The greatest poet of the English Renaissance is. General characteristics of the revival in england
If his predecessors were guided mainly by foreign literature, then on the basis of the same influences of Italian (and partly French) poetry he tried to create a purely English, national poetry.
He did not come from an aristocratic or wealthy family, but received a solid classical education at the University of Cambridge. In 1578 we find him in London, where his university comrades led him into the houses of Sydney and Leicester, through which he probably gained access to the court. By this time, Spencer created the "Shepherd's Calendar" and, probably, the beginning of work on the poem "The Fairy Queen". Since Spencer was not financially secure to live without service, friends procured him a place as personal secretary of Lord Gray in Ireland.
In 1589 Spencer returned to London and lived in the capital itself or not far from it for about a decade, completely devoted to literary creativity. In 1590, the first three books of the poem "The Queen of the Fairies" dedicated to Queen Elizabeth were published in London, which brought him literary fame; Despite the small annual pension assigned to him by Elizabeth, Spencer's material affairs were far from brilliant, and he again began to think about some kind of official position. In 1598 he was sheriff in a small Irish borough, but this year there was a major rebellion in Ireland. Spencer's house was ransacked and burned; he himself fled to London and soon died here in extremely straitened circumstances.
Shortly before his death, he wrote a prosaic treatise "On state of the art Ireland ". Contemporaries argued that it was this essay, which contained a lot of truth about the brutal exploitation and ruin of the Irish by the English authorities, that was the reason for Queen Elizabeth's anger at Spencer, who deprived him of any material support.
Spencer's first printed poems were his translations of six sonnets of Petrarch (1569); later they were revised and published together with his translations from the poets of the French Pleiades.
Another work of Spencer, whose design was inspired by F. Sydney, attracted much attention - "The Shepherd's Calendar" (1579). It consists of twelve poetic eclogs, consistently related to the 12 months of the year. In one of the bottom it is told how a shepherd (under the guise of which Spencer brings himself out) suffers from love for the inaccessible Rosalind, in another one praises Elizabeth, "the queen of all shepherds", in the third - representatives of Protestantism and Catholicism act as shepherds, leading disputes among themselves on religious and social topics, etc.
Following the pastoral genre fashionable at that time, the poems of the Shepherd's Calendar are distinguished by their sophistication of style and learned mythological content, but at the same time they contain a number of very vivid descriptions of rural nature.
Spencer's lyric poems are superior in their poetic merits to his earlier poems; they were published in 1591 after the great success of the first songs of his Fairy Queen.
Among these poems, some speak of an even early scholarly refined manner ("Tears of the Muses", "Ruins of Time"), others are distinguished by the sincerity of their tone and grace of expression ("Death of a Butterfly"), and still others, finally, by their satirical features (for example, "A Tale Mother Guberd ”, which tells the parable of the fox and the monkey).
The poem "The Return of Colin Clout" (1595) is also distinguished by satirical features.
The plot of the poem is based on the story of Spencer's invitation to return to London and the court of Cynthia (ie, Queen Elizabeth), made by the poet Walter Raleigh, a famous navigator, scientist and poet (in the poem he appears under the pretentious name "Shepherd of the Sea"). Raleigh visited Spencer in Ireland in 1589. The poem tells of the poet's reception at court, and under assumed names, motley, vivid descriptions of statesmen and poets close to the queen are given.
However, Spencer's most popular and most celebrated work was his poem The Fairy Queen.
The poems of Ariosto ("Furious Roland") and T. Tasso ("Jerusalem Liberated") served as models for this poem, but Spencer also owes much to medieval English allegorical poetry and a cycle of knightly novels about King Arthur. His task was to fuse these heterogeneous poetic elements into one whole and deepen the moral content of courtly poetry, impregnating it with new, humanistic ideas. "By the queen of the fairies, I want to mean fame in general," Spencer wrote about his poem, "in particular, I mean by her the excellent and glorious person of our great queen, and by the land of the fairies, her kingdom." He wanted to give his work the meaning of a national epic and therefore created it on the basis of English knightly traditions and insisted on its teaching, educational character.
The plot of the poem is very complex. The fairy queen Gloriana sends her twelve knights to destroy the twelve evils and vices from which humanity suffers. Each knight personifies some kind of virtue, just as the monsters with whom they fight personify vices and delusions.
The first twelve cantos tells of the twelve adventures of the Knights of Gloriana, but the poem remains unfinished; each knight had to take part in twelve battles and only after that could he return to the queen's court and give her an account of his exploits.
One of the knights, Artegall, personifying Justice, fights the giant Injustice (Grantorto); another knight, Guyon, who is the personification of Temperance, fights drunkenness, and drives him out of the temple of Voluptuousness.
The knight Sir Kalidor, the embodiment of Courtesy, attacks Slander: it is characteristic that he finds this monster in the ranks of the clergy and makes him silence after a fierce struggle. "But," Spencer observes, "at the present time, apparently, it has again got the opportunity to continue its pernicious activities."
Moral allegory combines with political: the powerful sorceress Duessa (Mary Stuart) and Geryon (king Spanish Philip II). In some dangerous adventures, the knights are helped by King Arthur (Elizabeth's favorite Earl of Leicester), who, seeing Gloriana in a dream, fell in love with her and, together with the wizard Merlin, went in search of her kingdom.
The poem would probably end in the marriage of King Arthur and Gloriana.
In the stories about the adventures of the knights, despite the fact that Spencer always gives them an allegorical meaning, there is a lot of fiction, amusement and beautiful descriptions. "The Queen of the Fairies" is written in a special stanza (consisting of nine lines of poetry instead of the usual octave in Italian poems, that is, eight lines), called the "Spencer stanza". This stanza was assimilated by English poets of the 18th century. during the period of revival of interest in the "romantic" poetry of Spencer and from them passed to the English romantics (Byron, Keith and others).
Widespread development in English literature of the 16th century. lyric and epic genres aroused interest in both theoretical problems poetry. In the last quarter of the XVI century. a number of English poetics appeared, discussing issues of English versification, poetic forms and style. Chief among these are The Art of English Poetry (1589) by George Puttenham and Defense of Poetry (published 1595) by Philip Sydney. In the first, the author, proceeding from the samples of ancient and Renaissance poetry, but with a full understanding of the originality of the English language, speaks in detail about the tasks of the poet, about the content and form of poetic works.
Sydney's "Defense of Poetry", in turn, proceeds from ancient and European Renaissance theoretical premises about poetry and from this side, by the way, condemns the English folk drama of the Shakespearean era, but at the same time speaks sympathetically about folk ballads and proclaims the realistic principle as the basis poetry. "There is not a single art form that constitutes the heritage of mankind," says Sydney, "that does not have natural phenomena as its object." The poets of Puttenham and Sydney were probably also known to Shakespeare.
Bishops don't care,
That a neighbor lives from hand to mouth
That Jill sheds her sweat,
That Jack bends his back over the arable land ...
(Translated by O.B. Rumer)
As a poet, Skelton is still closely associated with the traditions of the late Middle Ages. He draws on Chaucer and folk songs. In the future, the development of English Renaissance poetry took a different path. Striving for a more perfect, "high" style, English humanist poets depart from the "vulgar" traditions of the late Middle Ages and turn to Petrarch and ancient authors. The time has come for English book poetry. The French poetry of the 16th century developed approximately in the same way.
John Skelton Thomas Wyeth Henry Howard
The first poets of the new trend were the young aristocrats Thomas Wyeth (1503-1543) and Henry Howard (Earl of Sarri, in the former Russian transcription Serrey 1517-1547). Both of them shone at the court of Henry VIII, and both experienced the brunt of royal despotism. Wyeth spent some time in prison, and Sarri not only ended up in prison three times, but also ended, like Thomas More, his life on the block. For the first time their works were published in a collection published in 1557. Contemporaries highly appreciated their desire to reform English poetry, to raise it to the height of new aesthetic requirements.
Wyeth was the first to introduce the sonnet into English poetry, and Sarri gave the sonnet the form that we later find in Shakespeare (three quatrains and a final couplet with a rhyming system: avav edcd efef gg). The leading theme of both poets was love. She fills Wyeth's sonnets, as well as his lyric songs ("The Lute of the Lover", etc.). Closely following Petrarch (for example, in the sonnet "There is no peace for me, even though the war is over"), he sang about love that turned into sorrow (the song "Will you leave me?", Etc.). Having experienced a lot, having lost faith in many things, Wyeth began to write religious psalms, epigrams and satire, directed against the vanity of court life ("Life at court"), the pursuit of nobility and wealth ("Poverty and Wealth"). In prison he wrote an epigram in which we find the following mournful lines:
I feed on sighs, shed tears,
The shackle ringing serves as music for me ...
(Translated by V.V. Rogov)
Wyeth and Sarri laid the foundations for English humanistic lyrics, testifying to the increased interest in man and his inner world. By the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century. the flourishing of English Renaissance poetry - and not only lyrical, but also epic. Following the example of the Pleiades poets, the English devotees of poetry created a circle solemnly named Areopagus.
One of the most talented members of the Areopagus was Philip Sidney (1554-1586), a man of versatile interests and talents who raised English humanist poetry to high degree perfection.
He achieves high artistic perfection in the development of the sonnet form. His love sonnets (the cycle "Astrophile and Stella", 1580-1584, published in 1591) had a well-deserved success (Astrophile means in love with the stars, Stella - a star). It was thanks to Sydney that the sonnet became a favorite form in English Renaissance lyrics. Ancient myths ("Philomela", "Cupid, Zeus, Mars were judged by Phoebus") are revived in Sydney's poems. Sometimes Sidney has something in common with Petrarch and the Pleiades poets.
