The renaissance movement is used to describe how Europeans moved away from the restrictive ideas of the middle ages. Shakespeare updated the simplistic, two-dimensional writing style of pre-renaissance drama. He focused on creating “human” characters with psychologically complexity. Hamlet is perhaps the most famous example of this. Lyly must also be considered and remembered as a primary influence on the plays of William Shakespeare, and in particular the romantic comedies.
The age of Milton (that is, 1625-1660, comprising the Caroline age and the Commonwealth) was an age of singular activity in the field of English prose. The age of Milton has been very aptly called “the Golden Age of English Pulpit.” The names of such powerful writers as Taylor, Robert South, Fuller, Isaac Barrow, and Richard Baxter are associated with this department of writing. The “Gothic” style of most Elizabethans influenced a sizable proportion of the prose writer of the age of Milton.
Sir Thomas Browne was a quaint figure, though a very typical prose writer of his age. Browne’s Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor) which was published in 1642 immediately achieved Continental fame, and was translated into several languages. The work may be called “an autobiography of the soul”. But apart from its importance in revealing the personality of the writer, the work intended a curative effect on the “sick” society of the age.
“It is likely,” says Tucker Brooke in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, “that Dr. Browne, in all his estimable career, never prescribed a better medicine than when he wrote Religio Medici. In his Hydriotaphia or Urn-Burial and The Garden vf Gyrjus (both published 1658), the emphasis is clearly on style. Like Browne, Taylor is preoccupied with the thought of human mortality.
TayIor’s prose manifests what T. S. Eliot calls the association of sensibility. He is very close to the Elizabethans, and has been called—not without justice “the Shakespeare of English prose” and “the Spenser of the pulpit.”
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