What the Sixteenth Century Built

The idea

The sixteenth century gave English literature its forms, its theory and its stage. The Tudors came to power at Bosworth in fourteen eighty-five, and humanism, the press and the Reformation shaped what followed. Thomas More's Utopia, in Latin, described an island of common property whose name means no place, and More died for refusing Henry's supremacy over the Church. Wyatt brought the sonnet from Petrarch, and his "They flee from me" turns courtly convention on the abandoned speaker, while Surrey shaped the English sonnet and first used blank verse, the line of Elizabethan drama; his "Means to Attain Happy Life," printed by the exam, praises a modest life. Elizabeth the First wrote poems of her own. Sidney's Astrophil and Stella made the Petrarchan sequence English, and his Defence of Poesy answered Plato by arguing that poetry teaches and delights. Spenser's Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic in nine-line stanzas, gives each book a virtue and a knight, Redcrosse for Holiness, with Una and her false double Duessa, while his Amoretti and Epithalamion turn a sonnet sequence toward a marriage. Mary Sidney Herbert completed her brother's work and translated the Psalms in many metres. On the stage, Marlowe's mighty line and outsized heroes, Tamburlaine and the soul-selling Faustus, opened the great age of the theatre, Raleigh answered his shepherd's offer with the nymph's realism, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy set the pattern of revenge that Hamlet would follow. Read the century's poems by their scheme, their conventions and their turn, and read its allegory on two levels, and you will meet the next unit, Shakespeare, already knowing the forms he inherited.