The true manifesto of the new school was Sidney's treatise "Defense of Poetry" (c. 1584, published in 1595), which in many respects echoes the treatise of Du Bellay "Defense and Glorification French"Only if Du Bellay's opponents were pedantic scholars who preferred Latin to French, then Sidney considered it his duty to defend poetry (literature), attacked by pious Puritans. Sidney also owns the unfinished pastoral novel Arcadia, published in 1590. d. Like other works of this kind, it is written in a very conventional manner. A storm at sea, love stories, dressing up and other adventures and, finally, a safe ending make up the content of the novel, which takes place in the legendary Arcadia. The prose text includes many poems , sometimes very exquisite, written in a wide variety of sizes and forms of ancient and Italian origin (sapphic stanzas, hexameters, terzines, sextines, octaves, etc.).
Philip Sidney Edmund Spencer
Another outstanding poet of the XVI century. was Edmund Spencer (1552-1599), who took an active part in the creation of the Areopagus. He excellently wrote musical sonnets (Amoretti, 1591-1595), marriage hymns, including the Epithalam, dedicated to his own marriage, and the platonic Hymns in Honor of Love and Beauty (1596). Great success fell to the lot of his "Shepherd's Calendar" (1579), dedicated to Philip Sidney. Adhering to the tradition of European pastoral poetry, the poem consists of 12 poetic eclogies according to the number of months in a year. In eclogs it comes about love, faith, morality and other issues that attracted the attention of humanists. The May eclogue is very good, in which the elderly shepherd Palinodius, joyfully welcoming the arrival of spring, vividly describes the folk holiday dedicated to the merry May. The conventional literary element here recedes before the expressive sketch of English folk customs and mores.
But the most significant creation of Spencer is the monumental knightly poem "The Queen of the Fairies", which was created over many years (1589-1596) and earned the author the resounding fame of "the prince of poets". Through the efforts of Spencer, England finally acquired a Renaissance epic. In the Poetics of the Renaissance, including Sidney's Defense of Poetry, heroic poetry has always been given a place of honor. Especially highly appreciated Sidney "Aeneid" Virgil, which was for him the standard of the epic genre.
The poem widely uses elements of Arturov's courtly novels of the cycle with their fairy-tale fantasy and decorative exoticism. After all, the legends about King Arthur arose on British soil, and for the English reader King Arthur himself continued to be a "local hero", the personification of British glory. Moreover, it was in England in the 16th century. Sir Thomas Malory, in his extensive epic The Death of Arthur, summed up the majestic tales of Artur's cycle. But Spencer relied on more than just T. Mallory's tradition. He combined it with the tradition of W. Langland and created a chivalrous allegorical poem, which was supposed to glorify the greatness of England, illuminated by the radiance of virtues.
In the poem, King Arthur (a symbol of greatness), having fallen in love in a dream with the "fairy queen" Gloriana (a symbol of glory, contemporaries saw Queen Elizabeth I in her), is looking for her in a fairyland. In the image of 12 knights - companions of King Arthur, Spencer was going to deduce 12 virtues. The poem was supposed to consist of 12 books, but the poet managed to write only 6. In them, the knights perform feats, personifying Piety, Moderation, Chastity, Justice, Politeness and Friendship.
In the XVI century. the formation of the English Renaissance novel was also taking place, which, however, was not destined to reach the heights that the French (Rabelais) and Spanish (Cervantes) novels reached at that time. Only in the 18th century. The victorious march of the English novel across Europe began. Nevertheless, it was in England during the Renaissance that the utopian novel arose, with all the characteristic features inherent in this genre. Contemporaries warmly accepted F. Cindy's pastoral novel Arcadia. Noisy, although not lasting success fell to the lot of "educational novel by John Lily" Eufues, or Anatomy of Wit "(1578-1580), written in an exquisite syllable called" eufuism. " and England. Human weaknesses and vices are opposed in the novel by examples of high virtue and spiritual nobility. In "Eufuez" there is little action, but much attention is paid to the experiences of the heroes, their heartfelt outpourings, speeches, correspondence, stories of various characters,
The most striking success was achieved by English literature of the 16th century. in the field of drama. When we think of the English Renaissance, we certainly think of Shakespeare first. And Shakespeare was not at all alone. He was surrounded by a galaxy of talented playwrights who enriched the English theater with a number of wonderful plays. And although the heyday of the English Renaissance drama did not last very long, it was unusually stormy and colorful. A Renaissance drama took hold on the English stage. But in the country the folk theater continued to play an active role, which took shape in the middle of the century. Addressing the mass audience, he often in traditional forms vividly responded to the questions put forward by the era. This supported his popularity, made him an important element of public life. But not all traditional forms have stood the test of time. The mystery that had been rejected by the Reformation died out relatively quickly. But the interlude continued to loudly declare itself - the most mundane and fun genre of medieval theater and morality - an allegorical play that posed certain important questions of human existence.
The highest circles looked disapprovingly at plays containing seditious thoughts, and Queen Elizabeth in 1559 simply forbade putting on such morality.
For all the obvious conventions of the allegorical genre in English morality of the 16th century. bright everyday scenes appeared, and even allegorical characters lost their abstractness. Such was, for example, the buffoon figure of Vice. Among his ancestors we find Obedala from the allegorical poem by W. Langland, and among the descendants - the fat sinner Falstaff, vividly depicted by Shakespeare.
But, of course, colorful genre scenes should be primarily sought in interludes (interludes), which are the English version of the French farce. Such are the interludes of John Haywood (c. 1495-1580) - funny, spontaneous, sometimes rude, with characters snatched directly from everyday life. Not taking the side of the Reformation, Haywood at the same time clearly saw the shortcomings of the Catholic clergy. In the interlude "The Seller of Indulgences and the Monk", he makes the greedy ministers of the church start a scuffle in the temple, as each of them wants to pull as many coins as possible from the pocket of the faithful.
Illustration from the work of John Haywood SPIDER AND FLY, 1556
Since the end of the XVI century. social life in England was becoming more and more dynamic - after all, the time was not far away when the bourgeois revolution broke out in the country - the atmosphere of tense and sometimes contradictory creative quests that are so characteristic of the "Elizabethan drama", which forms the highest peak in history English Renaissance literature.
Robert Greene writes at his desk
Robert Greene (1558-1592) entered the history of English literature as a gifted playwright, was awarded a high degree of Master of Arts at the University of Cambridge. His play Monk Bacon and Monk Bongay (1589) enjoyed great success. When working on it, Green relied on the English folk book about the warlock Bacon, which was published at the end of the 16th century. Like the German Faust, the monk Bacon is a historical figure. The prototype of the hero of the popular legend was Roger Bacon, an outstanding English philosopher and natural scientist of the 13th century, who was persecuted by the church, which saw in him a dangerous free-thinker. The legend turned the monk Bacon into a warlock and connected him with evil spirits. In Green's play, Bacon has a significant role to play. At a time when interest in magic and all kinds of "secret" sciences grew in Europe, Green brought to the stage the colorful figure of an English warlock who owns a magic book and a magic mirror. In the end, Bacon repents of his sinful aspirations and becomes a hermit. But the leading theme of the play is not magic, but love. The real heroine of the play is a beautiful and virtuous girl, the daughter of the forester Margarita. The Prince of Wales falls in love with her, but she gives her heart to the Court Prince, Earl of Lincoln. No trials and misadventures can break her steadfastness and loyalty. Struck by Margaret's resilience, the Prince of Wales stops his harassment. The bond of marriage unites lovers. Demonic intricacies are not needed where great human love reigns.
About George Green, the Weckfield field watchman ", which saw the light after the death of Green (1593) and probably belongs to him. The hero of the play is no longer an arrogant warlock who renounces his sinful craft, but a valiant commoner, like Robin Hood sung in folk songs By the way, Robin Hood himself appears on the pages of the comedy. Hearing about the valor of George Green, he seeks a meeting with him. The play recreates the situation in which the English state is threatened both by internal and external danger, for a group of English feudal lords led by Count Kendal and in alliance with the Scottish king, he revolts against the English king Edward III.
It is no coincidence that contemporaries saw in Green a folk playwright. Subscribing to this opinion, N.N. Storozhenko wrote: “Indeed, the name of the people's playwright does not go to anyone as much as to Green, because none of the contemporary playwrights we will find so many scenes, so to speak, snatched from English life and, moreover, written in pure folk language, without any admixture of euphuism and classical ornamentation "
R. Green's friend at one time was the talented poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), the real creator of the English Renaissance tragedy.
Christopher Marlowe
It is also worth mentioning the play Edward II by Marlowe (1591 or 1592), which is close to the genre of historical chronicle, which attracted close attention of Shakespeare in the 90s.
When compiling this material, the following were used:
1. Cultural history of countries Western Europe in the Renaissance. Bragina Volodarsky Varyash. 1999
2. World art culture. From inception to the 17th century. (Essays on history). Lvova E.P., Fomina N.N., Nekrasova L.M., Kabkova E.P. - SPb .: Peter, 2008 .-- 416s.: Ill.
3. Center for Distance Education MGUP, 2001
HUMANISTS
The revival in England chronologically coincides with the period of the Tudor dynasty, from the accession to the throne of Henry VII (1485) until the death of Queen Elizabeth (1603), the last representative of this dynasty. Back in the 15th century, despite all the political turmoil and military setbacks, the economic development of England was rapidly moving forward, caused a deep social restructuring and increased the importance of those classes that later formed the main support of royal absolutism. In the 16th century, under the Tudors, England experienced a complete revolution in all areas of economic and social life, which turned it from a feudal country into a classic, in the words of Marx, a country of primitive accumulation. It was during this period that there was an extraordinary flourishing in England in all areas of thought and creativity. If the reasons that caused a new, humanistic culture in England were generally similar to those that caused the Renaissance in other countries of Western Europe, then the process of development of this culture took place in England in specific local conditions that gave it a special character throughout the 16th century. ...
From the end of the 15th century. in England there were already clearly outlined economic changes that were gradually preparing up to this time, extremely important in their consequences.
