The Renaissance context

Ever since nineteenth-century historians such as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt began elaborating a systematic concept of the Renaissance, the idea has proved controversial. Some have questioned whether it is accurate to speak of the Renaissance as a distinct period; others have confined themselves to questioning the dating of the age, or proposing a variety of Renaissances. Certainly when one surveys what has come to be known as the Renaissance, it looks different in different countries, and seems to proceed at different rates in different areas (the Renaissance in painting, for example, occurred long before what we think of as the Renaissance in music). Nevertheless, the fact that one still speaks of ‘Renaissances’ in these cases suggests some kind of underlying unity to the phenomena. And many of the figures who fall into the period we label the Renaissance show signs of having conceived of themselves as living in a distinct era, with a strong sense of having broken with the past. Though they may not have used the term ‘Renaissance’, writers such as Francis Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning (1605) speak of themselves as coming at the dawn of a new age. In the end, although one must grant that the idea of the Renaissance is the construction of historians, the concept remains useful for understanding a wide range of phenomena, including, as I hope to show, Shakespeare's achievement in Hamlet.

The Renaissance, as the name implies, was a rebirth : the rebirth of classical antiquity in the modern world, beginning in Italy roughly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and gradually spreading to the rest of Europe.