Letteratura inglese III (CALBI) 21/02/2012

1. Letteratura inglese III (CALBI)21/02/2012 • Key dates and Key words • Renaissance, Reformation, Humanism

2. Some dates • [1476/7: Establishment of Caxton’s printing press in England[1485: Henry VII (beginning of the Tudor dynasty)] • [1492: Columbus ‘discovers’ America] • 1509: Henry VIII’s accession to the throne • 1516: Sir Thomas More’s Utopia • [1517: Luther’s 95 ‘Theses’: start of the Reformation]

3. Richard III (1) • RICHMOND Inter their bodies as becomes their births:Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fledThat in submission will return to us:And then, as we have ta'en the sacrament,We will unite the white rose (York; Elizabeth of York) and the red (Lancaster):Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,That long have frown'd upon their enmity!What traitor hears me, and says not amen?England hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself;The brother blindly shed the brother's blood,The father rashly slaughter'd his own son,The son, compell'd, been butcher to the sire:

4. Richard III (2) • All this divided York and Lancaster,Divided in their dire division,O, now, let Richmond and Elizabeth,The true succeeders of each royal house,By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,That would reduce these bloody days again,And make poor England weep in streams of blood!Let them not live to taste this land's increaseThat would with treason wound this fair land's peace!Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:That she may long live here, God say amen!

5. Some dates (2) • [1525 Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament] • 1531: Henry VIII declared Head of the Church in England (beginning of the English Reformation] • 1533: Henry VIII secretly marries Anne Boleyn, divorce from Catherine of Aragon, excommunication by the Pope, birth of Princess Elizabeth • 1534: final break with Rome, Act of Supremacy, Henry VIII as ‘Supreme Head of Church’ (1535); execution of Thomas More • 1547: death of Henry VIII: succeeded by Edward VI (aged 9)

6. Some dates (3) • 1549: Book of Common Prayer (Cranmer, sober tone, replacing all other devotional books, uniform liturgy) • 1553: death of Edward VI; Mary I proclaimed queen (‘Bloody Mary’: Catholicism re-established in England. • (1557: Tottel’s Miscellany (poems by Surrey, Wyatt, etc.) • 1558: Accession of Elizabeth I (1559: Acts of Supremacy and Acts of Uniformity) • 1562-1567 : John Hawkins sails for the west coast of Africa, kidnaps villagers; crosses the Atlantic to sell his cargo, or those who survived the voyage, to the Spanish. • (1563: Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs) • 1577: Drake begins his circumnavigation of the globe; Holinshed’s Chronicles.

7. Some dates (4) • 1580: Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie • 1585: Raleigh establishes his first colony in Virginia (Roanoke) (1590: they all disappear) • 1587: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus • 1588: Defeat of the Spanish Armada • 1590: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Books I-III) • 1591-1599: Shakespeare’s histories (first tetralogy: 1, 2, 3 Henry VI, Richard III; second tetralogy: Richard II, 1, 2 Henry IV, Henry V); The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, MND, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing) • 1597: Bacon’s Essays.

8. Some Dates (5) • 1600: The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Twelfth Night • 1601: Hamlet; Execution of the Earl of Essex. • 1602: Troilus and Cressida1603: All’s Well that Ends Well; Jonson’s Sejanus; Death of Elizabeth I; accession of James VI of Scotland as King James I of England and Ireland (beginning of the Stuart dynasty)

9. Some keywords: Renaissance • Renaissance : as a term it begins to be used commonly in England during the 19th century in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851) and Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) • Classical study: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) • Rebirth of classical learning after the ‘dark ages’ of medieval scholarship (going back to the ‘origins’, to classical models). Self-awareness. • Difference: the valorising of the ‘individual’ (the concept of self-fashioning), the centralisation of power systems, discoveries of other worlds, rise of capitalism, invention of movable-block printing,etc.) • Contradictory formation.

10. Renaissance (2) • Renaissance began in Italy and spread northwards and westwards (between the beginning of Tudor dynasty and the beginning of the Restoration?) • National rebirth for England (the myth of the Nation, Holinshed, Shakespeare’s histories). • ‘Renaissance’ probably first used by Giorgio Vasari in 1550: his contemporaries are not anonymous artisans, but individual artists and creators. • Rebirth of knowledge (Marsilio Ficino: ‘This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts’, 1485).

11. Renaissance (3) • Radical change in consciousness. Cut off from established forms of identity and forced to fashion a new sense of themselves. • Theatrical sense of oneself. • Free individuals? (Burckhardt’s idea but questionable.) • See Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 1980: “there is in the early modern period a change in the intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of identities”

12. Renaissance (4) • Individualism but also attack on individualism (centralisation of the state, etc.) • Social mobility but also attempt to curb it • Existence of alternative modes of social and political organisation, but also imposition of control. • Greenblatt: “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (Christianity’s suspicion about fashioning one’s identity).