Textuality » 4A Interacting
The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the early 16th century to the early 17th century. It is usually thought of as beginning with the accession of the House of Tudor to the throne in 1485.
The term Renaissance means “re-born”, a question may rise into my mind: who was born again? The Classics did. As a matter of fact in the reign of Henry VII English scholars had travelled to Italy and returned home filled with new ideas of humanism and full of reverence for the Greek and Roman cultures of the past, and so they had produced works of their own inspired by the classics.
One possible reason why the English Renaissance developped later than in Italy is because that was a wars period, for example the Hundred Years' War that was a prolonged conflict lasting from 1337 to 1453 and the Wars of the Roses lasted from1454 to 1485. Those conflicts took everyone’s attention off human interests. Only when peace was established with the accession of the House of Tudor to the throne, England could be influenced by Italian humanists.
In the Renaissance litterature the idea of woman was expressed using figures of speech like metaphors, similes, paradoxes, etc. Poets expressed their passion for an unattainable Lady, hers beauty and virtues and they explored various aspects of their own emotions. Shakespeare refused to write convectionally of love, unlike traditional sonneteers, he addressed a young man, the Fair Youth, that was probably his patron or a social superior, and a woman, called Dark Lady. The Fair Youth was beautiful while the lady wasn’t. As a matter of fact the poet spoke of her physical appearance in a most uncourtly and unromantic manner.
In the ballad the idea of woman was that she was a dangerous tempty of men’s integrity. She was only an instrument to reach God. As a matter of fact in the Middle Ages (that is the period that ballads came into existence), people thought that the physical love was a sin, like in the Divine Comedy written by Dante, that lust was punished. While in the sonnet (during the Renaissance) the woman was a distant idealised woman, an unattainable woman. This form of love was used not to reach God like ballads, but was used as a metaphor of poets’homage to a patroness or the queen herself.
Ballad is an oral anonymous form which is a combination of verse, song and dance. Ballads came into existence in the Middle Ages. They were songs committed to memory and handed down orally from generation to generation. The subjects matter was about events and situations in the everyday life of common people, or about the border conflicts between English and Scots. The form is simple and regular with stanza of four rhyming lines. Sonnet is a composition of fourteen lines arranged into two quatrains and two tercets (for the Petrarchan sonnet) or three quatrains and a rhyming couplet (for the Shakespearian sonnet). The standard theme was that of the courtly love.
The ballad language is direct and straightforeward and makes considerable use of repetition especially in the refrain. The sonnet language is that of poetic diction, with refined, ornate (with figures of speech like metaphors paradoxes, similes, etc.), polysyllabic Latinate words, considered suitable for poetic effects.
