Elizabethan literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabethan literature names the body of writing produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. In those forty-five years, English writers reinvented what their language could do. They borrowed the sonnet from Italy, built a new form of blank verse for the stage, and launched what would become the novel. They also gave the world William Shakespeare.

  But Shakespeare was not alone. Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, and a dozen others were all working at the same moment, in the same London-centred culture, and often reading and borrowing from one another. The question worth asking is: why did all of this happen at once? What made the reign of one monarch into a flowering of English letters that writers, scholars, and readers have been returning to ever since?

  The answers involve Italian exiles, German folklore, ancient Roman playwrights, a disputed pamphlet that may be the first known literary attack on Shakespeare, and a woman who translated Euripides into English before almost anyone else thought to try.

• 2. The Italian Conduit

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  John Florio, born in 1553, was the son of an Italian father and spent his career carrying Italian ideas into English culture. He served as a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, and he translated the essays of Montaigne from French into English. He is also described as a possible friend and influence on William Shakespeare.

  Florio's position was representative of a broader channel. Italy was the primary source of Renaissance ideas reaching England, and a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London. English playwrights studied their Italian counterparts closely, absorbing the rediscovered plays of the ancient world that Italian scholars had brought back into circulation.

  The Roman tragedian Seneca supplied the model for tragic drama, while the comedies of Plautus and Terence shaped comic plots. One of Plautus's recurring figures, the boasting soldier, carried through the Renaissance and far beyond it. Italian tragedy did depart from Seneca in one important way: where Seneca kept violence offstage, the Italians put blood and murder directly before the audience. English playwrights inherited that choice, and it would define the revenge tragedies that became one of the most popular genres on the Elizabethan stage.

• 3. The Sonnet Transplanted

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  Thomas Wyatt, born in 1503, is credited alongside Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, with introducing the sonnet from Italy into England in the early sixteenth century. Wyatt's stated aim was to experiment with the English tongue, to raise its powers to match those of its neighbours.

  He worked closely from the Italian poet Petrarch, translating and imitating Petrarch's sonnets while quietly reshaping them. Petrarchan sonnets open with an octave rhyming ABBA ABBA, then pivot at a volta before closing with a sestet in various schemes. Petrarch never ended a poem with a rhyming couplet. Wyatt kept the Petrarchan octave but favoured a sestet rhyme scheme of CDDC EE. That closing couplet was the seed of what became the English sonnet: three quatrains and a final paired rhyme.

  By the later sixteenth century, poets like Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney had made elaborate language and allusion to classical myths the defining texture of English verse. Elizabeth I herself wrote occasional poems, among them "On Monsieur's Departure" and "The Doubt of Future Foes." Shakespeare then extended the English sonnet further, making significant changes to the Petrarchan model Wyatt had first transplanted. Surrey's birth year is given as 1516 or 1517, a small uncertainty that points to how much about this period still resists a tidy record.

• 4. Prose and the Pamphlet War

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  John Lyly, born in 1553 or 1554, published Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit in 1578 and its sequel Euphues and His England in 1580. The highly mannered style those books introduced became so distinctive that it acquired its own name: euphuism. Lyly's influence extended far beyond his own work. His play Love's Metamorphosis is considered a large influence on Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, and his Gallathea is a possible source for other plays.

  Thomas Nashe, born in November 1567 and dead around 1601, is considered the greatest of the Elizabethan pamphleteers. He was also a playwright and satirist, and his novel The Unfortunate Traveller is his most remembered work today. George Puttenham, born in 1529, contributed a different kind of prose: his Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, was an influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric.

  The most contentious piece of prose from this era may be Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, a pamphlet attributed to Robert Greene and published after his death around 1592. It is widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare, making it one of the earliest known references to Shakespeare as a figure of note in the London literary world.

• 5. Revenge, Faustus, and the Stage

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  Gorboduc, written by Sackville and Norton, was performed in 1561 and stands among the earliest Elizabethan plays. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy followed in 1592. Highly popular in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established the revenge tragedy as a genre in English theatre. Its plot included several violent murders and a personification of Revenge as a character. Other Elizabethan playwrights referenced or parodied it regularly, including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe.

  Kyd, born in 1558 and dead in 1594, is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet, a lost play that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet. Elements that The Spanish Tragedy shares with Hamlet include the play-within-a-play used to expose a murderer and a ghost seeking vengeance.

  Christopher Marlowe, born in 1564 and dead in 1593, drew on German folklore to bring the Faust story to England in his play Doctor Faustus, written around 1592. His Faustus is a scientist and magician who sells his soul to the Devil in pursuit of unlimited knowledge and technological power. The play borrowed the structure of the morality plays, deploying figures like the good angel, the bad angel, the seven deadly sins, and the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles.

  Thomas Dekker, born around 1570, was involved in about forty plays between 1598 and 1602, almost always in collaboration with others. His Shoemaker's Holiday of 1599, a rare case where he appears to have worked alone, is remembered for its realistic depiction of daily London life and its sympathy for the poor.

• 6. Shakespeare's Range

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  William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. His career spanned the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and he wrote across every available genre: histories, tragedies, comedies, and the late tragicomedies he called romances.

  His early comedies, like A Comedy of Errors, rely on tight double plots and precisely choreographed comic sequences. By the mid-1590s he had shifted toward the romantic atmosphere of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. After the verse-heavy Richard II, he began weaving prose comedy into his history plays, including Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. Julius Caesar, one of the tragedies that bounded this period, drew on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.

  In the early seventeenth century he wrote the so-called problem plays, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well, alongside the major tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. His final period produced Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and the collaboration Pericles, Prince of Tyre. These late plays are graver than his earlier comedies but end with reconciliation rather than catastrophe. He also collaborated on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.

• 7. A Shifting Canon

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  The five figures who anchor the Elizabethan canon as it formed over the centuries are Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. Their cultural importance has been considered so great that even reassessments on literary grounds have not dislodged them.

  Edmund Spenser, born around 1552 and dead in 1599, published The Faerie Queene in two instalments, in 1590 and 1596. That epic allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty had a significant influence on seventeenth-century poetry, and Spenser became the primary English influence on John Milton.

  Philip Sidney, born in 1554 and dead in 1586, left behind Astrophel and Stella, An Apology for Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.

  The canon as most readers inherited it was largely a Victorian construction, shaped by anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury. A representative sample of that Victorian view appears in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse, published in 1919. Thomas Warton's scholarship had helped rekindle interest in Elizabethan poetry during the eighteenth century, and the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century were widely read in Renaissance verse.

  In 1939, the American critic Yvor Winters challenged the Petrarchan mainstream directly. He excluded Sidney and Spenser from his alternative canon and argued instead for what he called the native or plain-style anti-Petrarchan movement. The most underrated figure in that movement, Winters argued, was George Gascoigne, born in 1525 and dead in 1577, who in Winters's view deserved to be ranked among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century. Winters also named Sir Walter Raleigh, Barnabe Googe, and George Turberville as members of this overlooked school. Their style, as Winters described it, stated matters as economically as possible rather than dwelling in rhetoric for its own sake.

  Jane Lumley, born in 1537 and dead in 1578, offered a different kind of claim on the period's legacy. Her translation of Euripides's Iphigeneia at Aulis is the first known dramatic work in English by a woman. T. S. Eliot, writing mostly about Elizabethan theatre, used an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926 to champion the forgotten poet Sir John Davies, a piece later republished in On Poetry and Poets in 1957.