In the countryside, the process of "fencing" began, that is, the forcible seizure of communal peasant lands by landowners in order to turn them into pastures for sheep. The revolution in agrarian relations and the resulting impoverishment of the countryside are closely linked with the development of a new, capitalist manufacturing industry and trade. As a result, in a relatively short period of time, the entire social appearance of England has radically changed and its class forces have received a completely different alignment.
One of the specific features of English social development during this period was the common economic and political interests of the most powerful classes, which were equally interested in supporting the absolute monarchy of the Tudors - the landed nobility and the bourgeoisie. The closest reasons for such a unification of social forces and the emergence of a community of cultural requests in their midst were:
The almost complete death in the wars of the Scarlet and White Rose of the old, feudal nobility, whose castles passed into new, bourgeois hands,
Sale of very extensive church and monastery lands during the Reformation (1535),
· The introduction of capitalist methods in all areas of economic life in the countryside and the city. The royal power encouraged a new social order and in every possible way contributed to the development of industry and trade in the country.
· English merchants were gradually freed from foreign mediation, set up a powerful merchant fleet, seized new markets, set up their own trading posts in distant countries of the world. Navigation was widely developed in this era, which ensured colonial trade and the ever-increasing increment of colonial territories and linked England more closely with the continental life of Europe.
The rapid capitalist development of England resulted in the fact that, along with the growing wealth of the ruling classes, the poverty of the people, ruined in the countryside and brutally exploited in the city, increased sharply. There was growing vagrancy, begging, against which harsh laws were issued; uprisings of the poor broke out in the village, fighting for the land and their lost rights; the largest of these was the peasant uprising of Robert Keth (1549).
Fast development in English society, bourgeois elements determined here the presence of real prerequisites for the bourgeois revolution that took place in England in the 40s of the 17th century.
However, from the very first years of the reign of James I (1603 - 1625), new features of public life that proclaimed this revolution became increasingly apparent: the aggravation of social contradictions, the collapse of the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy, and the growth of political antagonism between them. By this time, in England, a sharper social differentiation among the humanist-minded intelligentsia was gradually taking shape, and the subsequent crisis of humanistic culture.
The renaissance in England, capturing more than a century span of time, went through several stages in its development.
Early period coincided with Reformation , although it had deep national roots, but it happened here "from above", by the government decree of King Henry VIII (1534).
This determined important features English humanism. First of all, the issues of religion and church life for all early English humanists played an incomparably greater role than for the Italian humanists, since the first enthusiasm for ancient literature and the world of new philosophical ideas chronologically coincided in England with a vital interest in the problems of the imminent Reformation.
In the second period The English Renaissance situation changed significantly. Destroying the economic and political power of the church, royal power thereby undermined both its authority and its strong ideological influence until that time. The reformation of Henry VIII made it easier for subsequent generations of English humanists to fight for secular culture against church culture, for a cheerful worldview against medieval monastic asceticism, for the liberation of reason from church scholasticism. The fact that, in the general European plan, the Renaissance in England was a late historical phenomenon was also essential. Thanks to this, the British humanists could use the ideological heritage of the humanists of other countries.
The greatest flowering of the ideas of the Renaissance occurred in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), which at the same time was at the same time a remarkable rise in the colonial and commercial power of the country. During this period, bourgeois and Protestant England defeated the feudal Catholic monarchy of Spain (the death of the "Invincible Armada", 1588), became the largest maritime power, sending its merchant ships to all countries and strengthening its ties with all European states. This period also marks the time of the greatest balance of power between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, national unification, and high patriotic enthusiasm. During this period, England eagerly absorbs all the riches of European humanistic culture.
Continental influences come to England from different directions; Literature in translation is gaining unprecedented development; along with the ancient classics in England now translate numerous works of Italian, French and Spanish writers; the scientific and philosophical movement is developing widely, culminating in the appearance at the end of the century of the materialist philosophical system of Francis Bacon.
An unusually wide development is also received fiction... Following the path paved by the first imitators of Italian lyricists Wyeth and Serrey , a brilliant galaxy of lyric poets flourishes; other poets create epic poems similar in character to the poems of Ariosto and Tasso.
The English novel is also developing rapidly: chivalrous, shepherd's, adventurous and real-life; the richest drama with Shakespeare at the head arises.
This extraordinary flowering in all areas of thought and creativity, which England experienced in the second half of the 16th century, is, however, relatively short-lived.
Already at the very beginning of the 17th century. the bulk of the British bourgeoisie oppose the entire system of British absolutism. The impending feudal reaction brings the crisis of the joyous and life-affirming Renaissance worldview closer. This colors late English humanism in a rather pessimistic tone. However, pessimistic and sharply satirical sentiments have other origins in England. English humanists have witnessed profound changes in socio-economic life. In the end, their main enemy turned out to be not the old feudal world, which had already receded into the past in England, but a new society built on capitalist property and profit, and they reacted extremely sharply and painfully to all the ugly phenomena of life generated by this. It was this feature that proved to be especially stable and characteristic of humanistic culture in the classical country of primitive accumulation. In any case, this feature is clearly visible in the two major figures of the English Renaissance, one at the beginning, the other at the end of this era - Thomas More and Shakespeare.
At the end of the 15th century. at Oxford University a close friendly circle of young scientists, united by common interests, was formed with enthusiasm for studying classical antiquity. These were the first English philologists for whom, however, social goals and moral aspirations were closely intertwined with scientific goals. The most prominent members of the circle were William Grosin (William Grocyn), Thomas Linker (Thomas Linacre) and John Colet (John Colet). It was this circle that gave a friendly welcome to Erasmus of Rotterdam during several of his visits to England, some of which turned out to be quite lengthy. Thomas More later joined the same circle. They all studied in Italy and were associated with the University of Oxford. Their scientific inclinations were largely different, but they were all united by a common interest in the classical world and new science. Grosyn was interested in philology and philosophy, Linacre - in classical languages and medicine, John Colette saw in classical studies a means of updating religious issues. The new movement, however, was not confined to the walls of Oxford. The "Oxford Reformers", as Grosin's circle is sometimes called, had numerous friends in other cities of England, for example, in Cambridge and London. The small group of English humanists under Henry VII grew wider under Henry VIII. Most prominent among them was Thomas More.
Thomas Mop(Thomas More, 1478 - 1535) was born into the family of a poor London judge. Already at school, Thomas discovered a great ability for the Latin language and attracted the attention of a prominent politician of that time, Cardinal John Morton, who took the boy into his house, and then, when he was fifteen, sent him to Oxford University. Morton, who was in close relations with English humanists, gave Thomas a new impetus to study literature and philosophy, and at the university he improved his knowledge of Latin and Greek and diligently studied classical writers. He was especially interested in the works of Plato. At the end of the course at the university, More took a modest place and continued his literary works.
Elected to parliament (1504), he gained fame for his daring opposition to the government at that time, having achieved the refusal of parliament to vote a new sum of money for the king. The king imprisoned Father More, demanded the payment of a large fine, Thomas himself had to hide from the intrigues of the court. This era of his life was a time of a serious moral crisis, in-depth work on himself, the approval of the world outlook. By this time, Mora had already matured many of the ideas that he put in the basis of his "Utopias" ... Also of great importance to him was his continued friendship with the Oxford humanists, some of whom soon moved to London. It translates into English works of the Italian humanist P and code e lla world a Ndola, writes a lot in Latin and in English - in Latin, however, more willingly than in English. Among his works are Latin epigrams, satires, translations of poets from the Greek anthology; it is interesting that among these works is, for example, written in English ballad verse "A hilarious story about how a police sergeant taught how to play a monk." , which was very popular in England and even in the XVIII century. which inspired the poet J. Cowper with the plot of his comic ballad about "John Guilpin".
Mora's position changed dramatically with the accession to the throne of Henry VIII. Mor welcomed the new king, with whom in the early years of his reign they pinned hopes of patronizing the humanist movement, drew his attention and began to quickly rise up the ranks. In 1529 he attained the office of Lord Chancellor.
During a trip to Flanders in 1515, More conceived and partially wrote the most famous of his works - "Utopia", thanks to which he can rightfully be called the first representative of utopian socialism. While in Antwerp as a representative of the London merchants, More met a local teacher, humanist and friend of Erasmus, Peter Egidius, to whom Utopia was dedicated; he was also its first publisher (1516). Utopia was translated into English and published for the first time only many years later (1551).
"Utopia"- the word invented by More and since that time has become a household name, composed by him from Greek words and means "a non-existent, unprecedented place." More says in his book that in Antwerp he allegedly met with an experienced traveler, a Portuguese by birth, Raphael Gitlodei, who was one of the companions of the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who visited the New World several times and gave his description (1507). After parting with Vespucci, Gitlodey independently traveled to many hitherto unknown countries, including the island of Utopia located in the far West. Mora's book consists of conversations with the Gitlodey, and Mora puts many of his thoughts out of caution into the mouth of his interlocutor.
Giving a sharp criticism of the modern social order in the first part of the book, Guitlodey in the second part describes the social order on the island of Utopia, where he spent five years and from where he, in his own words, would never leave, as an example of "the best state of the state" if he had not been guided by the desire to tell about this new world ", since nowhere else did he" see a people with a more correct organization than there. "
The form of Mora's work was not new in the literature of the day; adjoining, on the one hand, to the late Greek adventurous "travel novels", "Utopia", on the other hand, has a direct connection with the legends widespread in the Middle Ages about the "earthly paradise", or islands of bliss and eternal fun.
At the beginning of the 16th century, shortly after the discovery of America and in the era of continuing geographical discoveries, this old plot scheme had to be completely transformed in a humanistic writer. Indeed, under Mora's pen she received both completely new features and a completely different ideological purposefulness. Among the sources that Thomas More used for his work, in addition to the stories about the newly discovered lands so topical at that time, were the medieval treatise of Blessed Augustine "On the City of God" (413). A treatise built, like Utopia, but in a different sense from it, on the opposition of an ideal state to a sinful state, stagnating in evil and vices.
