Middle English drama
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript. This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of
their writing is of medieval origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems
such as Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at
odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid
introduce blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an
essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually ephemeral performance
scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have
been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes
some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or
Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century
onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or Corpus Christi, cycles and the
morality plays. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and
Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.
They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain
and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus
Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Texts
of the cycles staged at York, Chester, and Wakefield and at an unstated location in East Anglia
(the so-called N-Town plays) have survived, together with fragments from Coventry, Newcastle,
and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has an
impressively realized version of Christ’s Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative
style in verse. The Wakefield cycle has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the
anonymous Wakefield Master, and his Second Shepherds’ Play is one of the masterpieces of
medieval English literature. The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of
a single character, representing the whole of humankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually
consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and
so forth. A varied collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of
Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most impressive piece is Everyman, an English
rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality
plays were frequently revived and performed into the 21st century.
The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The 15th century was a major period of growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully
expedited by the introduction into England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton
published Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in the same year (1485) that Henry Tudor acceded to the
throne as Henry VII, and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure was the translator
Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues (c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources,
was an early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his rendering of
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a thoroughly medieval satire on
contemporary folly and corruption. The Pastime of Pleasure (completed in 1506; published
1509) by Stephen Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate’s manner, unexpectedly
adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a necessary accomplishment of the
courtly knight or gentleman.
The themes of education and good government predominate in the new humanist writing of
the 16th century, both in discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the
Governor [1531] and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus [1545; “Lover of the Bow”] and The
Schoolmaster [1570]) and in drama (the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The
preeminent work of English humanism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), was composed in
Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551. The most distinctive voice in the poetry of
the time was that of John Skelton, tutor to Henry VII’s sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long play, Magnificence
(1516), like his Bowge of Court (c. 1498) an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate
satirical invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (both 1522); and
reflexive essays on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speak, Parrot (written 1521) and The
Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was also a notable period for courtly
lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems with musical settings, such as those found in the
Devonshire Manuscript.
This is very much the literary milieu of the “courtly makers” Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry
Howard, earl of Surrey, but, though the courtly context of much of their writing is of medieval
origin, their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems such as Wyatt’s “They flee
from me” and “Whoso list to hunt” vibrate with personal feeling at odds with the medieval
convention of anonymity, while Surrey’s translations from the Aeneid introduce blank verse
(unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time, providing an essential foundation
for the achievements of Shakespeare and John Milton.
