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that is, on regarding the human figure and reason without a necessary relating of it to the superhuman; but much of its energy also came from the *Neoplatonic tradition in writers such as *Pico della Mirandola. The word Renaissance has been applied in the 20th cent, to earlier periods which manifested a new interest in and study of the classics, such as the 12th cent, and the period of Charlemagne. But the Italian Renaissance is still seen as a watershed in the development of civilization, both because of its extent and because of its emphasis on the human, whether independent of or in association with the divine. See J. A. Symonds, History of the Renaissance in Italy (1875-86); W. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873); J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (English trans., S. G. C. Middlemore, 1929).
This course provides a concise introduction to the literature of Elizabethan and Stuart England (1558–1649). It is aimed chiefly at undergraduate students taking courses on sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, but will hopefully be useful, too, for taught postgraduates looking to refresh or consolidate their knowledge of the period’s literature, and lecturers preparing or teaching Renaissance courses.
The beginnings of what we now describe as ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Early Modern’ English literature precede the accession of Elizabeth I (1558), but Renaissance literary culture only became firmly established in England in the second half of the sixteenth century. Similarly, while the literature produced between 1649 and the Restoration of the Monarchy (1660) could be said to belong to the Renaissance, the unusual historical context in which it was produced marks the Interregnum as a distinctive literary era. This is why this book concentrates on the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries