Reinassance poetry
Renaissance Poetry. There was a collapse in learning and much technical capacity as a result of the and chaos that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. There was a revival of material culture long before the Renaissance. Surrey was the first one to use the blank verse of the translation of the Aeneid. Poetry became the entertainment of the high classes Spenser poetry.He was a renaissance neoplatonistic, he devoted his life to the writing of The faerie Queene, that was a praise to monarchy, Choser was Spenser favourite poet and therefore Spenser had a look at his texts to write his epic poem, The faerie Queene, between others. It is about patriotism and puritanism. It has a connotative meaning, being a pastoral text and then to praise the court of Elisabeth I. He used also another monarch, King Arthur and he compares this king and his knights to the queen. It is an echo of the Arthurian legends. The story is about The Gentle Knight hat have to rescue the faerie Queen and in as episode he will show a new virtue, such as bravery. He never write about the problems of England but about the virtues of it, the only fact that touches reality is his writing about being a protestant, he tried to be the poet laureate of his generation but failed, his model was John Skelton that was the tutor of Henry VIII and the poet of Henry VII. He invented his own stanza, he lived in Dublin and his concern with the deepest concerns of his time made him famous, but was not considered part of the literary elite. He did not write about anguish, religion, transience or war and that was the reason for his failure. His severe and serious tone can be found in Mutabilitie Cantos from The faerie Queene. His misfortune caused drama to be the most successful stream of the time. Philip Sidney: He was the perfect figure of the renaissance man, a lover, a warrior, a poet, and after his death, a hero for some people, sacrificing himself for others. He wrote Astrophel and Stella based on an autobiographical situation, he wrote it in 6 alexandrine sonnets, and have an epigrammatic conclusion in the last line, a melancholic tone will be found. He uses a much more down to earth vocabulary than Spencer, and harder themes. His Arcadia is another of his best works, interspersed between prose and verse. His theory is that poetry should teach and delight, art imitates nature, but imitation of an ideal nature. We go from a pastoral and epic poetry to a poetry nearer to the people. The poet must be a vate (prophet) and a maker (creator)
Shakespeare’s Style. His first style was characterised by stichomythia, two characters speaking whose speech is intertwined.Shakespeare’s first histories = abundant use of similes. In his first tetralogy, kings are orators.As one moves along chronologically, one can see stylistic improvement. Improvement of openings – key aspect of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, Hamlet or Macbeth. More flexible syntax, less formulaic rhetorical schemes. Less soliloquies but more complex themes. Among his most learned plays are Titus Andronicus and Richard III. Richard II is the first play that is realistic and keeps soliloquies and monologues. Characters will be divided by the way they speak and the way they act. The first plays had simpler ideas that will get complex, this will also happen with the vocabulary, which gets richer at the end. The syntax follows the opposite path, it gets more flexible.
Tyndale: Tyndale wrote his New Testament, he was trained in Greek and Hebrew, and his Bible was born in a epoch of changes in the status quo in religious status. It was a decisive time in European history. He had a passion for getting the Word of God to lay folks. The most archaic structures from the Bible were borrowed from Tyndale’s translation. The Geneva Bible: First was translated the New Testament, and then the whole Bible. It is the first bible to be translated completely from the Greek and Hebrew, the first academic translation as it was done by a group of scholars. It is based a Tyndale’s work and Tyndale’s New Testament.King James version: It is a Bible to be read in public, during mass. It comes from Tyndale’s vernacular style to an Early Modern expression of the standard variety. James aimed at a formal instead of a vernacular and common use of language. He wanted a text of the Bible for everyone. King James used chiasms, allusions, apostrophes, hyperbole, idioms, imagery, metaphors and personification. There are also grammatical features as the older word order, the eth/th third person singular (doth), several irregular verbs in their archaic from, the use of the preposition of in “tempted of Satan”, the use of “his” as a possessive form and common proverbial expressions and sayings.