Assignments for Part III----The Renaissance Period ( March 17,2008)

1. How would you define the term Renaissance?

2. What is the historical and cultural background of the English Renaissance?

3. What is blank verse?

4. What is Sonnet?

5. Roughly speaking, Shakespeare’s literary career can be divided into three periods.What are the three periods? And what are his major works in each period?

6. What is Shakespeare’s literary achievement?

7. How to define the term Humanism? And What are the main characteristics of humanist writing?

8. Give a brief introduction to Edmund Spenser and The Faerie Queene, Marlowe and his Dr. Faustus, Thomas More and his Utopia?http://www.blog.edu.cn/user4/caojinjin/archives/2007/1682937.shtml

1English Literature -- The Renaissance

. Renaissance: it is marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid 17th centuries. It first started from Italy and then spread all over Europe. The renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “revival”, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid 17th centuries. It first started from Italy and then spread all over Europe. The renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “revival”, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

Some Renaissance personality’s musicians: Guillaume Dufay was a famous Renaissance composer, who started a new generation of music. One of Dufay’s most famous breakthroughs was to write music for instruments and not just for singing. Guillaume Dufay was also the first composer to use a folk song in the mass. A mass is a group of songs sung to honour God in the Roman Catholic Church.

Scientist: Galileo was one of the chief founders of modern science. His greatest achievements were his telescope and the laws of motion. They changed the way people view the universe. In 1610 he went to Florence to continue his studies of the heavens where he found the truth of Copernicus’s theory. In 1632 he published an important book of the dialogues concerning the two chief world systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus.

Writer: Shakespeare was known as the greatest dramatist and poet to write in the English language. Shakespeare influenced literature and is looked up to for his great works. Some plays he wrote are Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet. Besides, he also wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a comedy. Shakespeare also wrote sonnets and narrative poems.

Artist: Michelangelo could possibly be the greatest artist and sculptor. His paintings and sculptures have changed the meanings of art forever. His greatest glory, painting the Sistine Chapel, began in 1508, and was completed in 1512. His carvings include Madonna of the Stairs, Pieta, and so on.

Architect: Leon Battista Alberti was known as the father of modern architecture. He was an ideal Renaissance man, and contributed a lot to the development of architectural styles in the Renaissance. Alberti designed the church Sant’ Andrea. He also redesigned the Santa Maria Nevella, Which was one of the most elaborate and brilliant pieces of that period.

A golden age of English literature commenced in 1485 and lasted until 1660.

Malory's Le morte d'Arthur was among the first works to be printed by William

Caxton, who introduced the printing press to England in 1476. From that time

on, readership was

vastly multiplied. The growth of the middle class, the continuing development

of trade, the new character and thoroughness of education for laypeople and

not only clergy, the centralization of power and of much intellectual life in

the court of the

Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and the widening horizons of exploration gave a

fundamental new impetus and direction to literature. The new literature

nevertheless did not fully flourish until the last 20 years of the 1500s,

during the reign of Queen

Elizabeth I. Literary development in the earlier part of the 16th century was

weakened by the diversion of intellectual energies to the polemics of the

religious struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of

England, a product of the

Reformation.

The English part in the European movement known as humanism also belongs to

this time.

Humanism: it is the essence of the Renaissance. Humanism is a system of beliefs upheld by writers and artists of the Renaissance period in their fighting against medieval asceticism. It states that man is godly, that man is able to find truth, goodness and beauty, and that man is in control of the present life rather than being controlled by God. Briefly, humanism puts man at the center of their beliefs and takes man to be the measure of every thing while the former asceticism puts God at the center of their beliefs and takes personal salvation to be the most important thing on the earth for man.

