English Renaissance

ALEXANDER FILIPOV AND MARTIN DAMYANOV

What is the Renaissance
• A flowering of literary, artistic
and intellectual development.
• Italy, XIV cent.
• Transition from the Middle Ages
to the Modern Age
• Effort to revive and surpass the
ideas and achievements of
Classical Antiquity
Florence – the birthplace of Renaissance
 English Renaissance

• Started with the reign of Henry

VIII (early XVI cent.)
• The ideas of the Reformation, the
Bible of William Tyndale and the
Geneva Bible.
• The split from the Catholic
Church and the formation of the
Church of England
Elizabethan Age
• Regarded as the height of English
Renaissance
• Flowering of poetry, drama and
the theatre
• New poetical forms: sonnet,
Spenserian stanza, and the blank
verse
• New forms in prose: first English
novels, pamphlets, historical
chronicles
List of artists and their works
• John Lyly - Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues and His England
• Thomas Nashe - The Unfortunate Traveller
• George Puttenham - The Arte of English Poesie
• Thomas Wyatt – English sonnet
• Edmund Spencer – The Faerie Queen
• Sir Philip Sidney - The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
English Renaissance Theatre
• Rediscovery of antient Greek and
Roman theatre in Italy
• John Florio brought much of the
Italian culture and language to
England
• William Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, and Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Kyd
• “play within a play”
 Renaissance writers and
important literature work
William Shakespeare
• Famous poet and playwright from
this period
• He wrote in many poetical and
prosaic, dramatic genres
• A Midsummers Night Dream, As
you like it, Richard II, Henry IV,
Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Julius
Caesar
Thomas More
• Lord Chancellor 1529-
1532
• Considered as one of
the greatest humanists
• The book “Utopia”
 King James Bible

• King James ordered the translation of

the Bible in 1604
• It was to serve as the official book of
the Anglicanism
• Published in 1611 and considered a
masterpiece of English prose
 Sonnets

• A new genre
• Three types:
Petrarchan
Shakespearean
Spenserian
• 14 lines long, definite rhymes and
has 10 syllables per line
Architecture
 Characteristics

• Characterized by gradual
increase in order, proportion
and regularity
• Resembled French architecture
Thank you for the
attention!