The Renaissance — Set 3 MCQs: Reformation, Humanism and the Elizabethan Age

The English Renaissance is conventionally dated from the rise of the Tudor dynasty (1485–1603) in the late fifteenth century. The fall of Constantinople and the death of Chaucer belong to earlier moments, and Charles I's coronation falls well after the period opens.

The period is usually taken to run on into the Stuart reigns — James I (1603–25) and, on a broader reckoning, Charles I (1625–49). It does not stop at the Tudors, nor does it extend into the Commonwealth.

John Milton is generally regarded as the last great poet of the Renaissance tradition, closing a line that runs through Spenser and Donne. His career extends past the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages into the Commonwealth and Restoration.

The earliest Renaissance literature emerged in fourteenth-century Italy, which is also where the movement as a whole began. It reached northern Europe and England considerably later.

Dante, Machiavelli and Ariosto are Italian, and stand with Petrarch and Boccaccio among the major Italian Renaissance writers. Erasmus was Dutch, and represents the movement's northern European rather than Italian phase.

Erasmus is the scholar whose writings, set beside Shakespeare's plays, Spenser's poems and Sidney's prose, mark the Renaissance in northern Europe. Machiavelli, Boccaccio and Ariosto belong to the Italian phase of the movement.

The Reformation is dated from 1517. That year marks Luther's decisive intervention, not the earlier date of printing's arrival in England (1476) or the later Armada year (1588).

Martin Luther laid the real foundation of the Reformation in 1517 with the publication of The Ninety-five Theses. Tyndale and More were significant figures of the English religious controversy, but neither began the movement.

William Tyndale is remembered chiefly as a great reformer of sixteenth-century England, notable above all for his work promoting Christianity in the vernacular. Utopia is More's, and the printing press was Caxton's.

The Faerie Queene shows Spenser to have been sharply critical of Roman Catholicism, its allegory repeatedly casting Catholic figures in a hostile light. He was neither sympathetic to Rome nor indifferent to the religious quarrels of his day.

More's Utopia imagines an island on which every religion is permitted and tolerance has the force of law. That religious tolerance is the defining feature of the society he depicts.

Utopia was written in Latin in 1516 and translated into English in 1551. The Latin original therefore precedes the English version by thirty-five years.

Renaissance humanists held that education in classical literature promoted civic virtue — that is, the realisation of a person's full potential, both for their own good and for the good of the society they lived in. Military discipline, monastic isolation and commercial skill were not its aims.

Humanism is characterised by the rejection of scholasticism, an emphasis on the individual and their moral autonomy, and an interest in the eloquent use of Latin and in philology. Strict adherence to feudal hierarchy is no part of it and runs directly against its individualist emphasis.

Among the core humanist beliefs is the conviction that poets, writers and artists can lead humanity towards a better way of living. This gives the arts a social and moral role rather than a merely decorative or devotional one.

“What does it mean to be human?” is the question at the centre of Renaissance humanism. Its focus on human nature and potential is precisely what distinguishes it from scholastic and monastic preoccupations.

The rejection of scholasticism supplies the intellectual method — a turn away from medieval scholastic learning — while the promotion of private and civic virtue supplies the civic purpose. Together they capture humanism's dual character.

Caxton is thought to be the first Englishman to bring a printing press to England, in 1476. This is decades before Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and the Reformation's beginning (1517).

Caxton's dates are given as c. 1422–c. 1491, placing his career in the second half of the fifteenth century. The other ranges belong to earlier or later generations entirely.

References to the changes brought by printing and the new discoveries can be found in Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. The Italian and classical writers listed wrote either before printing reached England or outside the English tradition.

The Elizabethan Era refers to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, 1558–1603. The neighbouring ranges belong to the earlier Tudors, the Jacobean Age and the Caroline Age respectively.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 filled the English with a spirit of nationalism. That surge of national feeling is one of the conditions usually held to underlie the literary confidence of the period.

The Elizabethan era is called the Golden Age of England because it was a time of peace and prosperity and therefore of progress. Stability, not conflict or austerity, is the reason for the label.

