The 16Th Century • by 1600, Though English Remained Somewhat Peripheral on the Continent, It Had Been Transformed Into an Imme

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• By 1600, though English remained somewhat peripheral on the continent, it had been transformed into an immensely powerful expressive medium, as employed by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the translators of the Bible. • The development of the English language is linked to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state. • Rather than the flowering of visual arts and architecture that had occurred in Italy, the Renaissance emerged in Britain through an intellectual orientation to humanism. • The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and salvation by faith alone (sola fide), came to England as a result of Henry VIII’s insistence on divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, against the wishes of the Pope. • A female monarch in a male world, Elizabeth ruled through a combination of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love. • Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. • Around 1590, an extraordinary change came over English drama, pioneered by Marlowe’s mastery of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse.

Summary

The English language had almost no prestige abroad at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One of the earliest sixteenth-century works of English literature, Thomas More's Utopia, was written in Latin for an international intellectual community. It was only translated into English during the 1550s, nearly a half-century after its original publication in Britain. By 1600, though English remained somewhat peripheral on the continent, it had been transformed into an immensely powerful expressive medium, as employed by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the translators of the Bible.

The development of the English language is linked to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state. The Wars of the Roses ended with Henry VII’s establishment of the Tudor dynasty that would rule England from 1485 to 1603. The Tudors imposed a much stronger central authority on the nation. The royal court was a center of culture as well as power, finding expression in theater, masques, fashion, and taste in painting, music, and poetry. The court fostered paranoia, and in this anxious atmosphere courtiers became highly practiced at crafting and deciphering graceful words with double or triple meanings. For advice on the cultivation and display of the self, they turned to Castiglione's Il Cortigiano (The Courtier). Beyond the court, London was the largest and fastest-growing city in Europe, and literacy increased throughout the century, in part due to the influence of Protestantism as well as the rise of the printing press. Freedom of the press did not exist, and much literature, especially poetry, still circulated in manuscript.

The movement now known as the Renaissance unleashed new ideas and new social, political and economic forces that gradually displaced the spiritual and communal values of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance came to England through the spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. Humanism, whose adherents included Sir Thomas More, John Colet, Roger Ascham, and Sir Thomas Elyot, was bound up with struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform. Education was still ordered according to the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music), and it emphasized Latin, the language of diplomacy, professions, and higher learning. But the focus of education shifted from training for the Church to the general acquisition of “literature,” in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

Officially at least, England in the early sixteenth century had a single religion, Catholicism. The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and salvation by faith alone (sola fide), came to England because of Henry VIII’s insistence on divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, against the wishes of the Pope. Henry declared himself supreme head of the Church of England (through the Act of Supremacy). Those like Thomas More who refused the oath acknowledging the king’s supremacy were held guilty of treason and Golden 2 executed. Henry was an equal-opportunity persecutor, hostile to Catholics and zealous reformers alike. His son Edward VI was more firmly Protestant, whilst Mary I was a Catholic. Elizabeth I, though a Protestant, was cautiously conservative, determined to hold religious zealotry in check.

A female monarch in a male world, Elizabeth ruled through a combination of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love. The court moved in an atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays, and masques. Leading artists like the poet Edmund Spenser and the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard celebrated Elizabeth’s mystery and likened her to various classical goddesses. A source of intense anxiety was Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic with a plausible claim to the English throne, whom Elizabeth eventually had executed. When England faced an invasion from Catholic Spain in 1588, Elizabeth appeared in person before her troops wearing a white gown and a silver breastplate; the incident testifies to her self-consciously theatrical command of the grand public occasion as well as her strategic appropriation of masculine qualities. By the 1590s, virtually everyone was aware that Elizabeth’s life was nearing an end, and there was great anxiety surrounding the succession to the throne.

Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. Aesthetically, Elizabethan literature reveals a delight in order and pattern conjoined with a profound interest in the mind and heart. In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney argued that poetry’s magical power to create perfect worlds was also a moral power, encouraging readers to virtue. The major literary modes of the Elizabethan period included pastoral, as exemplified in Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, and heroic/epic, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

A permanent, freestanding public theater in England dates only from 1567. There was, however, a rich and vital theatrical tradition, including interludes and mystery and morality plays. Around 1590, an extraordinary change came over English drama, pioneered by Marlowe’s mastery of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse. The theaters had many enemies; moralists warned that they were nests of sedition, and Puritans charged that theatrical transvestism excited illicit sexual desires, both heterosexual and homosexual. Nonetheless, the playing companies had powerful allies, including Queen Elizabeth, and continuing popular support. ~ ~ ~

Martyrdom John Foxe, from Acts and Monuments

In the 1540s, Henry VIII sought to return the English church to a doctrinally Catholic position, and Protestants were subjected to persecution. The outspoken Protestant Anne Askew, possibly denounced to the authorities by her estranged husband, was called in for questioning in 1545; the next year, she was tortured and burned at the stake. Askew's accounts of her two examinations were smuggled out of England and published in Germany by the reformer John Bale (1546–1547). The texts were later incorporated into John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. (For Foxe's account of the execution of Lady Jane Grey, see NAEL 8, 1.674.) Foxe's book, which in its final form recorded the persecution of English Christians from Roman Times to the reign of Mary Tudor, had an enormous influence on English Protestantism and on England's sense of itself as a nation. In 1570 the government ordered that Foxe's Acts be placed with the Bible in all cathedral churches.

The theological controversies over the eucharist, for which Askew and her companions along with many other Protestants and Catholics were willing to lay down their lives, require some explanation. Catholic doctrine held that sacraments properly performed were independent of the spiritual condition either of the priest or of the worshipper. Hence, for example, if the formula of consecration of the bread and wine was correctly spoken by a properly ordained priest, the miraculous transubstantiation of the Host into the body and blood of Christ would occur, whether the priest or the communicant was in a state of grace. Indeed, some Catholic theologians argued, since the bread had objectively been transformed into the body of God, even a mouse, nibbling on a consecrated host, would be receiving Christ's flesh. Protestants argued that the efficacy of certain key religious sacraments, including the Lord's Supper, depended on the spiritual state of the minister and the congregant. An evil priest, in such a conception, not only would be damning himself (as Catholics also believed) but would be turning the Lord's Supper into the Devil's Supper.

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The Norton Anthology of English Literature https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/review/summary.htm The Wives of Henry VIII http://thetudorenthusiast.weebly.com/henrys-wives.html

Tudor Monarchs http://thetudorenthusiast.weebly.com/tudor-monarchs.html

Mary I—Bloody Mary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eaMix9x4HE

England's Forgotten Queen: The Life and Death of Lady Jane Grey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsKC82mXVnE Elizabeth I— “The Virgin Queen” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV2GKPtnlTo (1 of 3) 7:16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pVWeyqMTQ4 (2 of 3) 7:23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05wAO-1XBLc (3 of 3) 7:44

The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_cZ4IK5Z2s&list=PLZWXkJlG-QRN1Q_Gg40-Ab6- Rtdbc6KIJ&index=6

Mary Queen of Scots: The Red Queen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zroAUC3y8Y&list=PLZWXkJlG-QRN1Q_Gg40-Ab6-Rtdbc6KIJ