routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Renaissance
prose
83
publications helped shape and encourage the expanding role of English
exploration and colonisation – a topic which was dramatised in what was
probably Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. Hakluyt’s work and influence
was continued by the man who had become his assistant, Samuel Purchas,
who in turn published accounts of voyages to countries as distant as China
and Japan. The Romantic poet Coleridge said he was reading Purchas
when he became inspired to write of Xanadu in Kubla Khan.
The description of Eldorado, as a kind of new world Eden, appears
in The Discovery of Guiana by Sir Walter Raleigh, published in 1596.
On both sides of this river, we passed the most beautiful country that
ever mine eyes beheld: and whereas all that we had seen before was
nothing but woods, prickles, bushes, and thorns, here we beheld plains
of twenty miles in length, the grass short and green, and in divers parts
groves of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and
labour in the world so made of purpose: and still as we rowed, the Deer
came down feeding by the water’s side, as if they had been used to a
keeper’s call. Upon this river there were great store of fowl, and of many
sorts: we saw in it divers sorts of strange fishes, and of marvellous bigness.
Raleigh was one of the central figures of the age, a Renaissance man
who was a traveller, a courtier, a notable poet, and later a political
prisoner. During his imprisonment, he embarked on an ambitious
History of the World (1614). The discovery of the Americas by Columbus
in 1492 had naturally made a huge impact on the European imagination.
Symbols of discovery, themes of geography and visions of Utopia are
found throughout Renaissance literature, from The Tempest to Donne’s
praise of his mistress – ‘my America, my New-found-land’.
The name of Shakespeare is found in a prose work by Robert Greene, who
was, like Marlowe, one of the ‘university wits’ – the generation of young writers of
the 1580s and 1590s who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
Greene was a prolific writer of plays, romances, and cony-catching pamphlets. It is
in an autobiographical piece, A Groats-Worth of Wit (1592), that we find the slighting
reference to Shakespeare, the first time his name is mentioned by another writer.
Greene describes him as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with Our Feathers’, who ‘is in
his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’. There is probably a touch of
envy here: unlike the ‘university wits’, Shakespeare had not been to university, but
was already a more successful playwright than his rivals. However, about twenty