The general spirit of the Elizabethan age is essentially romantic — expansive, imaginative and adventurous. The satirical and neoclassical tempers belong to later periods.

Shakespeare is the most significant literary figure of the Elizabethan age. Marlowe, Jonson, Spenser and Bacon all contribute to the age's richness, but none occupies the central place.

Both the poetry and the drama of the age were permeated by Italian influence, which remained dominant in English literature from Chaucer to the Restoration. French, Spanish and German influences are comparatively minor in this period.

Elizabethan poets largely imitated Italian forms and genres — the love sonnet, the pastoral and the allegorical epic. The ode, the satire, the ballad and the elegy are not the characteristic imported forms of this moment.

The Shepherd's Calendar stands with The Faerie Queene as Spenser's defining contribution to Elizabethan poetry. Arcadia is Sidney's, and Hero and Leander is Marlowe's, completed by Chapman.

Arcadia is Sidney's defining work of the period. The Faerie Queene and The Shepherd's Calendar are Spenser's, and Hero and Leander belongs to Marlowe and Chapman.

George Chapman is noted for completing Marlowe's unfinished poem Hero and Leander. The first English tragedy was Sackville and Norton's, and the University Wits were not his founding.

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets were published in 1609. The earlier dates of 1593 and 1594 belong to his two narrative poems rather than the sonnet sequence.

Venus and Adonis is dated 1593, the earlier of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems. The Rape of Lucrece followed in 1594.

The Rape of Lucrece is dated 1594, a year after Venus and Adonis. Both precede the 1609 publication of the sonnets.

The first playhouse, called The Theatre, was built in 1576. It precedes the Armada year and the publication of Shakespeare's sonnets by a wide margin.

The Theatre was supported chiefly by young playwrights from Cambridge and Oxford — the university-educated writers who would come to be known as the University Wits. It was not an exclusively courtly or Inns of Court venture.

The seven University Wits are John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nash, George Peele, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Lodge. Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser and Bacon are not counted among them.

The dramatic style associated with Marlowe and his circle is known as Marlowesque drama, or the tragedy of passion. The Comedy of Humours is Jonson's, and romantic comedy describes the age's comic mode generally.

Marlowe's four influential plays are Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II. The Spanish Tragedy is Thomas Kyd's work, not Marlowe's.

Thirty-seven is the usual count of Shakespeare's plays, but some literary historians put the figure at 38. The variation reflects genuine disagreement over collaborative and disputed works, not an inability to count them.

A. C. Bradley, in Shakespearean Tragedy, defines a Shakespearean tragedy as a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. The definition ties tragic effect to both the scale of the disaster and the rank of the protagonist.

Dr Johnson judged the plots of Shakespeare's comedies to be more structured than those of the tragedies. The comparison runs in the comedies' favour on the specific question of plotting.

The comedy of the Elizabethan age is generally known as romantic comedy. Jonson's Comedy of Humours is a named exception within the period, and the Comedy of Manners belongs to the Restoration.

Ben Jonson is known for the Comedy of Humours, in which characters are governed by a single dominant trait or “humour”. This sets his work apart from the romantic comedy of the age at large.

Every Man in His Humour is Jonson's first play. The Alchemist is his other chief comedy, and Volpone and Bartholomew Fair are later works.

The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), was written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton. Udall wrote Ralph Roister Doister, the early comedy, and Marlowe and Kyd belong to a later generation.

Gorboduc imitates Seneca directly, taking from him the chain of slaughter and revenge that shapes the play. Seneca is the model behind the English revenge-tragedy tradition generally.

Ralph Roister Doister was once regarded as the first comedy written in the English language. Gorboduc holds the corresponding place as the first English tragedy.

Francis Bacon is known as the father of the English essay and as the greatest prose writer of the Elizabethan era. Hooker, Sidney and Raleigh are significant prose writers of the period but hold neither distinction.

Bacon modelled his essays on those of Montaigne, the French philosopher known as the father of the essay. Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire all belong to later generations.

Bacon's chief philosophical work is the Instauratio Magna, left incomplete, which includes The Advancement of Learning. It is distinct from his separately published Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral.