The Renaissance: Elizabethan & Jacobean Age2 Marks Questions with Answers · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

Renaissance means 'rebirth' — the revival of classical Greek and Roman learning that spread from Italy after the fall of Constantinople (1453). It reached England in the early 16th century through humanists like Erasmus, Colet and Sir Thomas More, whose Utopia (1516, in Latin) is the first great English product of the movement. Its watchwords were humanism, individualism and the spirit of discovery.

The University Wits were the Oxford- and Cambridge-trained dramatists who prepared the stage for Shakespeare in the 1580s: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge and John Lyly. Thomas Kyd is often grouped with them although he attended no university. Greene's deathbed pamphlet famously attacked Shakespeare as 'an upstart crow'.

Euphuism is the highly ornate, artificial prose style named after John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580). Its hallmarks are balanced antithetical clauses, elaborate similes drawn from 'unnatural natural history', alliteration and rhetorical questions. It became the height of courtly fashion and a lasting byword for over-decorated prose.

Tottel's Miscellany (Songes and Sonettes, 1557) is the first printed anthology of English lyric poetry. It published posthumously the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into English, and the Earl of Surrey, who created the English (Shakespearean) sonnet form and first used blank verse. It is the conventional starting point of Elizabethan poetry.

The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590; IV–VI, 1596) is Edmund Spenser's allegorical romance-epic in praise of Elizabeth I, who appears as Gloriana. Spenser planned twelve books, each celebrating a virtue in its knight, but completed only six. It is written in the nine-line Spenserian stanza, and earned Spenser the title 'the Poets' Poet'.

The Spenserian stanza, invented for The Faerie Queene, has nine lines rhyming ABABBCBCC — eight lines of iambic pentameter closed by a longer alexandrine (iambic hexameter), which gives each stanza a slow, meditative ending. Later poets revived it: Byron in Childe Harold, Shelley in Adonais, Keats in The Eve of St Agnes.

An Apology for Poetry (also titled The Defence of Poesie, written c. 1580, published 1595) is Sir Philip Sidney's reply to Stephen Gosson's Puritan attack The School of Abuse (1579). It is the first major work of English literary criticism, defending poetry as superior to history and philosophy because the poet 'nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth'.

'Marlowe's mighty line' is Ben Jonson's phrase (in the First Folio tribute) for the thunderous blank verse Marlowe forged in Tamburlaine the Great (1587), Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II. Marlowe made blank verse the natural medium of English tragedy and created the over-reaching tragic hero that Shakespeare inherited.

Shakespeare's work is conventionally divided into four periods: (1) early experimentation — apprentice comedies and histories (to c. 1595); (2) the great histories and joyous comedies — Henry IV, As You Like It, Twelfth Night (1595–1600); (3) the great tragedies and bitter 'problem plays' — Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth (1600–1608); and (4) the late romances — Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest (1608–1612).

The First Folio (1623) is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, compiled by his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell seven years after his death. It contains 36 plays, eighteen of which — including Macbeth, Twelfth Night and The Tempest — had never been printed and would otherwise be lost. Ben Jonson's prefatory poem calls Shakespeare the 'Sweet Swan of Avon'.

The comedy of humours is Ben Jonson's form of satirical comedy, inaugurated by Every Man in His Humour (1598, with Shakespeare in the cast), in which each character is dominated by a single obsessive trait or 'humour'. Its masterpieces are Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614). The name derives from the four bodily humours of medieval physiology.

The Authorized or King James Version (1611), produced by about 47 scholars commissioned by James I, is the single most influential book in the history of English prose. Its rhythms, idioms and imagery shaped writers from Milton and Bunyan to the present day, and it standardised English at the moment the language was settling.

The Theatre, built by James Burbage in Shoreditch, London, in 1576, was England's first permanent public playhouse. When its lease failed in 1599, its timbers were carried across the Thames and rebuilt as the Globe, the open-air theatre of Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men).

By an ordinance of the Long Parliament on 2 September 1642, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the Puritan-dominated Parliament closed all public theatres, condemning stage plays as immoral. The closure lasted until the Restoration in 1660 and marks the formal end of the greatest age of English drama.

The Shepheardes Calender (1579) is Edmund Spenser's debut — twelve pastoral eclogues, one for each month, published under the name 'Immerito' with a learned commentary by the mysterious 'E.K.' Dedicated to Sidney, it announced the arrival of 'the new Poete' and is conventionally taken as the dawn of the great Elizabethan age of poetry.

