After the darkness of the European Middle Ages, there was a rebirth of the ideals of the classical era, which propelled the world toward new conquests and modernity. The mission of Renaissance literature was to reflect and advance these changes.
renaissance literature
Renaissance literature refers to the era of European literature that began in Italy during the XNUMXth century and spread throughout Europe during the XNUMXth to the early XNUMXth century. The XNUMXth century was also the age of humanism in Europe and characterized the philosophy of the Renaissance. The rediscovery of antiquity led to the secularization of man and human dignity.
The Renaissance was a profound transformation of the intellectual life of Europe that marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of early modern times. The time was marked by many different movements that took place simultaneously in most of Europe, and that had different fields of impact and meanings.
Europe was also marked by deep political and religious divisions, mainly between North and South, divided by the Reformation. It was a time of great geographical and scientific discoveries. With the invention of the art of printing, literature and writing spread like never before and gave rise to new literary genres. Some of humanity's greatest artists lived at this time.
Birth of a new time
The rediscovery of antiquity made classical literature available to Europe after being lost or unavailable for centuries, giving it the name of the period, the Renaissance. In the year 1488, the Homeric epics were read again in Italy and later translated into various European languages during the 1530th century; French and German in 1581 and English in XNUMX.
The time was marked by great social disturbances, wars and great political and religious contradictions. The Eastern Roman Empire perished during the Muslim conquest and Islam threatened Eastern Europe. The era was also marked by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation Reformation of Christianity.
The epoch also marks the distinction between antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modern times. The world changed with technological progress with new and destructive weapons like gunpowder, rifles and cannons. The national state and the bourgeoisie emerged as new factors of power.
Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World, America, in 1492 led to a complete change in the old world view. Johann Gutenberg's art of printing, the invention of a method of moving loose type and printing text with it, caused an explosion in literary publishing and the spread of literature, which in addition to promoting literature in the mother tongue, and it meant that Latin and Greek as literary languages began to grow.
The Renaissance was the age of humanism, and the two concepts are distinguished by the fact that "Renaissance" can be considered as the historical epoch that bridged the gap between the Middle Ages and the modern age, and "Humanism" as the movement formation that arose at this time.
France was a culturally leading center for philosophy and science with a strong influence from Italy. England and Flanders had seized the commercial dominance of the Italian city-states. In England the rise of state administration had gone further.
The German principalities were still marked by feudalism and power struggles. Spain and Portugal had been boosted by the discovery of the new world outside of Europe. The Nordic countries are characterized by being on the edge of Europe and here the Renaissance came later and to a lesser extent.
a new literature
Speaking of the Renaissance, we are talking directly about Italy, as the carrier of the main part of the ancient culture and the so-called Northern Renaissance, which took place in the countries of Northern and Western Europe: France, England, Germany, Holland, Spain and Portugal.
The aforementioned humanistic ideals are characteristic of the literature of the Renaissance. This epoch is associated with the emergence of new genres and with the formation of early realism, which is thus called “Renaissance realism” (or Renaissance), in contrast to the later, educational, critical, social stages.
In the works of authors such as Petrarch, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, a man is born who rejects the blind obedience preached by the Church and proclaims a new understanding of life. They represent man as the highest creation of nature, trying to reveal the beauty of his physical appearance and the richness of his soul and mind.
Renaissance realism is characterized by the scale of the images (Hamlet, King Lear), the poeticization of the image, the ability to feel great and at the same time the high intensity of the tragic conflict (Romeo and Juliet), reflecting the clash of a person against forces hostile to him.
Various genres are characteristic of Renaissance literature. But certain literary forms prevailed. The most popular genre was the short story, which is called the Renaissance short story. In poetry, the sonnet (stanza of 14 lines with some rhyme) becomes the most characteristic form. The dramatic art is undergoing a great development. The most prominent playwrights of the Renaissance are Lope de Vega in Spain and Shakespeare in England.
In Italy, Giordano Bruno denounces the church in his works, creates his new philosophical concepts. In England, Thomas More expresses the ideas of utopian communism in his book Utopia. Authors such as Michel de Montaigne ("Experiments") and Erasmus of Rotterdam ("In Praise of Madness") are also well known. Among the writers of that time were also crowned people. Duke Lorenzo Medici writes poems and Margaret of Navarre, sister of France's King Francis I, is recognized as the author of the Heptameron collection.
