of classical sources such as Plutarch's Lives. In contrast with such heroic delineation, the native tradition developed out of the medieval saints' legends.