The English Renaissance The English Renaissance dates from the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the early 17th century. The

The English Renaissance
    Good morning, everybody. Today we are going to talk about the so-called English Renaissance. The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century; like most of northern Europe England saw little of these developments for more than a century later.
    The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken as 1485 , when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. But Renaissance style and ideas were slow in penetrating England, and the Elizabethan period in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.
    Firstly, literature. (2) England had a long strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as the printing press became common by the mid 16th century. By the time of Elizabethan literature, a vigorous literary culture in both drama and poetry included poets such as Edmund Spenser, whose masterpiece The Faerie Queene did not become a dominating influence on English literature in the way that some foreign equivalents did for their countries. Instead the lyrics of William Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and others, typically circulating in manuscript form for some time before they were published, and above all the plays of English Renaissance theatre, were the outstanding legacy of the period.
    The English theatre scene, which performed both for the court and nobility in private performances, and a very wide public in the theatres, was the most crowded in Europe, with a host of other playwrights as well as the giant figures of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Elizabeth herself was a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, and wrote occasional poems at critical moments of her life. (4) All the 16th century Tudor monarchs were highly educated, as was much of the nobility, and Italian literature had a considerable following, providing the sources for many of Shakespeare’s plays.
    The second we turn to is visual arts. (5) England was very slow to produce visual arts in Renaissance styles, and the artists of the Tudor court were mainly imported foreigners until after the end of the Renaissance. The English Reformation produced a huge programme of iconoclasm that destroyed almost all medieval religious art, and all but ended the skill of painting in England; (6) English art was to be dominated by portraiture, and then later landscape art, for centuries to come. The significant English invention was the portrait miniature, which essentially took the techniques of the dying art of the illuminated manuscript and transferred them to small portraits worn in lockets. Though the form was developed in England by foreign artists, mostly Flemish like Lucas Horenbout, the somewhat undistinguished founder of the tradition, by the late 16th century natives such as Nicolas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver produced the finest work. The portrait miniature had spread all over Europe by the 18th century. The portraiture of Elizabeth I was carefully controlled, and developed into an elaborate and wholly un-realist iconic style, that has succeeded in creating enduring images.
    Architecture is also prosperous during the Renaissance. Despite some buildings in a partly Renaissance style from the reign of Henry VIII, notably Hampton Court Palace, the vanished Nonsuch Palace, Sutton Place and Layer Marney Tower, (7) it was not until the Elizabethan architecture of the end of the century that a true Renaissance style emerged, influenced far more by Northern Europe than Italy. The most famous buildings are large show houses constructed for courtiers, and characterised by lavish use of glass, as at "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall" , Wollaton Hall and Hatfield House and Burghley House, the style continuing into the early 17th century before developing into Jacobean architecture. Church architecture essentially continued in a late Gothic style until the Reformation, and then stopped almost completely, although church monuments, screens and other fittings often had classical styles from about the mid-century. The few new church buildings were usually still Gothic in style, as in Langley Chapel of 1601.
    The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which is usually considered to begin with Dante, Petrarch and Giotto in the early 14th century. In contrast, the English Renaissance can only be said to begin in the late 15 th century.
    The notion of calling this period "The Renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized in the 19th century. The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the northern Italian artists who are closely identified with the Renaissance. Indeed, England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare when Geoffrey Chaucer was working. Chaucer’s popularizing of English as a medium of literary composition rather than Latin occurred only 50 years after Dante had started using Italian for serious poetry. At the same time William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and John Gower were also writing in English. For this reason, scholars find the singularity of the period called the English Renaissance questionable.
    Historians have also begun to consider the word " Renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive " rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive Middle Ages. (10) Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "early modern" for this period, a term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but attempts to avoid positive or negative connotations. That’s all for today’s lecture.