Literature

in English Society

Before 1660

 

A Historical Survey

 

 

Brother Anthony, of Taizé

 

 

Part Two: The Renaissance 1485 - 1660

 

 

Sogang University Press


1998



 

 

 

 


 

 

Contents

 

 

Introduction

The Early Tudor Period

Henry VIII

Henry's break with Rome

The Dissolution of the Monasteries

Renaissance Scotland

England after Henry VIII

Humanism in Northern Europe and England

Thomas More

Utopia

Juan Luis Vives

Early 16th century lyric poetry

John Skelton

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

English Translations of the Bible

 

The Age of Elizabeth

The Church

John Foxe: The Book of Martyrs

The Queen's Power

Mary Queen of Scots

The Netherlands and France

Elizabeth and International Politics

The Death of Mary Queen of Scots

The Spanish Armada

The last years of Elizabeth's reign

 

Early Elizabethan Poetry

Gascoigne, Googe, and Turberville

The Mirror For Magistrates

Edmund Spenser

The Shepheardes Calendar

Italian epic poetry

The Faerie Queene

The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Amoretti and Epithalamion

 

European Prose Fiction

                 Sir Philip Sidney

The Old Arcadia

The Defence of Poesy

Astrophel and Stella

The New Arcadia.

 

Drama before Shakespeare

Early Comedies and Tragedies

Gorboduc

Further developments

The construction of the theaters0

The companies of actors

The University Wits

Christopher Marlowe

Thomas Kyd

 

William Shakespeare

A chronology of Shakespeare's works

Editions: quartos and folios

Shakespeare's sources

The Sonnets

 

Later Elizabethan Literature

Lyric Poetry

Longer Elizabethan poems

Marlowe's Hero and Leander

Shakespeare's longer poems

Sir John Davies

Elizabethan translations

 

The Seventeenth Century

Social History

The Stuarts

The Civil War

The Commonwealth

The Restoration

Whigs and Tories

The Glorious Revolution

The end of the court

 

John Donne

Donne the secular poet

Donne's Metaphysical style

Donne and the Church

The Holy Sonnets

Other religious poems

Donne's Prose

 

Ben Jonson

Every Man in His Humour

Prison and after

Volpone

Epicoene

The Alchemist

The Middle Years

The Later Years

 

 Jacobean and Caroline Drama

The social background

Francis Beaumont

John Fletcher

Thomas Middleton

Philip Massinger

Thomas Heywood

Thomas Dekker

John Marston

John Webster

John Ford

James Shirley

Sir William Davenant

Anthony Munday

William Rowley

Cyril Tourneur

Richard Brome

Thomas Nabbes

Thomas Killigrew

Restoration drama

Major themes of Jacobean drama

 

17th Century Lyric Poetry

Religious poets

George Herbert

Richard Crashaw

Henry Vaughan

                        Thomas Traherne

The "Sons of Ben" and the "Cavalier Poets"

Robert Herrick

Thomas Carew

Sir John Suckling

Richard Lovelace

Poets of the Mid-century

Edmund Waller

Sir John Denham

Abraham Cowley

Andrew Marvell

 

John Milton

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

Comus

Lycidas1

The Civil War and the Commonwealth

Paradise Lost

Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes

 

Seventeenth Century Thinkers

The European background

Francis Bacon

Sir Thomas Browne

Thomas Hobbes

The Cambridge Platonists

John Locke

Sir Isaac Newton

 

Epilogue: From Romance to Novel