Play Renaissance in English literature quiz
This quiz has all the questions and answers related to the English Renaissance in English literature. An era of cultural revival and poetic development beginning in the late fifteenth century and extending into the revolutionary years of the seventeenth century stands as the early pinnacle of the achievements of poetry, the age in which the modern sense of English poetry begins. The influence of the times—its enduring traditions, inspiring experiences, and seemingly impossible heights—resonates today.
This quiz helps English Renaissance lovers and increases general knowledge of people who belong to different age groups and fields of life.
How did the word Renaissance come about?
The term Renaissance, derived from French for “rebirth,” is a name given retroactively to nineteenth-century thinkers who marked the era with its revival: a renewed interest in ancient languages, the restoration of antique manuscripts, and a return to the classical ideals underlying the era’s defining intellectual movement, humanism in the Renaissance. Greek and Roman models, restored for modern purposes, were especially crucial to poets who defined or defended their art.
At the height of literary criticism of the era, in defense of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney borrowed his key terms and questions from Greek philosophers born nearly two thousand years earlier. He suggests that “Poesy” is an art of imitation, for Aristotle calls it in the word mimesis – i.e., representation, falsification or discovery – to speak figuratively, a conversational image – with this end, to teach and delight.”
Against the charge leveled in Plato’s Republic (about 375 BC), that all this poetic “falsification” amounted to a lie, Sidney launched a whole new defense that boasted a modern embrace of subterfuge and head-turning imagination. Poets can’t lie because their figurative and metaphorical inventions never pretended to be accurate or objective—or so Sidney argued in an ingenious dialectical maneuver: “The poet never confirms anything, and therefore never lies.”
Where was the center of poetry?
The center of poetry was the royal court for Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Sydney, and Walter Raleigh. There, nobles, gentry, civil servants, and charming men of society practiced poetry as a great pastime, an imaginative competition that transformed the social arts of persuasion, diplomacy, and self-making into displays of rhetorical virtuosity and verbal play. Many of the most famous poets of the period – Emilia Lanier, Mary Ruth, and Margaret Cavendish – emerged only in the seventeenth century.
The forms and volumes of a Renaissance poem revolve around Ben Johnson’s string of spiky, wordless poems (“on the gut”: “eats guts all day and tastes all night; /So he tastes all his meat twice”) to Edmund Spencer’s gigantic epic The Faerie Queen (1590, 1596); By his death, Spencer had completed six of the 24 proposed books and had already produced the longest poems in the language. Far from a period of formal restriction or rigidly codified rules, the Renaissance valued unserious differences and subtlety in games. Even the blank verse, or the unreinforced Tampa pentagram, which is quite possibly the most conspicuous form of all English poetry, resulted from a one-time experiment, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (ca. 1540) by the young Earl of Surrey.
Poets, guides to poems, essays, and recordings that follow go through nearly two centuries of poetry, from White to Milton. Readers and poets long regard the Renaissance as a golden age of poetic achievement in the English language. This introduction provides a diagram of the period’s continuous innovations and massive expansions.
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