Introdução/Indroduction

Emphasis on William Shakespeare (1564-1616) as an outstanding poet and playwright has often led to oversimplified notions of English literature and drama during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when many other remarkable writers existed. This period is generally called the Renaissance, despite the limitations of this term. Hollander and Kermode, for example, note that “By the English Renaissance,historians of literature and culture mean the period from about 1509 to 1660, the reign of the Tudor Henry VIII and his children and the first two Stuarts, and the revolutionary government of the Commonwealth...” (5) The articles in this issue of Ilha do Desterro cover the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. They address the work of six major writers: the playwrights Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), John Fletcher (1579-1625), Francis Beaumont (1584?-1616) and Ben Jonson (1572-1637); the poets John Donne (1572-1631) and George Herbert (1593-1633)