Introduction
- The age in which Edmund Spencer wrote is known as the Elizabethan Age.
- Milton ; about this age that, we suddenly see England,a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself, like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible lock’s.
- The queen [Elizabethan] had her people with the unbounded patriotism and personal devotion which finds a voice inThe FaerieQueene. In her time Englishliterature reached the pinnacle of its development.
- The most characteristic feature of the age ; comparative religious tolerance,.
- After the Thirty Years’ War on the continent, the whole kingdom stood divided. The North was Catholic and the South was strongly Protestant. Scotland followed the Reformation in its own manner and Ireland remained true to its old religious traditions and both countries had a rebellious
- Reformation in England established by The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
- starting of Reformation the religious issue was settled slowly and the man mind turned to forms of activity with a great creative impulse in literature too.
- So the age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and comfort among all classes,finds adequate literary expression in drama, which expresses the whole man.
- So it saw the rise of writers like Marlowe,Shakespeare, Ben Jonson among the dramatists and Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Bacon and many other.