Fundamentos Culturais da literatura em língua inglesa Aula 4:

The Tudors, the Renaissance and the Elizabethan Theater

Ao final desta aula, o aluno será capaz de:

1. Recognize the 16th century in England as the ‘Golden Age’, ‘the Elizabethan era’, and the

‘Tudors era’;

2. analyze the importance of the Protestant Reformation and establish how the rupture with the

Church favors Henry VIII;

3. understand how the Renaissance opposed the medieval mentality;

4. recognize the origins and development of the Elizabethan Theater and analyze one of

Shakespeare’s plays.

Elizabethan Age – a time of changes

The Elizabethan Age or Golden Age or Tudors Era may very well be called the Age of the Sea.

Emerging from the Middle Ages and facing the modern world we know today the country put its

efforts in a historical process involving the major nations of the time and would ensure its future as

a world leader. In the meantime, the sixteenth century, old and new England shared the same space

and fought for it bringing profound changes.

The medieval baron, the knight, the serf, and the Catholic prelate were no longer the dominant types

in English society. The agent of the national government, the wealthy urban merchant, the

Protestant reformer and the worldly scholar became more important. All the changes that deeply

marked English history forever made the Elizabethan Era one of the most remarkable periods in
human history.

Who were the Englishmen in the sixteenth century?

Englishmen in the 16th century were as devoutly religious as their medieval ancestors, but also

threw themselves passionately into the worldliest of projects and pastimes. They were still

superstitious enough to believe in witches and all kinds of sorcery. They were great respecters of

authority yet violently critical of their medieval ancestors for accepting it. Despite of being rather

conscious of the social status, determined by birth, they proclaimed their human right as men to

ascend in a social mobility scale.

Why does the period bear the name of Queen Elizabeth?

Elizabeth I was the greatest of the Tudor monarchs and ruled longer than any of them and promoted

tremendous political, religious, economic and intellectual changes during her reign. During this

period, fine arts flowered as it had never done before and life was intensively lived and loved.

Routine activity of the court involved royal agents, foreign ambassadors,churchmen, scholars,

poets, actors, musicians, all kind of servants, and chambermaids. People in general merged to

London from each corner of the country.

Elizabeth attended to public punishments such as hangings and witch burnings along with her

people wearing exquisite jewels and rich garments.

The Elizabethan Age had the most effervescent festive calendar in which dance celebrations,

holidays and various celebrations punctuated the life of the country. Besides more profound

discussion was openly held involving issues such as Christian theology, Greek philosophy and
Italian poetry.

Elizabethans loved their country more than anything else. Being so, they supported their queen in

risky endeavors as the remarkable event that occurred during the war with Spain when England

faced and overcame the Spanish Armada. The love and devotion they all dedicated to England can

be felt when we read the Elizabeth’s own words pronounced during the same episode “(…) I know I

have the body of a week feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King – and a King of

England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare to

invade the borders of my realm”.

These words reveal the same intense patriotism as John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s

Richard II:

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this real, this England.

Henry VIII – A divided monarch

As his father, who became a powerful and rich king by taking over the nobles’ lands, Henry VIII

was always looking for new sources of money. However, land belonging to the Church and the

monasteries had not been touched. The Church was a huge landowner and the monasteries were not
important to economical and social growth as they had been in two hundred years earlier. In fact the

institution and the clergymen had turned into unpopular elements because many monks no longer

led a respectable religious life but lived in wealth and comfort.

How did England become Protestant?

Henry’s break with Rome was purely political. He did not approve the new ideas of Protestant

Reformation introduced by Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in Geneva. He still believed

in the Catholic faith. Like his father, Henry VIII governed England through his close advisers, men

who were completely dependent on him for their position.

When he broke with Rome, he used Parliament to make the rupture legal. Through several Acts of

Parliament, between 1532 and 1536, England became politically a Protestant country, even though

the popular religion was still Catholic.

How did Reformation advance with Henry VIII?

Thomas Cromwell became the king’s chief minister. Between 1536 and 1539 they closed 560

monasteries and other religious houses. Henry did this in order to keep to the crown all the money

and goods that had once belonged to the Church and to religious orders, but he also wanted to be

popular with the rising classes of landowners and merchants. He sold or gave much of the

monasteries’ lands to them.

Meanwhile the monks and nuns were thrown out. Some were given small sums of money, but many

were unable to find work and became wandering beggars. The dissolution of the monasteries was

probably the greatest act of official destruction in the history of Britain. However, the king

remained loyal to Catholic religious teaching, and executed Protestants who refused to accept it.
Did Henry manage to have a son?

The king, in the following years, would remarry some other times. Anne Boleyn, his second wife,

for whom he had changed the country face for ever, did not give him the son Henry wished. Having

been accused of high treason, Anne Boleyn was sentenced to death with the knowledge and

agreement of the king himself.

She was decapitated, few years after her marriage leaving a daughter – Elizabeth – who would run

the country with successful iron fist for a long period. Henry died in 1547, leaving behind his sixth

wife, Catherine Parr, and his three children. Mary, the eldest, was daughter of Catherine of Aragon.

