Both the expansion of education and the religious controversies of the sixteenth century
created a larger and more avid reading public for vernacular works, and enterprising
authors and publishers responded. As discussed in the introduction, the best-selling
works between the invention of the printing press and 1700 were religious; between 1518
and 1525, one-third of all books printed in German were by Luther. Printed religious
works varied from expensive leather-bound Bibles to eight-page pamphlets or chapbooks
with paper covers, or even single-sheet broadsides, usually illustrated and often
scandalous, scurrilous, or gory. The same qualities could be found in other popular
non-fi ction printed works, such as travel literature, accounts of recent events, or biographies,
though how-to manuals also sold very well. Baldassar Castiglione’s The Book of
the Courtier (1508–16), which sets out proper behavior for courtiers and court ladies (or
those aspiring to such positions), sold very well in its original Italian, and was translated
into Spanish, French, English, German, and Polish. The personal qualities Castiglione
praises – reserve, discretion, good manners, solidity, and learning worn lightly for men,
and purity, modesty, beauty, agreeableness, and affability for women – became ideals for
people much further down the social scale than his original audience.
Both middle-class people and courtiers read poetry and prose fi ction along with
religious works and instruction manuals, and some of them tried their hand at writing
these as well. A circle of poets grew up in Florence at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici,
who patronized writing in Italian as well as humanist scholarship in Latin. Lorenzo
himself wrote love lyrics, sonnets, pastorals, odes, and carnival songs, many of them
meditations on nature or on the fl eetingness of human life: “Fair is youth and void
of sorrow;/But it hourly fl ies away./Youths and maids, enjoy today;/Nought ye know
about tomorrow.” His circle included the young artist Michelangelo and the humanist
Poliziano, all of them infl uenced by Platonic concepts of beauty and love. Humanist
sodalities or similar groups in other European cities offered people an opportunity to
discuss and share works written in the vernacular as well as Latin; though most of these
groups were made up only of men, because they were less formal than universities or
academies, women sometimes participated. In Poitiers in France, for example, Madeleine
and Catherine des Roches (1520–87 and 1542–87), a mother and daughter, shared
their poetry with a humanist circle. Members of such groups read their works aloud or
circulated them in manuscript, and often never published them. Thus even at this elite
social and educational level, older forms of cultural transmission continued.
Italian was the fi rst modern European language to be transformed into a literary
language, a process that began with Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) decision to write the
Divine Comedy in his northern Italian Tuscan dialect instead of Latin. The sonnets of
Petrarch and the prose fi ction of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) further solidifi ed this
language as “Italian,” with authors from elsewhere in Italy, such as the Venetian poet
and church offi cial Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), adopting and defending it.
The epics, romances, and lyric poetry of medieval troubadours laid the foundations
of modern French, and by the sixteenth century authors such as Marguerite
d’Angoulême were combining chivalric themes with Platonic and Christian ideals; her
Heptameron , a collection of seventy-three lively stories about people from all walks of
life published shortly after her death, was extremely popular in France and was quickly
translated into English. A circle of seven poets at the French court under the leadership
of Pierre de Ronsard (1524?–85) defended the use of French as a literary medium,
writing in what they saw as a new style that combined classical, Italian, and French
forms. They dubbed themselves the Pléiade , taken from a Greek word for a group of
seven, used to describe seven poets in ancient Alexandria, and the seven daughters of
the mythical fi gure Atlas, who were said to have eventually become a constellation of
seven stars.
Other authors whose works were widely read frequently drew on medieval romances
and epics as well as classical traditions. Several writers in sixteenth-century Italy, for
example, retold the story of the Frankish knight Roland (Orlando in Italian), though
Orlando furioso (1515) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), a poet at the court of the Este
family in Ferrara, may have been mocking epics more than emulating them. Orlando
goes mad when the young woman he is pursuing falls in love with someone else, but his
wits are restored to him by another knight who travels to the moon to retrieve them.
In France, the former friar and physician François Rabelais (1483–1553) adapted bawdy
stories about the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel that had been told orally for
centuries and printed in cheap chap-books. Rabelais’s novels – which eventually grew to
fi ve volumes – show the two giants living life to its fullest, whether in terms of learning,
drinking, eating, or sex; along with contemptuous satire and vulgar humor, they have
serious discussions of politics, philosophy, religion, and education. This combination
got Rabelais into trouble with theologians at the University of Paris, but he was shielded
from serious consequences by the patronage of church offi cials and members of the
royal family, including Marguerite d’Angoulême.
Many of the scenes in Orlando furioso or Gargantua and Pantagruel would have
fi tted very well into Don Quixote (1605; Part II, 1615), the major work of Miguel de
Cervantes (1547–1616), and often regarded as the greatest masterpiece in Spanish literature.
Cervantes studied in Italy, fought and was wounded in the Battle of Lepanto,
was captured by pirates, was sold as a slave, and was eventually ransomed at a price
that would ruin his family. He wrote romances, more than twenty plays, only two of
which survive, and toward the end of his life Don Quixote , which tells the story of
the country gentleman Don Quixote and his faithful squire Sancho Panza, whose
encounters with every kind of person in Spanish society are shaped by Don Quixote’s
often misguided idealism. Cervantes wrote in Castilian, the language of central
Spain, which became literary “Spanish.” The era in which he wrote is often called the
“Golden Age” by Spanish literary scholars, who base their judgment on the works of
many other authors besides Cervantes, especially the prolifi c playwright Félix Lope
de Vega (1562–1635), whose roughly 1,800 plays – 500 of them extant – include tragedies,
historical drama, romances, comic love intrigues, and plays that blend all of
these.