There were also sources in classical literature, in particular the works of Plato (Republic, Laws, philosophical dialogues Timaeus and Critias, with their narrative about the island of Atlantis).
Even more important to More was the English reality of his day; in contrast to it, he created a picture of an ideal state. Through the mouth of Gitlodey, Mor in the first part describes in detail England with its "greedy and insatiable gluttons", destroying the borders of fields, uniting thousands of acres of land in their hands, driving out peasants and with their violence and oppression, turning them into homeless vagabond wanderers.
In other words, More characterizes in detail the agrarian crisis and the process of the emergence of capitalist agriculture and industry in England taking place before his eyes. Mor puts into the mouth of his interlocutor the words that have become famous, which Marx also recalls in "Capital": "Your sheep ... have become so gluttonous and indomitable that they even eat people, ravage and devastate fields, houses and cities." (1 See: Marx K. and Engels F. Op. Ed. 2, v. 23, p. 731. Approx. 193.)
Mor sees the main reason for the disaster that gripped England in private property, in the existence of which there can be neither justice nor social welfare. "In my opinion," he says, "wherever there is private property, where everything is measured by money, there is hardly ever a correct and successful course of state affairs." Therefore, in Utopia, all the land is a common property and is cultivated by free labor. But More goes further: he believes that of all forms of private property, the most powerful and most disfiguring human nature is money, which does not bring happiness either to its owners or to those who are completely deprived of it. Therefore, in "Utopia" he preaches contempt for gold and jewelry and establishes complete social equality, community of labor and the use of all its results.
The organization of production in Utopia is of a family-craft nature and does not in the least resemble the capitalist manufactories that emerged in England, as well as the whole way of life of the Utopians.
Their way of life and customs are fundamentally different from the specific living conditions of any European country of the 16th century, primarily England. In some places in the description of the island of Utopia, archaic features are clearly visible: for example, the population of Utopia, cut off from land ownership and periodically moving from village to city and back every two years, is closely attached to the family and family union. The people are organized by families of no less than 40 people, and by the Philae - from 30 families, over which the Philarch is in charge; the head of the 10 philarchs is the protophilarch; the contrast between community of property and the preservation of patriarchal parental authority is striking. The same archaic features in Utopia are the preservation of religious beliefs, albeit in a form different from Christianity, and the presence of the institution of slavery among the Utopians.
And nevertheless, by the boldness of thought, by the clarity of the solution to his task - to show by a concrete example how a society can be organized on the basis of universal equality without private property - "Utopia" occupies a completely exclusive place in world literature, and the author with a complete law must be called the ancestor and one of the greatest representatives of utopian socialism.
The influence of "Utopia" on world literature and socio-political thought was extremely great. In one way or another, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Swift studied and pondered over his book.
All social utopias of the 16th-19th centuries. from Campanella to Morelli, Fontenelle, Denis Veras and Cabet go back to T. Mora's Utopia as its primary source. Utopia was first translated into Russian (from French) in 1790.
Mohr's further literary activity is of much less interest. Written by him in English "The Story of Richard III" and remained unfinished. Nonetheless, this work is one of the earliest examples of a new English humanist historiography, exemplifying a coherent and deeply thought-out historical narrative, and, in addition, written in excellent English prose.
In 1518 More was already at the court of Henry VIII. His wide popularity as a brilliant publicist and philosopher prompted the king to bring him closer to him. Soon Mora's help was needed by the king for his polemic with Luther.
However, Mora subsequently participated in the compilation and editing of books published on behalf of Henry VIII. "The Confirmation of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther" (1521) and "Reply to Martin Luther" (1523) served as a pretext for accusing More of high treason. This happened when Henry broke with Rome and abruptly embarked on the path of the reformation. More refused to recognize the legality of the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and even more sharply objected to Henry's assignment of the title of "head of the Church of England", not wanting to take the oath to the king.
In 1532 he resigned from the post of Lord Chancellor, soon afterwards he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death (1535), which he met courageously, without renouncing his convictions. This was one of the earliest and largest victims of Tudor absolutism.
The largest English scientist and philosopher of the Renaissance was standing at the end of this period Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon, 1561-1626).
Bacon by origin belonged to the new nobility, studied at the University of Cambridge, then lived for some time in Paris. Returning to England, he studied law and became a legal adviser to the Treasury. In 1593 Bacon was elected to parliament, where for some time he spoke in the ranks of the opposition.
Having then retired to his estate, not far from London, he devoted himself to scientific and literary work. After the accession to the throne of Jacob I, Bacon was again attracted to government activities and, continuously moving forward up the ranks, received in 1617 the post of Lord Keeper of the Seal, and in the next - Lord Chancellor, one of the highest positions in the state. However, in 1621 the opposition parliament accused him of abuse and bribery, and Bacon was put on trial; however, his imprisonment did not last long, and although his political activity ended there, he again got the opportunity to devote himself to scientific and literary work.
The flowering of scientific and literary activity Bacon falls on the first decades of the 17th century.
In 1605 he published a treatise "On the success of sciences" , then he wrote a number of philosophical works - on the classification of scientific disciplines, on ancient knowledge on astronomy, natural science, etc.
The most important of them was "New organon" (1620), so named in opposition to Aristotle's Organon. In this work, Bacon severely criticized scholastic science and recommended a new method based on the experimental study of nature.
According to his philosophical views, Bacon is a materialist. Marx calls him "the real ancestor English materialism and all modern experimental science". “Natural science is in his eyes a true science, and physics, based on sensory experience - the most important part of natural science. (...) According to his teaching, the senses infallible and constitute a source all knowledge. Science is experimental science and consists in applying rational method to sensory data. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment are the main conditions of the rational method ... Bacon, as its first creator, materialism still conceals in itself in a naive form the embryos of all-round development. Matter smiles with its poetic and sensual brilliance to the whole person "1.
(1 Marx K. and Engels F. Op. Ed. 2, v. 2, p. 142-143.)
Bacon also occupies an important place in the history of English prose as an author "Experiments" (1597). Written in English, in contrast to his scientific works, which were written or published for the most part in Latin, Bacon's "Experiments" in England caused a number of imitations.
This book consists of small "sketches" or "studies" in which Bacon sets out his views on various issues of philosophy, morality and social life. In a concise but generally understandable form, in a simple but well-honed language, Bacon here discusses "friendship," "truth," "revenge," "travel," "gardening," etc., trying to draw conclusions from direct experience of life or observations of reality and opposing them to abstract reasoning of a book nature.
We find here many bold and unexpected aphorisms and deep glimpses of dialectical thought. The name "Experiments" arose under the influence of the book of the same name by the French humanist writer Montaigne; however, despite several borrowings from Montaigne, Bacon in his entire system of views bears little resemblance to the founder of French skepticism.
Bacon is also the author of a Latin-language utopia "New Atlantis" (1623), in which he glorifies science, considering the progress of scientific technology as the basis for the future happy life of mankind. But in this utopian work of his, Bacon not only does not express such bold ideas about social transformations as Thomas More, but even enters into polemics with him on a number of issues. The reason for this is that in the 20s of the XVII century. the humanistic thought of England was already at the expense.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
LYRICS AND POEMS OF THE XVI CENTURY
English literature of the Renaissance developed in close connection with the literature of other European countries, primarily humanistic Italy.
Throughout the 16th century, Italian literature enjoyed particular popularity in England, being a favorite source of themes, plots and forms for English writers. In the originals and translations in England, the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and various Italian novelists were widely disseminated. "Italomania" was at this time so widespread in various circles of English society that Roger Asham, in his " School teacher»Compared Italy with Circe, whose singing filled all hearts and threatened, in his opinion, the final spoilage of morals. Lovers of Italian literature, he said, "had more respect for the" Triumphs "of Petrarch than for the book of Genesis, and Boccaccio's novels were valued more than the biblical story."
Under the influence of Italian models (and partly French ones, which in turn were under Italian influence), many literary genres were reformed in England and new poetic forms were adopted. First of all, the reform affected poetry. In the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, a circle of court poets transformed English lyrics into Italian style. The most important actors in this reform were Wyeth and Surrey.
Thomas Wyeth(Thomas Wyatt, 1503 - 1542) belonged to a prominent aristocratic family, studied at Cambridge and stood out among the king's entourage for his deep and comprehensive education. In 1527 he visited Italy, and the journey was as important to him as it was to Chaucer. In Italy, he became acquainted with the culture of the Renaissance, became interested in Italian poetry and tried to imitate it in his own poetry.
The main theme of Wyeth's early lyrics is the anxieties and aspirations of love, which he sang sometimes with complete seriousness, sometimes half-jokingly. In the second half of his life, Wyeth performed a number of diplomatic assignments, living in Spain, then in France. Although even now love themes have not completely disappeared from Wyeth's work, more serious tones sounded in his poems, they often heard deep disappointment with court life, and instead of sonnets and love songs of intimate content, he often turned to epigrams and satires. In 1540, Wyeth returned to his homeland, was arrested and charged with high treason. After his release, he retired from the court to his estates, wrote here three satires based on the models of Horace, Persia and the Italians of his day, where he sharply and with great bitterness criticized the court environment and manners, contrasting them with a calm life in the middle of nature, far from the court and the capital.
Wyeth's poetry has a bookish, artificial character. Most of his poems are imitations of foreign models, especially Italian ones. Most of all, Wyeth was fascinated by the poetry of Petrarch and, under his influence, introduced into English literature the sonnet form, until then unknown in England. Of the 32 sonnets Wyeth wrote, 12 are translations of Petrarch's sonnets.
