16th Century Renaissance English Literature

Creator: Anion Jokinen | visit site

Grade Range: 8 - 11

While there are countless sites on Shakespeare, this one offers the OTHER authors from the greatest period of English literature. This site doesn’t even bother with Shakespeare, sending the reader to a different source for that information. The site divides the plays into Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods. This is an impressive array that focuses on the history of the Tudors as background for Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Hooker, Spenser, and dozens more. There is a new section on Renaissance drama and another on religious writers, who were very influential at this time. The variety offered here, particularly for those who think the only writer of this time was Shakespeare, is amazing. The small Google ads are unobtrusive.

In the Classroom

This is a great site for research and sharing with students. It gives them a taste beyond what they think they know about the English Renaissance. Most of the author-specific pages have links to discussion forums for that author, and students can quickly find other aficionados for obscure writers of this period. Share an author a day as you read Shakespeare, then ask students to research a favorite and create a digital museum piece about him/her on a wiki or write a blog entry as if from their person’s journal.

At Home

If your student is interested in Shakespeare or simply has a research assignment, use this site to introduce other authors from the same time period.

Tags

elizabethan, literature, marlowe, elizabethan, literature,

Subjects

Drama, Language Arts, Language Arts, Social Studies, Social Studies, History & Culture: World, English,