o
High Renaissance trio- Leonardo
da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarotti, and Raphaello Sanzio( Raphael)
o
Pico detta Mirandola’s Of
the Dignity of Man(1486) emphasizes the human capacity to ascend the Platonie
scale of creation, attaining heavenly state through a progressive self-education
and self-fashioning; his idea of the perfectibility of Man was Christian.
o
Machiavelli (1469-1527) in his The
Prince (1513) had anatomized the cynical meaning by which Cesare Boregia
had kept power Machiavelli advices the Prince to feared than loved.
o
Hamlet, on man ‘what a
prince of work is man’. How noble is Reason! How infinite in faculty! In form
and moving how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In
apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragons of animals..!’
o
In 1517, the year of Michelangelo’s
death and Shakespeare’s birth, the Italian Renaissance was over but the English
renaissance had hardly begun.
o
The Governor (1531)
by Thomas Elyot and The Schoolmaster (1558) of Roger Ascham, who
become tutor to Queen Elizabeth.
o
Philip Sidney’s ‘Defense of Poesy’ (1579)
o
More’s Latin Utopia
was brought out by Erasmus in Louvain in 1517. It was not Englished until 1551,
in 1557 appeared More’s finished English History of King Richard II. Utopia
describes and ideal country, like Plato’s Republic but also like the witty True
History of Lucian.
o
Raphael Hythoday is
a travelling scholar, who in Book II tales of his visit to a far off
geometrical island run like a commune with an elected, reasonable ruler, there
is no private property, priests are few and virtuous, and some are female.
o
The book of the Courtier by Sir Thomas
Hoby originally written by Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528).
o
Philip Sidney praises
Thomas Wyatt on ‘Epitaph on Sir Thomas Wyatt’ (1542)
o
Wyatt and Surrey were
first printed in 1557 in Tottel’s Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets. The
sonnet and an unrhymed iambic pentameter, first used in Surrey’s version of
Virgil’s Aenied II and IV, known as blank verse.
o
Authorized Version of
Bible published in 1611.
o
By 1539 Miles Coverdale produced
of the first completed print English Bible, known that his words formed part of
the services of the church of the England.
o Sir Thomas Eliot’s Governor (1531) dedicated to Henry
VIII.
o Roger Ascham (1515-68), the author of School Teacher, has
also written Toxophillus (1545), which he had dedicated to Henry.
Toxophillus means bow-lover.
o Book of Martyrs (1563) by John Foxe.
o Medwall wrote Fulgence and Lucrece in 1497.
o John Rastell (1470-1536) wrote interlude The Four
Elements, with the first printed music.
o John Heywood wrote The Four P’s- a Palmer, a Pardoner,
a Pothecary and a Pedlar.
o Ralph Roister Doister, was written by Nicholas Udall
(1504-56). The Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
borrows from Udall a joke based on miss punctuation.
o Jasper Heywood published in1559, a translation into
English of Seneca’s Troas and with others, Seneca his Ten
Tragedies (1581).
o Sidney praised Thomas Sackville and Thomas
Norton’s blank verse tragedy Gorboduc (1561) as full of stately
speeches and well sounding Phrases, Clyming to the height of Seneca his style
and full of notable moralities.
o Sir Gawain and The Green Knight was not published until 1839.
o The Norman spoke Norman French. The Norman French of England is
called Anglo Norman.
o William the conqueror had made London the capital of England and
it was not until 1362 Parliament opened instead of French.
o Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary got published in 1755.
o Layamon’s Brut (1200), a work in Old English heroic
style, this based on French Roman De Brut by Wace, dedicated to Eleanor of Aquitaine.
o Latin History Regum Britannine by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
o The Owl and the Nightingale (13th Century), a
debate between two birds, a wise old and a pleasure loving Nightingale, dusty
wisdom and appealing song.
o Julian Norwich (1343-1413) and Margery Kempe who met with
each other were finest spiritual writer before George Herbert.
o John Mandeville wrote ‘The Travel’ claims to be
his own experience of January to Holy land, thrice visited by Chaucer’s wife of
Bath, twice visited by St. Godrice and once visited by Margery Kempe.
o Piers Plowman is a dream poem in the alliterative style,
opens on the Malvern Hilss on Worcestshire, by William Langland. New in his
work is Gothic Existentialism and dizzy secular. In atmosphere, not in
convention or setting, it parallels. Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov
(1880). Its scheme is like Bunnyan Burton’s Pilgrim Progress (1684), but
sweep like that of Pound’s Cantos (1917-59) theological.
o The book of the Duchess is based on Guillaum de Merchants.
o The House of Fame is a three part vision in which the
dreaming poet finds himself in a temple of Venus, its glass walls engraved with
the story of Dido and Aeneas.
o The Parliament of Fowls, is a dream ending in Puzzle. He has
been reading Cicero’s Scipio’s Dream, in which African explains how the
immortal soul can attain the havens only by working on common good.
o Chaucer’s last work, The Canterbury Tells opens with ‘When
the April with his shoures soote.’ Eliot began his lament for civilization,
The Waste Land, with ‘April is the cruelest month’. The inner
Keeper proposes tale-telling game to pass time on the way to the two-day
journey to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket of Canterbury killed by agents of
Henry II in 1170 at the altar of his cathedral.
o John Lydgate (1370-1449), a mark his book Troy Book was
written for Henry V, Fall of Prince for Humphrey, and The Pilgrimage of the
Life of man for the Earl of Salisbury.
o 29 pilgrims were there mentioned in the Prologue.
o The oldest prose narrative still familiar in English Le Morte De
Arthur (1470) by Sir Thomas Marloy. He wrote the book while he was in Jail
Finished in1469 and got printed by Caxton in 1485.
o Tennyson’s The Lady of
Shallot was based on this Le Morte D Arthur.
o Bruce of John Barbour was the first Scottish literature and had written
in 14000 octosyllabics.
o Sir Richard Holland’s Boke of the Howlat, Kingis Quair (1424)
o Robert Henryson’s Fables are his great achievement but
the Testament of Cressied, a sequel to Chaucer’s Troilus. His Testament
has a very medieval divinity and morality. Parted from Troilus, Cresseid took
became a whore and was afflicted with leprosy.
o William Dunbar’s Lament for the Markaris (makers, poets).
o Gavin Douglas produced the first version of Virgil’s Aenied in
any variety of English.
o George Gascoigne wrote supposed a play adapted
from Ariosto, a source for Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew’.
o Edmund Spenser dedicated his work The Shepherd’s Calendar
(1579) to Sir Philip Sidney.
o Sidney lead a group which sought to classicize English metre
called Areopagus; its members were Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville.
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