Humanism encouraged greater care in the study of the literature of classical

antiquity and reformed education in such a way as to make literary expression

of paramount importance for the cultured person. Literary style, in part

modeled on that of the

ancients, soon became a self-conscious preoccupation of English poets and

prose writers. Thus, the richness and metaphorical profusion of style at the

end of the century indirectly owed much to the educational force of this

movement. The most immediate

effect of humanism lay, however, in the dissemination of the cultivated,

clear, and sensible attitude of its classically educated adherents, who

rejected medieval theological misteaching and superstition. Of these writers,

Sir Thomas More is the most

remarkable. His Latin prose narrative Utopia (1516) satirizes the

irrationality of inherited assumptions about private property and money and

follows Plato in deploring the failure of kings to make use of the wisdom of

philosophers. More's book

describes a distant nation organized on purely reasonable principles and

named Utopia (Greek for "nowhere").

7 Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. Humanism is a system of beliefs upheld by writers and artists of the Renaissance period in their fighting against medieval asceticism. It states that man is godly, that man is able to find truth, goodness and beauty, and that man is in control of the present life rather than being controlled by God. Briefly, humanism puts man at the center of their beliefs and takes man to be the measure of every thing while the former asceticism puts God at the center of their beliefs and takes personal salvation to be the most important thing on the earth for man.

3 不押韵的诗称无韵诗或白体诗（blank verse）.多用在戏剧和叙事诗中。Blank Verse is any verse comprised of unrhymed lines all in the same meter, usually iambic pentameter. It was developed in Italy and became widely used during the Renaissance because it resembled classical, unrhymed poetry. Marlowe's "mighty line," which demonstrated blank verse's range and flexibility, made blank verse the standard for many English writers, including both Shakespeare and Milton, and it remained a very practiced form up until the twentieth century when Modernism rebelled and openly experimented with the tradition. Regardless, blank verse was embraced by Yeats, Pound, Frost, and Stevens who skillfully brought the tradition through this century. While it may not be as common as open form, it retains an important role in the world of poetry.

blank verse: is the unrhymed iambic pentameter line, It was Surrey who first brought it in and Marlowe who perfected it with his “mighty line”

Blank verse can be composed in any meter and with any amount of feet per line (any line length), though the iamb is generally the predominant foot. Along with the iamb are 3 other standard feet and a number of variations that can be employed in a blank verse poem. It is difficult--almost impossible--to write a blank verse poem consisting of all iambs, and other types of feet get used more often than one may think

4 sonnet: fourteen-line rhyming poem with set structure: a short poem with 14 lines, usually ten-syllable rhyming lines, divided into two, three, or four sections.

There are many rhyming patterns for sonnets, and they are usually written in iambic pentameter.

Edmund Spenser(1552-1599) received education first at Merchant Taylor’s School and then at Pembroke College, Cambridge. The Shepheardes Canlender , Epithalamion—the most beautiful wedding hymns for their marriage. Spenser’s masterpiece is The Faerie Queene, to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. The Redcrosse knight in Book I and Sir Guyon in Book II

The five main qualities of Spenser’s poetry are: a. a perfect melody; b. a rare sense of beauty; c. a splendid imagination; d. a lofty moral purity and seriousness; e. a dedicated idealism. In addition to the above, Spenser uses strange forms of speech and obsolete words in order to increase the rustic effect. It is Spenser’s idealism, his love of beauty, and his exquisite melody that make him know as “the poets” poet.

B. Christopher Marlowe : (1564-1593) a son of a Canterbury shoemaker. First to the King’s School, then Cambridge. As a man of letters. Play Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus, is gifted of the “University Wits”, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, non-dramatic poetry includes Hero and Leander, “the Passionate Shepherd to His6 Love” and a verse translation of Ovid’s Amores, pioneer of English drama

Dr. Faustus is a play based on the German legend of a magician aspiring for knowledge and finally meeting his tragic end as a result of selling his soul to the Devil. The play’s dominant moral is human rather than religious. It celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness; it also reveals man’s frustration in realizing the high aspirations in a hostile moral order. And the confinement to time is the cruelest fact of man’s condition.

