THE RENAISSANCE
THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

Historical and social background

1485-1509

1509 - 1547

HENRY VII ascended to the throne of England

end of the War of the Roses

➕

beginning of Tudor dinasty

Reign characterised by
economic and political stability

  • policy aiming at holding feuding noblemen at bay
  • laws improving and protecting domestic industry and opened new markets for the commerce of English wool
  • creation of a mercantile fleet
  • improving of the royal navy to protect English commerce from pirates

1547 - 1553

HENRY VIII

ideal Renaissance monarch

Governor + very cultured man

His reign marked by
- ENGLISH REFORMATION (1534)

Separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church

ENGLAND = PROTESTANT NATION

REASONS

Personal

Political

Pope's refusal to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon who had born him a daughter Mary, instead of a male heir

King's intolerance towards the Pope's authority

Thomas Cranmer
Archbishop of Canterbury

Annulled his marriage and crowned Ann Boleyn Henry's mistress, Queen of England in 1533

ACT OF SUPREMACY 1534

King = only supreme
Head of the Church of England

➕

- DISSOLUTION OF MONASTERIES 1536-1539

- DIVULGATION OF THE BIBLE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Extinction of religious communities + distribution of confiscated lands and wealth to a landed gentry loyal

1553 - 1558

EDWARD VI
Only 9 years old

ACT OF UNIFORMITY 1549

imposed English liturgy and
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Official service book of the Church of England by Archbishop Cranmer

1558 -1603

MARY I TUDOR
Bloody Mary

married catholic Philip II of Spain and attempted to reintroduce Catholic religion

persecutions against protestants ...many victims also Cranmer

1603

QUEEN ELIZABETH I

brilliant monarch whose political skills and strengh led to the foundation and rise of the English Nation daughter of Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn

reintroduced Protestant religion and consolidated national Church known as Church of England
or Anglican Church

2 acts

Second Act of Supremacy 1559

Act of Uniformity 1559

Reasserted spiritual and temporal authority of the monarch

reintroduced Cranmer's the Book of Common Prayer

VIRGIN QUEEN childless and refused to marry to protect England from foreign domination but also from Catholics

MARY STUART, QUEEN OF THE SCOTS

at the centre of several plots planned by Spain and the extreme wing of English Catholics who wanted a Catholic Queen on the throne

Kept prisoner by Elizabeth for nineteen years and eventually sentenced to death in 1587 after the discovery of the latest plot

Pretext for Spain to declare war on England

1588 INVICIBLE ARMADA Spanish fleet made up of heavy ships attacked English fleet , inferior in number but faster and easier to handle

VICTORY CONFIRMED ENGLAND'S INDEPENDENCE

Elizabeth dies leaving the throne to Mary Stuart's protestant son

JAMES VI known as JAMES I

Cultural and literary background

SOCIAL CHANGES

they led to stability and religious tolerance and economic prosperity as England changed from an agricultural to a commercial and industrial country

  • enclosures = common land was enclosed with hedges to make pasture. This deprived villagers of their only means of subsistence and led to the development of towns where they were forced to move to find work
  • The Poor Law 1601 to prevent poverty caused by enclosures and unemployment. Help for the poor but at the same time vagabondage and begging became crimes punished with fines or imprisonment
  • new social classes such as trade and merchant classes
  • geographical explorations contributed to the colonisation of new lands. Also new trading companies like the East India Company were instituted

Sir Walter Raleigh founded a colony in North America called Virginia in honour of the Virgin Queen

  • slave trade triangular trade, traffic of black people between England, Africa and North America. English ships reached the Western Coast of Africa to buy black slaves who were brought to America and sold in exchange of raw materials to work on colonial plantations. Finally the ships returned to England with precious goods.

ELIZABETHAN WORLD PICTURE
Different levels of existence, including human and cosmic, were correlated so that correspondencies, affinities and symbolic allusions could be perceived everywhere

macrocosm-microcosm analogy

Copernican revolution

the great chain of being

the King's two bodies

cosmic dance

medieval doctrine which conceived the universe as interlocking hierarchical structure ordained by God. Every being had its place within this Chain depending on different degrees of intellect, mobility and capability.

All physical matter was made up of 4 elements possessing each some qualities and forming a hierarchy:

  • Lower heavier elements: earth (cold and dry) and water (cold and moist)
  • Upper lighter elements: air (hot and moist) and fire (hot and dry)

Human personality depended on the mixture of these elements that produce the 4 humours or temperaments

  • melancholic
  • phlegmatic
  • sanguine
  • choleric

man = a microcosm that reflects the macrocosmic order of the universe. It justified a hierarchical structure of society

monarch had a body natural and a body politic: the first was subject to decay and death, while the second was immortal and passed to a rightful successor. This doctrine supported the theory of the divine right of the king which asserted that a monarch was appointed by God and could not be deposed

universe has a finite spherical shape with the earth at its centre. The earth is motionless and is surrounded by a series of nine concentric crystalline spheres including the orbits of the seven planets which revolved around it. The universe is therefore believed to be in a perpetual state of music and dance

Ptolemaic world-system

work of Nicolaus Copernicus replaced the geocentric structure of the Ptolemaic universe with the heliocentric cosmology. The earth was not at the centre of the universe but revolved around the sun

CULTURAL

revival of classical culture. RENAISSANCE = rebirth of culture and learning that began in Italy in the 14th century and spred throughout Europe during 15th and 16th centuries

LITERARY

increasing interest in translation

Humanism or New Learning

growing importance of cultural institutions stitutions

Rise of
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH

influence of Italian cultural models

birth of literary genres

Promoted the centrality of human values, the recovery of the classics, the ideals of Greek and Roman thought, the improvement of vernacular literature with classic rethoric, introduction of Greek language and literature in university curricula

translation and editing of Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin and other classical translation into English

Virgilio 's Aeneid by the earl of Surrey

grammar schools, Oxford and Cambridge universities, Inns of Court which provided a higher education in the law

Education included the teaching of liberal arts (grammar, rethoric and dialectic) and the scientific ones (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and musical theory)

optional use of the auxiliary in the negative and interrogative forms, the th-ending in the 3rd singular person of the verbs, frequent use of pronoun and adjective forms thou, thee, massive introduction of Latin and Greek words as well as words from Italian, Spanish and French

the sonnet, the novella, the epic and pastoral genres, the Commedia dell'Arte

Niccolò Macchiavelli Il Principe became influential as it defined a new model of governor

flourishing of different prose styles and lyric and narrative poetry as imitation of foreign literary models

GOLDEN AGE OF DRAMA

Rise of theatre as a secular institutionnd the development of dramatic genres such as revenge tragedy, history plays, euphemistically and romantic comedy