Carpe diem!

Carpe diem! Seize the day! The motto of Renaissance England, where life was too short too waste even a minute.

Now we're in the Golden Age of English literature-one of the richest periods of time for the art in England. After years of religious unrest during Henry VIII's reign and the ensuing short reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, the long reign of Elizabeth I and her love of poetry and drama was an ideal environment for the likes of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and, of course, William Shakespeare to blossom.

The Renaissance, a cultural rather than political movement, had started in Italy over a century previously. Chaucer had started to bring French and Italian literary styles to England, and this increased in Elizabeth's time. The notion of love, courtly and divine, was being dealt with more widely in English poetry. The Italian sonnet of Petrarch- a 14-line poem with intricate rhyme schemes devoted entirely to the subject of the unrequited love of a melancholy lover for his lady- was popular with English poets such as Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare.

This week we read two such sonnets: the first, a sonnet in a sequence called "Astrophil and Stella" by Philip Sidney, who discovers he was looking in the wrong place for insipiration for his poetry - "'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write'";

the second, a sonnet from the sequence "Amoretti" written by Edmund Spencer describing the courtship of his wife: "My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name."

The idea of immortalising ladies through poetry was common in the period, as we shall see with Shakespeare later.

Mid-term exams

Hello all,
No new material to talk about this week, but I'd just like to wish you good luck for the exam.
By the way, some of your comments have been including factual information rather than personal reactions. I'm giving the factual information in the main post, so you don't need to repeat that.

Medieval Drama

This week we looked at the state of the medieval Church in England and how that an army of less than perfect friars were responsible for the religious education of the illiterate peasants. One effective way to transmit religious teachings to the illiterate was through drama, and the first English drama emerged in monasteries. Over time, the behaviour by both players and audience became unacceptable to the Church, and the plays moved into the marketplace, where thy were perfomred by the various craft guilds of the towns. Plays which related stories from the Bible were called "mystery plays" and were performed in cycles; and those which narrated the lives of saints were "miracle plays". Once out of the Church, the subject matter of the plays became diluted with everyday characters and events, as we saw in the example of Noah's Ark (evening group only!!).

"Morality" plays, such as Everyman, developed in parallel with the mystery plays but taught religious principles through allegory. These plays were performed by professional actors, often employed by the king or other nobles and often with the aim of criticising the Church. Everyman tells us the importance of doing good deeds over worldly goods.