elizabethan drama was written in which of the following forms
Elizabethan literature - wikipedia Elizabethan literature Jump to : navigation , search Elizabeth I Armada Portrait British School Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I ( 1558 -- 1603 ) , and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature . Elizabeth I presided over a vigorous culture that saw notable accomplishments in the arts , voyages of discovery , the `` Elizabethan Settlement '' that created the Church of England , and the defeat of military threats from Spain . During her reign a London - centred culture , both courtly and popular , produced great poetry and drama . English playwrights combined the influence of the Medieval theatre with the Renaissance 's rediscovery of the Roman dramatists , Seneca , for tragedy , and Plautus and Terence , for comedy . Italy was an important source for Renaissance ideas in England and the linguist and lexicographer John Florio ( 1553 -- 1625 ) , whose father was Italian , a royal language tutor at the Court of James I , who had furthermore brought much of the Italian language and culture to England . He also translated the works of Montaigne from French into English . Contents ( hide ) 1 Prose 2 Poetry 2.1 Changes to the canon 3 Theatre 4 List of other writers 5 See also 6 References Prose ( edit ) Two of the most important Elizabethan prose writers were John Lyly ( 1553 or 1554 -- 1606 ) and Thomas Nashe ( November 1567 -- c. 1601 ) . Lyly is an English writer , poet , dramatist , playwright , and politician , best known for his books Euphues : The Anatomy of Wit ( 1578 ) and Euphues and His England ( 1580 ) . Lyly 's mannered literary style , originating in his first books , is known as euphuism . Lyly must also be considered and remembered as a primary influence on the plays of William Shakespeare , and in particular the romantic comedies . Lyly 's play Love 's Metamorphosis is a large influence on Love 's Labour 's Lost , and Gallathea is a possible source for other plays . Nash is considered the greatest of the English Elizabethan pamphleteers . He was a playwright , poet , and satirist , who is best known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller . George Puttenham ( 1529 -- 1590 ) was a 16th - century English writer and literary critic . He is generally considered to be the author of the influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric , The Arte of English Poesie ( 1589 ) . Poetry ( edit ) The epic poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser ; titlepage , printed for William Ponsonby in 1590 Italian literature was an important influence on the poetry of Thomas Wyatt ( 1503 -- 42 ) , one of the earliest English Renaissance poets . He was responsible for many innovations in English poetry , and alongside Henry Howard , Earl of Surrey ( 1516 / 1517 -- 47 ) introduced the sonnet from Italy into England in the early 16th century . Wyatt 's professed object was to experiment with the English tongue , to civilise it , to raise its powers to those of its neighbours . While a significant amount of his literary output consists of translations and imitations of sonnets by the Italian poet Petrarch , he also wrote sonnets of his own . Wyatt took subject matter from Petrarch 's sonnets , but his rhyme schemes make a significant departure . Petrarch 's sonnets consist of an `` octave '' , rhyming abba abba , followed , after a turn ( volta ) in the sense , by a sestet with various rhyme schemes , however his poems never ended in a rhyming couplet . Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave , but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee . This marks the beginnings of English sonnet with 3 quatrains and a closing couplet . In the later 16th century , English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths . The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney . Elizabeth herself , a product of Renaissance humanism , produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur 's Departure and The Doubt of Future Foes . Edmund Spenser ( c. 1552 -- 99 ) was one of the most important poets of this period , author of The Faerie Queene ( 1590 and 1596 ) , an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. Another major figure , Sir Philip Sidney ( 1554 -- 86 ) , was an English poet , courtier and soldier , and is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan Age . His works include Astrophel and Stella , The Defence of Poetry , and The Countess of Pembroke 's Arcadia . Poems intended to be set to music as songs , such as by Thomas Campion ( 1567 -- 1620 ) , became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households . See English Madrigal School . Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet , which made significant changes to Petrarch 's model . Poems intended to be set to music as songs , such as those by Thomas Campion , became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households . See English Madrigal School . Changes to the canon ( edit ) While the canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th has always been in some form of flux , it is only towards the late 20th century that concerted efforts were made to challenge the canon . Questions that once did not even have to be made , such as where to put the limitations of periods , what geographical areas to include , what genres to include , what writers and what kinds of writers to include , are now central . The central figures of the Elizabethan canon are Edmund Spenser , Sir Philip Sidney , Christopher Marlowe , William Shakespeare , and Ben Jonson . There have been few attempts to change this long established list because the cultural importance of these five is so great that even re-evaluations on grounds of literary merit has not dared to dislodge them from the curriculum . Edmund Spenser had a significant influences on 17th - century poetry . Spenser was the primary English influence on John Milton . In the 18th century interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others . The Lake Poets and other Romantics , at the beginning of the 19th century , were well - read in Renaissance poetry . However , the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed only in the Victorian period , with anthologies like Palgrave 's Golden Treasury . A fairly representative idea of the `` Victorian canon '' is also given by Sir Arthur Quiller - Couch 's Oxford Book of English Verse ( 1919 ) . The poems from this period are largely songs and apart from the major names , one sees the two pioneers Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey , and a scattering of poems by other writers of the period . However , the authors of many poems are anonymous . Some poems , such as Thomas Sackville 's Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates , were highly regarded ( and therefore `` in the canon '' ) but they were omitted from the anthology as non-lyric . In the 20th century T.S. Eliot 's many essays on Elizabethan subjects were mainly concerned with Elizabethan theatre , but he also attempted to bring back long - forgotten poets to general attention , like Sir John Davies , whose cause he championed in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926 ( republished in On Poetry and Poets , 1957 ) . The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939 , an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry . In this canon he excludes the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry , represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser , and instead turns his eye to a Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement , which he claims has been overlooked and undervalued . The most underrated member of this movement he deems to have been George Gascoigne ( 1525 -- 1577 ) , who `` deserves to be ranked ... among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century , and perhaps higher '' . Other members were Sir Walter Raleigh ( 1552 -- 1618 ) , Thomas Nashe ( 1567 -- 1601 ) , Barnabe Googe ( 1540 -- 1594 ) , and George Turberville ( 1540 -- 1610 ) . Characteristic of this movement is that a poem has a theme usually broad , simple , and obvious , even tending toward the proverbial , but usually a theme of some importance , humanly speaking ; a feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject ; a rhetoric restrained to a similar minimum , the poet being interested in his rhetoric as a means of stating his matter as economically as possible , and not , as are the Petrarchans , in the pleasures of rhetoric for its own sake . There is also in the school a strong tendency towards aphoristic statement . Both Eliot and Winters were very much in favour of the established canon . Towards the end of the 20th century however , the established canon was criticized , especially by those who wished to expand it to include , for example , more women writers . Theatre ( edit ) See also : English Renaissance theatre and Elizabethan theatre The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre . This revival of interest was instrumental in the development of the new drama , which was then beginning to make apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages . The Italians were inspired by Seneca ( a major tragic playwright and philosopher , the tutor of Nero ) and by Plautus ( whose comic clichés , especially that of the boasting soldier , had a powerful influence during the Renaissance and thereafter ) . However , the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca 's ethics : showing blood and violence on the stage . In Seneca 's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters . A 1596 sketch of a rehearsal in progress on the thrust stage of The Swan , a typical circular Elizabethan open - roof playhouse . During the reign of Elizabeth I ( 1558 -- 1603 ) and then James I ( 1603 -- 25 ) , in the late 16th and early 17th century , a London - centred culture , that was both courtly and popular , produced great poetry and drama . The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model : a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London . The linguist and lexicographer John Florio ( 1553 -- 1625 ) , whose father was Italian , was a royal language tutor at the Court of James I , and a possible friend and influence on William Shakespeare , had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England . He was also the translator of Montaigne into English . The earliest Elizabethan plays include Gorboduc ( 1561 ) , by Sackville and Norton , and Thomas Kyd 's ( 1558 -- 94 ) revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy ( 1592 ) . Highly popular and influential in its time , The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English literature theatre , the revenge play or revenge tragedy . Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge . The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to , or parodied , in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights , including William Shakespeare , Ben Jonson , and Christopher Marlowe . Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy , such as the play - within - a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance , appear in Shakespeare 's Hamlet . Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur - Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare 's primary sources for Hamlet . Jane Lumley ( 1537 -- 1578 ) was the first person to translate Euripides into English . Her translation of Iphigeneia at Aulis is the first known dramatic work by a woman in English . William Shakespeare ( 1564 -- 1616 ) stands out in this period both as a poet and playwright . Shakespeare wrote plays in a variety of genres , including histories , tragedies , comedies and the late romances , or tragicomedies . His early classical and Italianate comedies , like A Comedy of Errors , containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences , give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies , A Midsummer Night 's Dream , Much Ado About Nothing , As You Like It , and Twelfth Night . After the lyrical Richard II , written almost entirely in verse , Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s , Henry IV , parts 1 and 2 , and Henry V . This period begins and ends with two tragedies : Romeo and Juliet , and Julius Caesar , based on Sir Thomas North 's 1579 translation of Plutarch 's Parallel Lives , which introduced a new kind of drama . Shakespeare 's career continued into the Jacobean period , and in the early 17th century Shakespeare wrote the so - called `` problem plays '' , Measure for Measure , Troilus and Cressida , and All 's Well That Ends Well , as well as a number of his best known tragedies , including Hamlet , Othello , Macbeth , King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra . The plots of Shakespeare 's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws , which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves . In his final period , Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays : Cymbeline , The Winter 's Tale and The Tempest , as well as the collaboration , Pericles , Prince of Tyre . Less bleak than the tragedies , these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s , but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors . Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays , Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen , probably with John Fletcher . Other important figures in the Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe , and Thomas Dekker . Marlowe 's ( 1564 -- 1593 ) subject matter is different from Shakespeare 's as it focuses more on the moral drama of the Renaissance man than any other thing . Drawing on German folklore , Marlowe introduced the story of Faust to England in his play Doctor Faustus ( c. 1592 ) , about a scientist and magician who , obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man 's technological power to its limits , sells his soul to the Devil . Faustus makes use of `` the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation , fall , and damnation , and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins , along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles . '' Thomas Dekker ( c. 1570 -- 1632 ) was , between 1598 and 1602 , involved in about forty plays , usually in collaboration . He is particularly remembered for The Shoemaker 's Holiday ( 1599 ) , a work where he appears to be the sole author . Dekker is noted for his `` realistic portrayal of daily London life and for `` his sympathy for the poor and oppressed '' . Robert Greene ( c. 1558 -- 1592 ) was another popular dramatist but he is now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him , Greenes , Groats - worth of Witte , bought with a million of Repentance , widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare . List of other writers ( edit ) List of other of the writers born in this period : John Donne ( 1572 -- 1631 ) -- see Jacobean Literature Ben Jonson ( 1572 -- 1637 ) -- see Jacobean Literature Thomas Middleton ( 1580 -- July 1627 ) -- see Jacobean Literature John Webster ( c. 1580 -- c. 1634 ) -- see Jacobean Literature See also ( edit ) Renaissance literature References ( edit ) Jump up ^ `` Elizabethan Literature '' , Encyclopædia Britannica . Jump up ^ `` Elizabeth I , Queen of England 1533 -- 1603 '' , Anthology of British Literature , A ( concise ed . ) , Petersborough : Broadview , 2009 , p. 683 . Jump up ^ Frances A. Yates , The life of an Italian in Shakespeare 's England . Jump up ^ Kerrigan , J. ed . `` Love 's Labours Lost '' , New Penguin Shakespeare , Harmondsworth 1982 , ISBN 0 - 14 - 070738 - 7 ; Jump up ^ `` John Lilly and Shakespeare '' , by C.C. Hense in the Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakesp . Gesellschaft , vols . vii and viii ( 1872 , 1873 ) . Jump up ^ Nicholl , Charles ( 8 March 1990 ) . `` ' Faustus ' and the Politics of Magic '' . London Review of Books . pp. 18 -- 19 . Retrieved 11 May 2015 . Jump up ^ John O'Connell ( 28 February 2008 ) . `` Sex and books : London 's most erotic writers '' . Time Out . Retrieved 26 November 2015 . ^ Jump up to : Tillyard 1929 . Jump up ^ Burrow 2004 . Jump up ^ Ward et al. , p. 3 . Jump up ^ The Norton Anthology of English Literature : Sixteenth / Early Seventeenth Century , Volume B , 2012 , p. 647 Jump up ^ Poetry , LII ( 1939 , pp. 258 - 72 , excerpted in Paul . J. Alpers ( ed ) : Elizabethan Poetry . Modern Essays in Criticism . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1967 . Jump up ^ Poetry , LII ( 1939 , pp. 258 - 72 , excerpted in Paul . J. Alpers ( ed ) : Elizabethan Poetry . Modern Essays in Criticism . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1967 : 98 Jump up ^ Poetry , LII ( 1939 , pp. 258 - 72 , excerpted in Paul . J. Alpers ( ed ) : Elizabethan Poetry . Modern Essays in Criticism . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1967 : 95 Jump up ^ Waller , Gary F. ( 2013 ) . English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century . London : Routledge . pp. 263 -- 70 . ISBN 0582090962 . Retrieved 30 March 2016 . Jump up ^ Buck , Claire , ed . `` Lumley , Joanna Fitzalan ( c. 1537 -- 1576 / 77 ) . '' The Bloomsbury Guide to Women 's Literature . New York : Prentice Hall , 1992 . 764 . Jump up ^ Ackroyd 2006 , p. 235 . Jump up ^ Ackroyd 2006 , pp. 353 , 358 ; Shapiro 2005 , pp. 151 -- 153 . Jump up ^ Bradley 1991 , p. 85 ; Muir 2005 , pp. 12 -- 16 . Jump up ^ Bradley 1991 , pp. 40 , 48 . Jump up ^ Dowden 1881 , p. 57 . Jump up ^ Wells et al. 2005 , pp. 1247 , 1279 Jump up ^ `` Christopher Marlowe . '' Encyclopædia Britannica . Encyclopædia Britannica Online . Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. , 2013 . Web . 6 April 2013 . < http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/365890/Christopher-Marlowe > . Jump up ^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature ( 1996 ) , pp. 266 -- 7 . Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabethan_literature&oldid=829435312 '' Categories : Early Modern English literature History of literature English Renaissance Talk Contents About Wikipedia Български Español Edit links This page was last edited on 8 March 2018 , at 16 : 47 . Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike License ; additional terms may apply . By using this site , you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . Wikipedia ® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation , Inc. , a non-profit organization . About Wikipedia
1. Elizabethan literature
2. Queen Elizabeth I
3. English poetry and drama
4. Shakespeare and his plays
5. Renaissance influence on English literature