SURVEY OF ENGLISH

AND AMERICAN
LITERATURE
The Morality Play
-In the course of time the Miracle plays passed beyond the control of the clergy into
the hands of the trade guilds , which used them as the attractive feature
of great public fairs. These occasions furnished a harvest time for thieves and
scoundrels. Confidence games and all sorts of immoralities flourished .
The clergy, therefore, turned against the Miracle play and introduced a new and
less objectionable drama.
The Interlude
- Another type of play was the interlude, at first a little scene performed
between the courses of a banquet, but later enlarged and developed. An
example is The Foure PP by John Heywood, a scene in which a Pothecary,
a Pardoner, and a Palmer enter into a contest to determine which can tell
the biggest lie . The Pedler is the judge.
The Pothecary tells of his wondrous cures ; the Pardoner,of how he went
down to hell to pardon a sinner. Each tells a lie worthy of the prize, but the
Palmer wins with the following :
The sixteenth century
- was a time of great intellectual
activity in England ; almost, if not quite, the most brilliant
period in English literature. Back in the fifteenth century
events had taken place which were fast transforming the in
tellectual life of all Europe. At first these events were more
influential on the continent than in England, because the
Wars of the Roses had so distracted the English people and
wasted their energies that intellectual progress was almost
impossible.
Still, there were signs of revival even in fifteenth
century England, and at the beginning of the new century
the nation was ready to yield itself with enthusiasm to all
the forces of the Renaissance. The most important of these
forces, as far as literature is concerned, were the rise of Human
ism, the invention of printing, the discovery of the new world,
and the Reformation.
Humanism
-is the name given to the reawakened interest in the study of the classical
literature of Greece and of Rome. It began in Italy. Indeed, at the end of the
fifteenth century, Italy led the world in learning. Earlier in the century,
Constantinople had been the center of the Greek learning , but after the
capture of the city by the Turks in 1453 Greek scholars flocked into Italy,
bringing numerous Greek manuscripts with them, and spreading the influence
of their learning everywhere. Copies of these manuscripts were distributed
over all Europe, reaching, among other places, the English universities.
The Invention of Printing
- This humanistic movement was greatly accelerated by Gutenberg's
invention of printing. Before this invention the masterpieces of literature
were written out by hand on parchment or vellum, and were therefore very
costly. The only books, as the term is commonly understood, were picture
books called " block books, " printed on coarse paper from wooden blocks .
Maritime Discoveries
- The minds of men were stim
ulated also by a rapid series of maritime discoveries. Colum
bus discovered America in 1492. Almost immediately afterward Vasco da Gama
rounded Africa and reached India by sea. The Cabots sailed to the mainland of North
America, and brought back wonderful stories of the new continent. In 1520 Magellan
sailed round the world. And to know the circumference of the earth was not all, for
Copernicus discovered that the earth itself, huge as it seemed, is but an insignificant
thing in the wide universe, just one of the myriad stars, and by no means the most
important. All this knowledge enlarged the mind and stimulated the imagina tion more
than we can easily realize.
Miscellanies- One of the first significant books showing
the Renaissance influence in England is Tottel's Miscellany, a collection of poems
published in 1557, the year before Elizabeth's accession . Many of the poems of this
collection were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, court
poets of the time of Henry VIII, who were inspired largely by the Italian culture.
Twenty- six of Wyatt's sonnets, for example, are translations from Petrarch. This
miscellany was followed by many similar collections both in poetry and prose, notably
The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) , Paradise of Dainty Devices ( 1576) , and Painter's
Palace of Pleasure (1566) . These collections, especially the last, furnished Shakespeare
and his contem poraries with the subject-matter for many of their famous masterpieces.
John Lyly and Sir Philip Sidney
- More important than miscellanies are John Lyly's Euphues and Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia. Both are prose stories, long and full of digressions . Euphues consists of a
loose framework of story into which Lyly fits his ideas of love, friendship,
education, and religion. The latter part reflects the life, the talk, and the dress of the
court of Elizabeth, its fantastic and extravagant gallantry, its fanciful imitation of
chivalry, its far-fetched metaphors and playing with language, its curious and
gorgeous fashions in dress.
The Shepherd's Calendar
- The most famous poet of the period was Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) . His work
represents the indirect and artificial manner of the pastoral and the allegory. His first
important work, The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) , is a conventional pastoral. The
characters are spoken of as shepherds and shepherdesses, and they have
the sheep and the crook, but in thought they are far from simple country people.
The Faerie Queene
-Spenser's greatest work was The Faerie Queene, an allegory published in
1590. The poem is an allegorical romance of chivalry . In the introductory
letter to Raleigh, Spenser explains that his plan is to write, in twelve books,
the adventures of twelve knights, who represent the twelve virtues of
Aristotle, and who contend with the opposing vices. The main hero,
however, was to be Arthur, the hero of the old romances, who represents the
sum of all virtues . In the end he was to be wedded to the Faerie Queene, the
glory of God, to which all human act and thought aspire.
THANK YOU
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