This book includes an introductory essay placing Renaissance literature in its historical context and a variety of critical essays on the writings of Petrarch, Machiavelli, the metaphysical poets, John Milton, and William Shakespeare.

Includes index. Includes chronology.

Italian humanism: recovering the past / Gloria K. Fiero -- The achievement of Petrarch / Charles G. Nauert -- Princes and courtiers: the writings of Machiavelli and Castiglione / E. R. Chamberlin -- Beginnings of the northern Renaissance / Robert E. Lerner -- Erasmus's The praise of folly and the Humanist reform agenda / Clarence H. Miller -- Sir Thomas More and his Utopia / Burton A. Milligan -- The comic vision of Rabelais / M. A. Screech -- The conventions of Petrarchan poetry / Leonard Forster -- Edmund Spenser's The Faerie queene: educating the reader / Russell J. Meyer -- John Donne and the metaphysical poets / Richard Willmott -- The epic sensibility of Milton's paradise lost / Merritt Y. Hughes -- Renaissance women writers / Katharina M. Wilson -- Montaigne and his readers / Richard L. Regosin -- The educational writings of Sir Francis Bacon / Brian Vickers -- Shakespeare's predecessors: Lyly, Greene, Kyd, and Marlowe / David Bevington -- Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Renaissance aspiration / Roma Gill -- Shakespeare's earlier plays: history and romantic comedy / Derek Traversi -- Shakespeare's later plays: the achievement in tragedy / Philip Edwards -- Ben Jonson and the sensational Jacobean drama.