Spenser – The Poets' Poet
Introduction:
Spenser's tombstone proclaims him to be "the Prince of Poets in his Time." The truth will not be violated if we proclaim him to be "the Prince of Poets of all Times." The prince of essayists, Charles Lamb, .appropriately designated the prince of poets, Edmund Spenser, "the poets' poet."
In spite of what some modern Zoiluses may say, Spenser's work strikes us as an exquisite embodiment of the ultimate in poetic excellence which has been the rather mirage-like goal of all poetical endeavour, beckoning all the generations of English poets after Spenser as an example and ideal. Whatever may be the other faults of Spenser, there is no gainsaying the fact that there is no dearth of the poetic in him. And the poetic faculty transforms, like the Philosopher's Stone or a magic wand, all the dross that it touches into the pure gold of genuine poetry. How intensely he influenced the succeeding poets and how widely he excited imitation are common knowledge for a student of English literary history.
Spenser through the Ages:
That Spenser's contemporaries hailed him as the greatest of the poets of their age, we have mentioned above. He was often enthusiastically called "the New Poet." His eclogues (in Tlte Shepherd's Calender) and his epic The Faerie Queene earned him the very proud title of "the English Virgil." The reputation that he gained among his contemporary poets was perpetuated over the ages after him by a very large number of poets who acknowledge him as their master and model. Spenser's poetic works provided the poets of all schools practical lessons in the writing of excellent poetry. In no age was Spenser out of vogue. Donne's reputation suffered a complete eclipse in theeighteenth century, the century of Pope, and Pope's own reputation fell in the nineteenth, but Spenser's reputation has remained constant like the lodestar which twinkles but does not fade. Of course, in the early eighteenth century, "the age of prose and reason," Spenser went somewhat put of vogue, but towards the middle of the century he became a source of inspiration for the poets like Croxhall and many others. The great Dr. Johnson looked with dismay and disapproval at the contemporary cult of imitating Spenser, but he could do nothing to stem the popular tide in spite of his being the arbiter of contemporary taste. Spenser was, indeed, as James Reeves says, "at no time out of fashion." He was, to quote the same critic, "a copious source of inspiration to other poets for three centuries."
It must be noted that, unlike Chaucer's influence on his immediate successors, Spenser's influence on his immediate successors was not so marked. Chaucer inspired a large number of "Chaucerians"-both in England and Scotiand-whose cherished aim was to write like their master or, even, "father" (as Lydgate called him). Spenser, "the second father of English poetry," did not generate such a tremendously imitative tendency. The reason for it was the rise and extreme popularization of the drama in the Elizabethan age. Most of the literary geniuses up to about twenty years after the death of Spenser tried their hand at the writing of the drama-the most popular and "paying" literary genre of their age. But later on, even a poet of Milton's stature acknowledged him to be his original, and in Penseroso he referred tohim quite reverently as a poet who sang
Of tourneys, and of trophies hung,
Of forests and enchantments drear,
Wliere more is meant than meets the ear.
Further, in Areopagitica he extolled him as "our sage and serious Spenser." Cowley tells us how by reading a copy of Spenser lying in his mother's parlour he became a poet at the age of tw%lve. Dryden proclaimed him as one of his two models-the other one being the "smooth Waller." Even in the eighteenth century we find the great Pope himself praising Spenser and acknowledging his debt to The Shepherd's Calendar in the writing of his own Pastorals. Addison, however, in his Account of the Greatest English Poets dismissed The Faerie Queene as a "mystic tale" which
Can charm an understanding age no more.
But it must be remembered that Addison's judgement of Spenser was as wanting in maturity as his summary dismissal of Chaucer as a rude barbarian,
Who tries to make his readers laugh in vain.
Addison wrote this critical—in fact, "uncritical"—poem when he was a callow youth, and he was sensible enough in his years of maturity to dissociate himself from his patently irresponsible judgements. Steele 'knew better when he observed in a Spectator that Spenser's "numbers" were "exquisite." In the later years of the eighteenth century, with the birth of a more imaginative spirit, Spenser came to be appreciated with a far keener sensitivity. Thomson and Shenstone not only caught a spark of the Spenserian flame but also used the Spenserian stanza to register a prosodic break with the heroic couplet of the Popean school—the former in his Castle of Indolence and the latter in his Schoolmistress. To discuss the influence of Spenser on the early nineteenth-century poets-Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge arc Keats-will require a sizable volume. Keats in The Eve of St. Agrxs. Scott in the Vision of Don Roderick, Shelley in The Revolt oflslarr^ and Byron in his Childe Harold prolonged the Spenserian note, though the last named was alien to the Spenserian spirit, and once remarked: "I can make nothing of him." Later, in the Victorian age we find Spenser exerting a profound influence on Tennyson, becoming the idol of Charles Doughty, and even being re-echoed in the "Spenserian" cadences of the poems of Robert Bridges. Among modern poets W. B. Yeats comes nearestto him.
Spenser's Equipment as a Poet:
Why and how Spenser inspired and influenced such a large number of poets can be explained by pointing out that he had what every poet aspires to have~a fertile, teeming imagination wedded to exquisite craftsmanship. Some poets have too powerful an imagination but a poor degree^of craftsmanship to mould it into artistic patterns of poetry. Blake is a representative example of such a poet whose imagination runs away unbridled by artistic control. Some other poets have a ratheY unproductive imagination even though they are .wonderful craftsmen. Spenser is one of the ideal poets like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton who have a fertile imagination which is perfectly moulded into poetry by their uncanny sense of pattern and architectonics, in addition to their mastery of the poetic idiom with all its suggestiveness. Spenser was fully equipped as a poet. He was as learned as Milton. As a "child" of the Renaissance, he was well read into the classics which were in his age beginning to exercise a hold on scholars and men of letters. He was an M. A. from Cambridge University and well grounded in the traditions of Greek and Latin poetry as also the poetry of Renaissance Italy and France. Homer, Virgil, and Ovid on the one hand, and Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, Ronsard, and du Bellay on the other, were at his finger-tips. In his poetic works he freely drew upon them with the result that there grew a number of similarities, stylistic as well as thematic, between his own works and the works of the above named masters before him. And that is not all. Spenser was well-versed even in the philosophers-Plato and Aristotle-out of whom the former exercised a strong hold upon his mind. In his Four Hymns and elsewhere, he effectively and unmistakably gives expression to"his Platonism which believes that we should ascend from a specific embodiment of beauty to the idea of beauty itself. This idea of beauty is divine, and its contemplation something religious in nature. Nor was Spenser ignorant of the medieval lore. Though he disapproved medieval patterns of thought yet he loved to breathe the medieval air with all its fairv-land tints of chivalry, knight errantry, religious fervour plus all its superstitions and backwardness. He captured this air exquisitely in The Faerie Queene. Then he was greatly influenced by the Reformation, too, and in his work we are not unconscious of his puritanic temper. Thus he exhibited a rarely synthesizing temper and mind which is the hall mark of every poet who aspires for universal fame. With all his poetic equipment it was natural for him to be the envy of all poets. He wrote for the cultivated and the initiated, and not what in Europe and America are called "the common people" and in India "the masses." He was the poets' poet and not the people's poet, in any sense, Marxian or otherwise.
Spenser s Poetic Genius:
But all of Spenser's learning and scholarly equipment would have been of no avail if he did not have the all-important poetic impulse which was necessary to electrify it into poetry. Even a huge dump of fuel fails to give heat without the all-important spark. Spenser had this spark. Even captious Addison admitted that Spenser was "warm'd with poetic rage." This poetic rage, genius, or impulse is hard to define, but it unmistakably shows itself in every page and every line of Spenser's works. Spenser may be a prodigiously learned man, but what matters most is his poetic genius. "The Faerie Queene", says W. P. Ker, "is the truest sort of poetry in which the poetic genius declares--itself most truly, as distinct from other kinds of genius." Leigh Hunt likewise observes: "Take him in short for what he is, whether greater or less than his fellows, the poetic faculty is so abundantly and beautifully predominant in him above every other." W. L. Renwick appropriately remarks: "Beyond question, what moved Spenser to write was a genuine poetic impulse He sang because he must; not only because people listened....He sang not because he was learned....or an intense votary of the Reformation-or the Renaissance, but because his imagination longed for outward embodiment, because it must give birth to its divine conceptions, because it insisted on relief and deliverance. In other words, Spenser's poetry is a true incarnation of a poetical spirit, not the elaborate effort of a partisan, literary, political, religious. " As is said about Shelley, Spenser exhales verses as a flower exhales fragrance. He cannot help it.'
