Humanism in English Renaissance Literature
During the Middle Ages—sometimes disparagingly referred to as the Dark Ages, because a lot of dark and unpleasant stuff like the Plague happened then—people focused a lot on heaven and the afterlife. They tended to believe that this life was simply a test of your goodness. Then, if you were deemed goodly enough, you could move on to the godly next world.
So most everything Middle Ages Europeans did was not for the sake of the here-and-now, but for life-after-death.
But, after experiencing the widespread deaths of the Plague, people began to adopt a new attitude toward this life. They expanded their art and music and literature to open the door for meditations on the present. And, in concert with that thinking, they began to consider the human being as more than just a body-as-vehicle-for-the-soul.
Practically speaking, a renewed interest in people as people led to the reemergence of classical education. Once again, students were expected to study a variety of subjects, ranging from philosophy and history to literature, geometry, and physics.
As people re-focused on the human and the real, they made a lot of really cool scientific discoveries. And came up with a buncha cool new inventions, too. What's that? We live in a sun-centered solar system? Oh, and here's a printing press, for all your mass-printing needs.
As people started taking themselves more seriously as interesting art-and-technology-makers, and these lives on earth more seriously as birthplaces of creativity, Europe began to undergo some really exciting changes.
After all, if we can build boats that sail around the world, not fall off, and bring back Sriracha sauce to season our food, what can't we do? Seriously, we should do everything. In fact, that's where the term for a person with a wide range of well-honed skills—a Renaissance man—comes from. Those Renaissance men really did do all of the things.
Literarily speaking, a focus on the human also led to some funky experimentation with form and the idea of possible other worlds within our known world. Like, behind mirrors, inside pools of water, or even inside of our own bodies—like in Margaret Cavendish's lyric poems on atoms.
The human body quickly became a central metaphor for just about everything, actually: political bodies, planetary bodies, continental bodies, you name it. This metaphorical line-of-thought also opened the door to new philosophies about alternate realities, as in John Donne's "The Computation."
Chew on This
After Metamorphosis, Virgil's Aeneid may just win the award for Myth Containing the Most Allusions. Any guesses as to why an epic about the fall of Troy (and the start of Rome) would be so inspirational? Hint: the answer's got a lot to do with political bodies. And other kinds of bodies.
What's the political body that mattered most to Shakespeare? Elizabethan England, of course. What's the political body he just loved to use as a stand-in for it, allegorically speaking? Ancient Rome. His bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus, examines the problems of Elizabethan England with a double allegory: England as Rome as Lavinia's body. What happens to these bodies in the play? How does what's happening to her body represent what's happening to Rome? To Elizabethan England?