The national heroic epic
The ancient epic, a longer narrative poem, usually with a high-value theme of heroic deeds and events important to the nation, such as Homer's Odyssey and the Iliad, as well as Virgil's Aeneid, emerged in Renaissance literature.
With enthusiasm for antiquity, combined with nascent nationalism, as well as the interest of the time in spectacular travel and adventure, it was obvious that the Renaissance saw the need not only to continue the ancient epic as a literary genre, but to surpass it. In several European countries there was an intense desire to acquire a national epic of their own, as the Greeks and Romans already had, so that they could inscribe themselves in the great tradition.
Another source of inspiration for Renaissance literature was that of the Middle Ages, two traditional heroic types of tales, the Song of Roland and the cantos de geste (stories about heroic deeds). The first was the object of the threat of invasion by the Moors, which had become a reality in Spain. The second variant was the continuation of the Arthurian romances, with brave knights who fought for the virtue of chaste virgins.
The epic of the Renaissance knights therefore had a strong anachronistic feeling, where historical time, people and events were happily mixed. The oldest work in this tradition of Renaissance literature was Orlando in Love by Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441 – 1494), first published in 1495.
Various authors tried to complete the poem, and it was not until Ludovico Ariosto (1474 – 1533), another Italian poet, that he succeeded, with his magnificent epic poem Orlando Furioso. The first version arrived in 1516, but it was not published in its complete edition until 1532. The work's influence on literature and art for the next 300 years, up to the XNUMXth century, can hardly be overestimated.
The great Counter-Reformation poet Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595) and his 1581 epic The Liberated Jerusalem is equally important in the context of Renaissance literary history. The story is clearer, more coherent and structured than the two epics mentioned above about Orlando, full of irony and baroque. Incipient dark tones, but although it has a certain historical character, the action is still seasoned with supernatural and fantastic events.
National epics rose to prominence during the 1524th century in several European countries. The French poet Pierre de Ronsard (1585 – 1572) tried to honor King Charles IX of France in La Francíada (XNUMX), while at the same time continuing the strict Greco-Roman models.
Similarly, in Portugal, Luís de Camões (1524 – 1580) wrote his great epic of the nation, Os Lusíadas, which means “The sons of Luso”. The combined adventure travels in the ancient epics, the discoveries of the century, the poem turns Vasco da Gama's journey to India into legendary material, with the influence of pagan gods. For its part, a Spanish epic from the years between 1569 and 1589, La Araucana, written by Alonso de Ercilla (1533 – 1594). Here the empire is built and celebrated by the conquests of the new world of America.
Also England demanded its national epic and Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599) wrote The Fairy Queen, published for the first time in three books in 1590, and later in six books in 1596, although the inspiration is not the antiquity, but to the legend of Arthur. The tribute was addressed to Queen Elizabeth I (in the poem pictorially as the elven queen herself, "Gloriana") who has given her name to the English Renaissance era, the Elizabethan era.
prose stories
In the Renaissance narrative poetry was more prominent and the epic was also composed in prose. Most are epics about knights and heroes and had similar content to those in rhyme. One was Amadís de Gaula, which was written by various writers over several years. It is Don Quixote who idealized Amadís and often compared his hero's adventures with his own. The first known printed edition of Amadís de Gaula was published in Zaragoza in 1508, but the tales already existed in the XNUMXth century and came from Portugal.
During the XNUMXth century, the serious short story was further developed in Renaissance literature, and it was Italy that shaped its own genre term, “novella”, that is, “novelty”, which has been our concept of short story. short. The genre was claimed for the first time in Boccaccio's Decameron, which in the external narrative framework allows the different main characters to tell their own story; a hundred stories told by ten people.
Cervantes also wrote more than drama novels and pastoral poetry, including Exemplary Novels. In general, they are of uneven quality, but Cervantes had probably hoped that they would become for the Spanish what Boccaccio's work had been for the Italians: some are pure anecdotes, some are mini-romances, some are serious and some are comic, and all they are written in an oral and light style and some are so long that today they would be considered novellas.
comic-burlesque tales
The epic is a genre of high quality in contrast to comic-burlesque prose, which has a popular, cheerful and playful narrative style and which Renaissance literature continued from the end of the Middle Ages. The comic-burlesque direction turned the preferred qualities of the epic upside down and instead promoted the ugly and the vulgar in both the action and the characters of the story.