W. L. Renwick further points out that even when Spenser sometimes uses material which is prosaic enough he transforms it into true poetry. He refers in this connexion to the description of the House of Alma in Book II of The Faerie Queene and the versification of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Britons in the following canto and observes that whatever be the difficulties in Spenser's path, "he never ceases to be a poet." He alwavs flies and never creeps or even walks. Nobody has ever posed the question-as was done too openly and too repeatedly in the case of Pope-whether he is a poet or not. He is not only a poet, a great poet, but the poets' poet. "Of all the poets", observes Hazlitt, "he is the most poetical." He offers in his work the quintessence of poetic lushness.
Spenser's Deft Craftsmanship:
Add to Spenser's vigorous poetic impulse his virtuosity and sureness of touch as a craftsman. He has a perfect mastery over his medium-words. He does whatever he likes with words and makes them responsive to all sorts of moods and feelings. His poetry has a rare pictorial quality which was sought to be imitated by poets like Keats, Swinburne, Tennyson, and many more. He was, as Legouis so well puts it. a painter who never held a brush. With equal justice we may remark that he was a musician who never wielded a musical instrument. The English language, tattered and jagged as it had become by the awkward handling of the fifteenth-century poets like Lydgate and Skelton, in Spenser's hands not only regained the harmony of Chaucer's numbers, but vastly added to its musical quality, in which it was previously much below Italian and French. "He seemed able," writes Legouis, "to tune English verse which had been so long rebellious, to the natural tones of his voice. For him language ceased to be refractory." It may be true that, as Ben Jonson complained, Spenser wrote no language. But whatever he wrote bespeaks a highly poetic spirit subjected to the process of exquisite craftsmanship which has always remained with the poets of all ages a thing of professional interest and emulation. It is in this sense, too, that Spenser can be called the poets' poet.
Spensers Importance:
Spenser appears as a source of inspiration for the succeeding poets because through his example he amply showed that the heights were within reach of English poetry, and he did actually make his poetry reach them. In his age-the age of the Renaissance--before he started writing, England had to show nothing to compare with the poetry of the Italian Renaissance poets such as Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrach, and the French Renaissance poets like Ronsard and du Bellay. By his poetic effort Spenser proved that, to quote Renwick, "modern England was capable of poetry as great as that of any other age and that she had her share of poetic power, of art and learning." In his pastoralism (The Shepherd's Calendar) he challenges comparison with the ancient Theocritus and Virgil, in his sonneteering with Petrarch and Ronsard, in his epic-writing Tasso and Ariosto and in his imaginative fertility and craftsmanship with any poet ancient or modern. He taught his countrymen once and for all not to look for poetic gems to Italy or France but to their own country, for it had come after all to have a great poet, the poets' poet!
The Influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Middle Ages On spenser
Introduction:
What Chaucer was to the England of the late fourteenth century, Spenser was to that of the late sixteenth century. In his work he has completely and effectively captured the spirit of the age. The late sixteenth century was a period known appropriately as that of the efflorescence of the Renaissance in England. Simultaneously, it was the age when England came under the full impact of the Reformation which had started in the early part of the sixteenth century.
In the age of Spenser the spirit of the Renaissance as also the Reformation was abroad, and nobody could keep himself untinctured by it. Spenser's works are imbued with this twjn spirit. But though Spenser kept pace with the changing times he sometimes also shows evidence of looking to the past-the fairyland of the Middle Ages. Consequently, we find him not only faithfully recording the impact of the Renaissance and the Reformation but also allowing a gust of the medieval wind to blow across his pages. He is at once a child of the Renaissance and the Reformation even triough there are some touches of medievalism in his poetry as well as temper: Let us now try to bring out, one after the other, the elements peculiar to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Middle Ages in the work of Spenser. Let us start with the Renaissance.
THE RENAISSANCE
The Spirit of the Age:
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 tfie 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 are1 tempered by the Reformation ideals.
Writers:
Spenser, an M. A. of Cambridge University, was well read in much of the ancient classical literature which had then begun to be commonly known. He borrowed a good deal from the vast treasure of that literature and came to be intimately influenced by a number of ancient poets and philosophers and the writers of Renaissance Italy who themselves had been influenced by these poets and philosophers. He modelled his most important work The Faerie Queene upon the epics of the Greek Homer, the Roman Virgil, and the Italian Ariosto and Tasso. Theocritus and Virgil prompted him to try his hand at the pastoral {The Shepherd's Calendar). The first English writer of the eclogue was Barclay (of the Ship of Fools fame) who flourished in the fifteenth century; but he had based his five eclogues on the work of the Italian poet Mantuanus rather than the great Virgil and Theocritus. Spenser went back to Virgil and wrote what stands in comparison with his eclogues. Then, Spenser looked to Petrarch and his French followers while composing his sonnet sequence Amoretti. Thus in his selection of the literary genres for his use Spenser clearly displays his debt to the ancient Greek and Roman and the modern Italian writers. Moreover, there are some specific echoes of these writers in his works. For instance, we have a number of Virgilian phrases which, like a good writer, Spenser does not allow to stand out, but submerges into the context. In The Faerie Queene Sir Guyon's voyage to the Bower of' Bliss (where his arch enemy Acrasy is living) is suggested most probably by a similar voyage in Homer's Odyssey; but Spenser means by this voyage what Homer did not. Then the descent of the false Duessa to Hades is suggested by the sixth book of Virgil''s Aeneid. Tasso'? Armida gave Spenser some obvious hints for his description of Acrasy and her terrible powers. Ariosto, the writer of the first romantic epic in the history ofworld literature (Orlando Furioso), set before Spenser a living example of the romantic love of adventure and unbounded activity which he was to imitate in The Faerie Queene.
Plato and Aristotle:
The, great Greek philosophers, Plato and his disciple Aristotle, exerted a strong hold on Spenser's intellectual and moral temper. In his Four Hymns Spenser gives a poetic utterance to the Platonic conception of Love and Beauty. Plato taught that all material beauty (such as the beauty of the human body) is a shadow as well as a symbol" of the Ideal Beauty which is divine. A specific embodiment of beauty should be used for ascending to the contemplatiotrdf the abstract Idea of Beauty. The abstract Idea is divine, and the contemplation of the Idea is a religious activity. Echoing the true Platonic spirit, Spenser observes in the Hymn in Honour of Beauty that "a comely corpse, with beauty fair endowed" is the house of a 'beauteous soul."
Fit to receive the seed of virtue strewed:
For all thatjair is, is by nature good.
Spenser well became a spokesman of the neo-PIatonism of the Renaissance.
Aristotle, too, was a philosopher of abiding interest for Spenser. He seems to have effectively taught Spenser the doctrine of the golden mean which finds an effective embodiment in Guyon who stands for Temperance. The very groundplan of The Faerie Queene, which is to celebrate twelve cardinal virtues, is perhaps suggested by Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. If it is not Aristotle himself, it must have been some of his very numerous commentators who seems to have enumerated the twelve virtues each of which was to be dealt with in one of the twelve projected books of The Fairie Queene. Spenser's Prince Arthur is described as "the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised." writes a critic," Spenser follows the great formative work of Elizabethan and later English culture, the Nichomachean Ethics."
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.
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 taughtto 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. 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 (as for example, the Italian Castiglione) "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:
Coming to kiss her lips (such grace I found),
Me seem 'd I smelt a garden of sweet flow'rs,
That dainty odours from them threw around,.
For damsels fit to deck their lovers, 'bow 'rs.
Her lips did smell like unto gilliflowers,
Her ruddy cheeks like unto roses red,
Her snowy brows like budded betlamoures,
Her lovely eyes like pinks but newly spread,
Her goodly bosom like a strawberry bed.
Her neck like to a bunch ofcullambines.
Her breast like lilies ere their leaves be shed,
Her nipples like young blossom 'd jessamines;
Such fragrant flow 'ers do give most odorous smell,
But her sweet odour did them all excel.
THE REFORMATION
Introduction:
The very important movement called the Reformation was started in Europe by the German clergyman named Martin Luther sometime in the early sixteenth century. This movement was intended against the growing corruptions of the Pope of Rome and his deputies and had for its aim the taking of Christianity back to the original religion of Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible. A permanent cleavage came to separate Roman Catholicism and the new "religion" termed Protestantism. Most of the Englishmen under Henry VIII and later his daughtei, Queen Elizabeth, embraced the new religion which recommended simplicity amounting to abstemiousness as against the luxury and pageantry of the Popish religion. Spenser was much influenced by the spirit of the Reformation which he, however, tried to reconcile with that of the Renaissance. He was a devout Christian and, as such, adored the Bible. The thought-content of the Four Hymns is a compromise between Christianity and neo-Platonism to which we have already referred. As regards his sincerity as a Christian, there can be no doubt, even though his Christianity puts a few hurdles in the path of his voluptuous enjoyment and his sensitive appreciation and assimilation of the Greek and Roman antiquity.
