Literature in British Society :
The Renaissance

By Brother Anthony, of Taize

Seoul : Sogang University Press, 1998

Contents

Introduction   ix

The Early Tudor Period  1
     Henry VIII   3
          Henry's break with Rome   5
          The Dissolution of the Monasteries   6
          Renaissance Scotland   7
          England after Henry VIII   8
          Humanism in Northern Europe and England    9
          Thomas More   11
               Utopia   12
          Juan Luis Vives   22
     Early 16th century lyric poetry   24
          John Skelton   25
          Sir Thomas Wyatt   29
          Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey   35
     English Translations of the Bible   39

The Age of Elizabeth    43
     The Church   43
     John Foxe: The Book of Martyrs   46
     The Queen's Power   47
     Mary Queen of Scots    48
     The Netherlands and France   49
     Elizabeth and International Politics   49
     The Death of Mary Queen of Scots   51
     The Spanish Armada   51
     The last years of Elizabeth's reign   52

Early Elizabethan Poetry   55
     Gascoigne, Googe, and Turberville   55
     The Mirror For Magistrates   58

Edmund Spenser   61
     The Shepheardes Calendar   62
     Italian epic poetry   66
     The Faerie Queene   69
     The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie   74
     Amoretti and Epithalamion   75
     European Prose Fiction   81

Sir Philip Sidney    85
     The Old Arcadia   88
     The Defence of Poesy   90
     Astrophel and Stella   93
     The New Arcadia   99

Drama before Shakespeare   103
     Early Comedies and Tragedies   104
          Gorboduc   106
     Further developments   109
     The construction of the theaters   110
     The companies of actors   111
     The University Wits   113
           Christopher Marlowe   113
           Thomas Kyd   123

William Shakespeare   131
     A chronology of Shakespeare's works   135
     Editions: quartos and folios   141
     Shakespeare's sources   142
     The Sonnets   145

Later Elizabethan Literature   149
     Lyric Poetry   149
     Longer Elizabethan poems   163
          Marlowe's Hero and Leander   163
          Shakespeare's longer poems   166
          Sir John Davies   170
     Elizabethan translations   172

The Seventeenth Century   177
     Social History  177
          The Stuarts   177
          The Civil War   178
          The Commonwealth   180
          The Restoration   181
          Whigs and Tories   183
          The Glorious Revolution   184
          The end of the court   185

John Donne   189
     Donne the secular poet   190
     Donne's Metaphysical style   203
     Donne and the Church   205
     The Holy Sonnets   207
     Other religious poems   209
     Donne's Prose   209

Ben Jonson    213
     Every Man in His Humour   214
     Prison and after   216
     Volpone   220
     Epicoene   222
     The Alchemist   222
     The Middle Years   223
     The Later Years   232

Jacobean and Caroline Drama   235
     The social background   235
     Francis Beaumont   237
     John Fletcher   237
     Thomas Middleton   239
     Philip Massinger   241
     Thomas Heywood   241
     Thomas Dekker   242
     John Marston   243
     John Webster   244
     John Ford    245
     James Shirley   246
     Sir William Davenant   246
     Anthony Munday   247
     William Rowley   247
     Cyril Tourneur   248
     Richard Brome   248
     Thomas Nabbes   249
     Thomas Killigrew   249
Restoration drama   249
Major themes of Jacobean drama   251

17th Century Lyric Poetry   253
     Religious poets   254
          George Herbert   254
          Richard Crashaw   264
          Henry Vaughan   267
          Thomas Traherne   273
     The Sons of Ben and the Cavalier Poets  274
           Robert Herrick   276
          Thomas Carew   279
          Sir John Suckling   282
          Richard Lovelace   283
     Poets of the Mid-century   285
          Edmund Waller   285
          Sir John Denham   290
          Abraham Cowley   292
          Andrew Marvell   295

John Milton   303
     On the Morning of Christ's Nativity   303
     L'Allegro and Il Penseroso   307
     Comus   310
     Lycidas   311
     The Civil War and the Commonwealth   313
     Paradise Lost   316
     Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes   325

Seventeenth Century Thinkers  331
     The European background   331
     Francis Bacon   337
     Sir Thomas Browne   343
     Thomas Hobbes   347
     The Cambridge Platonists   351
     John Locke   353
     Sir Isaac Newton   354

Epilogue: From Romance to Novel   357