Bővebb ismertető
Histories
The essence of the renaissance experience was a heightened self-consciousness, a self-awareness: one can see it in painting in the new, unexannpled development of portraiture. In England its fullest expression is to be seen in literature with William Shakespeare. The full flowering of the Renaissance impulse was rather late in reaching Britain, impeded as it was by the absorption of the Reformation experience. From the 1580s onwards these twin impulses fused in the national self-consciousness and bounding self-confidence generated by the struggle with Spain - a small half-island country against the world-empire of Philip II's Spain and Portugal combined.
It was not simply rejoicing over the defeat of the Spanish Armada, as literary folk are apt to think; there were three Armadas which met with disaster, in 1588, 1596 and 1597,
Opposite: Frontispiece to Histories volume ofJ.O. HalliwelVs edition of Shakespeare's works, 1853
Below: Defeat of Spanish Armada. Engraving by Cornelius Vroom
(1566-1619)