Illustration:
'Spenser is not only a Christian but a Protestant. As such, he is extremely and zealously critical of Roman Catholicism which the Reformation was sweeping off the English land. The first book of The Faerie Queene, read on a particular plane of symbolism, is a representation of the conflict between--Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, ending in a decisive victory for the former. It is the work of a zealous partisan who loads the dice too obviously in favour of his own religion. Una may be justly considered to be representative of Protestantism. Her champion is the Red Cross Knight representing Holiness. Duessa, who represents Roman Catholicism, is false, deceitful, and corrupt and is supported by the arch-trickster . \Ajchi-ma-gq: Orgoglio. the horrible monster, symbolises the itiultifarious corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church. The evil designs of Archimago and Duessa to create a schism between the forces of holiness and Protestantism are shown by Spenser to be frustrated with the help of Prince Arthur. To which side Spenser's sympathies lie is crystal clear. He powerfully, though indirectly, lashes at the follies and corruptions of the papists and satisfies his fervour by showing them put to rout by the forces unleashed by the Reformation.
Odd Synthesis:
The synthesis of the elements of the Renaissance with the features of the Reformation appears to be odd. But Spenser was a child of his age which itself effected such a synthesis. About that age Lytton Strachey observes: "It is, above all, the contradictions of the age that baffle our imagination and perplex our intelligence; the inconsistency of the Elizabethans exceeds the limits permitted to man." "To Spenser", says another critic, "as to his contemporaries, the best of all three worlds, the ancient, the medieval, and the Christian Renaissance, were almost on one plane," And Spenser moved quite glibly on this "one plane." He was at once a Hellenist, a humanist, a Christian, and a medievalist. Let us now consider him in his last-mentioned manifestation.
THE MIDDLE AGES
Introduction:
Broadly speaking,the Renaissance signalised the end of the Middle Ages and the arrival of the modern times. Though Spenser represented in himself what the Renaissance stood for, yet he also showed in his work some elements associated with the Middle Ages. In this respect he lags behind his times which were not yet far from the Middle Ages. Let us consider briefly some elements associated with the Middle Ages which we come across in his work.
Medieval Chivalry:
Spenser was the last English writer who wrote about medieval chivalry, love, and courtesy, and believed in them. Though The Faerie Queene has a didactic aim very much pertinent for Spenser's contemporaries, yet its setting and times are medieval. The allegory works through a multitude of knights and monsters, damsels in distress, magicians, and enchanters. As C. S. Lewis has well put it, the surface of the poem consists of "interlocked stories of chivalrous adventure in a world of marvels." Now these stories and this "world of marvels" were quite distasteful to Renaissance scholars who scoffed at them as things from the ignorant past. But, as we have said, Spenser believed in them and looked at them with singularwistfulness. While gathering the flowers of the New Learning he could not forget the flavour of the medieval lore.
His Recourse to Allegory:
Spenser is a mediaevalist in his frequent recourse to the old-world device of allegory or what he called "the dark conceit." Allegory in the Middle Ages was a conventional medium of poetic utterance. Even Chaucer, "the first of the moderns," wrote most of his poems in the allegorical form, though, of course. The Canterbury Tales has somehow escaped unhurt. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century the followers of Chaucer continued writing in the form of allegory. Happily, however, in the age of Spenser the vogue of allegory was discarded in favour of a direct and realistic form of poetry. But Spenser continued sticking to the convention of the Middle Ages, and filled his Faerie Queene with such allegorical complexities as have for him earned the censure of both the critic and the reader in spite of such defence as Hazlitt's who said that the allegory in The Faerie Queene does not "bite" anybody.
Diction and Alliteration:
In his diction and frequent employment of alliteration, too, Spenser seems to be going back to the Middle Ages. It was perhaps his admiration for his "master" Chaucer which led him to archaise his diction. Many of the words he used in The Faerie Queene were out of date even in his own age; but he employed them to lend an old-world flavour to the setting of the poem, which was the England of the Middle Ages. Ben Jonson rightly complained that Spenser wrote "no language". In his frequent employment of alliteration, too, he reminds one of the alliterative measure of verse which was in use before Chaucer. Spenser did not revive that measure but practised too frequently its salient features. Lastly Spenser's love of myths, symbols, antiquarian details, and his discursiveness and leisurely progress with the narrative are also suggestive of the manners and taste of the Middle Ages rather than of the age of the Renaissance.
The Influence of the Renaissance on English Literature
Introduction:
It is difficult to date or define the Renaissance. Etymologically the term, which was first used in England only as late as the nineteenth century, means' "re-birth". Broadly speaking, the Renaissance implies that re-awakening of learning which came to Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Renaissance was not only an English but a European phenomenon; and basically considered, it signalised a thorough substitution of the medieval habits of thought by new attitudes. The dawn of the Renaissance came first to Italy and a little later to France. To England it came much later, roughly about the beginning of the sixteenth century. As we have said at the outset, it is difficult to date the Renaissance; however, it may be mentioned that in Italy the impact of Greek learning was first felt when after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople the Greek scholars fled and took refuge in Italy carrying with them a vast treasure of ancient Greek literature in manuscript. The study of this literature fired the soul and imagination of the Italy of that time and created a new kind of intellectual and aesthetic culture quite different from that of the Middle Ages. The light of the Renaissance came very slowly to the isolated island of England, so that when it did come in all its brilliance in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance in Italy had already become a spent force.
It is difficult to define the Renaissance, but its broad implications in England do not defy discussion. Michelet exaggeratedly calls the Renaissance "discovery by mankind of himself and of the world." This is, indeed, too sweeping. More correctly we can say that the following are the implications of the Renaissance in England :
(a) First, the Renaissance meant the death of mediaeval
scholasticism which had for long been keeping human thought in bondage. The schoolmen got themselves entangled in useless controversies and tried to apply the principles of Aristotelean . philosophy to the doctrines of Christianity, thus giving birth to a vast literature characterised by polemics, casuistry, and sophistry which did not advance man in any way.
(b) Secondly, it signalised a revolt against spiritual authority-the authority of the Pope. The Reformation, though not part of the revival of learning, was yet a companion movement in England. This defiance of spiritual authority went hand in hand with that of intellectual authority. Renaissance intellectuals distinguished themselves by their flagrant anti-authoritarianism.
(c) Thirdly, the Renaissance implied a greater perception of beauty and polish in the Greek and Latin scholars. This beauty and this polish were sought by Renaissance men of letters to be incorporated in their native literature. Further, it meant the birth of a kind of imitative
tendency implied in the term "classicism."
(d) Lastly, the Renaissance marked a change from the theocentric to the homocentric conception of the universe. Human life, pursuits, and even body came to be glorified. "Human life", as G. H. Mair observes, "which the mediaeval Church had taught them [the people] to regard but as a threshold and stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness and value.".The "otherworldliness" gave place to "this-worldliness". Human values came to be recognised as permanent values, and they were sought to be enriched and illumined by the heritage of antiquity. This bred a new kind of paganism and marked the rise of humanism as also, by implication, materialism.
Let us now consider the impact of the Renaissance on the various departments of English literature.
Non-creative Literature:
Naturally enough, the first impact of the Renaissance in England was registered by the universities, being the repositories of all learning. Some English scholars, becoming aware of the revival of learning in Italy, went to that country to benefit by it and to examine personally the manuscripts brought there by the fleeing Greek scholars of Constantinople. Prominent among these scholars were William Grocyn (14467-1519), Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), and John Colet (14677-1519). After returning from Italy they organised the teaching of Greek in Oxford. They were such learned and reputed scholars of Greek that Erasmus came all the way from Holland to learn Greek from them. Apart from scholars, the impact of the Renaissance is also; in a measure, to be seen on the work of the educationists of the age. Sir Thomas Elyot (14907-1546) wrote the Governour (1531) which is a treatise on moral philosophy modelled on Italian works and full of the spirit of Roman antiquity. Other educationists were Sir John Cheke (1514-57), Sir Thomas Wilson (1525-81), and Sir Roger Ascham (1515-68). Out of all the educationists the last named is the most important, on account of his Scholemaster published two years after his death. Therein he puts forward his views on the teaching of the classics. His own style is too obviously based upon the ancient Roman writers. "By turns", remarks Legouis, "he imitates Cicero's periods and Seneca's nervous conciseness". In addition to these well-known educationists must be mentioned the sizable number of now obscure ones—"those many unacknowledged, unknown guides who, in school and University, were teaching men to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity" (Legouis).