Petrarch's influence is also felt in other works of Wyeth. However, Petrarch attracted Wyeth not so much by the freshness and character of his lyrical experiences as by the peculiar intricacy and even pretentiousness of the form of verbal expression inherent in some of his sonnets. For Wyeth's sonnets, which are somewhat artificial and ponderous, there remains, however, the merit that they introduced this form into English poetry, causing many imitations. In addition to sonnets, Wyeth also wrote, partly based on French models (Clement Marot), rondo and odes (in his understanding - love poems, songs for musical accompaniment); in his poems there are also imitations of Spanish and old English poets (Chaucer).
Even more important than Wyeth's lyrics was the poetry of his successor and friend, Serrey. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, 1517 - 1547), belonged to one of the most noble families in England and, like Wyeth, experienced all the vicissitudes of life at the court of the "bloody" King Henry VIII. Having been close to the king for a number of years, on the basis of several incautious words he said, he was accused of high treason and executed in January 1547, a few days before the death of Henry VIII, becoming one of his last victims.
Serrey's poetry began with the imitation of Wyeth (to whom he dedicated one of his best poems) and his models. Serrey had never been to Italy, but he was deeply imbued with the spirit of Italian poetry. If Wyeth still obediently followed the Italian models, then Serrey already treated them more freely, deviating from the strict form of the Italian sonnet, but following the lyrical essence of this genre, continuing and improving it in English poetry. Much of Serrey's poems are devoted to love themes.
Among other works by Serrey, one should note his translation of two songs from Virgil's Aeneid, which is interesting not only because he is one of the first English quite successful and close to the original translations of the Latin classic, but especially because in this translation for the first time in an English poetry (under Italian influence) applied white verse (iambic pentameter without rhymes), which soon began to play a large role in England, mainly in dramatic poetry (Marlowe and Shakespeare).
The works of Wyeth and Serrey became available to a wider circle of English readers only when they were published by the bookseller R. Tottel in 1557, along with poems by many other authors (the so-called "Tottel Collection" ). Following this book, other similar collections of poetry began to appear.
In particular, it began to be used in England after the pattern of Italian poetry. sonnet shape ... At the end of the XVI century. there were already dozens of "sonnetists" in England. Philip Sydney, Edmund Spencer and, finally, Shakespeare were considered among the best authors of sonnets.
Philip Sydney(Philip Sidney, 1554 - 1586) was born in the ancestral castle in Kent County to a prominent aristocratic family, studied at Oxford University, after which he was appointed a member of the embassy, which was being sent to France. In Paris, he continued to study, but also moved at court and made acquaintance with a number of French Huguenot writers.
St. Bartholomew's night (24 August 572) forced him to hastily leave France; thus began the time of his wanderings in Europe. Sydney went to Frankfurt am Main, then to Vienna, visited Hungary, Italian lands, Prague, a number of German cities and returned to his homeland through Holland.
We can say that he traveled all over Europe and at the same time visited all the main centers of the then humanist education and the reformation movement, of which he was an ardent supporter.
In England, Sydney was invited to the court and here for the first time he saw Penelope Dever, the daughter of the Earl of Essex, whom he later sang under the name of Stella in a collection of sonnets ( Astrofel and Stella , ed. in 1591). Court intrigues forced Sydney to retire to his sister's rural castle, and here he wrote the most important of his works - a pastoral novel "Arcadia" , which also includes many of his lyric poems, and a treatise "Defense of Poetry" (1579-1580).
Subsequently, Sydney returned to the court, but then in 1585 he joined the British troops sent to the Netherlands to fight against Catholic Spain, and was killed here in one of the battles.
The greatest poet of the English Renaissance is Edmund Spencer (Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599). If his predecessors were guided mainly by foreign literature, then on the basis of the same influences of Italian (and partly French) poetry he tried to create a purely English, national poetry.
The environment in which Spencer was raised bears little resemblance to the environment in which Wyeth, Surrey, or Sydney lived.
He did not come from an aristocratic or wealthy family, but received a solid classical education at the University of Cambridge. In 1578 we find him in London, where his university comrades led him into the houses of Sydney and Leicester, through which he probably gained access to the court. By this time, Spencer created "Shepherd's calendar" and probably the beginning of work on the poem Fairy Queen ... Since Spencer was not financially secure to live without service, friends procured him a place as personal secretary of Lord Gray in Ireland.
In 1589 Spencer returned to London and lived in the capital itself or not far from it for about a decade, completely devoted to literary creativity. In 1590, the first three books of the poem were published in London Fairy Queen dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, who brought him literary fame; Despite the small annual pension assigned to him by Elizabeth, Spencer's material affairs were far from brilliant, and he again began to think about some kind of official position. In 1598 he was sheriff in a small Irish borough, but this year there was a major rebellion in Ireland. Spencer's house was ransacked and burned; he himself fled to London and soon died here in extremely straitened circumstances.
Shortly before his death, he wrote a prosaic treatise "On the current state of Ireland" ... Contemporaries argued that it was this essay, which contained a lot of truth about the brutal exploitation and ruin of the Irish by the British authorities, that was the reason for Queen Elizabeth's anger at Spencer, who deprived him of any material support.
Spencer's first printed poems were his translations of six sonnets of Petrarch (1569); later they were revised and published together with his translations from the poets of the French Pleiades.
Another work of Spencer attracted great attention, the idea of which was inspired by F. Sydney - "Shepherd's calendar" (1579). It consists of twelve poetic eclogs, consistently referring to the 12 months of the year. In one of the bottom it is told how a shepherd (under the guise of which Spencer brings himself out) suffers from love for the unapproachable Rosalind, in another, Elizabeth is praised, "the queen of all shepherds", in the third - representatives of Protestantism and Catholicism act as shepherds, leading disputes among themselves on religious and social topics, etc.
The sixteenth century is the most dramatic in the annals of England, the most glorious in the history of its literature. Are there any more picturesque figures in the gallery of English monarchs than Henry VIII and the great Elizabeth? Is there a victory more legendary than the defeat of the Spanish Invincible Armada? Is there a poet more glorious than Shakespeare? In just a hundred years, the country on the outskirts of Europe, torn apart by civil strife, turned into a great power, ready to fight for its primacy in all oceans, went almost from a broken trough to that England, which would soon be rightfully called the "Lady of the Sea."
The English Renaissance largely coincided with the Tudor era. The starting point should be considered the Battle of Botsworth (1485), in which the king fell Richard III, the notorious villain from Shakespeare's play of the same name. Thus ended the wars of the Scarlet and White Rose. Both bushes, scarlet - York and white - Lancaster, were plucked to a flower, and Henry VII (1485-1509), the founder of the new Tudor dynasty, ascended the throne. The country was drained of blood, noble lords were killed, French possessions were almost completely lost. Exactly seven years after the Battle of Botsworth, in 1492, Columbus will discover America and begin the great race for the lands and treasures of the New World. Most of this fatty pie will be captured by Spain at first. But Henry Tudor (let's give him his due), despite his proverbial tight-fistedness, even then did not spare money for the development of the English fleet. And the results were evident - during the reign of his glorious daughter Elizabeth.
Not the lust for power of kings, but the very logic of things pushed the country, tired of strife, to an absolute monarchy. Henry VII was already guided by this, and even more so was his son Henry VIII Tudor(1509-1547). In the end, he established full power not only over the state, but also over the English Church, proclaiming himself its supreme head (1534). This meant a break with the pope, but here the English were no longer the first; the Anti-Pope Restoration, begun by the Wittenberg Doctor of Theology Luther, had already won by that time in many German lands, as well as in Holland; over time, England will increasingly begin to focus on its Protestant allies in Europe.
Henry VIII went down in history as a despot and "Bluebeard" on the English throne. He was a domineering and stubborn king who strengthened and rallied the country - but at the same time also split it according to the religious principle, which will still be reflected a century later, in the era of the English Revolution and the Civil War. He was highly educated, encouraged humanistic knowledge and Renaissance culture; it was under him that it became indecent for the young courtier not to play music, not sing, not write poetry. But this art lover, without pity, sent the great Thomas More to the scaffold, executed the Earl of Sarri and a number of other court poets. The crowned knight, who fought in tournaments for the honor of beautiful ladies and composed madrigals for them with his own hand, without hesitation, betrayed his wife Queen Anne Boleyn to the executioner, and then Queen Elizabeth Howard; it was also good that the king did not execute all his wives (he had six of them), but only after one.
Henry's young son Edward VI, crowned in 1547 (he is described in the novel by Mark Twain "The Prince and the Pauper"), was terminally ill and did not rule for long. After him, the throne was seized by Henry's daughter from his first marriage with Catherine of Aragon, Mary Tudor(1553-1558). Having married the Spanish prince Philip, she abruptly turned England back to Catholicism. If some ten years ago, those who remained faithful to the Catholic faith and did not recognize the royal "Act of Suprematism" were executed, now tens and hundreds of those who did not want to return under the authority of the Roman Church went to the stake and under the executioner's ax. Not surprisingly, when Mary the Catholic died, many Englishmen breathed a sigh of relief. the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Tudor (1558–1603), came to power and began one of the longest reigns in English history.
Time has shown what "Machiavelli in a Skirt" was the new queen. Seriously educated, fluent in several languages, she also possessed exceptional political and diplomatic talents. At that time, there was a prejudice against women on the throne; but Elizabeth was able to turn this "drawback" to her advantage, turn it into a trump card. She offered the people an idea virgin queens as a symbol of the mystical union between the monarch and the state. The calculation was accurate: a woman is a sinful Eve, from whom all troubles, but a virgin is the Most Holy Mary, from whom salvation comes. Elizabeth never got married, the crown replaced her wedding crown. But moreover - that's what is curious! - remaining as if betrothed to the English people, the queen, throughout her reign, negotiated marriage with many European rulers, using herself as a decoy, and the prospective marriage as a powerful lever of politics, and skillfully, for years, led the applicants by the nose - in particular, the Spanish king Philip.
