The European Renaissance

Gutenberg's press and humanism's revival of antiquity gave the Renaissance its raw materials; what it built with them was new: the essay, the professional public stage, and a soliloquy that could hold a whole indecisive mind. Six texts run from a scholar's damnation to Milton's biblical epic, the direct runway into the novel a generation later.

1. 1
   Doctor Faustus

   Christopher Marlowe · 1592

   Lvl 5120pp

   Marlowe stages the era's central bargain in blank verse and under two hours: a scholar trades his soul for twenty-four years of knowing everything. The shortest door in.

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2. 2
   Macbeth

   William Shakespeare · 1606

   Lvl 5110pp

   Shakespeare compresses ambition, prophecy, and guilt into his tightest tragedy: soliloquy doing interior work no stage had attempted before.

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3. 3
   The Essays

   Michel de Montaigne · 1580

   Lvl 61300pp

   Montaigne invents a form to hold nothing but his own mind changing: humanism's private, self-examining turn, and the ancestor of every 'I' that follows it into fiction.

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4. 4
   Gargantua and Pantagruel

   François Rabelais · 1534

   Lvl 81000pp

   Rabelais gets print culture drunk on its own new freedom: giants, lists, and bodily excess deployed against scholastic pomposity, high philosophy and toilet humor sharing a page without apology.

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5. 5
   The Faerie Queene

   Edmund Spenser · 1590

   Lvl 91050pp

   Spenser revives antiquity on purpose and stretches it into a national allegory vast enough for Elizabeth I to star in her own epic.

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6. 6
   Paradise Lost

   John Milton · 1667

   Lvl 8300pp

   The capstone: Milton, writing after the theatres had closed under Puritan rule, brings epic's full machinery back for one last biblical story, and gives the devil the best lines.

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