Prose:
The most important prose writers who exhibit well the influence of the Renaissance on English prose are Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Lyly, and Sidney. The first named was a Dutchman who, as we have already said, came to Oxford to learn Greek. His chief work was The Praise of Folly which is the English translation of his most important work-written in England. It is, according to Tucker Brook, "the best expression in literature of the attack that the Oxford reformers were making upon the medieval system." Erasmus wrote this work in 1510 at the house of his friend Sir Thomas More who was executed at the bidding of Henry VIII for his refusal to give up his allegiance to the ' Pope. More's famous prose romance Utopia was, in the words of Legouis, "true prologue to the Renaissance.'" It was the first book written by an Englishman which achieved European fame; but it was written in Latin (1516) and only later (1555) was translated into English. Curiously enough, the next work by an English man again to acquire European fame-Bacon's Novum Organwn-was also written originally in Latin. The word "Utopia" is from Greek "ou topos" meaning "no place". More's Utopia is an imaginary island which is the habitat of an ideal republic. By the picture of the ideal state is implied a kind of social criticism of contemporary England. More's indebtedness to Plato's Republic is quite obvious. However, More seems also to be indebted to the then recent discoveries of the explorers and navigators-like Columbus and Vasco da Gama who were mostly of Spanish and Portuguese nationalities. In Utopia, More discredits mediaevalism in all its implications and exalts the ancient Greek culture. Legouis observes about this work : "The Utopians are in revolt against the spirit of chivalry : they hate warfare and despise soldiers. Communism is the law of the land; all are workers for only a limited number of hours. Life should be pleasant for all; asceticism is condemned. More relies on the goodness of human nature, and intones a hymn to the glory of the senses which reveal nature's wonders. In Utopia all religions are authorized, and tolerance is the law. Scholasticism is scoffed at, and Greek philosophy preferred to that of Rome. From one end to the other of the book More reverses medieval beliefs." More's Utopia created a new genre in which can be classed such works as Bacon's The New Atlantis (1626), Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), W. H. Mallock's The New Republic (1877), Richard Jefferies' After London (1885), W. H. Hudson's The Crystal Age (1887), William Morris" News from Nowhere, and H. G. Well's A Modern Utopia (1905).
Passing on to the prose writers of the Elizabethan age-the age of the flowering of the Renaissance-we find them markedly influenced both in their style and thought-content by the revival of the antique classical learning. Sidney in Arcadia, Lyly in Euphues, and Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity write an English which is away from the language of common speech, and is either too heavily laden—as in the case of Sidney and Lyly-with bits of classical finery, or modelled on Latin syntax, as in the case of Hooker. Cicero ?eemed to these writers a verv obvious and respectable model. Bacon, however, in his sententiousness and cogency comes near Tacitus and turns away from the prolixity, diffuseness, and ornamentation associated with Ciceronian prose. Further, in his own career and his Essays, Bacon stands as a representative of the materialistic, Machiavellian facet of the Renaissance, particularly of Renaissance Italy. He combines in himself the dispassionate pursuit of truth and the keen desire for material advance.
Poetry:
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and the Earl of Surrey (15177-47) were pioneers of the new poetry in England. After Chaucer the spirit of English poetry had slumbered for upward of a century. The change in pronunciation in the fifteenth century had created a lot of confusion in prosody which in the practice of such important poets as Lydgate and Skelton had been reduced to a mockery. "The revival", as Legoius says, "was an uphill task; verse had to be drawn from the languor to which it had sunk in Stephen Hawes, and from the disorder in which a Skelton had plunged it; all had to be done anew". It was Wyatt and Surrey who came forward to do it.
As Mair puts it, it is with "these two courtiers that the modern English poetry begins." Though they wrote much earlier, it was only in 1557, a year before Elizabeth's coronation, that their work was published in Tottel's Miscellany which is, according to G. H. Mair, "one of the landmarks of English literature." Of the two, Wyatt had travelled extensively in Italy and France and had come under the spell of Italian Renaissance. It must be remembered that the work of Wyatt and Surrey does not reflect the impact of the Rome of antiquity alone,. but also that of modern Italy. So far as versification is concerned, Wyatt and Surrey imported into England various new Italian metrical patterns. Moreover, they gave English poetry a new sense of grace, dignity, delicacy, and harmony which was found by them lacking iil the works of Chaucer and the Chaucerians alike. Further, they Were highly influenced by the love poetry of Petrarch and they did their best to imitate it. Petrarch's love poetry is of the courtly kind, in which the pining lover is shown as a "servant" of his mistress with his heart tempest-tossed by her neglect and his mood varying according to her absence or presence. There is much of idealism, if not downright artificiality, in this kind of love poetry.
It goes to the credit of Wyatt to have introduced the sonnet into English literature, and of Surrey to have first written blank verse. Both the sonnet and blank verse were later to be practised by a vast number of the best English poets. According to David Daiches.
"Wyatt's sonnets represent one of the most interesting movements toward metrical discipline to be found in English literary history." Though in his sonnets he did not employ regular iambic pentameters yet he created a sense of discipline among the poets of his times who had forgotten the lesson and example of Chaucer and, like Skelton, were writing "ragged" and "jagged" lines which jarred so unpleasantly upon the ear. As Tillyard puts it, Wyatt "let the Renaissance into English verse" by importing Italian and French patterns of sentiment as well as versification. He wrote in all thirty-two sonnets out of which seventeen are adaptations of Petrarch. Most of them (twenty-eight) have the rhyme-scheme of Petarch's sonnets; that is, each has the octave a bbaabba and twenty-six out of these twenty-eight have the c d d c e e sestet. Only in the last three he comes near what is called the Shakespearean formula, that is, three quatrains and a couplet. In the thirtieth sonnet he exactly produced it; this sonnet rhymes a b a b, a b a b, a b a b, c c. Surrey wrote about fifteen or sixteen sonnets out of which ten use the Shakespearean formula which was. to enjoy the greatest popularity among the sonneteers of the sixteenth century. Surrey's work is characterised by .exquisite grace and tenderness which we find missing from that of Wyatt. Moreover, he is a better craftsman and gives greater harmony to his poetry. Surrey employed blank verse in his translation of the fourth book of The Aeneid, the work which was first translated into English verse by Gavin Douglas a generation earlier, but in heroic couplets.
Drama:
The revival of ancient classical learning scored its first clear impact on English drama in the middle of the sixteenth century. Previous to this impact there had been a pretty vigorous native tradition of drama, particularly comedy. This tradition had its origin in the liturgical drama and had progressed through the miracle and the mystery, and later the morality, to the interlude. John Heywood had written quite a few vigorous interludes, but they were altogether different in tone, spirit, and purpose from the Greek and Roman drama of antiquity. The first English regular tragedy Gorboduc (written by Sackville and Norton, and first acted in 1562) and comedy Ralph Roister Doister (written about 1550 by Nicholas Udall) were very much imitations of classical tragedy and comedy. It is interesting to note that English dramatists came not under the spell of the ancient Greek dramatists "(Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the tragedy writers, and Aristophanes, the comedy writer) but the Roman dramatists (Seneca, the tragedy writer, and Plautus and. Terence! the comedv writers). It was indeed unfortunate, as Greek drama is vastly superior to Roman drama. Gpfboduc is a s'avish imitation of Senecan tragedy and has all its features without much of its life. Like Senecan tragedy it has revenge as the tragic —otive, has most of its important incidents (mostly murders) narrated on the -stage by messengers, has much of rhetoric and verbose declamation, has a ghost among its dramatis personae, and so forth. '.". is indeed a good instance of the "blood and thunder" kind' of tragedy. Ralph Roister Doister is modelled upon Plautus and Terence. It is based on the stupid endeavours of the hero for winning the love of a married woman. There is the cunning, merry slave-Matthew Merrygreek-a descendant of the Plautine slave who serves as the motive power which keeps the play going.
Later on, the "University Wits" struck a note of independence in their dramatic work. They refused to copy Roman drama as slavishly as the writers of Gorboduc and Roister Doister. Even so, their plays are not free from the impact of the Renaissance; rather they show it as amply, though not in the same way. In their imagination they were all fired by the new literature which showed them new dimensions of human capability. They were humanists through and through. All of them—Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge, Marlowe, and Kyd-show in their dramatic work not, of course, a slavish tendency to ape the ancients but a chemical action of Renaissance learning on the native genius fired by the enthusiasm of discovery and aspiration so typical of the Elizabethan age. In this respect Marlowe stands in the fore-front of the University Wits. Rightly has he been called "the true child of the Renaissance".