Gradually and without sudden movements, Elizabeth restored the Anglican Church, which, according to its dogmas and structure, realizes a kind of compromise between Catholicism and Lutheranism. At the same time, two wings of radicals were formed: Catholics, supporters of the Pope, and Puritans, who stood for complete liberation from Roman rites, with each of which the state had to fight in the future. Especially dangerous were the Catholics, who were supported not only by the continental powers, but also by Scotland, independent of England, and the northern counties adjacent to it. Elizabeth had to fear the Scottish Queen Mary Stuart, her cousin, who was predicted by the northerners to the throne of England. Fortunately for Elizabeth, Mary became entangled in amorous intrigues and, accused of involvement in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, was forced to flee to England, where she soon found herself in the position of a prisoner. In 1586, when Spain was actively preparing for an attack on England, Elizabeth's secret service developed and carried out an operation (one might say, a provocation) to involve Mary Stuart in criminal correspondence with Spain and received all the evidence she needed. The Scottish Queen was charged with conspiracy against England, tried and executed on February 8, 1587. The following year, the Spanish Invincible Armada of 134 ships with a huge expeditionary force on board sailed to the shores of England, intending to end the "heretic queen" once and for all, but was decisively attacked by the English fleet in the English Channel, near the port of Calais. The defeat was completed by a storm that sunk many Spanish ships; only the pitiful remnants of the Armada managed to return to their homeland.
The victory over the Invincible Armada inspired the British. The fight against the Spaniards at sea, which until then had an episodic character - remember the pirate exploits of Francis Drake, knighted by Elizabeth! - took the character of a real naval war: raids on the Spanish colonies in America, the capture of the "gold" and "silver fleets" going from there to the metropolis, attacks on the port cities in Spain itself (for example, the capture of Cadiz in 1596). British volunteers and regular units fought in the Netherlands, helping the young Dutch Republic to resist the same Spaniards. At the same time, international trade expanded. Since 1554, the Moscow Company existed, sending its ships to Arkhangelsk every summer; in 1581, the Levantine Company was founded to trade with the Middle East, and in 1600, the famous East India Company was founded. The British tried to gain a foothold on the shores of the New World. Sir Walter Raleigh made an expedition to Guiana, on the banks of the Orinoco River, where he sought the golden land of El Dorado. On his own initiative, the first English colony in North America, Virginia, was founded.
All this news, innovations and achievements became public domain - through royal and parliamentary decrees, travel reports, flyers with ballads on topical topics, through theatrical performance, finally. The horizons of the average Englishman broadened dramatically, the country felt itself standing at a great historical and geographical crossroads; and it is no coincidence that precisely these years of patriotic upsurge coincided with the years of rapid flourishing of English theater, poetry and drama.
The first English Renaissance poet, in fact, was already Geoffrey Chaucer (1340? -1400) - a contemporary of Boccaccio and Petrarch. His poem Troilus and Cressida, along with the poems of the Italians, served as a direct model for English poets of the 16th century from Wyatt to Shakespeare. But Chaucer's heirs failed to build on his achievements. The century after Chaucer's death was a time of poetic reversal, a prolonged pause. Perhaps this is due to the political instability of England in the 15th century? Judge for yourself. In the XIV century - the 50-year reign of Edward III - and the appearance of Chaucer. In the 15th century - the leapfrog of kings, the War of the Roses - and not a single great poet. In the 16th century, the 38-year reign of Henry VIII and the first flowering of poetry, then the 45-year reign of Elizabeth and all the highest achievements of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare. It turns out that stability is important for poetry, even if it is tough power or despotism. There is something to think about here.
Of course, there were other reasons for the flourishing of English poetry. One, quite obvious, is the beginning of English printing by William Caxton in 1477. Since then, the number of books published in England has grown in geometric progression directly affecting the rise national education- school and university. Among the first books published by Caxton were Chaucer's half-forgotten poems, which thus became the property of the general public.
However, in the 16th century, the development of English poetry was uneven: after the execution of the Earl of Sarri in 1547, there was a hitch for three decades - until such star names as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh appeared on the poetry horizon. Only in the 1580s does the acceleration begin, and in the last decade of the Elizabethan era - a sharp rise: Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne.
English Renaissance culture is literary-centric. Alas, she cannot boast of masterpieces of painting or sculpture. Whether the lack of sun or the predominance of imagination over observation, characteristic of peoples northern forests- Germans and Celts, let's not guess, but the fact remains: the cultural hero of the British was not an artist, but a poet. Writing in 16th century England became a real mania. Not to mention the fact that the art of poetry was considered an indispensable part of knightly perfection and in this capacity it spread at court and in high society, the same poems - through school education, theater, through books and ballads-leaflets - entered the life of almost all literate classes ... Rarely has a London apprentice been unable to compose a sonnet, or even a couple of rhymed stanzas, if necessary. Not only friendly messages and love notes were written with poems, but also scholarly, edifying, historical, geographical and so on books.
The Age of Rhymes; all around and teeming
Poems, poems ... no, I'll save you from poems, -
Ben Johnson said sarcastically. Of course, poetry is not yet poetry, and quantity does not always turn into quality ... although in the end it does. "A Rhyming Age" was at its peak as an age of poetic geniuses.
Poems, as we have already said, then existed at different levels. They could serve as a means of communication or an instrument of a court career - high nobles were not insensitive to poetic flattery; and at the same time, poetry was perceived as art, that is, service to the beautiful. But it was not fitting for a poet-nobleman to publish his poems, that is, to make them the property of an outside public. Neither Wyatt nor Sidney lifted a finger to publicize their poems, their ambition did not go beyond the narrow circle of connoisseurs, "dedicated".
The situation began to change only towards the end of the century, when a new generation of common writers entered literature. In an effort to gain support, they dedicated their books to nobles - patrons of the arts or the monarch herself. A professional writer, in essence, cannot exist without material protection - either a philanthropist or the public. But the book trade was not yet developed enough for a poet to live (or simply survive) on his poems. Only the heyday of theaters in Shakespeare's era gave the poet-playwright such an opportunity. Writers such as Shakespeare and Johnson actually used both forms of support — the overbearing patron and the theater crowd. Few, who wrote only "for the soul", managed to pass between Scylla and Charybdis: for example, we include among them the most talented student of John Donne, the priest George Herbert.
The poetry of the Renaissance was closely connected with the monarchy, with the life of the royal court. The first major poet of the Tudor era John Skelton was first the Latin teacher of Prince Henry (the future king), and then something like a court jester. The author of the first English sonnets Thomas Wyatt romantic legend associates with Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII; when the unfortunate queen fell, he only narrowly escaped death. George Gascoigne, the best poet of the middle of the century, all his life tried to attract the attention of the court, to enter the favor of the ruling monarch - and died, barely reaching the desired goal. Philip Sidney, "English Petrarch", after his heroic death on the battlefield was canonized as an exemplary knight and poet, received state splendor funerals and posthumous honors. Walter Raleigh, widely known as a soldier, politician, scientist and navigator, also possessed a first-class literary gift; Raleigh's poems to the "Virgin Queen" belong to the finest colors of her poetic wreath. Elizabeth herself dedicated poetry to her favorite, faithful "Sir Walter". Alas, after the death of the old queen, the wheel of Fortune turned: the powerful favorite was a prisoner of the Tower, and "the smartest head in the kingdom" eventually fell, cut off by the executioner's hand.
It is easy to multiply examples of how literary affairs intertwined with state affairs. Many of these stories are tragic; but the main thing is different. The poems were given importance. Yes, sometimes denunciations were written against their authors, they could be arrested and even killed. And at the same time, princes and nobles considered it their duty to provide patronage to poets, their works were copied and carefully stored. Without poets and the brilliance of the court, and the life of the state as a whole, and inner world the individual were incomplete. When Charles I was executed, he took two books with him to the scaffold: a prayer book and Philip Sidney's pastoral-lyrical Arcadia. This symbolic gesture ended an entire era: in puritanical, bourgeois England, poetry took a fundamentally different place. It was only a century and a half later that romantic poets resurrected Shakespeare's age and re-appreciated the rich heritage of their Renaissance poetry.
Today, peering through the thickness of translucent time, we see: this is the whole Atlantis, a huge continent that has sunk under water. Hundreds of poets, thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of lines of poetry. The thirty or so authors presented here are just a small selection of this amazing variety. It is involuntarily subjective, although it includes all the main names of that era. Of the poets of the first row, only Edmund Spencer represented nominally by a single sonnet: if it were a well-balanced anthology, at least one passage should be given from his illustrious Fairy Queen, an allegorical poem glorifying Queen Elizabeth.
Of the poets, relatively speaking, the second row with special regret had to be omitted John Davis, whose main works, the poems "Nosce Teipsum" and "Orchestra", would hardly have been perceived in scanty passages, and there was simply no room for more in the book. Of the poetesses, I wanted to present, first of all, Isabella Whittney, who published in 1573 the first book of poetry written by a woman in England. But her witty "Testament to Londoners", in which she writes to her readers all of her beloved London - a detailed guide to the streets, shops and markets of the city - in translation would inevitably lose both its authenticity and charm. In general, the final part of the work on this book was the most painful, because I had to voluntarily give up a lot and a lot - for the sake of compactness and harmony, constantly calling for order the widening eyes. And yet I wanted to reflect the breadth and scope of the poetic era, the variety of genres, themes and author's personalities. Along with the classics of Shakespeare and Donne, the reader will find here also masterpieces of poetry belonging to the pen of lesser-known poets, for example, poetry Chidika Tichborna composed before execution () or Thomas Nash... The book also includes poems by royalty: Henry VIII, Elizabeth and James I, as well as unnamed songs and ballads. Dramatic poetry is represented by two excerpts from little-known tragedies - "Werewolf" Thomas Middleton and George Chapman, and the genre of the epigram is half-forgotten Thomas Bastard.
