The Renaissance Revised

...Chaucer's language is recognizably English, but it bristles with unusual words and odd grammatical constructions...

...Indeed, for 200 years writers and readers took heart to think that the glories of classical culture could be so successfully rendered into the peculiar hybrid of Germanic and Romance languages that is English...

...pretty love songs...

...Moreover, his medieval heritage evokes a world that is foreign to us...

...The mid-17th century marked "the world turned upside down," in the words of an anonymous balladeer...

...He concludes with a series of farewells, admitting, "He that takes leave so oft, I think,/He likes not to depart...

...George, on the other hand, gave up a prom-ising academic career for a country parson's cassock, and became England's supreme devotional poet...

...What they achieved sounded so fresh and powerful that subsequent generations have looked up to it, in place of the classics...

...It actually refers to Henry VIII's mother...

...Where the Elizabethan writers pitted one theology against another, the Stuarts exhibited greater diversity, as is concisely illustrated by the gifted Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and his younger sibling, the Reverend George Herbert...

...In a 160-line poem written to his wife from prison, he expresses with moving simplicity his deep love for his family, his frustrations with incarceration, and his trust in Christ and the Catholic Church...

...Apparently the age of Shakespeare was to be seen through the rosy lens of Edwardian romanticism and praised for its robust innocence and simplicity...

...it was imported across the Channel...

...The restoration of Charles II in 1660, of course, concluded the interregnum, and the mood switched once again...

...In addition, he felt that courtly puns such as "dying," the Renaissance double entendre for sexual climax, were permissible, but not so "low" a poem as Skelton's "Elinour Rumming," a comic account of the proprietress of an ale house and her boozy patrons...

...Harold Bloom maintains that Shakespeare invented us...

...They experimented with transplanting the metrics of Homer, Sappho, Ovid, and Horace into English...

...nevertheless I found it necessary to resort to at least 10 reference books in reading these volumes, and was unable to find any information on several of the lesser poets...

...By the reign of Henry VIII, however, the culture becomes accessible...

...But in his incisive Introduction, Jones points out that our ready identification with Renaissance poetry was not universal...

...His descriptions of the vagaries of Renaissance court life, and the difficulty of maintaining one's integrity among powerful leaders demanding flattery, could serve as a characterization of present-day Washington...

...In the process, the country endured an era of chaos as Catholic and Protestant female claimants to the throne fought for pre-eminence...

...For all of their exuberance and beauty, the pre-Pleiade Skelton and Wyatt lacked the range and vocabulary of Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and other French-influenced contemporaries...

...Never mind its modern-seeming degeneracy, corruption or ideological fanaticism...

...Here, he is rightly accorded a generous selection...

...As a result, a number of literary works were produced in jail...

...One might suppose that Lord Herbert would be more appealing in these doubt-ridden days, yet it is his priestly brother's sensitive treatment of inner conflict that still captivates believer and unbeliever alike...

...The selections of Jones and Fowler also remind us that periods of change, despite the distress they may cause, often come to be looked upon later as moments of unparalleled creativity...

...Even now the more literary news commentators quote couplets like "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide," or "So easy still it proves in factious times/ With public zeal to cancel private crimes...

...Tudor and Stuart monarchs encouraged their subjects to consider themselves as living in a new Athenian or Augustan golden age of the arts and learning...

...Sir Thomas Wyatt's love lyrics, for instance, speak a universal language...

...Some, like Francis Tregian, found impending death to be their muse...

...the focus on the natural world introduced a realism that replaced shopworn medieval conventions...

...Anything might be questioned—and was...

...Many of his neglected fellows have been resurrected by Jones as well...

...What was written before then requires some translation...

...Religion's made a tennis ball/For every fool to play withal," groused Humphrey Willis, who went on to deplore the exploitation of the citizenry's opinions and allegiances by the government and press...

...The remarkable effect these discoveries had on English poets is evident in Jones' collection...

...Fowler closes fittingly with a lyric by the teenage Alexander Pope, who would become the exponent of the new century...

...Chapman, John Donne and Ben Jonson help build the bridge between Tudor and Stuart culture, as the medieval imagination that envisioned Jerusalem or Troy in terms of one's own village finally is replaced by the cosmopolitan attitudes of travelers and students of science...