In the comic-burlesque genre there are traits of drunken songs, swearing and ridicule, that is, parodies, especially against high-quality literature. Most of the time, it is the course of a person's life that is told in a single course of action, almost as loose episodes linked together. An example of parody is the Italian Luigi Pulci who wrote The Great Morgante, a high-pitched but deliberately parodic epic about a giant who became a Christian and followed the knight Orlando.
It was this literary environment that characterized Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616) when in 1605 he sent the first part of Don Quixote, knight of the sad figure. With Don Quixote, a masterpiece of comic-burlesque Renaissance literature, Cervantes became famous, but the economic benefits were meager. The second part arrived in 1615, and since then Cervantes' reputation has only grown and become for Spain what Shakespeare is for England.
Essay and personal reflection
To the extent that the essay was a new genre, akin to the diary, epistolary conversation and personal reflection, the French essay was a genre of Renaissance humanist literature, innovative and characteristic, although historically it can be seen as a later development of the ancient prose epistles. .
It was first promoted by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne in his massive book Les Essais, published in 1580 and has since been revised several times. It consists of two parts, the first is a meditation on classic quotes, while the second part deals with complex issues, such as friendship and child rearing, but not least the texts deal with him and his psychological self-knowledge.
Montaigne's writings have been characterized as the informal essay in contrast to the formal essay of the Englishman Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), more characterized by the structure and scientific views that pointed towards the Enlightenment.
pastoral romances
The novel, the long narrative in prose, stood as a literary genre at a certain distance from the literary hierarchy of the Renaissance, but nevertheless the so-called popular books were also generalized. Pastoral poetry, or pastoral romance, was an ancient genre that had a new boom in the Renaissance, for the pastoral poets Theokrit and Vergil the ancient novels of Longo, Heliodorus and Achilles Tatios were mainly the inspiration.
The Italian humanist and poet Jacopo Sannazaro wrote Arcadia. Its elegant narrative framework around lyrical fragments from Virgil's eclogues was the inspiration for a number of other writers who continued the concept, notably the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor who wrote the pastoral novel Diana about the courtly love between the shepherd Sireno and Pastor Diana. Instead of an account of the pastoral life of the ancients, it is an allegory about the intricate rules of love.
From popular theater to Elizabethan theater
Roman comedy theater probably continued in Italy and parts of Europe and although documentation is sparse, there are indications that by the late Middle Ages there were performances of erudite comedy theater in cathedral schools and colleges. The aristocrats invited troubadours, jugglers and itinerant actors to perform. In the church, there were dramatizations, inside the church itself or in the square in front of the church or in conjunction with the church processions.
In Italy, a comic drama emerged in the 1560s, called the Commedia dell'arte, which was highly valued by the aristocracy. The roots of the theater are somewhat unclear, but it differed from conventional theater in that it was neither professional nor open to the public. The plays did not consist of finished written pieces, but rather a loose framework that formed situations and complications, and where the actors improvised most of the dialogue.
In Spain, the theater had its golden age in the years 1550 to 1700, where three types were popular: the one-act nuns, the worldly comedy, and a kind of musical, the zarzuela. Initially, women were allowed to participate in religious performances and later became participants in worldly performances as well. The contemporary Catholic Church opposed secular plays, especially actresses who were considered by the Church to be prostitutes. The Spanish authorities promoted several laws on gender and theater.
The greatest Spanish playwright was Lope de Vega (1562 – 1635). He wrote in most genres, epics, novels, sonnets. In the new art of comedy making at the time, Vega did not clearly distinguish between genres, and is almost modern in that sense of being one of the earliest representatives of tragicomedy: his comedies were not necessarily funny or had a happy ending. . He also praised the royal house at the same time that he was also the spokesman for the people.
Elizabethan England's greatest contribution to literature was drama, and although there are similarities between the development of drama in Spain and England, English drama was not unilaterally popular, but rather kept in touch with the educated class and the forms of the Renaissance in a happy alliance between high and low.
The two most important English Renaissance writers were Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593) and William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616). Marlowe died young under unclear circumstances. As for Shakespeare, his life and biography are largely unknown, despite his great output and status as the world's most famous playwright. A third English playwright was Ben Jonson (1572–1637), who professed the rules of Aristotle, but was nonetheless a typical Elizabethan playwright.
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