Renaissance

Playwright, poet, and translator George Chapman was an important figure in the English Renaissance. His plays, particularly, were adapted for the stage throughout the Restoration, and, though his reputation...

The achievement of Christopher Marlowe, poet and dramatist, was enormous—surpassed only by that of his exact contemporary, William Shakespeare. A few months the elder, Marlowe was usually the leader, although...

No one can deny the power, endurance, and memorable lines of the work of John Skelton; he is indisputably the first major Tudor poet, writing during the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III, and (for most of his...

Thomas Tusser was born in Essex, England, in 1524. Employed as a “singing boy” from a young age, he was educated at Eton and King’s College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It seems likely that he also spent time...

French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard was educated at the Collège de Navarre in Paris. He served as a page to the Duke of Orléans and to James V, the king of Scotland. After nearly losing all his hearing...

Gaspara Stampa was a 16th-century poet, musician, and singer born in Padua, Italy. Following her father’s death in the 1530s, she and her mother moved to Venice. There, her family home became an epicenter ...

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a prolific writer who worked in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, letters, biography, science, and even science fiction. Unlike most women of her ...

Marguerite de Navarre was not the only educated woman to write and publish verse during the first half of the sixteenth century, but she was the first woman of the French nobility who carefully compiled from...

Mary Sidney was the most important non-royal woman writer and patron in Elizabethan England. Without appearing to transgress the strictures against women's writing, she composed a sizable body of work, evading...

Elizabethan epigrammatist and clergyman Thomas Bastard was born in Blandford, Dorchester, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he earned a BA and MA and was made a perpetual Fellow...

Chidiock Tichborne was born in Southampton, England, to Roman Catholic parents. Though Catholicism was tolerated in England during Tichborne’s early years, when Queen Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the ...

Lady Mary Wroth was the first Englishwoman to write a complete sonnet sequence as well as an original work of prose fiction. Although earlier women writers of the 16th century had mainly explored the genres...

British Renaissance playwright Thomas Middleton wrote comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy. After Middleton’s father died in 1586, his mother, Anne, married a man who had lost money in Sir Walter Raleigh...

Richard Barnfield was born in Staffordshire, England. In his youth, Barnfield was deeply influenced by Virgil’s work and the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, which popularized ...

Isabella Whitney claims attention as the first Englishwoman believed to have written original secular poetry for publication. Her established oeuvre consists of two short anthologies of lively materials joined...

No poet represents the complexities of the British court of Henry VIII better than Sir Thomas Wyatt. Skilled in international diplomacy, imprisoned without charges, at ease jousting in tournaments, and adept...

Thomas Vaux, the second Baron Vaux of Harrowden, was a Tudor poet from Harrowden, Northamptonshire. In 1527, he accompanied Cardinal Wolsey to France and traveled with Henry VIII to Calais and Boulogne in ...

Robert Southwell, a poet and prose writer of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson‘s generation, spent his adolescence and early manhood in Italy. His brief literary career flourished during the years when he...

One of the most colorful, politically powerful members of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh (sometimes spelled Ralegh) is one personification of the English Renaissance. Born at Hayes Barton, ...