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Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University Unit 4: The Renaissance-Elizabethan Age

Notes
Unit 4: The Renaissance-Elizabethan Age

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
4.1 Writers
4.2 Plato and Aristotle
4.3 Classical Mythology
4.4 Emphasis on Self-culture
4.5 The Renaissance
4.6 Elizabethan Age
4.7 Prose Fiction
4.8 Summary
4.9 Keywords
4.10 Review Questions
4.11 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Describe plato and Aristotle.
Define classical mythology.
Explain the renaissance and elizabethan age.
Define prose fiction.

Introduction

The Renaissance (etymologically, re-birth) which started in Italy (and somewhat later, in France)
as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries came to have its full impact on England only
sometime in the middle of the sixteenth. Basically, the arrival of the Renaissance signalised a
revival of interest in ancient Greek and Roman literature and learning, but as the Renaissance
arrived in England via Italy (and to some extent, France), it came after acquiring a particular
complexion associated with the Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Not only were the
ancient Greek and Roman men of letters and philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Homer, arid Virgil
hailed as guides and models by the English but also the Italian poets and philosophers of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, like Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, and Machiavelli who themselves
had written under the impact of the ancient masters. By the time the dawn of the Renaissance
arrived in England, it had already become a decadent, if not an altogether defunct, force in Italy.
Nevertheless, the Renaissance meant in England not only the revival of interest in the Greek and
Roman antiquity but also a great deal of respect for the values of Renaissance Italy which was
characterised, along with an avid love of learning, by such features as a reckless spirit of adventure,
a taste for pomp and splendour, a keen appreciation of beauty (generally of the physical kind), a
kind of “Machiavellian” egocentricism, and a general love of luxury. Spenser’s work very well
captures the spirit of the Italian Renaissance which stirred the life of his age in all its aspects except
the sordid Machiavellianism which held such £ sinister interest for some of, his contemporaries,
like the University Wits arid Baron as well as a vast brood of gilded courtiers. The Renaissance
elements in Spenser are tempered by the Reformation ideals.

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