ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Early Modern English (EModE), especially Elizabethan, literature. William Shakespeare was indeed the pinnacle of Elizabethan writing. But it was an age full of well turned and true filed lines. The EModE period had an interesting literature from beginning to end, and Elizabeth's reign yielded the richest. Shakespeare's name is certainly dominant in the field of drama, a flourishing genre in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare's plays can be roughly divided into Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Romances. His four major tragedies are Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. The Hamlet quotation is an example, as indeed is Marlowe's Dr Faustus speech. This type of unrhymed verse is called blank verse. Much blank verse and indeed much Elizabethan rhymed verse use a rhythmical scheme, called the iambic pentameter. Philip Sidney has been chosen here to represent a large body of lyrical poetry of the Elizabethan age, far too large to consider in any detail.