Introduction:
Spenser's tombstone proclaims him to be "the Prince of Poets in his Time." The truth will not be violated if we proclaim him to be "the Prince of Poets of all Times." The prince of essayists, Charles Lamb, .appropriately designated the prince of poets, Edmund Spenser, "the poets' poet."
In spite of what some modern Zoiluses may say, Spenser's work strikes us as an exquisite embodiment of the ultimate in poetic excellence which has been the rather mirage-like goal of all poetical endeavour, beckoning all the generations of English poets after Spenser as an example and ideal. Whatever may be the other faults of Spenser, there is no gainsaying the fact that there is no dearth of the poetic in him. And the poetic faculty transforms, like the Philosopher's Stone or a magic wand, all the dross that it touches into the pure gold of genuine poetry. How intensely he influenced the succeeding poets and how widely he excited imitation are common knowledge for a student of English literary history.
Spenser through the Ages:
That Spenser's contemporaries hailed him as the greatest of the poets of their age, we have mentioned above. He was often enthusiastically called "the New Poet." His eclogues (in Tlte Shepherd's Calender) and his epic The Faerie Queene earned him the very proud title of "the English Virgil." The reputation that he gained among his contemporary poets was perpetuated over the ages after him by a very large number of poets who acknowledge him as their master and model. Spenser's poetic works provided the poets of all schools practical lessons in the writing of excellent poetry. In no age was Spenser out of vogue. Donne's reputation suffered a complete eclipse in theeighteenth century, the century of Pope, and Pope's own reputation fell in the nineteenth, but Spenser's reputation has remained constant like the lodestar which twinkles but does not fade. Of course, in the early eighteenth century, "the age of prose and reason," Spenser went somewhat put of vogue, but towards the middle of the century he became a source of inspiration for the poets like Croxhall and many others. The great Dr. Johnson looked with dismay and disapproval at the contemporary cult of imitating Spenser, but he could do nothing to stem the popular tide in spite of his being the arbiter of contemporary taste. Spenser was, indeed, as James Reeves says, "at no time out of fashion." He was, to quote the same critic, "a copious source of inspiration to other poets for three centuries."
It must be noted that, unlike Chaucer's influence on his immediate successors, Spenser's influence on his immediate successors was not so marked. Chaucer inspired a large number of "Chaucerians"-both in England and Scotiand-whose cherished aim was to write like their master or, even, "father" (as Lydgate called him). Spenser, "the second father of English poetry," did not generate such a tremendously imitative tendency. The reason for it was the rise and extreme popularization of the drama in the Elizabethan age. Most of the literary geniuses up to about twenty years after the death of Spenser tried their hand at the writing of the drama-the most popular and "paying" literary genre of their age. But later on, even a poet of Milton's stature acknowledged him to be his original, and in Penseroso he referred tohim quite reverently as a poet who sang
Of tourneys, and of trophies hung,
Of forests and enchantments drear,
Wliere more is meant than meets the ear.
Further, in Areopagitica he extolled him as "our sage and serious Spenser." Cowley tells us how by reading a copy of Spenser lying in his mother's parlour he became a poet at the age of tw%lve. Dryden proclaimed him as one of his two models-the other one being the "smooth Waller." Even in the eighteenth century we find the great Pope himself praising Spenser and acknowledging his debt to The Shepherd's Calendar in the writing of his own Pastorals. Addison, however, in his Account of the Greatest English Poets dismissed The Faerie Queene as a "mystic tale" which
Can charm an understanding age no more.
But it must be remembered that Addison's judgement of Spenser was as wanting in maturity as his summary dismissal of Chaucer as a rude barbarian,
Who tries to make his readers laugh in vain.
Addison wrote this critical—in fact, "uncritical"—poem when he was a callow youth, and he was sensible enough in his years of maturity to dissociate himself from his patently irresponsible judgements. Steele 'knew better when he observed in a Spectator that Spenser's "numbers" were "exquisite." In the later years of the eighteenth century, with the birth of a more imaginative spirit, Spenser came to be appreciated with a far keener sensitivity. Thomson and Shenstone not only caught a spark of the Spenserian flame but also used the Spenserian stanza to register a prosodic break with the heroic couplet of the Popean school—the former in his Castle of Indolence and the latter in his Schoolmistress. To discuss the influence of Spenser on the early nineteenth-century poets-Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge arc Keats-will require a sizable volume. Keats in The Eve of St. Agrxs. Scott in the Vision of Don Roderick, Shelley in The Revolt oflslarr^ and Byron in his Childe Harold prolonged the Spenserian note, though the last named was alien to the Spenserian spirit, and once remarked: "I can make nothing of him." Later, in the Victorian age we find Spenser exerting a profound influence on Tennyson, becoming the idol of Charles Doughty, and even being re-echoed in the "Spenserian" cadences of the poems of Robert Bridges. Among modern poets W. B. Yeats comes nearestto him.
Spenser's Equipment as a Poet:
Why and how Spenser inspired and influenced such a large number of poets can be explained by pointing out that he had what every poet aspires to have~a fertile, teeming imagination wedded to exquisite craftsmanship. Some poets have too powerful an imagination but a poor degree^of craftsmanship to mould it into artistic patterns of poetry. Blake is a representative example of such a poet whose imagination runs away unbridled by artistic control. Some other poets have a ratheY unproductive imagination even though they are .wonderful craftsmen. Spenser is one of the ideal poets like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton who have a fertile imagination which is perfectly moulded into poetry by their uncanny sense of pattern and architectonics, in addition to their mastery of the poetic idiom with all its suggestiveness. Spenser was fully equipped as a poet. He was as learned as Milton. As a "child" of the Renaissance, he was well read into the classics which were in his age beginning to exercise a hold on scholars and men of letters. He was an M. A. from Cambridge University and well grounded in the traditions of Greek and Latin poetry as also the poetry of Renaissance Italy and France. Homer, Virgil, and Ovid on the one hand, and Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, Ronsard, and du Bellay on the other, were at his finger-tips. In his poetic works he freely drew upon them with the result that there grew a number of similarities, stylistic as well as thematic, between his own works and the works of the above named masters before him. And that is not all. Spenser was well-versed even in the philosophers-Plato and Aristotle-out of whom the former exercised a strong hold upon his mind. In his Four Hymns and elsewhere, he effectively and unmistakably gives expression to"his Platonism which believes that we should ascend from a specific embodiment of beauty to the idea of beauty itself. This idea of beauty is divine, and its contemplation something religious in nature. Nor was Spenser ignorant of the medieval lore. Though he disapproved medieval patterns of thought yet he loved to breathe the medieval air with all its fairv-land tints of chivalry, knight errantry, religious fervour plus all its superstitions and backwardness. He captured this air exquisitely in The Faerie Queene. Then he was greatly influenced by the Reformation, too, and in his work we are not unconscious of his puritanic temper. Thus he exhibited a rarely synthesizing temper and mind which is the hall mark of every poet who aspires for universal fame. With all his poetic equipment it was natural for him to be the envy of all poets. He wrote for the cultivated and the initiated, and not what in Europe and America are called "the common people" and in India "the masses." He was the poets' poet and not the people's poet, in any sense, Marxian or otherwise.
Spenser s Poetic Genius:
But all of Spenser's learning and scholarly equipment would have been of no avail if he did not have the all-important poetic impulse which was necessary to electrify it into poetry. Even a huge dump of fuel fails to give heat without the all-important spark. Spenser had this spark. Even captious Addison admitted that Spenser was "warm'd with poetic rage." This poetic rage, genius, or impulse is hard to define, but it unmistakably shows itself in every page and every line of Spenser's works. Spenser may be a prodigiously learned man, but what matters most is his poetic genius. "The Faerie Queene", says W. P. Ker, "is the truest sort of poetry in which the poetic genius declares--itself most truly, as distinct from other kinds of genius." Leigh Hunt likewise observes: "Take him in short for what he is, whether greater or less than his fellows, the poetic faculty is so abundantly and beautifully predominant in him above every other." W. L. Renwick appropriately remarks: "Beyond question, what moved Spenser to write was a genuine poetic impulse He sang because he must; not only because people listened....He sang not because he was learned....or an intense votary of the Reformation-or the Renaissance, but because his imagination longed for outward embodiment, because it must give birth to its divine conceptions, because it insisted on relief and deliverance. In other words, Spenser's poetry is a true incarnation of a poetical spirit, not the elaborate effort of a partisan, literary, political, religious. " As is said about Shelley, Spenser exhales verses as a flower exhales fragrance. He cannot help it.'