This book covers mainly the Tudor era - from Henry to Elizabeth. The poetry of the times of Jacob Stuart is reflected only in the works of authors already familiar, that is, "smoothly passed" into the new century and new reign (including Donna and Johnson), as well as the names of their students George Herbert and Robert Gerrick... The final section is devoted to Andrew Marvell; this is a completely different era - the English Revolution and the protectorate of Cromwell. And yet (this is the inertia of style) Marvell's poetry is still largely Renaissance, it is the completion of the traditions of both the English Petrarchists and English metaphysicians - a kind of epilogue and drawing a line under what the poets of the 16th century did.
Shakespeare's work is the pinnacle of the English renaissance and the highest synthesis of the traditions of common European culture
INTRODUCTION
a) classic sonnet;
b) Shakespeare's sonnet.
CONCLUSION
"The soul of our century, the miracle of our stage, it belongs not to one century, but to all times," wrote his younger contemporary, the English playwright Ben Johnson, about Shakespeare. Shakespeare is called the greatest humanist of the late Renaissance, one of the greatest writers in the world, the pride of all mankind.
Representatives of many literary schools and trends at different times turned to his work in search of actual moral and aesthetic solutions. The endless variety of forms that is born under such a powerful influence is somehow progressive in nature, whether it be quotes in the satirical "Opera of the Beggars" by John Gay or passionate lines in the political tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, the image of "healthy art" in the tragedy of Johann Goethe's "Faust" or the democratic ideas expressed in the article-manifesto by François Guizot, a keen interest in the inner state of personality among English romantics or "a free and broad portrayal of characters" in Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov ...
This, probably, can explain the phenomenon of "immortality" of Shakespeare's creative legacy - an indisputably great poetic gift that refracts the most acute moral conflicts hidden in the very nature of human relations, is perceived and rethought by each subsequent era in a new aspect characteristic only of this moment, while remaining a product (so to speak) of its era, which absorbed all the experience of previous generations and realized the creative potential accumulated by them.
To prove that Shakespeare's work is the pinnacle of the English Renaissance and the highest synthesis of the traditions of the European Renaissance culture (without claiming the laurels of George Brandes, who presented this topic quite extensively and significantly in his work "William Shakespeare" (1896)) I, perhaps , I will take on the example of his USonetovF, as a genre that was born on the eve of the era in question and precisely during the Renaissance, and in the subsequent XVII century, experiencing the time of its highest flowering.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE RENAISSANCE
Renaissance (Renaissance), a period in the cultural and ideological development of the countries of Western and Central Europe (in Italy, the XIV-XVI centuries, in other countries, the end of the XV-early XVII centuries), a transition from medieval culture to the culture of modern times.
Distinctive features of the culture of the Renaissance: anti-feudalism at its core, secular, anti-Clerical character, humanistic worldview, appeal to the cultural heritage of antiquity, as it were, "revival" of it (hence the name).
The renaissance arose and was most clearly manifested in Italy, where already at the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries. its forerunners were the poet Dante, the artist Giotto and others. The creativity of the Renaissance figures is imbued with faith in the limitless possibilities of man, his will and reason, the denial of Catholic scholasticism and asceticism (humanistic ethics). The pathos of affirming the ideal of a harmonious, liberated creative personality, beauty and harmony of reality, an appeal to man as the highest principle of being, a sense of wholeness and harmonious regularity of the universe give the Renaissance art a great ideological significance, a majestic heroic scale.
In architecture, secular structures began to play a leading role - public buildings, palaces, city houses. Using arched galleries, colonnades, vaults, baths, architects (Alberti, Palladio in Italy; Lescaut, Delorme in France, etc.) gave their buildings majestic clarity, harmony and proportionality to man.
Artists (Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and others in Italy; Jan van Eyck, Bruegel in the Netherlands; Dürer, Niethardt - in Germany; Fouquet, Goujon, Clouet in France) consistently mastered the reflection of all the richness of reality - the transmission volume, space, light, depicting a human figure (including a nude one) and a real environment - an interior, a landscape.
Renaissance literature created such monuments of enduring value as "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (1533 - 1552) by Rabelais, Shakespeare's dramas, the novel "Don Quixote" (1605 - 1615) by Cervantes, etc., organically combining interest in antiquity with an appeal to folk culture, the pathos of the comic with the tragedy of being. Petrarch's sonnets, Boccaccio's novellas, Aristo's heroic poem, philosophical grotesque (Erasmus of Rotterdam's treatise Praise of Folly, 1511), Montaigne's essays - in different genres, individual forms and national variants embodied the ideas of the Renaissance.
In music imbued with a humanistic outlook, vocal and instrumental polyphony develops, new genres of secular music appear - solo song, cantata, oratorio and opera, contributing to the establishment of homophony.
During the Renaissance, outstanding scientific discoveries were made in the field of geography, astronomy, and anatomy. The ideas of the Renaissance contributed to the destruction of feudal-religious ideas and in many ways objectively met the needs of the nascent bourgeois society.
REBIRTH IN ENGLAND
In England, the Renaissance began somewhat later than, for example, in Italy, and here it had its own important differences.
It was a difficult and bloody time in England. Inside the country, there was a hard struggle with those who did not want her to free herself from the influence of the Vatican. The ideas of the Renaissance were affirmed in the struggle. England was at war with Spain, which protected the power of Catholicism throughout Europe.
Naturally, the first to express in books the thoughts and feelings of modern times were humanists. They could not only talk about how wonderful it is to be human - they saw the suffering of ordinary Englishmen. At the beginning of the XVI century. appeared the book of the first great humanist of England Thomas More "Utopia". It described the fictional island of Utopia - a society of the future, where justice, equality, and abundance reign. Thomas More's book had a huge impact not only on his contemporaries, but also on the development of communist ideas in the future.
The ideas of the Renaissance in England were most strongly embodied on the stages of theaters. A large group of talented playwrights worked in the English theater - Green, Marlowe, Kid and others. They are usually called the predecessors of Shakespeare, whose work absorbed and developed all the best that was in their works.
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF THE RENAISSANCE OUTLOOK
Since the XV century. there are a number of changes in the socio-economic and spiritual life of Western Europe, marking the beginning of the period under consideration. Socio-economic changes (the emergence of conditions for the formation of modern European nations and modern bourgeois society, the emergence of the foundations for the later world trade and the transition of handicrafts to manufacture, etc.) were accompanied by significant changes in mentality. The process of secularization determines the independence of all areas of cultural and social life in relation to the church, including science, philosophy and art.
In the era under consideration, a new "renaissance" interpretation of being appears in philosophy, the foundations of the new European dialectic are laid.
Realizing itself as the revival of ancient culture, the ancient way of thinking and feeling, and opposing itself, thereby, to medieval Christianity, the Renaissance nevertheless arose as a result of the development of medieval culture. The most important distinguishing feature of the Renaissance worldview is its orientation towards art. If the focus of antiquity was natural and cosmic life, in the Middle Ages - God and the idea of salvation associated with him, then in the Renaissance, man is in the center.
Man did not feel such power and power over everything that exists either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. He does not need the grace of God, without which, as it was believed in the Middle Ages, he could not cope with the shortcomings of his "sinful nature." He himself is now a creator. Thus, in the Renaissance, creative activity acquires a kind of sacred character - with its help he creates a new world, creates beauty, creates himself. It was this era that gave the world a number of outstanding individuals with a bright temperament, all-round education, strong will, determination, and tremendous energy.
A sophisticated artistic taste everywhere recognized and emphasized the originality and uniqueness of each individual, not taking into account that the intrinsic value of individuality means the absolutization of the aesthetic approach to a person, while personality is a rather moral and ethical category. These are the heroes of Shakespeare - the distinctive personality traits (the ability to recognize good and evil, to act in accordance with this distinction and be responsible for their actions), it seems to me, are replaced by purely aesthetic criteria (how and how does the hero differ from everyone else, how original his actions are ). We can easily find examples of this in each of Shakespeare's works.
It is not by chance, in my opinion, that the heyday of the sonnet fell precisely during the Renaissance and the anthropocentric thinking of this period, the Renaissance interpretation of dialectics contributed to the emergence of outstanding creative personalities, gave a powerful progressive impetus to both science and art.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORK
Biographical information about Shakespeare is scarce and often inaccurate. Researchers believe that he began performing as a playwright in the late 80s of the 16th century. Shakespeare's surname first appeared in print in 1593 in a dedication to the Earl of Southampton in the poem Venus and Adonis. Meanwhile, by that time at least six plays by the playwright had already been staged on the stage.
Early plays are imbued with a life-affirming beginning: the comedy "The Taming of the Shrew" (1593), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1596), "Much Ado About Nothing" (1598), the tragedy "Romeo and Juliet" (1595) .). The historical chronicles "Richard III" (1593), "Henry IV" (1597-98) capture the crisis of the feudal system. The deepening of social contradictions led to Shakespeare's transition to the genre of tragedy - Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), Macbeth (1606). Socio-political issues are characteristic of the so-called "Roman" tragedies: "Julius Caesar" (1599), "Antony and Cleopatra" (1607), "Coriolanus" (1607). The search for an optimistic solution to social tragedies led to the creation of the romantic dramas "Cymbelin" (1610), "Winter's Tale" (1611), "The Tempest" (1612), which have the shade of a kind of instructive parable. Shakespeare's Canon (his undoubted plays) includes 37 dramas, written mainly in white verse. Subtle penetration into the psychology of heroes, vivid imagery, public interpretation of personal experiences, deep lyricism distinguish these truly great works that have survived the centuries, have become an invaluable asset and an integral part of world culture.
