One of the most salient characteristics of
the morality play is the way that characters are named. A morality play is a type of theater, which was common in medieval Europe. It uses allegorical characters to teach the audience
moral lessons, typically of a Christian nature. The one great rival was Spain, with
which England clashed both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604. John Bunyan’s 1678 novel, The Pilgrim’s
Progress, while
not an example of drama, relies heavily on the tropes of the morality play.
Spenser, an M. A. of Cambridge University, He modelled his most important work The Faerie Queene upon the epics of the Greek Homer, the Roman Virgil, and the Italian Ariosto and Tasso. The first English writer of the eclogue was Barclay (of the Ship of Fools fame) who flourished in the fifteenth century; but he had based his five eclogues on the work of the Italian poet Mantuanus rather than the great Virgil and Theocritus.
Spenser went back to Virgil and wrote what stands in comparison with his
eclogues. Then, Spenser looked to Petrarch and his French followers while
composing his sonnet sequence Amoretti. The, great Greek philosophers, Plato and his disciple
Aristotle, exerted a
strong hold on Spenser’s intellectual and moral temper. In his Four Hymns, Spenser gives a poetic utterance to the Platonic conception of Love and Beauty.
The age of the Renaissance in England was, as has been often said, “a young age.” The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term “Renaissance man”.
The great literary period is taken by common consent
to begin with the publication of Spenser’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ in 1579, and to end in some sense at
the death of Elizabeth in 1603, though in the drama, at
least, it really continues many years longer. The most important collection was
Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ in 1566. John Lyly, who is also of some importance in the
history of the Elizabethan drama. In 1578, Lyly, at the age of twenty-five, came from Oxford to London, full of the enthusiasm of Renaissance
learning, and evidently determined to fix himself as a new and dazzling star in
the literary sky.
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