The English RenaissanceI . IntroductionThe English Renaissance was a cultural

The English Renaissance
   Good morning, everybody. Today we are going to talk about the so-called English Renaissance. The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th to the early 17th century.
   The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken as 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. But Renaissance styles and ideas were slow in penetrating England, (1) and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.
   Firstly, we will talk about literature. (2) England had a long strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as the printing press became common by the mid-16th century.
    (3) The English theatre scene, which performed both for the court and nobility in private performances, and a very wide public in the theatres, was the most crowded in Europe, with a host of other playwrights as well as the giant figures of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Elizabeth herself was a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, and wrote occasional poems at critical moments of her life.
    (4) The second we turn to is visual arts. (5) England was very slow to produce visual arts in Renaissance styles, and the artists of the Tudor court were mainly imported foreigners until after the end of the Renaissance. (6) The English Reformation produced a huge programme of iconoclasm that destroyed almost all medieval religious art, and all but ended the skill of painting in England. English art was to be dominated by portraiture, and then later landscape art, for centuries to come.
   Architecture is also prosperous during the Renaissance. Despite some buildings in a partly Renaissance style from the reign of Henry VIII, it was not until the Elizabethan architecture of the end of the century that a true Renaissance style emerged, influenced far more by Northern Europe than Italy. (7) The most famous buildings are large show houses constructed for courtiers, and characterized by the lavish use of glass. (8) Church architecture essentially continued in a late Gothic style until the Reformation, and then stopped almost completely.
    (9) Historians have begun to consider the word "renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive "rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive Middle Ages. (10) Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "early modern" for this period, a term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but attempts to avoid positive or negative connotations.
   That’s all for today’s lecture.