W. L. Renwick further points out that even when Spenser sometimes uses material which is prosaic enough he transforms it into true poetry. He refers in this connexion to the description of the House of Alma in Book II of The Faerie Queene and the versification of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Britons in the following canto and observes that whatever be the difficulties in Spenser's path, "he never ceases to be a poet." He alwavs flies and never creeps or even walks. Nobody has ever posed the question-as was done too openly and too repeatedly in the case of Pope-whether he is a poet or not. He is not only a poet, a great poet, but the poets' poet. "Of all the poets", observes Hazlitt, "he is the most poetical." He offers in his work the quintessence of poetic lushness.
Spenser's Deft Craftsmanship:
Add to Spenser's vigorous poetic impulse his virtuosity and sureness of touch as a craftsman. He has a perfect mastery over his medium-words. He does whatever he likes with words and makes them responsive to all sorts of moods and feelings. His poetry has a rare pictorial quality which was sought to be imitated by poets like Keats, Swinburne, Tennyson, and many more. He was, as Legouis so well puts it. a painter who never held a brush. With equal justice we may remark that he was a musician who never wielded a musical instrument. The English language, tattered and jagged as it had become by the awkward handling of the fifteenth-century poets like Lydgate and Skelton, in Spenser's hands not only regained the harmony of Chaucer's numbers, but vastly added to its musical quality, in which it was previously much below Italian and French. "He seemed able," writes Legouis, "to tune English verse which had been so long rebellious, to the natural tones of his voice. For him language ceased to be refractory." It may be true that, as Ben Jonson complained, Spenser wrote no language. But whatever he wrote bespeaks a highly poetic spirit subjected to the process of exquisite craftsmanship which has always remained with the poets of all ages a thing of professional interest and emulation. It is in this sense, too, that Spenser can be called the poets' poet.
Spensers Importance:
Spenser appears as a source of inspiration for the succeeding poets because through his example he amply showed that the heights were within reach of English poetry, and he did actually make his poetry reach them. In his age-the age of the Renaissance--before he started writing, England had to show nothing to compare with the poetry of the Italian Renaissance poets such as Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrach, and the French Renaissance poets like Ronsard and du Bellay. By his poetic effort Spenser proved that, to quote Renwick, "modern England was capable of poetry as great as that of any other age and that she had her share of poetic power, of art and learning." In his pastoralism (The Shepherd's Calendar) he challenges comparison with the ancient Theocritus and Virgil, in his sonneteering with Petrarch and Ronsard, in his epic-writing Tasso and Ariosto and in his imaginative fertility and craftsmanship with any poet ancient or modern. He taught his countrymen once and for all not to look for poetic gems to Italy or France but to their own country, for it had come after all to have a great poet, the poets' poet!
The Influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Middle Ages On spenser
Introduction:
What Chaucer was to the England of the late fourteenth century, Spenser was to that of the late sixteenth century. In his work he has completely and effectively captured the spirit of the age. The late sixteenth century was a period known appropriately as that of the efflorescence of the Renaissance in England. Simultaneously, it was the age when England came under the full impact of the Reformation which had started in the early part of the sixteenth century.
In the age of Spenser the spirit of the Renaissance as also the Reformation was abroad, and nobody could keep himself untinctured by it. Spenser's works are imbued with this twjn spirit. But though Spenser kept pace with the changing times he sometimes also shows evidence of looking to the past-the fairyland of the Middle Ages. Consequently, we find him not only faithfully recording the impact of the Renaissance and the Reformation but also allowing a gust of the medieval wind to blow across his pages. He is at once a child of the Renaissance and the Reformation even triough there are some touches of medievalism in his poetry as well as temper: Let us now try to bring out, one after the other, the elements peculiar to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Middle Ages in the work of Spenser. Let us start with the Renaissance.
THE RENAISSANCE
The Spirit of the Age:
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 tfie 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 are1 tempered by the Reformation ideals.
Writers:
Spenser, an M. A. of Cambridge University, was well read in much of the ancient classical literature which had then begun to be commonly known. He borrowed a good deal from the vast treasure of that literature and came to be intimately influenced by a number of ancient poets and philosophers and the writers of Renaissance Italy who themselves had been influenced by these poets and philosophers. He modelled his most important work The Faerie Queene upon the epics of the Greek Homer, the Roman Virgil, and the Italian Ariosto and Tasso. Theocritus and Virgil prompted him to try his hand at the pastoral {The Shepherd's Calendar). The first English writer of the eclogue was Barclay (of the Ship of Fools fame) who flourished in the fifteenth century; but he had based his five eclogues on the work of the Italian poet Mantuanus rather than the great Virgil and Theocritus. Spenser went back to Virgil and wrote what stands in comparison with his eclogues. Then, Spenser looked to Petrarch and his French followers while composing his sonnet sequence Amoretti. Thus in his selection of the literary genres for his use Spenser clearly displays his debt to the ancient Greek and Roman and the modern Italian writers. Moreover, there are some specific echoes of these writers in his works. For instance, we have a number of Virgilian phrases which, like a good writer, Spenser does not allow to stand out, but submerges into the context. In The Faerie Queene Sir Guyon's voyage to the Bower of' Bliss (where his arch enemy Acrasy is living) is suggested most probably by a similar voyage in Homer's Odyssey; but Spenser means by this voyage what Homer did not. Then the descent of the false Duessa to Hades is suggested by the sixth book of Virgil''s Aeneid. Tasso'? Armida gave Spenser some obvious hints for his description of Acrasy and her terrible powers. Ariosto, the writer of the first romantic epic in the history ofworld literature (Orlando Furioso), set before Spenser a living example of the romantic love of adventure and unbounded activity which he was to imitate in The Faerie Queene.
Plato and Aristotle:
The, great Greek philosophers, Plato and his disciple Aristotle, exerted a strong hold on Spenser's intellectual and moral temper. In his Four Hymns Spenser gives a poetic utterance to the Platonic conception of Love and Beauty. Plato taught that all material beauty (such as the beauty of the human body) is a shadow as well as a symbol" of the Ideal Beauty which is divine. A specific embodiment of beauty should be used for ascending to the contemplatiotrdf the abstract Idea of Beauty. The abstract Idea is divine, and the contemplation of the Idea is a religious activity. Echoing the true Platonic spirit, Spenser observes in the Hymn in Honour of Beauty that "a comely corpse, with beauty fair endowed" is the house of a 'beauteous soul."
Fit to receive the seed of virtue strewed:
For all thatjair is, is by nature good.
Spenser well became a spokesman of the neo-PIatonism of the Renaissance.
Aristotle, too, was a philosopher of abiding interest for Spenser. He seems to have effectively taught Spenser the doctrine of the golden mean which finds an effective embodiment in Guyon who stands for Temperance. The very groundplan of The Faerie Queene, which is to celebrate twelve cardinal virtues, is perhaps suggested by Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. If it is not Aristotle himself, it must have been some of his very numerous commentators who seems to have enumerated the twelve virtues each of which was to be dealt with in one of the twelve projected books of The Fairie Queene. Spenser's Prince Arthur is described as "the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised." writes a critic," Spenser follows the great formative work of Elizabethan and later English culture, the Nichomachean Ethics."
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.
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 taughtto 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. 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 (as for example, the Italian Castiglione) "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:
Coming to kiss her lips (such grace I found),
Me seem 'd I smelt a garden of sweet flow'rs,
That dainty odours from them threw around,.
For damsels fit to deck their lovers, 'bow 'rs.
Her lips did smell like unto gilliflowers,
Her ruddy cheeks like unto roses red,
Her snowy brows like budded betlamoures,
Her lovely eyes like pinks but newly spread,
Her goodly bosom like a strawberry bed.
Her neck like to a bunch ofcullambines.
Her breast like lilies ere their leaves be shed,
Her nipples like young blossom 'd jessamines;
Such fragrant flow 'ers do give most odorous smell,
But her sweet odour did them all excel.
THE REFORMATION
Introduction:
The very important movement called the Reformation was started in Europe by the German clergyman named Martin Luther sometime in the early sixteenth century. This movement was intended against the growing corruptions of the Pope of Rome and his deputies and had for its aim the taking of Christianity back to the original religion of Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible. A permanent cleavage came to separate Roman Catholicism and the new "religion" termed Protestantism. Most of the Englishmen under Henry VIII and later his daughtei, Queen Elizabeth, embraced the new religion which recommended simplicity amounting to abstemiousness as against the luxury and pageantry of the Popish religion. Spenser was much influenced by the spirit of the Reformation which he, however, tried to reconcile with that of the Renaissance. He was a devout Christian and, as such, adored the Bible. The thought-content of the Four Hymns is a compromise between Christianity and neo-Platonism to which we have already referred. As regards his sincerity as a Christian, there can be no doubt, even though his Christianity puts a few hurdles in the path of his voluptuous enjoyment and his sensitive appreciation and assimilation of the Greek and Roman antiquity.
