What were the e ects of the Renaissance on English literature?

Expert Answers
Dolly Doyle | Certified Educator
During the Renaissance, English literature gained greater psychological complexity. The
Middle Ages was largely dominated by plays more interested in imparting morals or
presenting religious stories than anything else. Around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
humanism—a system more interested in human affairs than what might occur after death—
was on the rise.

Poetry flourished during this period. English poets were inspired by Italian poetry in
particular. Edmund Spenser sought to write his own national epic in The Faerie Queene, a
work as Protestant as Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy is Catholic. Shakespeare penned
his famous collection of sonnets during this period as well.

English drama of this period was heavily influenced by the theatre of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, a trend followed by science, visual arts, and philosophy, which also took cues from
antiquity during the Renaissance. The Roman playwright Seneca was a big influence on
English tragedies, particularly "revenge tragedies" such as The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet.
These plays tended to have their characters brought low not by bad fortune or supernatural
temptations, but through bad decisions or fatal flaws already present within the hearts of
the characters, much as the tragedians of antiquity did. Comedies used similar situations and
character types as the Greek/Roman farces as well.

A play like Hamlet is a perfect example of how the Renaissance affected English literature: a
medieval version of this story might have rendered Hamlet's inner turmoil as mere good
versus evil, while, as it is, the play is psychologically complicated and more ambiguous
regarding the morality of its cast of characters, many of whom do not fit into simple "bad" or
"good" categories.

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