Renaissance literary theory and practice

The word _renaissance_ suggests a state of mind, the sense of recovering something neglected by one’s literary ancestors. “Ours is a new day,” says the fifteenth century. “We ha...

The Middle Age had developed Latin style freely as a medium of communication and variously as a medium of expression. On these terms Latin had had a progressive history as the l...

Renaissance classicism is most obvious in adoption of prose forms. Orations, letters, dialogues, first in Latin, then in the vernaculars, studiously conform. Orations were none...

The lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an extensive revival of Augustan measures in Latin. Meantime imitation of Petrarch made him an Italian classic and a Eur...

Sixteenth-century poetic has no specific relation to Renaissance development of verse narrative. The more pervasive counsels and habits of imitation agree in exalting Vergil. Ve...

Vulcan, Atalanta, the dragon’s teeth, and Hercules; Book II, a faun, the easy descent to Hades, the god of love, Pasithea, Narcissus, the Laestrigonians and Anthropophagi, the g...

that, ladies, is strange.” Canto XLIV still postpones, as lesser issues have been postponed, _the_ issue, their marriage. Canto XLVI ends characteristically on description of th...

Revival of drama is not a Renaissance achievement. The Renaissance has no drama distinctively its own. Even the sixteenth century prolonged a period of transition. Elizabethan c...

In Act II Portia’s monologue is followed by a chorus imitating Horace’s second Epode, and the Nurse’s monologue by their dialogue and another Horatian chorus. There is no action...

announce the rout and death of Brutus. The ensuing dialogue of balanced contrasts passes to Senecan speeches. After a chorus Antony vaunts the deeds of his mythical ancestors an...

Not really five acts, then, but three frame a piece without dramatic action. Though it is focused on a brief period, it does not thereby realize dramatic sequence. Consisting of...

monologue and a chorus. In II Cornelia and Cicero remind each other of the past and moralize on human life. The theme of mutability, carried out in the chorus, ends on the hope...

nevertheless, after Hecuba’s opening monologue, of responsive lyrics between her and the chorus. The envoy Talthybius arrives toward the end. Act II, mainly a debate between And...

The revival of classical Latin was promoted by manuals and discussions, and accompanied by still others directed to vernacular poetry. Though none of these ranks as a poetic in...

Petrarch’s _Trionfi_, and insists that the lack of unity in Ariosto’s _Orlando_ is a cardinal fault. If the teaching of the ancients “and the example of Homer’s poetry is true,...

to _canzone_. The triad of Pindar’s odes he calls _volta_, _rivolta_, _stanza_. His own praises of Charles V consist of five such triads. “As Pindar,” he goes on, “narrates the...

_elocutio_ and _compositio_, and with detailed consideration of metric. The counsels for imitation, though tolerating the usual Renaissance closeness, stop short of Ciceronianis...

the “three styles,” finds the third, _magnifico_ (the Latin _grande_), appropriate to epic (52). [Tasso’s own practice of _magnifico_ is neither florid nor dilated.] Ariosto’s s...

“Proportion” is exhibited (chapter ii) in “staff” (i.e., stave or stanza); (iii) in “measure” (i.e., feet) estimated by the number of syllables without assigning a distinct func...

At the end of the sixteenth century, then, these Englishmen could still assume, with Ascham fifty years earlier, that English poetry had no valid tradition of its own, still see...

Nothing is more characteristic of the Renaissance than the abundance of tales. Printed in large collections, they evidently answered a steady demand; and they furnished many plo...

Bruni puts orations oftenest into the mouths of envoys to develop issues which he has already summarized. Generally they are terser than the speeches of the fashionable dialogue...

factions; Book IV, the creation of the _vexillifer justitiae_ as a republican means of checking the selfish ambitions of the nobles. The increasing use of mercenaries shown in B...

indicative of the habit of the time. So is handled (VII. xxxiii. 162) Professor Cola Montano’s doctrinaire enthusiasm for republics and scorn of tyrants. His pupils find the iss...

Two Italian books of the early sixteenth century became so famous as to be almost proverbial. Written about the same time, Macchiavelli’s _Principe_ (1513) and Castiglione’s _Co...