IMAGE-THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE "SONETS" CYCLE
Shakespeare owns a cycle of 154 sonnets, published (without the knowledge and consent of the author) in 1609, but written, apparently, back in the 1590s (in any case, already in 1598, a message about him flashed in the press. " sweet sonnets, known to close friends ") and was one of the most brilliant examples of Western European lyric poetry of the Renaissance. Having managed to become popular among English poets, the form under the pen of Shakespeare sparkled with new facets, containing a vast range of feelings and thoughts - from intimate experiences to deep philosophical reflections and generalizations. Researchers have long drawn attention to the close connection between sonnets and Shakespeare's drama. This connection is manifested not only in the organic fusion of the lyrical element with the tragic, but also in the fact that the ideas of passion that inspire Shakespeare's tragedies also live in his sonnets. Just as in tragedies, Shakespeare touches in sonnets the fundamental problems of existence that have worried mankind for centuries, talks about happiness and the meaning of life, about the relationship between time and eternity, about the transience of human beauty and its greatness, about art that can overcome the inexorable run of time. , about the high mission of the poet.
The eternal inexhaustible theme of love, one of the central themes in the sonnets, is closely intertwined with the theme of friendship. In love and friendship, the poet finds a true source of creative inspiration, regardless of whether they bring him joy and bliss or the pangs of jealousy, sadness, mental anguish.
Thematically, the entire cycle is usually divided into two groups: it is believed that the first
(1 - 126) is addressed to the poet's friend, the second (127 - 154) - to his beloved - "swarthy lady". The poem that distinguishes these two groups (perhaps precisely because of its special role in the general row), strictly speaking, is not a sonnet: it has only 12 lines and an adjacent arrangement of rhymes.
The leitmotif of sorrow about the frailty of everything earthly, passing through the entire cycle, the poet's clearly aware of the imperfection of the world does not violate the harmony of his attitude. The illusion of afterlife bliss is alien to him - he sees human immortality in glory and posterity, advising his friend to see his youth reborn in children.
In the literature of the Renaissance, the theme of friendship, especially male, occupies an important place: it is viewed as the highest manifestation of humanity. In such a friendship, the dictates of reason are harmoniously combined with a spiritual inclination, free from the sensual principle.
Sonnets dedicated to the beloved are no less significant. Her image is emphatically unconventional. If in the sonnets of Petrarch and his English followers (Petrarchists) a golden-haired, angelic beauty, proud and inaccessible, was usually sung, Shakespeare, on the contrary, devotes jealous reproaches to a swarthy brunette - inconsistent, obeying only the voice of passion.
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in the first period of creativity, when he still retained faith in the triumph of humanistic ideals. Even despair in the famous 66th sonnet finds an optimistic outlet in the "sonnet key". Love and friendship are still acting, as in "Romeo and Juliet", a force that affirms the harmony of opposites. Hamlet's break with Ophelia is still ahead, as is the disruption of consciousness embodied in the Danish prince. A few years will pass - and the victory of the humanistic ideal will be relegated to the distant future for Shakespeare.
The most remarkable thing about Shakespeare's sonnets is the constant feeling of inner contradiction human feeling: that which is the source of the highest bliss, inevitably gives rise to suffering and pain, and vice versa, happiness is born in severe torment.
This confrontation of feelings in the most natural way, no matter how complex Shakespeare's metaphorical system is, fits into the sonnet form, in which dialectic is inherent "by nature."
DIALECTIC CHARACTER OF SONNETIC FORM
CLASSIC SONNET
A relatively small number of so-called solid forms - strictly canonized and stable stanza combinations - exist among a huge variety of poetic works of various genres. In terms of popularity and prevalence, none of the solid forms - the Italian and French (Middle Ages) triolette, virile, sextina, Iranian gazelle, or tanka from Japanese poetry - can compare with the sonnet.
Appearing around the beginning of the XIII century. in Italy (sonnet - from Italian Sonet (song), based on the word Son (sound)), this genre very quickly acquired the canonical rules formulated in 1332 by the Padua lawyer Antonio da Tempo, later repeatedly refined and tightened.
The most stable structural features of the classic sonnet:
- stable volume - 14 lines;
- clear division into four stanzas: two quatrains (quatrains) and two three verses (tercets);
- strict repetition of rhymes - in quatrains there are usually two rhymes four times, in tercets the other three rhymes twice or two rhymes three times);
- stable rhyme system - the preferred "French" sequence: abba abba ccd eed (or ccd ede), "Italian": abab abab cdc dcd (or cde cde);
- constant size - usually this is the most common size in national poetry: five- or six-foot iambic in Russian, German, Dutch, Scandinavian poetry; pentameter - in English; eleven-syllable verse - in Italy, Spain and Portugal; the so-called Alexandrian verse - twelve syllables with a caesura in the middle - in a classic French sonnet.
In addition, the sonnet canon also contains some other more or less universal requirements:
- each of the four parts (quatrains and terzets) should have, as a rule, internal syntactic completeness and integrity;
- quatrains and tercets differ in intonation - the melodiousness of the former is replaced by the dynamism and expression of the latter;
- rhymes should preferably be precise and sonorous, and a regular change of masculine rhymes (with an emphasis on the last syllable) is recommended;
- it is highly undesirable to repeat the same words in the text (with the exception of conjunctions, pronouns, etc.), unless this is dictated by the conscious intention of the author.
The subjects of the sonnets are extremely diverse - a person with his deeds, feelings and the spiritual world; the nature that surrounds him; expression of the inner world of a person through the images of nature; a society in which a person exists. The sonnet form is equally successfully used in love-psychological and philosophical, in descriptive, landscape, political lyrics. Through her, both tender feelings and angry pathos, sharp satire are perfectly conveyed. And yet the specificity of the form is primarily due to the universal adaptation to the transmission of the sensation of the dialectic of being.
In the work of Johannes R. Becher "The Philosophy of a Sonnet, or Small Instructions on a Sonnet" the definition of a sonnet as dialectical genre .
According to Becher, the sonnet reflects the main stages of the dialectical movement of life, feeling or thought from the thesis, through antithesis to synthesis (position - opposition - removal of opposites). In the classical form of a sonnet, the first quatrain contains the thesis, the second contains the antithesis, and the tercets (sextet) contain the synthesis. But "the relationship between position and opposition is extremely complex, and, perhaps, at first glance, imperceptible, as well as the removal of both opposites in the final part."
All the basic requirements of the sonnet canon are firmly connected with the dialectical nature of this poetic form and arose in the search for the most perfect way to embody the dialectical content. Nevertheless, the ways of conveying the forms of movement of human thought, realizing its internal dialectics, are infinitely varied in the sonnet. The sonnet canon is not as motionless as it might seem at first glance. Non-canonical sonnet forms include, for example, "tailed sonnets" (sonnets with a coda - an additional verse, one or more tercets), "overturned sonnet" - begins with tercets and ends with quatrains, "headless sonnet" - the first quatrain is absent, "lame sonnet" - the fourth verses of the quatrains are shorter than the others, etc.
SHAKESPEAR'S SONNET
The very history of the sonnet form is deeply dialectical: the inner stability and stability of the canon is combined with its constant movement and improvement.
Until now, many dictionaries refer to the "Shakespearean" sonnet conventionally as an English rhyme. Although the first English poets interested in this genre probably did not realize that they were daringly violating the sonnet canon.
The poets Thomas Wyeth and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, created their sonnets in the 1530s. Undoubtedly, the stimulus for them was the acquaintance with the sonnets of Petrarch and his Italian followers. In addition, they have been to France on several occasions. Thus, their sonnets were built according to the scheme: abba abba cdd cee. But in the first editions, the breakdown into quatrains and tercets was most often not indicated, so soon this scheme began to be perceived as a combination of three quatrains and a couplet: abba abba cddc ee. Serrey takes another step in violation of the classical canon - in twelve out of sixteen sonnets, he breaks the poem into three quatrains with cross rhyme and the final couplet with paired rhyme: abab cdcd efef gg, that is, he is not limited to a sextet, like the French poets and Wyeth, but rebuilds the whole structure of the sonnet.
The researchers explain the use of paired rhymes at the end of a sonnet and cross rhymes in quatrains by the influence of the English ballad, and also partly by the fact that the English language is relatively poor in rhymes. In addition, the presence of a "sonnet key" (the final couplet with a paired rhyme) met the tastes of English poets, their predilection for the epigrammatic completeness of the poem.
Shakespeare's hand made the norm what was only a timid attempt by his predecessors. The type of sonnet that Serrey introduced into English poetry was called "Shakespearean" and after Shakespeare became the national English version of the canon.
CONCLUSION
So, using the example of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which are an integral part and, in my opinion, a fairly vivid example of his work, one can come to the following conclusions:
1). The changes developed and consolidated by Shakespeare in the national English version of the sonnet canon, called "Shakespeare's", not without reason allow us to consider his "Sonnets", as part of creativity, the pinnacle of the English Renaissance.
2). The traditions of the common European Renaissance culture, defined as the revival of the ancient way of thinking and feeling and being at the same time the result of the development of medieval culture, created the conditions for the emergence of outstanding creative personalities, which is undoubtedly W. Shakespeare. The figurative-thematic system and the very form of his "Sonnets" reflect the anthropocentric thinking of this period, revealing the complex inner world of the great poet on the basis of modern European dialectics, brilliantly embodying his creative intention. Thus, the work of W. Shakespeare can be considered the highest synthesis of the traditions of the common European Renaissance culture.
LITERATURE
The material of this section is based on the introductory article by Z.I. Plavskin to the book UWestern European SonnetF, L .: Publishing house Leningrad University, 1998
I would like to note that there is a solid cycle (poem), consisting of 15 architectonically related sonnets (the last line of the first verse is the first of the next, and from the first lines of 14 sonnets the 15th C "highway" is compiled, which carries the main semantic load), which carries a poetic the name "wreath of sonnets".
Becher I.R. Philosophy of a Sonnet, or Small Instructions on a Sonnet // Voprosy literatury. 1965. No. 10. P.194.
