The Renaissance Rhyme Scheme

In the 21st century, literature is a crucial part of our society, but how important was it during the Renaissance? The Renaissance was a time period from approximately 1300 to 1600, during which the revival of interest classical culture lead to artistic, architectural, and academic achievements. Due to the population decrease caused by the Black Death, general living standards were much higher. Literature flourished during the Renaissance. Things were increasingly being written in the vernacular, the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region. This allowed more people to read and understand certain works without having to learn the original language they were written in. The spread of the printing …show more content…
Famous poets such as Francesco Petrarch and William Shakespeare wrote poems that were often about time, dualities, beauty, love, the morality of men, and the present rather than the future. These thoughts were composed into sonnets, pillions, and country-house poems. Poems were written in rhyme or blank verse. The sonnet was a very popular type of poem during the Renaissance. The themes of these sonnets were typically beauty or love. Sonnets follow a very specific format which includes a certain rhyme scheme, and a technique called iambic pentameter. A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyme that the lines of a poem or stanza follow. A sonnet’s rhyme scheme is as follows: a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f, g, g. If a represents the last word of a line, all other a lines rhyme with the last word of that line. For example, if an a line ends in cat, every a line thereafter must rhyme with cat. This would repeat for every letter in the specified order. Another attribute of sonnets is iambic pentameter. This is a structural requirement of the sonnet saying that it must have ten syllables per line and an alternating stress on the syllables. For example “yes” has one syllable and “incomprehensibility” has eight. Counting syllables is an important part of giving a poem it’s “flow” which is why sonnets uniformly have ten per …show more content…
Drama became more secular rather than religious, as did art. The three main genres of plays were tragedies, comedies, and histories. Plays often had several plots, consisting of one main plot and several other subplots that related to each other. It was common to alternate between different plots and styles in consecutive scenes. Theatrical metaphors and jokes were common in plays. Prologues, episodes, sides, soliloquies, and plays-within-plays are often seen in plays written during this time period. Some examples of non-fiction material are Utopia by Sir Thomas More, a semi-fictional political narrative written in Latin prose, and Beware the Cat by William Baldwin, which is thought to be the first English novel, and was a fictional prose in the first-person