William Shakespeare is one of the supreme examples of the flowering of the Renaissance in literature, and his various works exemplify the concerns of the Renaissance, centered more on man than in previous ages, seeking a new understanding of the importance of life on this earth, and built on a new respect for learning and a revival of the artistic sensibility of the ancient world, especially the Greek world. Shakespeare's poetry can serve as a particular example of how the poet has incorporated certain elements into his work and how he has been influenced by the forces of the Renaissance.
During the Renaissance, there was a new value placed on individualism and personal genius, and the ideal of the Italian Humanists was similarly that of the emancipated man of many-sided genius:
The medieval Christian ideal in which personal identity was largely absorbed in the collective Christian body of souls faded in favor of the more pagan heroic mode--the individual man as adventurer, genius, and rebel (Tarnas 227).
The reference here is to individuals involved in the political life of their city, but it is applicable to other realms as well. The epitome of the Renaissance man was Leonardo da Vinci, whose intellectual energies were brought to bear on a wide variety of areas of human inquiry. Shakespeare fits the mold in a number of ways. Though he did not expand beyond literature, he demonstrated in his writings such a wide knowledge of many different fields that subsequent generations have doubted one so low-born could have written the plays and poems attributed to him or have acquired the knowledge he has incorporated into his work.
Shakespeare's fame as a playwright has overshadowed his abilities as a poet, but in his lifetime he was better known as a poet and was a poet before he was a playwright. His first long poem was Venus and Adonis, and this was the work by which he was best known, for it was an instant and immense...