Middle Ages
- Piers Plowman is written in unrhymed alliterative verse.
- The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is sometimes known as the "Pearl poet".
- Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde ends with an invitation to John Gower to correct it.
- Shakespeare used Gower's Confessio Amantis as a source for Pericles, and Gower appears as a character in the Chorus.
- Malory's Morte D'Arthur is distinguishable from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it was written in prose.
- Robert Henryson supplemented Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde with his The Testament of Cressied.
- Margery Kempe's The Book of Margery Kempe was the first autobiography in English and was also useful as an insight to middle-class life in the Middle Ages.
- Julian of Norwich's Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love was believed to be the first book written by a woman in England.
- Rhyme royal is also known as the Chaucerian stanza, because Chaucer was the first one to use it.
The Renaissance
- The sonnet and blank verse were developed during this period of time
- Spenser's Faerie Queene Gloriana is actually Queen Elizabeth I.
- Wyatt & Surrey were the ones who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet form into English literature.
- Raleigh wrote "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" as a response to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love."
- The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd was the first Elizabethan revenge tragedy.
- Skelton - skeltonics!
- Sidney - a man of firsts:
- Astrophil and Stella was the first English sonnet cycle
- A Defense of Poesy was the first piece of literary criticism in English
- Shakespeare borrowed from Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia for a subplot in King Lear
- Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela
- The main idea of Sidney's A Defense of Poesy is that poetry is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue.
- Sidney's "Ye Goatherd Gods" (part of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia) is a double sestina
- Spenser's The Shepheard's Calendar is a collection of eclogues
- Spenser created a sonnet form AND a stanza form
- Spenser also writes purposely antique to sound like Chaucer
- Marlowe's Tamburlaine was important in establishing blank verse as the preferred style for later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
- Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" has responses from Raleigh, Donne, Herrick and C. Day Lewis.
