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Unit 4: The Renaissance-Elizabethan Age

knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.” writes a critic,” Notes
Spenser follows the great formative work of Elizabethan and later English culture, the
Nichomachean Ethics.”

4.3 Classical Mythology
Another Renaissance feature of Spenser’s work is his employment of classical mythology for
ornament and illustration. Being a devout Christian he did not believe at all in the multiplicity of
pagan-deities, but, like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Lyly, and almost all the rest of his contemporaries,
he was attracted by classical mythology which he freely drew upon in his works. Very like Milton
he uses his profound and vast knowledge of this mythology even when his sincere aim is to drive
home a Christian moral. At any rate, the frequent references to classical mythology give the
language a veneer of richness and exoticism which was so much sought after by the English
writers of the Renaissance.

4.4 Emphasis on Self-culture

A new creed of humanism arrived with the Renaissance in England. It taught that the universe was
not, as the middle Ages had believed, theocentric (that is, centred in God), but homocentric (that is,
centred in man). Much emphasis came to be laid upon man, human life, the material world, and
man’s activity in this world. Such things had hitherto been despised, for man was taught to concern
himself with his welfare in the next world. The new humanistic thinking, which put human
interests paramount, gave special importance to self-culture which did not mean simply the
cultivation of the well-known Christian virtues but implied a harmonious development of the
human personality on all planes-thought, feelings, and action. More concretely, it meant the
cultivation of “the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.” In The Faerie Queens
Spenser celebrates not only Holiness but also other virtues, like justice and Temperance, which are
more of secular and humanistic than of Christian nature.

Did u know? Spenser’s aim in his great poem is not just to teach people to submit passively
before the Divine Will, or to seek for divine Grace, but in the manner of a
Renaissance humanist “to fashion”, as he himself writes, “a gentleman or
noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”

Some Other Renaissance Features
The age of the Renaissance in England was, as has been often said, “a young age.” It was marked by
unprecedented ebullience and adolescent impatience of all fetters intellectual, religious, and even
moral. It also developed a craving for sensuous thrills. Renaissance Italy had burst forth into hectic
activity in the field of arts like painting, music, and sculpture which in the Middle Ages were
looked down upon as too mundane. England in the late sixteenth century produced a number of
great musicians such as Byrd, but she remained devoid of the plastic arts. However, in the poetry
of the age” we often find the sensuous touches of a painter. Spenser’s poetry is well known for its
sensuous and more specifically, pictorial quality. He was in the words of Legouis, “a painter who
never held a brush.” But, what is more, Spenser—with all his Platonism and Puritanism
notwithstanding— seems too frequently to indulge in the pleasures of the senses for their own
sake. His paradise seems to be as earthly as that of Omar Khayyam himself. He spends all his art
while describing the beauty of the nude female figure, which he does quite voluptuously and with
untiring zeal, dwelling on each and every part with great patience and a greater joy. He is, no
doubt, uncontaminated by the virus of the Italian pornographic eroticism which is evident in
works like Marston’s Pigmalionand even in Marlowe’s Hero and.Leander arid Shakespeare’s
Venus and Adonis, but his taste for the delights of the senses is quite apparent. For instance, see the
following sonnet:
LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 25