William Shakespeare (1564–1616) The Bard of Avon; En- glish poet, dramatist, and actor; national poet and playwright of England; considered by most scholars as the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare’s active career spanned 28 years, from 1582 to 1610, when he was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s company in London’s Globe Theatre. Most of his plays were written in the 16th century, but his tragedies— considered his masterpieces—were written in the first decade of the 17th century, before he retired in 1610. The exact order of his plays is not known with certainty, and all that is avail- able is the date when they were first performed. From 1590 to 1595 he wrote mainly comedies, including The Comedy of Er- rors (1592–93), The Taming of the Shrew (1593), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–95), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96), as well as histories such as Henry VI, Part I (1589–92), Richard III (1592–93), and Richard II (1595–96) and the early tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1594–95). In the last years of the century he wrote two comedies, The Merchant of Venice (1596–97) and Much Ado About Nothing (1598–99), and two histories, Henry IV, Part I and Julius Caesar (1599–1600). In the first decade of the 17th century came Hamlet (1600–1), Othello (1604–5), King Lear (1605–6), and Macbeth (1605–6). His last plays were The Winter’s Tale (1610–11) and The Tempest (1611). The first collected edition of his plays, known as the First Folio, was issued in 1623. In addition to his plays Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets and two heroic narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594).
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Lope de Vega (Lope Félix de Vega Carpio) (1562–
1635) Known as the Phoenix of Spain, Lope de Vega was the most important Spanish dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, the author of 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces of which 43 plays and 50 shorter pieces sur- vive. Vega was a master of the Spanish comedia, the then- new verse drama of love and intrigue that presented characters as exaggerated personifications of a vice or flaw. Vega’s output was phenomenal and his range vast, but his plays fall into two categories: historical plays and cloak- and-dagger dramas of intrigue. The best examples of his historical plays are Peribanez and the Commander of Ocana, The King, The Greatest Alcalde, All Citizens Are Soldiers, The Knight from Olmedo, and Fuente ovejuna. The best examples of his cloak-and-dagger plays are The Gardener’s Dog, Across the Bridge, Juana, The Lady Nit-Wit, The Girl with the Jug, and The King and the Farmer. A collection of Vega’s non- dramatic works in verse and prose fill 21 volumes and in- clude pastoral romances, biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems, and burlesques.
Luíz Camões (Luíz Camoëns) (1524/1525–1580) Portugal’s national poet and author of the epic poem The Lusiads, which describes Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India. Born into an old, impoverished Portuguese aristoc- racy, Camões spent 17 years in India. He returned to Lisbon in 1570 and published The Lusiads in 1572. His nondramatic works include Rimas, a collection of poems (1595). He was also a great dramatist; his plays include The Two Amphit- ryons and King Seleucus, both comedies, and Filodemo, a morality play.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) Spanish nov- elist, playwright and poet; creator of Don Quixote; and Spain’s most important writer. As a youth, Cervantes joined the army and took part in the great naval battle of Lepanto against the Turks (1571), during which he received a wound that permanently crippled his left hand. En route to Spain he was captured by the Turks, sold into slavery, and ransomed five years later. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605 and the second part in 1615, and they were immediate successes. Originally conceived as a comic satire against the chivalric romances of the day, the novel describes realistically what befalls an elderly knight who sets out on his old horse, Rosinante, with his squire, San- cho Panza, to seek adventure. In the process he also finds love in the person of the peasant Dulcinea. The influence of the novel can be seen in the works of the classic 19th- century novelists, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Herman Melville. Cervantes also wrote some 20 to 30 plays, of which The Traffic of Algiers, Eight New Comedies and Eight New Interludes, and Numantia survive. Among his subsequent works are the 12 short stories of Exemplary
Tales, as well as a romance, The Labors of Pesiles and Sigismunds: A Northern Story.
François Rabelais (1494–1553) French writer, author of the satirical classics Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534). Ra- belais began his life as a Franciscan and later Benedictine monk but left the order to become a physician. His first suc- cess as a writer came with the publication of Pantagruel, which displays his genius as a storyteller, his profound sense of the comedy of language, and a mastery of the comic situ- ation, monologue, dialogue, and action. His work was con- demned as bawdy by civil and ecclesiastical authorities and was banned in France. Pantagruel was followed by Panta- gruel’s Prognostication (1532) and the Third Book (1546) and Fourth Book (1552) of Gargantua.
Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) Dutch humanist, the quintessential Renaissance scholar. He became an Augustin- ian monk and was ordained a priest in 1492. Later education in Paris turned him from scholastic theology to humanism, the learning or cultural impulse characterized by a revival of classical letters, a critical spirit, and a shift of emphasis from religious to secular concerns. He made four visits to England, where he lectured at the universities of Oxford and Cam- bridge and met Sir Thomas More, the chancellor of England; St. John Fisher, a professor at Cambridge University; and the theologian John Colet, who inspired him to study the Bible. He spent his later years visiting Italy, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, where he died. His greatest achievement was a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament. His secular publications include Proverbs (1500) and The Praise of Folly (1511).
Gil Vicente (1465–1536/1537) Portuguese playwright who wrote in both Spanish and Portuguese and who combined lyrical as well as satiric talents. From 1502 to 1536 he was the Portuguese poet laureate and wrote fervent patriotic verse, such as Exhortation to War (1513) and Play of Fame (1515) inspired by imperial campaigns. Vicente’s 44 plays reflect the upheaval, squalor, and splendor of the era of great maritime explorations. Twelve of the plays were written in Spanish, 14 in Portuguese, and the remaining in both languages. His major plays included Jupiter’s Court (1521), The Forge of Love (1524), The Temple of Apollo (1526), and Summary of the His- tory of God, The Ship of Love, The Coat of Arms of the City of Coimbra, and The Carriers (all 1527). His last four plays show him at the peak of his powers: The Pilgrimage of the Aggrieved (1533), Forest of Deceits (1536), Triumph of Winter (1529) and Amadís de Gaula (1532–33).
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) French courtier and the author of Essais (Essays), which established a new literary form. He began work on Essays in 1571; the first edi- tion came out in 1580, and a second edition, in 1588. The 32 ■ The Sixteenth Century
first edition consisted of two books of 57 and 37 chapters, each chapter, or essay, varying greatly in length. The second edition included a third book. Essays is considered one of the most captivating and intimate self-portraits in literature. In a world corrupted by violence and hypocrisy, Montaigne sought understanding through self-examination. The title of the book was revealing because it is roughly translated from the French as “attempts,” implying trial and error and tenta- tive exploration. The essays move freely from one topic to an- other and cover diverse and disparate subjects such as friendship, solitude, politics, sleep, fear, death, sadness, and moderation.
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) English poet and play- wright. Marlowe’s output was prodigious considering his short life—he died at 29, reportedly in a tavern brawl—and a writing career that spanned only six years. He created some of the finest plays of the Elizabethan era. He wrote the first, Tamburlaine the Great (published in 1590) while he was a student at Cambridge. His other plays include The Jew of Malta (1589), Dr. Faustus (1592), Edward II (1592), and The Massacre at Paris (1593), which were all published posthumously. His poem, the much praised Hero and Le- ander, was left incomplete at his death. Dido, Queen of Carthage, an unfinished play, was completed by Thomas Nashe in 1594.
Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) French poet. A student of the classics, Ronsard formed, with a group of fellow students, the literary group that came to be called the Pléiade, in emu- lation of the seven ancient Greek poets of Alexandria. The aim of the group was to elevate the French language to the level of the classical tongues as a medium of literary expres- sion. Odes, Ronsard’s first collection of poems, was based on the Odes of Horace. In Les Amours he used the Italian can- zona, a medieval Italian lyric poem in stanzaic form, as a model. In Bocages and Meslanges (both 1554), two of his most exquisite poems, he found inspiration in the Greek poet Anacreon. Continuation des Amours and Nouvelle Continua- tion des Amours mined the same vein. In 1555 he began to write a series of long poems published as Hymnes, based on the style of the Greek poet Callimachus. In Meslanges, he crit- icized the Western colonization of the New World, whose na- tive people he described as ideal and noble savages worthy of admiration. During the Wars of Religion in France, Ronsard, an extreme Royalist and Catholic, used his pen to attack the Protestants in Discourse on the Miseries of These Times (1562). As the unofficial poet laureate of France, he undertook but did not complete a national epic called La Françiade, an imi- tation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The collected edition of his works, published in 1578, contained many new works including “Elegy Against the Woodcutters of Gatine,” Les Amours de Marie, and Sonnets pour Hélène. His last verse collection, Les Derniers Vers, was published posthumously.