Renaissance
Print, the public theatre and the sonnet arrive together. English writers discover blank verse, and with it the ability to let a character think aloud in real time. By the end of the period Milton is writing an epic and Donne is writing prose that sounds like an argument with God.
✦Blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter
✦The sonnet sequence
✦The soliloquy, thought performed in public
✦Metaphysical wit: arguments built from unlikely images
William Shakespeare
No writer has given English more of its phrases, or shown more convincingly how a mind changes while it speaks.
Christopher Marlowe
He gave tragedy its blank-verse voice — a single ambitious man arguing with heaven.
John Donne
He invented the metaphysical conceit: an argument carried by an outrageous comparison.
John Milton
The last great Renaissance poet and the first to make blank verse carry an epic.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
William Shakespeare · 1609
The love poem that quietly promises to outlive every summer.
To be, or not to be
William Shakespeare · Hamlet · 1601
The most famous think-out-loud in the language, plainly translated.
Macbeth — The Dagger Soliloquy
William Shakespeare · 1606
A man argues with a dagger he knows perfectly well isn't there.
Doctor Faustus — The Bargain
Christopher Marlowe · c. 1592
The bargain with the devil that English drama never got over.
No Man Is an Island
John Donne · 1624
The sentence that gave Hemingway a title and everyone else a funeral reading.
Paradise Lost — The Invocation
John Milton · 1667
The epic in which the villain quietly gets the best lines.
Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
William Shakespeare · 1609
The anti-love poem that ends up the most honest love poem in English.
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
William Shakespeare · 1609
Love defined by what it survives, not by what it feels.
All the world's a stage
William Shakespeare · As You Like It · 1599
Seven ages of man, from the play's most cheerfully depressed courtier.
Death, be not proud
John Donne · 1633
A sonnet that argues with death and wins on a technicality.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1606
A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to flatter him.
Othello
William Shakespeare · 1603
One rumour, repeated by a friend, destroys a marriage.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1595
Four lovers, six actors, one forest, and a very petty fairy king.
The Tempest
William Shakespeare · 1611
A magician on an island stages a shipwreck for his enemies.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
William Shakespeare · 1608
A prince loses everything at sea and spends a lifetime getting it back.