Edward VI, who was nine years old, was Jane Seymour’s son, the only wife whom Henry had really

loved, but who had died giving birth to his only son. However, Edward VI never ruled England. He

died still young and left the throne to her sister.

The English Renaissance occurs much latter, compared to the Italian and Flemish. It only becomes

marked in 1485 with the consolidation of the national state English. There was no significant

development in the arts as in Italy. The cultural production focused on music, literature and theater.

How did English nationalism become strong?

During Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603), England became a world naval power and began the

foundations of the far-flung British Empire. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 gave

impetus to a powerful surge of nationalistic fervor that energized all English pursuits, including

literature and arts.

What were the key Renaissance characteristics?

• Emphasis on classical studies in the expanding universities;

• Increasing literacy among the laity;

• Growth of a critical, skeptical type of scholarship, leading to scientific inquiry;

• Increasing trade leads to individual wealth, general prosperity, nationalism and materialism;

• Gradual movement from unquestioned religious beliefs toward a more human-centered

philosophy.

English drama had its beginnings with the church plays and pantomimes of the Middle Ages.

Introduced by the clergy in order to help the unlettered congregation to understand the Latin Church

service, these plays eventually became so elaborate and so filled with secular or humorous incidents

that they were moved to the church porch.

The figure of Shakespeare towers above all other English authors, of both the Renaissance and all

other periods. Drama at this time has moved completely into the secular world. Blank verse

becomes the standard form for drama, except for scenes of ‘low’ comedy, which are in prose. Many

early plays were based on this Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence and the tragedies of Seneca.

The revenge tragedy is a popular form, reaching its apotheosis in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The fact

that female roles are played by young boys makes somewhat more plausible the standard plot of the

girl disguised as a boy in romantic comedies.

How were the characters in the Elizabethan theater?

The characters were complex because they combined personality traits. The transition from

personified abstractions to characters drawn from real life was improved by the Renaissance ideas

that men and women, as individuals, were fascinating objects of study.

The crowning of this new kind of theater was William Shakespeare who created a roster of

characters who often seem more real than our own friends and acquaintances.

What was the aspect and characteristic of the playhouses during Restoration?

• They were rectangular instead of round and no longer open to sky;

• Artificial lighting was necessary for the first time;

• Women’s parts were now played by women;

• The stage was filled with movable scenery;

• The stage looked like a box left open on one side, or a framed canvas with actors painted on it.

Most of the plays have an historical element – the Roman plays, for example, are historical but

scholars don’t refer to those Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus etc.)

as history plays. The plays that we normally mean when we refer to the ‘history’ plays are the ten

plays that cover English history from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and the 1399-1485

period in particular. Each play is named after, and focuses on, the reigning monarch of the period.

In chronological order of setting, these are King John, Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, Henry V,

Henry VI Parts I, II and III, Richard III and Henry VIII, although Shakespeare didn’t write them in

that order. The plays dramatize five generations of medieval power struggles. For the most part they

depict the Hundred Years War with France, from Henry V to Joan of Arc, and the Wars of the Roses,

between York and Lancaster.

Shakespeare’s historical plays

We should never forget that they are works of imagination, based very loosely on historical figures.

Shakespeare was a keen reader of history and was always looking for the dramatic impact of

historical characters and events as he read.

Today we tend to think of those historical figures in the way Shakespeare presented them. For

example, we think of Richard III as an evil man, a kind of psychopath with a deformed body and a

grudge against humanity.

Shakespeare’s historical plays

Historians can do whatever they like to set the record straight but Shakespeare’s Richard seems

stuck in our culture as the real Richard III. Henry V, Prince Hal, is, in our minds, the perfect model

of kingship after an education gained by indulgence in a misspent youth, and a perfect human being,

but that is only because that’s the way Shakespeare chose to present him in the furtherance of the

themes he wanted to develop and the dramatic story he wanted to tell.

In fact, the popular perception of medieval history as seen through the rulers of the period is pure

Shakespeare. We have given ourselves entirely to Shakespeare’s vision. What would Bolingbroke

(Henry IV) mean to us today? We would know nothing of him but because of Shakespeare’s plays

he is an important, memorable and significant historical figure.

The history plays are enormously appealing. Not only do they give insight into the political

processes of Medieval and Renaissance politics but they also offer a glimpse of life from the top to

the very bottom of society – the royal court, the nobility, tavern life, brothels, beggars, everything.

The greatest English actual and fictional hero, Henry V and the most notorious fictional bounder,

Falstaff, are seen in several scenes together. Not only that, but those scenes are among the most
entertaining, profound and memorable in the whole of English literature.

O que vem na próxima aula

Understand the concepts of freedom and search for liberty during the Revolutionary period in the

United States;

analyze to what extent, these concepts are present in the Declaration of Independence and in the

Constitution of the Uni

Nessa aula você:

Recognize the 16th century in England as the ‘Golden Age’, ‘the Elizabethan era’, the ‘Tudors era’;

analyze the importance of the Protestant Reformation and to establish how the rupture with the

Church favors Henry VIII;

understand how the Renaissance opposed the medieval mentality;

recognize the origins and development of the Elizabethan Theater and analyze one of Shakespeare’s

plays.