The Works Of William Shakespeare And Sir Philip Sidney

Edmund Spenser was a notorious English poet known for writing the long allegorical poem The Faerie Queen. Born into a family of very little wealth he was enrolled into the Merchant Taylors’ grammar school. He later went on to study at the University of Cambridge where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. The time he spent at Cambridge was undoubtly very crucial for the acquisition of his wide knowledge not only of the Latin and some of the Greek classics but also of the Italian, French, and English Literature of his own and earlier times. Without the Roman epic poet Virgil’s Aeneid, the 15th-century Italian Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and, later, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Spenser could not have written his heroic, or epic, poem The Faerie Queene. The corpus of Spenser can be discussed in the context of the works of William Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney. The three share an influence in the same popular Renaissance literary genre, Pastoral, which can be depicted as an idealized vision of a simpler, rural life and a longing for a lost world of innocence. Much happened in the time of the Renaissance, including Reformation and an epidemic so it made sense to want to write about less complex ways of living as a way to â€Å"escape† reality. In The Faerie Queen, Spenser writes with the intent to show young men what better virtues to cultivate in their lives. He does an excellent job doing this by his use of symbolism and descriptive imagery.Show MoreRelatedElizabethan Poetry Essay582 Words   |  3 PagesSurrey In 1557 Tottel printed A Miscellany of Uncertain Authors commonly known as Tottels Miscellany. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 - 42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-47) made valuable contributions to this anthology. 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