As England entered the Renaissance and as humanism, with its focus
on classical literature and philosophy, informed the educational
system, English intellectuals engaged in a concerted effort to
remake the culture, language, manners-indeed, the whole national
style-through adapting the classics. But how could English
literature, art, and culture, become "classical," not only in
imitating the ancients, but in the sense subsequently applied to
music: "classical" as opposed to popular, as formal, serious, and
therefore as good? For several decades in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, Stephen Orgel writes, the return to the
classics held out the promise of refinement and civility. Poetry
was to be modeled on Greek and Roman examples rather than on the
great English medieval works, which though admirable, lacked
"correctness." More than poetry was at stake, however, and the
transition would not be easy. Classical rules seemed the wave of
the future, rescuing England from what was seen as the crudeness
and the sheer popularity of its native traditions, but advocacy was
tempered with a good deal of ambivalence: classical manners and
morals were often at variance with Christian principles, and the
classicism of the age would need to be deeply revisionist.
"Christian humanism" was never untroubled, Orgel writes, always an
unstable or even paradoxical amalgam. In Wit's Treasury, one of our
foremost interpreters of Renaissance literature and culture charts
how this ambivalence yielded the rich creative tension out of which
emerged an unprecedented flowering of drama, lyric, and the arts.
Orgel has here written a book that will appeal to anyone interested
in English Renaissance art and literature, and particularly in the
cultural ferment that produced Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser,
Jonson, and Milton.
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