Chaucer’s age was followed by the period of Renaissance. Renaissance (“rebirth”) is the name applied to the period of European history following the Middle Ages; it is commonly said to have begun in Italy in the late fourteenth century and to have continued in Western Europe through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this period the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature reached an eminence not exceeded by any civilization in any age.
The development came late to England in the sixteenth century, and did not have its flowering until the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; sometimes, in fact, Milton (1608-1674) is said to be the last great Renaissance poet.
Many attempts have been made to define “the Renaissance,” as though one essence underlay the complex features of the culture of numerous countries over several hundred years. It has been described as the birth of the modern world out of the ashes of the dark ages; as the discovery of the world and the discovery of man; as the era of untrammeled individualism in life, thought, religion and art.
Recently some historians, finding that these attributes were present in various people and places in the Middle Ages, and also that many elements long held to be medieval survived into the Renaissance, have denied that the Renaissance ever existed.
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It is true that history is a continuous process, and that “periods” are invented not by God but by historians; but the concept of a period is a convenience, if not a necessity, of historical analysis, and one is able to identify, during the span of the Renaissance, a number of events and discoveries which in the course of time altered radically the views, productions, and manner of life of the intellectual classes.
All these events may be regarded as putting a strain on the relatively closed and stable world of the great civilization of the later Middle Ages, when most of the essential truths about man, the universe, religion, and philosophy were held to be well known and permanently established. The full impact of many of these Renaissance developments did not make itself felt until the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but the very fact that they occurred in this period indicates the vitality, the audacity, and the restless curiosity of many men of the Renaissance, whether scholars, thinkers, artists, or adventurers.
John Lydgate:
John Lydgate (c. 1370-1451) was a monk at the Benedictine Monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk. Perhaps his most interesting piece of work is his London Lack penny, an agreeable and lively set of verses describing the woes of a poor man in Westminster Hall and about the London Streets, where he sees much to attract him, but can avail himself of no allurements or purchases for lack of funds. His learning overweighed his muse, and the naive admission of Occleve, “But I was dulled,” might well have been uttered by Lydgate also. He imitated with more labor than skill, Chaucer’s favorite meters, and his treatment of romantic themes but he floundered about disastrously in his cadences, admitting ruefully, “I took none head neither of short nor long.”
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Possibly, no unfair description of Lydgate would be to call him an accomplished scholar with a fair knack of verse-making, and a fluency that considerably outruns the knack.
Stephen Hawes. (d. 1523) Post Chaucer scholars such as Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, affect one all in the same way. Their work has literary merit of a fitful kind, but it is sadly lacking in spontaneity, original impulse, and sincerity. Among these scholars Stephen Hawes was a man of culture with a taste for travel and remarkable memory. He wrote loyal verse to congratulate Henry VII on his accession. He had a gift for phrases which lighten up his prolix muse from time to time, for instance these lines: “Be the day weary, or be the day long, At length it drawled to Evensong.” And an aptitude for allegory, less happy in pleasure-conferring qualities. The French aspects of Chaucer’s genius attracted him chiefly, and he follows the author of the Remount of the Rose rather than that of the Canterbury Tales.
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John Skelton was a Norfolk cleric, a remarkable scholar and at one time tutors to Henry VIII. He attacked abuses of the day, both in the Church and Court, with an uncompromising rigor worthy of John Knox. When Wolsey was at the height of his power, Skelton did not hesitate to criticize him severely, as in his satire Why Come ye not to Court? There is no advance in beauty of workmanship. In fact, Skelton neglects beauty quite openly, striving for some fresh metrical form of expression to suit his subject matter.
But at any rate we are outgrowing the imitative period, for Skelton is an original force, albeit a rough and undisciplined one. Beginning as most young poets do in the conventional and imitative vein, he soon broke away, and his later work, despite all its uncouthness, has an individual flavor, refreshing to meet with after the tameness of his predecessors. He is a moralist, with a message for his generation, which he determined to make as effective as possible. “For though’ my rime be ragged, Tattered and jagged, rudely rain-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten; It hath in it some pith”
His most popular work was the quaint Bake of Philip Sparrow celebrating the death of the pet bird of Mistress Joan Scrape; his most outspoken was the Hogarth an sketch The Tuning (brewing) of Banora Ramming-recounting the brewing and subsequent ritual of a certain broach of ale by a rural alewife and her friends. He had a liking for brief, jerky meters: e.g.
“Mistress Gertrude with womanhood endued.” Scottish Literature in the 14th and 15th Century
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Scotland had won hardly and desperately, her war of independence, and this fact had served as trumpet call to the imaginative minds of the age.
John Barbour leads the way with his patriotic poem- Bruce (c. 1376), a poem recalling, in its noble apostrophe to Freedom, the famous lines of Shelley in the Masque of Anarchy. The rough material of poetry is there, all that is needed is something of the fine culture that had already made its way into England, to fashion and graces it.
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About this time JAMES I, a cultured and accomplished prince returned from his years of captivity in England and the influence he exercised on national verse was just what was needed. His own poem, The King’s Quail, is one of no small beauty and power. Imitative, it is true, of Chaucer and of the head. He writes with power because he loved Lady Jane Beaufort, not because he fancied himself a versifier of Chaucer’ school.
Robert Henry Son (1430-1506) was a “school master in Dunfermline”. Like his royal predecessor a faithful admirer of Chaucer Henry son, he shows real first-hand observation of nature and an insight born of no mere literary accomplishment into the simple and ordinary aspects of lowly life. There is a quaint charm about his description of why he added to Chaucer’s story of Troilus and Cressida. One winter’s night, he tells us, he sat by the fire reading Triodes, and comforting himself with some hot drink.
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After Henry son, comes WILLIM DUNBAR, a poet of striking undisciplined power, and one of the great names in Scottish Literature. He is the Burns of the fifteenth century, with something of that poet’s passion for beauty, native humor, and force of expression. He was not unlike Burns, moreover, in character: sensual and head-strong.