...So many upheavals had fostered a craving for peace and stability...

...The mystic writing of Robert Southwell, an underground Jesuit priest eventually executed by Elizabeth I, has hitherto been represented in anthologies by only one or two poems...

...I would include John Skel-ton, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and a host of lesser lights...

...The poets of the closing decades covered by Jones are picked up in Alastair Fowler's compilation...

...Jones is especially fascinated by the "recusant" poets, who remained faithful to Roman Catholicism after it was outlawed as treason to the Crown...

...I happen to have a more than passing acquaintance with 17th-century poetry...

...Thus, the bloody, treacherous imagery of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi or Shakespeare's King Lear gave way to the likes of "Greensleaves," written as a lute song, and "Fine Knocks for Ladies," a madrigal...

...The greatest English literary revolution of the century, though, did not come in response to domestic politics...

...A stanza of love poetry needs no gloss, whereas a lengthy satire of some political crisis cannot be read as little as 20 years later without the aid of background information...

...Today we might not choose to read Homer or Ovid in George Chapman's translations, but the vigor and freshness of the verse cannot be denied...

...An encouraging thought...

...Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate attempted to utterly refashion society, and he had powerful literary champions in Milton and Andrew Marvell, not to mention the prose writer John Bunyan...

...He likewise censored by omission ballads dealing with religious conflicts...

...The witty, scandalous John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, poetically portrayed London's seamy amusements so obscenely that his work could not be publicly printed until the 1970s...

...Sir Edmund Chambers' 1932 Oxford anthology depicted Elizabethan literature as "dainty pastorals and...

...The emphasis on the classics enabled them to expand the range of available metrics and rhetorical devices...

...The link becomes apparent in The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (Oxford, 769 pp., $39.95), edited by Emrys Jones, and The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse (Oxford, 831 pp., $39.95), edited by Alastair Fowler...

...Satires from the 17th century, such as John Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," a pointed account of the rebellion of Charles II's illegitimate son, have exerted a lasting influence on our perception of political events...

...My sole objection to these comprehensive and enthralling anthologies is Oxford's snobbish policy of including not a hint of biographical or historical information...

...How many readers will wonder which royal is the subject of Sir Thomas More's "A Lamentation of Queen Elizabeth...

...This is folk poetry at its most poignant...

...In a satire subtitled "The Person of Spenser is Brought in, Dissuading the author from the Study of Poetry, and Showing how Little It is Esteemed and Encouraged in this Present Age," John Oldham employed the kind of black humor and indignation we associate with Jonathan Swift...

...The elder was a deist with an outlook akin to Alexander Pope or Thomas Jefferson...

...The obvious difference between Renaissance literature and ours is that its verse was steeped in Greek and Roman models most readers today scarcely know...

...It deliberately avoided "the grotesque, the ugly, the difficult, the obscure...

...Fed up with violence and resigned to the prospect of still another faulty head of state, writers turned from metaphysics to social topics...

...A group of French writers known as the Pleiade enriched the poetry of their native tongue by studying Greek and Roman works and by closely observing and describing nature...

...Religious poets no longer thought of the basis of their faith as self-evident, but spoke of the ways God had manifested himself to them...

...Educated women like Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and, in the American colonies, Anne Bradstreet, sketched the conditions of female existence with a mixture of irony and grace...

...Writers & Writing THE RENAISSANCE REVISED BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The modern era of English poetry bloomed in the 16th century and blossomed in the 17th...

...Hence, poets attempted to incorporate the eloquence and psychological depth they admired in antiquity into their own poetry...

...Chambers was an outstanding scholar of early drama, yet he bowed to the New Critics' disdain for historical references...

...Precisely because the 16th and 17th centuries began to lay the groundwork for our current understanding of the world, their literature continues to provide revelation and enlightenment...

...Simultaneously, the old certainties of religion were fading...

...Jones remarks that although people of many periods have regarded themselves as undergoing violent transitions, none had a better right to assert this than those who lived in the time of the British Renaissance...

...Sixteenth- and 17th-century writers formed their styles on classical pastorals, elegies, epics, and "satyrs...

...During the 16th century, England moved from a basically feudal government to an absolute monarchy, where the ruler was head of both church and state...