The Importance Of Renaissance Literature

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, English literature and language was suffering a reputation as the language of the unrefined, lacking semantic variety and so doubted as a medium that could successfully produce elegant or creative discourse. By the century’s end, the language had been fashioned into an ‘immensely powerful expressive medium’, and an abundance of remarkable poesy and prose had been created by English writers.1 The focus of this argument is to examine the extent to which Renaissance poetry was able to express sincerity in this understandably notorious era of linguistic expansion. Poets were credited for having ‘greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy’2, but it is unclear how valuable this cohesive effort of poets is in demonstrating the communication of truth.

Overturning the medieval ideal of prudent restraint of emotion, society in 16th century England increasingly encouraged expressiveness under the ideal of sincerity. These priorities were very different to those of the Middle Ages, where, in the words of Jacob Burckhardt, human consciousness ‘lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession.’3 The emerging emphasis of not only the existence of an individual self, but also its capacity to be developed4 (Greenblatt, p. 1) no doubt encouraged greater personal reflection in literature, which to this purpose is interpreted as increased sincerity. While personal writings had existed in the culture of the Middle Ages, what was novel about the sixteenth century view of self was the way in which men and women in the Renaissance began to conceptualise the connection between their interior selves and the expression of their beliefs and em...

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... a constant need to erect a public façade, individuals were significantly affected and distorted from their sincere selves into idealised replicas.

Renaissance society was no doubt responsible for the experience of a divided self. Although poets had the opportunity to escape courtly constrictions of fear and requirements of self-promotion through the distancing mechanism of translation, the expectations of the newly developing society were inescapable to the extent of a collapse between the relation of sincere truth of emotion, and the erected public façade. This however remains a conflict only as long as sincerity is viewed as the expression of personal truth. Renaissance literature was extremely successful in depicting not personal sincerity, but public sincerity; permitting an invaluable mirror of Renaissance society through the products of its constrictions.