Dr. Faustus is the greatest of Marlowe’s plays, in which the old German legend if freely reshaped. Faustus is a great scholar bored of his present study on the academic curriculum and turns to black magic. By conjuration he calls up Mephistophilis, the Devils’s servant . Faustus makes a bond to sell his soul to the devil in return for twenty-four years of life in which he may have the services of Mephistophilis to give him everything he desires. With the help of devil, Faustus brings his magical art into full play and sees the Pope, Alexander the Great and even the beautiful Helen of Greece. Meanwhile Faustus has experienced much internal conflict, symbolized in the appearances of both Good Angel and Bad Angel. In the final scene, there remains only the terrifying soliloquy in which the anguish of the hero’s mind is poignantly expressed.

6 Shakespeare’s views on literature:

He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kind-ness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality.

The characteristics of Shakespeare’s characters:

His major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones: they are individuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others.

The characteristics of Shakespeare’s plot:

Shakespeare’s plays are well-known for their adroit plot construction, Shakespeare seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources.

The characteristics of Shakespeare’s language:

The language is his subtle instrument. Shakespeare can write skillfully in different poetic forms, like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader.

· Reflections on Humanism of Renaissance

By the time when the 14th century began, some important changes were taking place in European culture. Writers could write about non-religious matters. Men became interested in natural science, art, and literature. This period of change is called the Renaissance, meaning "being born again".

A movement called humanism was one of the first products of the spirit in the history of the Renaissance that characterized 14th-century Italy.

History background

As we know that, Renaissance, or, the rebirth of letters, is an intellectual movement. It is a series of literary and cultural movements in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. These movements began in Italy and eventually expanded into Germany, France, England, and other parts of Europe.

Two features are striking of the movement. The one is a thirsting curiosity for classical literature. Old manuscripts were dug out. There arose a general revival of the study of Greek and Latin authors. The other feature is the keen interest in life and human activities. People ceased to look upon themselves as living only for God and a future world. Thinkers, artists and poets arose, who gave expression, (sometimes in an old guise, though) to the new feeling of admiration for human beauty and human achievement, a feeling in sharp contrast with medieval theology. Hence arose Humanism.

General introduction

What is humanism?

Humanism is a system of thought that is based on the values, characteristics, and behavior that are believed to be best in human beings, rather than on any supernatural authority- concern for people: a concern with the needs, well-being, and interests of people.

Humanism, in philosophy, emphasizes the dignity and worth of the individual. A basic premise of humanism is that people are rational beings who possess within themselves the capacity for truth and goodness. The term humanism is most often used to describe a literary and cultural movement that spread through Western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. This Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman studies emphasized the value of the classics for their own sake, rather than for their relevance to Christianity.

Humanism and renaissance

Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the ancient authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values represented in the works. Renaissance humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfections, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.

Humanist movement

The humanist movement started in Italy, where the late medieval Italian writers Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarch contributed greatly to the discovery and preservation of classical works. Humanist ideals were forcefully expressed by another Italian scholar, Pico della Mirandola, in his Oration on the dignity of man. The movement was further stimulated by the influx of Byzantine scholars who came to Italy after the fall of Constantinople (present-day 0stanbul) to the Ottomans in 1453 and also by the establishment of the Platonic Academy in Florence. The academy, whose leading thinker was Marsilio Ficino, was founded by the 15th-century Florentine statesman and patron of the arts Cosimo de' Medici. The institution sought to revive Platonism and had particular influence on the literature, painting, and architecture of the times.

The collection and translation of classical manuscripts became widespread, especially among the higher clergy and nobility. The invention of printing with movable type, around the mid-15th century, gave a further impetus to humanism through the dissemination of editions of the classics. Although in Italy humanism developed principally in the fields of literature and art, in central Europe, where it was introduced chiefly by the German scholars Johann Reuchlin and Melanchthon, the movement extended into the fields of theology and education, and was a major underlying cause of the Reformation.

One of the most influential scholars in the development of humanism in France was the Dutch cleric Desiderius Erasmus, who also played an important part in introducing the movement into England. There humanism was definitely established at the University of Oxford by the English classical scholars William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre and at the University of Cambridge by Erasmus and the English prelate John Fisher. From the universities it spread throughout English society and paved the way for the great flourishing of Elizabethan literature and culture

Features of Shakespeare’s Dramati