Italian Renaissance art and cultural development

Italian Renaissance

The Impact of the Italian Renaissance upon English Literature

The Italian Renaissance's focus upon humanity and scientific discovery paved the way of much of the intellectual literary exploration that was to take place during the England of the subsequent century. Plays such as Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" openly questioned the ideal that humanity must be subservient to God, and embodied the Renaissance ideal that the proper focus of humanity was humanity, not the divine alone. In Marlowe's play, the scholar Faustus mocks the Catholic Church, and sells his soul to gain more knowledge and to get a kiss from the lovely ideal of classical beauty, Helen of Troy.

Thus, one of the predominant literary influences of the Italian Renaissance was that humanity and the desire of humanity to expand upon its knowledge of the known and scientific world, not humanity's relationship with God alone, became the primary focus of poetry and drama. Freed from the need to conform to dogmatic struggles and to merely adhere to Biblical narratives, new fictions flourished. However, there was also an embrace of past, existing forms of Mediterranean literary ideals, such as the Italian sonnet form that became the Elizabethan sonnet form. The latter modified the original Italian sonnet's rhythmical constraints for the English language.