Illustration:
'Spenser is not only a Christian but a Protestant. As such, he is extremely and zealously critical of Roman Catholicism which the Reformation was sweeping off the English land. The first book of The Faerie Queene, read on a particular plane of symbolism, is a representation of the conflict between--Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, ending in a decisive victory for the former. It is the work of a zealous partisan who loads the dice too obviously in favour of his own religion. Una may be justly considered to be representative of Protestantism. Her champion is the Red Cross Knight representing Holiness. Duessa, who represents Roman Catholicism, is false, deceitful, and corrupt and is supported by the arch-trickster . \Ajchi-ma-gq: Orgoglio. the horrible monster, symbolises the itiultifarious corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church. The evil designs of Archimago and Duessa to create a schism between the forces of holiness and Protestantism are shown by Spenser to be frustrated with the help of Prince Arthur. To which side Spenser's sympathies lie is crystal clear. He powerfully, though indirectly, lashes at the follies and corruptions of the papists and satisfies his fervour by showing them put to rout by the forces unleashed by the Reformation.
Odd Synthesis:
The synthesis of the elements of the Renaissance with the features of the Reformation appears to be odd. But Spenser was a child of his age which itself effected such a synthesis. About that age Lytton Strachey observes: "It is, above all, the contradictions of the age that baffle our imagination and perplex our intelligence; the inconsistency of the Elizabethans exceeds the limits permitted to man." "To Spenser", says another critic, "as to his contemporaries, the best of all three worlds, the ancient, the medieval, and the Christian Renaissance, were almost on one plane," And Spenser moved quite glibly on this "one plane." He was at once a Hellenist, a humanist, a Christian, and a medievalist. Let us now consider him in his last-mentioned manifestation.
THE MIDDLE AGES
Introduction:
Broadly speaking,the Renaissance signalised the end of the Middle Ages and the arrival of the modern times. Though Spenser represented in himself what the Renaissance stood for, yet he also showed in his work some elements associated with the Middle Ages. In this respect he lags behind his times which were not yet far from the Middle Ages. Let us consider briefly some elements associated with the Middle Ages which we come across in his work.
Medieval Chivalry:
Spenser was the last English writer who wrote about medieval chivalry, love, and courtesy, and believed in them. Though The Faerie Queene has a didactic aim very much pertinent for Spenser's contemporaries, yet its setting and times are medieval. The allegory works through a multitude of knights and monsters, damsels in distress, magicians, and enchanters. As C. S. Lewis has well put it, the surface of the poem consists of "interlocked stories of chivalrous adventure in a world of marvels." Now these stories and this "world of marvels" were quite distasteful to Renaissance scholars who scoffed at them as things from the ignorant past. But, as we have said, Spenser believed in them and looked at them with singularwistfulness. While gathering the flowers of the New Learning he could not forget the flavour of the medieval lore.
His Recourse to Allegory:
Spenser is a mediaevalist in his frequent recourse to the old-world device of allegory or what he called "the dark conceit." Allegory in the Middle Ages was a conventional medium of poetic utterance. Even Chaucer, "the first of the moderns," wrote most of his poems in the allegorical form, though, of course. The Canterbury Tales has somehow escaped unhurt. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century the followers of Chaucer continued writing in the form of allegory. Happily, however, in the age of Spenser the vogue of allegory was discarded in favour of a direct and realistic form of poetry. But Spenser continued sticking to the convention of the Middle Ages, and filled his Faerie Queene with such allegorical complexities as have for him earned the censure of both the critic and the reader in spite of such defence as Hazlitt's who said that the allegory in The Faerie Queene does not "bite" anybody.
Diction and Alliteration:
In his diction and frequent employment of alliteration, too, Spenser seems to be going back to the Middle Ages. It was perhaps his admiration for his "master" Chaucer which led him to archaise his diction. Many of the words he used in The Faerie Queene were out of date even in his own age; but he employed them to lend an old-world flavour to the setting of the poem, which was the England of the Middle Ages. Ben Jonson rightly complained that Spenser wrote "no language". In his frequent employment of alliteration, too, he reminds one of the alliterative measure of verse which was in use before Chaucer. Spenser did not revive that measure but practised too frequently its salient features. Lastly Spenser's love of myths, symbols, antiquarian details, and his discursiveness and leisurely progress with the narrative are also suggestive of the manners and taste of the Middle Ages rather than of the age of the Renaissance.
The Influence of the Renaissance on English Literature
Introduction:
It is difficult to date or define the Renaissance. Etymologically the term, which was first used in England only as late as the nineteenth century, means' "re-birth". Broadly speaking, the Renaissance implies that re-awakening of learning which came to Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Renaissance was not only an English but a European phenomenon; and basically considered, it signalised a thorough substitution of the medieval habits of thought by new attitudes. The dawn of the Renaissance came first to Italy and a little later to France. To England it came much later, roughly about the beginning of the sixteenth century. As we have said at the outset, it is difficult to date the Renaissance; however, it may be mentioned that in Italy the impact of Greek learning was first felt when after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople the Greek scholars fled and took refuge in Italy carrying with them a vast treasure of ancient Greek literature in manuscript. The study of this literature fired the soul and imagination of the Italy of that time and created a new kind of intellectual and aesthetic culture quite different from that of the Middle Ages. The light of the Renaissance came very slowly to the isolated island of England, so that when it did come in all its brilliance in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance in Italy had already become a spent force.
It is difficult to define the Renaissance, but its broad implications in England do not defy discussion. Michelet exaggeratedly calls the Renaissance "discovery by mankind of himself and of the world." This is, indeed, too sweeping. More correctly we can say that the following are the implications of the Renaissance in England :
(a) First, the Renaissance meant the death of mediaeval
scholasticism which had for long been keeping human thought in bondage. The schoolmen got themselves entangled in useless controversies and tried to apply the principles of Aristotelean . philosophy to the doctrines of Christianity, thus giving birth to a vast literature characterised by polemics, casuistry, and sophistry which did not advance man in any way.
(b) Secondly, it signalised a revolt against spiritual authority-the authority of the Pope. The Reformation, though not part of the revival of learning, was yet a companion movement in England. This defiance of spiritual authority went hand in hand with that of intellectual authority. Renaissance intellectuals distinguished themselves by their flagrant anti-authoritarianism.
(c) Thirdly, the Renaissance implied a greater perception of beauty and polish in the Greek and Latin scholars. This beauty and this polish were sought by Renaissance men of letters to be incorporated in their native literature. Further, it meant the birth of a kind of imitative
tendency implied in the term "classicism."
(d) Lastly, the Renaissance marked a change from the theocentric to the homocentric conception of the universe. Human life, pursuits, and even body came to be glorified. "Human life", as G. H. Mair observes, "which the mediaeval Church had taught them [the people] to regard but as a threshold and stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness and value.".The "otherworldliness" gave place to "this-worldliness". Human values came to be recognised as permanent values, and they were sought to be enriched and illumined by the heritage of antiquity. This bred a new kind of paganism and marked the rise of humanism as also, by implication, materialism.
Let us now consider the impact of the Renaissance on the various departments of English literature.
Non-creative Literature:
Naturally enough, the first impact of the Renaissance in England was registered by the universities, being the repositories of all learning. Some English scholars, becoming aware of the revival of learning in Italy, went to that country to benefit by it and to examine personally the manuscripts brought there by the fleeing Greek scholars of Constantinople. Prominent among these scholars were William Grocyn (14467-1519), Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), and John Colet (14677-1519). After returning from Italy they organised the teaching of Greek in Oxford. They were such learned and reputed scholars of Greek that Erasmus came all the way from Holland to learn Greek from them. Apart from scholars, the impact of the Renaissance is also; in a measure, to be seen on the work of the educationists of the age. Sir Thomas Elyot (14907-1546) wrote the Governour (1531) which is a treatise on moral philosophy modelled on Italian works and full of the spirit of Roman antiquity. Other educationists were Sir John Cheke (1514-57), Sir Thomas Wilson (1525-81), and Sir Roger Ascham (1515-68). Out of all the educationists the last named is the most important, on account of his Scholemaster published two years after his death. Therein he puts forward his views on the teaching of the classics. His own style is too obviously based upon the ancient Roman writers. "By turns", remarks Legouis, "he imitates Cicero's periods and Seneca's nervous conciseness". In addition to these well-known educationists must be mentioned the sizable number of now obscure ones—"those many unacknowledged, unknown guides who, in school and University, were teaching men to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity" (Legouis).
