including headings Alliterative verse, Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain, Chaucer at court, Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, ...
The story of English literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon settlers. Beowulf stands at its head. This epic poem of the 8th century is in Anglo-Saxon, now more usually described...
The mysterious death of Marlowe, the Cambridge graduate, and the brilliant subsequent career of Shakespeare, the grammar-school boy from Stratford, have caused some to speculate that his secret service activities make it...
By the 16th century the view is gaining ground that a personal knowledge of scripture is precisely what ordinary people most need for their own spiritual good. Erasmus, though he himself translates the New Testament only...
By 1600 Shakespeare has conclusively demonstrated his genius in every kind of play except tragedy. In dramatizing English history he has progressed from the fumbling beginnings of the three parts of Henry VI (1590...
The French poetic tradition inclines to lines of a regular metrical length, usually linked by rhyme into couplets or stanzas. German poetry depends more on rhythm and stress, with repeated consonants (alliteration) to bi...
The greatest of the chansons de geste is also one of the earliest - the Chanson de Roland, dating probably from about 1100. Although it is set in one of Charlemagne's campaigns, the attention is on his foll...
Voltaire travels to England, where he is struck by a matter-of-fact frame of mind very different from the attitudes of France. In religion this results in Deism, an offshoot of the reasonable philosophy of John Locke; in...
The final flowering of Sanskrit literature takes place at the courts of the Gupta dynasty. By this time the spoken languages of India have long been evolving in their own separate directions. Sanskrit has become a litera...
By the time of Richard II the English kingdom can hold its own in learning and the arts. The university of Oxford, which earlier in the century has produced William of Ockham (one of the last great figures of medieval sc...
With the renewal of interest in Greek literature in the Renaissance, Plutarch is published in Greek and Latin in Italy in the early 16th century and is subsequently translated into French (1559) and from French into Engl...
As a form, the essay is much taken up by English writers. Francis Bacon, a generation younger than Montaigne, gives it its subsequent identity and length - as a speculation of a few pages on a given topic ('Of Truth', 'O...
At the same period as the Reformation, the attitudes of the Renaissance have a beneficial effect on Welsh literature. The Renaissance passion for rediscovering classical texts becomes, in the Welsh context, a scholarly i...
The poem of Beowulf, amounting to 3218 lines, is the first and the greatest surviving work of early Germanic literature. The story tells of fantastic fights against fierce dragons, but it is set in an authentic hi...
The theatres built in London in the quarter century from 1576 are a notable example of a contribution made by architecture to literature. In previous decades there have been performances of primitive and rumbustious Engl...