The Arcadia is Sir Philip Sidney's sprawling prose romance of princes, shepherds and disguises, written for his sister the Countess of Pembroke. It exists in two versions — the original 'Old Arcadia' and the revised, unfinished 'New Arcadia' (published 1590). With Astrophil and Stella and the Apology, it makes Sidney the all-rounder of Elizabethan letters, all published after his death at Zutphen (1586).

Astrophil and Stella (published 1591) is the first great English sonnet sequence — 108 sonnets and 11 songs in which 'star-lover' Astrophil pursues Stella, modelled on Penelope Devereux. Its publication ignited the 1590s sonnet craze that produced Spenser's Amoretti (1595) and Shakespeare's sonnets. Its famous opening command: 'Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.'

Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, were written while plague closed the theatres in 1592–94. Venus and Adonis was the best-selling of all Shakespeare's works in his lifetime. The stanza of Venus and Adonis (ABABCC) and the rhyme royal of Lucrece are both standard metre questions.

Thomas Thorpe published the 154 sonnets in 1609 with the riddling dedication to 'Mr. W.H.', their 'onlie begetter'. Sonnets 1–126 address the Fair Youth (1–17 urging him to marry are the 'procreation sonnets'); 127–152 concern the Dark Lady. They use the English (Shakespearean) form Surrey devised: three quatrains and a couplet, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Francis Bacon naturalised the essay in English — Essays (1597, enlarged 1612 and 1625), in a compressed, aphoristic style ('Reading maketh a full man…'). The Advancement of Learning (1605) is the first major philosophical work in English, and his Novum Organum (1620, Latin) made him the prophet of inductive science — 'the father of the scientific method'.

Metaphysical poetry is the witty, argumentative devotional and love poetry founded by John Donne — startling conceits (lovers as compasses in 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'), colloquial openings, and the fusion of thought with feeling. The label began as Dryden's complaint that Donne 'affects the metaphysics' and was fixed by Johnson's Life of Cowley. Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Marvell continue the school.

The 'Sons' or 'Tribe of Ben' were the younger poets who gathered around Ben Jonson at the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern. From them came the Cavalier poets of Charles I's court — Herrick ('Gather ye rosebuds'), Carew, Suckling and Lovelace ('Stone walls do not a prison make') — polished lyricists of love, loyalty and carpe diem, set against the Puritan temper of the age.

'Problem plays' is F. S. Boas's term (1896) for the bitter, unclassifiable comedies of Shakespeare's middle years — All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida — where comic form carries tragic and cynical matter. The term, borrowed from Ibsen-era drama criticism, is itself a guaranteed terminology question.

The masque was the lavish allegorical court entertainment of the Jacobean and Caroline courts — poetry, music, dance and spectacular scenery, with courtiers themselves performing. Ben Jonson wrote the greatest masques with designer Inigo Jones (inventing the comic 'antimasque'), until their famous quarrel over whether poetry or spectacle mattered more. Milton's Comus (1634) is the form's last masterpiece.

Utopia (1516, in Latin; English translation by Ralph Robinson, 1551) founded an entire genre and coined its name — Greek for 'no-place'. Book II's ideal commonwealth, with common property and religious tolerance, doubles as Book I's satire on enclosure-era England ('sheep devour men'). More, executed by Henry VIII in 1535, is the first great English humanist.

The War of the Theatres or Poetomachia (c. 1599–1602) was the stage quarrel in which Ben Jonson satirised the playwrights Marston and Dekker (Poetaster, 1601) and they struck back (Satiromastix, 1601). Fought partly between the boy companies of the private theatres and the adult companies, it is alluded to in Hamlet's 'little eyases' passage.

Jacobean tragedy darkens the revenge formula into corruption, madness and the macabre — courts of poisoned skulls and spying malcontents. John Webster's The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613) are its peaks: the Duchess's 'I am Duchess of Malfi still' is its defiant motto, and T. S. Eliot's verdict — Webster 'saw the skull beneath the skin' — is the quotation examiners expect.

Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592; surviving in differing A and B texts) dramatises the scholar who sells his soul to Mephistophilis for twenty-four years of power — the Renaissance over-reacher destroyed by his own aspiration. Its final soliloquy ('See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament') is the most famous hour-of-death speech in English drama.