Prose:
The most important prose writers who exhibit well the influence of the Renaissance on English prose are Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Lyly, and Sidney. The first named was a Dutchman who, as we have already said, came to Oxford to learn Greek. His chief work was The Praise of Folly which is the English translation of his most important work-written in England. It is, according to Tucker Brook, "the best expression in literature of the attack that the Oxford reformers were making upon the medieval system." Erasmus wrote this work in 1510 at the house of his friend Sir Thomas More who was executed at the bidding of Henry VIII for his refusal to give up his allegiance to the ' Pope. More's famous prose romance Utopia was, in the words of Legouis, "true prologue to the Renaissance.'" It was the first book written by an Englishman which achieved European fame; but it was written in Latin (1516) and only later (1555) was translated into English. Curiously enough, the next work by an English man again to acquire European fame-Bacon's Novum Organwn-was also written originally in Latin. The word "Utopia" is from Greek "ou topos" meaning "no place". More's Utopia is an imaginary island which is the habitat of an ideal republic. By the picture of the ideal state is implied a kind of social criticism of contemporary England. More's indebtedness to Plato's Republic is quite obvious. However, More seems also to be indebted to the then recent discoveries of the explorers and navigators-like Columbus and Vasco da Gama who were mostly of Spanish and Portuguese nationalities. In Utopia, More discredits mediaevalism in all its implications and exalts the ancient Greek culture. Legouis observes about this work : "The Utopians are in revolt against the spirit of chivalry : they hate warfare and despise soldiers. Communism is the law of the land; all are workers for only a limited number of hours. Life should be pleasant for all; asceticism is condemned. More relies on the goodness of human nature, and intones a hymn to the glory of the senses which reveal nature's wonders. In Utopia all religions are authorized, and tolerance is the law. Scholasticism is scoffed at, and Greek philosophy preferred to that of Rome. From one end to the other of the book More reverses medieval beliefs." More's Utopia created a new genre in which can be classed such works as Bacon's The New Atlantis (1626), Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), W. H. Mallock's The New Republic (1877), Richard Jefferies' After London (1885), W. H. Hudson's The Crystal Age (1887), William Morris" News from Nowhere, and H. G. Well's A Modern Utopia (1905).
Passing on to the prose writers of the Elizabethan age-the age of the flowering of the Renaissance-we find them markedly influenced both in their style and thought-content by the revival of the antique classical learning. Sidney in Arcadia, Lyly in Euphues, and Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity write an English which is away from the language of common speech, and is either too heavily laden—as in the case of Sidney and Lyly-with bits of classical finery, or modelled on Latin syntax, as in the case of Hooker. Cicero ?eemed to these writers a verv obvious and respectable model. Bacon, however, in his sententiousness and cogency comes near Tacitus and turns away from the prolixity, diffuseness, and ornamentation associated with Ciceronian prose. Further, in his own career and his Essays, Bacon stands as a representative of the materialistic, Machiavellian facet of the Renaissance, particularly of Renaissance Italy. He combines in himself the dispassionate pursuit of truth and the keen desire for material advance.
Poetry:
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and the Earl of Surrey (15177-47) were pioneers of the new poetry in England. After Chaucer the spirit of English poetry had slumbered for upward of a century. The change in pronunciation in the fifteenth century had created a lot of confusion in prosody which in the practice of such important poets as Lydgate and Skelton had been reduced to a mockery. "The revival", as Legoius says, "was an uphill task; verse had to be drawn from the languor to which it had sunk in Stephen Hawes, and from the disorder in which a Skelton had plunged it; all had to be done anew". It was Wyatt and Surrey who came forward to do it.
As Mair puts it, it is with "these two courtiers that the modern English poetry begins." Though they wrote much earlier, it was only in 1557, a year before Elizabeth's coronation, that their work was published in Tottel's Miscellany which is, according to G. H. Mair, "one of the landmarks of English literature." Of the two, Wyatt had travelled extensively in Italy and France and had come under the spell of Italian Renaissance. It must be remembered that the work of Wyatt and Surrey does not reflect the impact of the Rome of antiquity alone,. but also that of modern Italy. So far as versification is concerned, Wyatt and Surrey imported into England various new Italian metrical patterns. Moreover, they gave English poetry a new sense of grace, dignity, delicacy, and harmony which was found by them lacking iil the works of Chaucer and the Chaucerians alike. Further, they Were highly influenced by the love poetry of Petrarch and they did their best to imitate it. Petrarch's love poetry is of the courtly kind, in which the pining lover is shown as a "servant" of his mistress with his heart tempest-tossed by her neglect and his mood varying according to her absence or presence. There is much of idealism, if not downright artificiality, in this kind of love poetry.
It goes to the credit of Wyatt to have introduced the sonnet into English literature, and of Surrey to have first written blank verse. Both the sonnet and blank verse were later to be practised by a vast number of the best English poets. According to David Daiches.
"Wyatt's sonnets represent one of the most interesting movements toward metrical discipline to be found in English literary history." Though in his sonnets he did not employ regular iambic pentameters yet he created a sense of discipline among the poets of his times who had forgotten the lesson and example of Chaucer and, like Skelton, were writing "ragged" and "jagged" lines which jarred so unpleasantly upon the ear. As Tillyard puts it, Wyatt "let the Renaissance into English verse" by importing Italian and French patterns of sentiment as well as versification. He wrote in all thirty-two sonnets out of which seventeen are adaptations of Petrarch. Most of them (twenty-eight) have the rhyme-scheme of Petarch's sonnets; that is, each has the octave a bbaabba and twenty-six out of these twenty-eight have the c d d c e e sestet. Only in the last three he comes near what is called the Shakespearean formula, that is, three quatrains and a couplet. In the thirtieth sonnet he exactly produced it; this sonnet rhymes a b a b, a b a b, a b a b, c c. Surrey wrote about fifteen or sixteen sonnets out of which ten use the Shakespearean formula which was. to enjoy the greatest popularity among the sonneteers of the sixteenth century. Surrey's work is characterised by .exquisite grace and tenderness which we find missing from that of Wyatt. Moreover, he is a better craftsman and gives greater harmony to his poetry. Surrey employed blank verse in his translation of the fourth book of The Aeneid, the work which was first translated into English verse by Gavin Douglas a generation earlier, but in heroic couplets.
Drama:
The revival of ancient classical learning scored its first clear impact on English drama in the middle of the sixteenth century. Previous to this impact there had been a pretty vigorous native tradition of drama, particularly comedy. This tradition had its origin in the liturgical drama and had progressed through the miracle and the mystery, and later the morality, to the interlude. John Heywood had written quite a few vigorous interludes, but they were altogether different in tone, spirit, and purpose from the Greek and Roman drama of antiquity. The first English regular tragedy Gorboduc (written by Sackville and Norton, and first acted in 1562) and comedy Ralph Roister Doister (written about 1550 by Nicholas Udall) were very much imitations of classical tragedy and comedy. It is interesting to note that English dramatists came not under the spell of the ancient Greek dramatists "(Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the tragedy writers, and Aristophanes, the comedy writer) but the Roman dramatists (Seneca, the tragedy writer, and Plautus and. Terence! the comedv writers). It was indeed unfortunate, as Greek drama is vastly superior to Roman drama. Gpfboduc is a s'avish imitation of Senecan tragedy and has all its features without much of its life. Like Senecan tragedy it has revenge as the tragic —otive, has most of its important incidents (mostly murders) narrated on the -stage by messengers, has much of rhetoric and verbose declamation, has a ghost among its dramatis personae, and so forth. '.". is indeed a good instance of the "blood and thunder" kind' of tragedy. Ralph Roister Doister is modelled upon Plautus and Terence. It is based on the stupid endeavours of the hero for winning the love of a married woman. There is the cunning, merry slave-Matthew Merrygreek-a descendant of the Plautine slave who serves as the motive power which keeps the play going.
Later on, the "University Wits" struck a note of independence in their dramatic work. They refused to copy Roman drama as slavishly as the writers of Gorboduc and Roister Doister. Even so, their plays are not free from the impact of the Renaissance; rather they show it as amply, though not in the same way. In their imagination they were all fired by the new literature which showed them new dimensions of human capability. They were humanists through and through. All of them—Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge, Marlowe, and Kyd-show in their dramatic work not, of course, a slavish tendency to ape the ancients but a chemical action of Renaissance learning on the native genius fired by the enthusiasm of discovery and aspiration so typical of the Elizabethan age. In this respect Marlowe stands in the fore-front of the University Wits. Rightly has he been called "the true child of the Renaissance".
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