Lope de Vega’s plays were staged for all types of audiences; court performances could
be very elaborate, with expensive costumes and complex stage settings, while public
performances were much simpler. The same was true for drama elsewhere in Europe,
which provided the best way for people who could not read to experience and create
vernacular literature. All sorts of plays were put on as part of church holidays or
city festivals, by local groups or traveling companies of players. Mystery plays depicted
biblical episodes, miracle plays told stories from the lives of the saints, and morality
plays presented religious and moral allegories, with comic or satiric interludes often
interspersed between the acts of these more serious plays. Towns or groups within
towns – either craft guilds or specifi cally organized dramatic societies called “abbeys”
or “chambers of rhetoric” – competed with one another to write and put on the best
play. Itinerant performers used puppets, trained animals, and acrobatic tricks to attract
viewers, and sometimes included tooth-pulling and selling medicines as part of
their entertainment. In the Ottoman Empire, artisans’ guilds and the sultan sponsored
festivals that included acrobats, fi reworks, mock battles, and the staging of scenes of
workshops, fortresses, and mosques.
Humanist scholars rediscovered the works of Greek and Latin playwrights, and wrote
tragedies in Latin and comedies in the vernacular based on these. One of the most popular
of the latter was Machiavelli’s Mandragola (1524), in which he wove the themes of fortune
and nature into a story involving a young woman, her young lover, her old husband,
her scheming mother, her wily priest, and a love potion made out of a mandrake root.
Most imitations of classical drama were tediously boring, however, and people preferred
instead to attend performances of traveling Commedia dell’Arte troupes, in which actors
and actresses dressed up as certain stock characters – Harlequin, the trickster servant,
Pulchinello, the lecherous old hunchback, Scaramouche, the swaggering soldier, Columbine,
the witty and mischievous maid, and Pantalone, the miserly merchant. Dialogue
in Commedia dell’Arte plays was improvised, gestures were exaggerated, and comedy
was slapstick – a word that comes from the stick or bat carried by Harlequin – all of
which made the plays easy to understand and fun to watch. Playwrights such as Lope de
Vega incorporated characters based on Commedia dell’Arte types into their plays as
side characters, where they provided commentary and subplots that enhanced the
central story.
Plays of all types were also very popular in England, where writing in the vernacular
had developed out of the dialect spoken in the City of London and the nearby
royal court of Westminster. Before the Hundred Years War, English kings and nobles,
many of them descendants of Normans, had spoken French, but the war made the use
of English a matter of national pride. The writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400),
a diplomat and royal offi cial, especially his Canterbury Tales , solidifi ed this language
while still incorporating classical models, just as Petrarch and Boccaccio had done in
Italian. Later English poets such as Edmund Spenser (1552–99) and Sir Philip Sidney
(1554–86) built on this base, composing in English but blending in classical structures,
conventions, and philosophical concerns, and often using verse forms derived from
Italian, such as the sonnet. Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) began to use blank (unrhymed)
verse for his plays as well as his poems, often centering the plot around a
fi gure whose life is destroyed by an aspect of his own character, such as passion or
ambition. Marlowe’s plays are fi lled with violence, bloodshed, and brutality, making
them popular with London audiences, who regularly fi lled the increasing numbers of
public theatres that staged plays.
Those theatres also staged the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who is often
simply described as “the greatest playwright who ever lived”; Shakespeare dominates
English literature in a way that no single writer dominates any other European
literature, not even Dante or Lope de Vega with his 1,800 plays. Shakespeare came from
a middle-class background in a medium-sized town, probably attended a Latin grammar
school, but had no further formal education. He married and had three children,
then went to London, where he became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men, a company of professional actors. He later became the part-owner of
several London theatres, and spent most of the rest of his life in London, writing plays
and apparently taking minor roles in them. Shakespeare’s talent was so great that some
people have doubted whether someone from such a middling background could actually
have written the plays, but his use of classical and historical sources, and of both
medieval and humanist forms of language, demonstrate how widely humanist education
had spread.
Literary critics generally approach Shakespeare’s plays as texts, but his contemporaries
watched them as performances, so that their impact went far beyond London’s
literate minority. In 1607, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was even performed by the sailors on
an English ship bound for India and anchored off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone
in West Africa; their audience included the rest of the crew, and also four Africans, one
of whom was the offi cial translator of the area’s king, so, as the play was performed,
Shakespeare’s words were most likely translated into Portuguese and perhaps Temne,
the local African language.
Assessing the impact of that performance on either the European crew or their
African guests is diffi cult, but this is true for any play or literary work that was shared
orally, as there are very few sources that provide evidence about the cultural life of
people who could not read and write. We know from a variety of sources that people
often told stories to one another while they were working, or in the evenings sitting in
a tavern or at home around a fi re. They certainly talked about the day’s events, people
they knew, and other aspects of village life, but they also told stories, recited poems,
and sang ballads about famous people, mythological creatures, and amazing heroes.
Such “fairy tales” were fi rst written down in the seventeenth century by the French
poet Charles Perrault (1628–1703), and later by the Grimm brothers, but it is clear they
circulated long before that.
World History
