What are the characteristics of English literature during the renaissance?

The English
renaissance was particular in its preoccupation with religion and the place of man in
relationship with God. England had undergone an especially fraught period in its religious
convictions with Henry VIII having taken the country through the reformation, the country having
gone from being Catholic to becoming Protestant, adherents of the newly formed Church of
England. Some might claim that the King James Bible and Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer stand as
particular examples of English renaissancethat were to be profoundly influential upon Englishof
the period.

The literary work of this period was particularly interesting in
its questioning of religious orthodoxy and in the questioning of religious authority.
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, for example, is set in the same
Wittenberg University in which Martin Luther, the first protestant reformer, nailed his 95
theses to the cathedral door. In a profoundon the questing spirit of the protestant reform,
Marlowe make Faustus an intellectual man who wishes to test his personal relationship with God -
one of the underpinning notions of protestant theology - by selling his soul to the
devil.

Equally, later works such as
Shakespeare's Macbeth sought to test the bounds of supernatural beliefs via
the presence of witches on stage and Macbeth's belief in his self-determination tested by the
prophecies of these 'weird sisters' whose prediction of his demise finally transpires to be
correct. Moreover, Hamlet, another Wittenberg student and rationalist, is also tested in his
belief in the power of the human intellect to explain God's creation when he witnesses his
father's ghost early in the play which defies his rationalist belief in 'ocular
proof'. 

The crowning glory of this change in religious attitude comes in one
of the triumphs of the late English renaissance, John Milton's Paradise
Lost and its reconsideration of the role of the ultimate acts of religious free will,
Lucifer's expulsion from heaven and mankind's original sin. Milton's puritanical religious
thought is made all the more interesting by his sympathetic portrayal of Satan as a beguiling
character, one of whose confrontation of God and later temptation of man are made understandable
by Milton. 

One might also look to the issue of changes in social status in
renaissance England for another major theme. In an early sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder,
'Whose List to Hunt' he overly reveals the constraints of monarchy in writing about his own
clandestine affair with Anne Boleyn who is represented as a 'hind' who he would 'hunt' but for
the fact that she has 'Noli me tangere' (do not touch me) on a collar around her neck. He, of
course, touched her and with it tacitly acknowledges a socially revolutionary act that was
echoed in much renaissance literature. One only need to look to the Machiavellian Iago and
Edmund of Shakespeare's Othello and King Lear to see
two characters who seek social advancement past their socially prescribed places in life while
Middleton and Rowley's De Flores of The Changeling serves a similar
purpose. None finally achieve their aim but all are exponents of the expediency espoused in
Nicolo Machiavelli's The Prince and find their echoes in other examples
from renaissance drama in particular such as Henry V who, for example, is willing, as Prince Hal
in Henry IV Part II, to inform on his best friend, Falstaff to save his own
reputation and in Part I of the same play sequence, to plot his own rise
from infamy. As newly crowned monarch in Henry V he is willing to execute
an old acquaintance to maintain order, a reflection of the political expediency that one might
argue that Elizabeth I also showed in her execution of Mary Queen of Scots during a period of
anti-Catholic sentiment.