16th and early 17th Century
What this domain covers
Roughly 1500–1660: the English Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Civil War. The exam samples sonnets, verse epistles, dramatic verse and prose, asking about form, rhetorical figure, genre (revenge tragedy, city comedy, masque), and the period's religious and political pressures.
Core rules and concepts
- Sonnet forms. Petrarchan: octave abbaabba plus sestet cdecde, volta at line 9. English: three quatrains plus couplet, abab cdcd efef gg, volta usually at line 13. Wyatt and Surrey import the form; Surrey invents blank verse in his Aeneid.
- Blank verse. Unrhymed iambic pentameter, established on stage by Gorboduc (1561) and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, flexible enough for Hamlet's soliloquies.
- Spenserian stanza. Nine lines, ababbcbcc, closing alexandrine; The Faerie Queene is an allegory whose 'dark conceit' needed a prefatory letter to Raleigh.
- Metaphysical poetry. Extended conceits arguing a case (Donne's compasses in 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'), colloquial openings, jagged stress. 'Metaphysical' is Johnson's label in the Lives of the Poets (1779); Eliot's 1921 essay revived the group.
- Cavalier lyric. Jonson and his 'sons' - Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, Suckling - carpe diem, classical polish, social ease.
- Drama genres. Revenge tragedy (Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, Webster's Duchess of Malfi), city comedy (Jonson's Volpone, The Alchemist), the court masque, tragicomedy; prose for low characters, verse for high.
- Prose. Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595), Bacon's Essays (1597), Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the King James Bible (1611).
Worked example
A fourteen-line poem opens 'When I do count the clock that tells the time,' moves through images of violet, sable curl and lopped trees, and ends: 'And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence / Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.'
How does the structure organize the argument? Count and rhyme first: three quatrains plus a couplet, so English form. The quatrains accumulate examples of decay; the couplet supplies the turn and the remedy. Recognizing that the couplet is where the argument lands - not a decorative summary - is what earns the point. Contrast Milton's 'When I consider how my light is spent,' an English Petrarchan sonnet whose sestet resolves the octave's complaint.
Traps that cost marks
- 'Sonnet' does not mean Shakespearean: Milton's are Petrarchan, and so is Shelley's 'Ozymandias'.
- Blank verse is metered; free verse is not.
- 'Metaphysical' is a later label, not a group's self-description.
- Not all Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare; questions test Marlowe, Kyd, Webster, Jonson, Middleton.
- The sonnet sequence's 'I' is a persona, not a diary.