Elizabethan literature

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See also: English Renaissance § Literature
The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, by an unidentified artist. This portrait showcases both the imperial majesty of Elizabeth I, in allegorical figures of the foreground, and the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, with its naval backdrop.[1]
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    Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of

    Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney[2] and Thomas Kyd
    .

    Historical context

    Elizabeth I presided over a vigorous culture that saw notable accomplishments in the arts, voyages of discovery, the "

    Elizabethan Settlement" that created the Church of England, and the defeat of military threats from Spain.[3]

    During her reign, a London-centred culture, both

    James I, who had furthermore brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. He also translated the works of Montaigne from French into English.[4]

    Prose

    Two of the most important Elizabethan prose writers were

    Elizabethan pamphleteers.[7] He was a playwright, poet and satirist, who is best known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller.[8]

    George Puttenham (1529–1590) was a 16th-century English writer and literary critic. He is generally considered to be the author of the influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie (1589).

    Poetry

    The epic poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; titlepage, printed for William Ponsonby in 1590

    Italian literature was an important influence on the poetry of

    English sonnet with three quatrains and a closing couplet.[12]

    In the later 16th century, English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include

    occasional poems such as "On Monsieur's Departure" and "The Doubt of Future Foes
    ".

    Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99) was one of the most important poets of this period, author of

    Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. Another major figure, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), was an English poet, courtier and soldier, and is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. His works include Astrophel and Stella, An Apology for Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion (1567–1620), became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School
    .

    Shakespeare also popularised the English sonnet, which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.

    Changes to the canon

    While the canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th century has always been in some form of flux, it is only towards the late 20th century that concerted efforts were made to challenge the canon. Questions that once did not even have to be made, such as where to put the limitations of periods, what geographical areas to include, what genres to include, what writers and what kinds of writers to include, are now central.

    The central figures of the Elizabethan canon are Spenser, Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. There have been few attempts to change this long established list because the cultural importance of these five is so great that even re-evaluations on grounds of literary merit have not dared to dislodge them from the curriculum. Spenser, for example, had a significant influence on 17th-century poetry and was the primary English influence on John Milton.[citation needed]

    In the 18th century, interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others.

    The

    Oxford Book of English Verse (1919). The poems from this period are largely songs and apart from the major names, one sees the two pioneers Wyatt and Surrey, and a scattering of poems by other writers of the period. However, the authors of many poems are anonymous. Some poems, such as Thomas Sackville's Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates
    , were highly regarded (and therefore "in the canon") but they were omitted from the anthology as non-lyric.

    In the 20th century

    Sir John Davies, whose cause he championed in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926 (republished in On Poetry and Poets in 1957).[citation needed
    ]

    In 1939, American critic

    Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sidney and Spenser. Instead, he focused on the "native or plain-style" anti-Petrarchan movement, which he argued had been overlooked and undervalued.[13] The most underrated member of this movement he deems to have been George Gascoigne (1525–1577), who "deserves to be ranked ... among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".[14] Other members were Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), Barnabe Googe (1540–1594), and George Turberville (1540–1610). Winters characterised such anti-Petrarchan poems as having "broad, simple, and obvious" themes that border on "proverbial" as well as a restrained, aphoristic style; such a poet would "stat[e] his matter as economically as possible, and not, as are the Petrarchans, in the pleasures of rhetoric for its own sake".[15]

    Both Eliot and Winters[clarification needed] were much in favour of the established canon. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, the established canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers.[16]

    Theatre

    See also: English Renaissance theatre

    The

    miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and by Plautus (whose comic
    clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier, had a powerful influence during the Renaissance and thereafter). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters.

    A 1596 sketch of a rehearsal in progress on the thrust stage of The Swan, a typical circular Elizabethan open-roof playhouse.

    During the reign of

    play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet
    that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.

    Iphigeneia at Aulis is the first known dramatic work by a woman in English.[17]

    A Comedy of Errors, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies,[18] A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which introduced a new kind of drama.[19]

    Shakespeare's career continued into the

    Anthony and Cleopatra.[20] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.[21] In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.[22] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.[23]

    Other important figures in the

    Thomas Dekker
    .

    Marlowe's (1564–1593) subject matter is different from Shakespeare's as it focuses more on the moral drama of the Renaissance man than any other thing. Drawing on German folklore, Marlowe introduced the story of Faust to England in his play Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), about a scientist and magician who, obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits, sells his soul to the Devil. Faustus makes use of "the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and damnation, and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles."[24]

    Thomas Dekker (c. 1570–1632) was, between 1598 and 1602, involved in about forty plays, usually in collaboration. He is particularly remembered for The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), a work where he appears to be the sole author. Dekker is noted for his "realistic portrayal of daily London life" and for "his sympathy for the poor and oppressed".[25]

    Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance
    , widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare.

    List of other writers

    List of other of the writers born in this period:

    See also

    References

    1. ^ "The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I". Retrieved 21 January 2020.
    2. ^ "Elizabethan Literature". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
    3. ^ "Elizabeth I, Queen of England 1533–1603", Anthology of the British Literature, vol. A (concise ed.), Petersborough: Broadview, 2009, p. 683.
    4. ^ Frances Amelia Yates (1934). John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England. United Kingdom: University Press. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
    5. ISBN 0-14-070738-7
      ;
    6. ^ "John Lilly and Shakespeare", by C. C. Hense in the Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakesp. Gesellschaft, vols. vii and viii (1872, 1873).
    7. ^ Nicholl, Charles (8 March 1990). "'Faustus' and the Politics of Magic". London Review of Books. pp. 18–19. Retrieved 11 May 2015.
    8. ^ John O'Connell (28 February 2008). "Sex and books: London's most erotic writers". Time Out. Archived from the original on 10 April 2019. Retrieved 26 November 2015.
    9. ^ a b Tillyard 1929.
    10. ^ Burrow 2004.
    11. ^ Ward et al. 1907–21, p. 3.
    12. ^ The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Sixteenth/Early Seventeenth Century, Volume B, 2012, p. 647
    13. ^ Poetry, LII (1939, pp. 258–72, excerpted in Paul. J. Alpers (ed): Elizabethan Poetry. Modern Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
    14. ^ Poetry, LII (1939, pp. 258–72, excerpted in Paul. J. Alpers (ed): Elizabethan Poetry. Modern Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967: 98
    15. ^ Poetry, LII (1939, pp. 258–72, excerpted in Paul. J. Alpers (ed): Elizabethan Poetry. Modern Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967: 95
    16. ISBN 978-0582090965
      . Retrieved 30 March 2016.
    17. ^ Buck, Claire, ed. "Lumley, Joanna Fitzalan (c. 1537–1576/77)." The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. New York: Prentice Hall, 1992. 764.
    18. ^ Ackroyd 2006, p. 235.
    19. ^ Ackroyd 2006, pp. 353, 358; Shapiro 2005, pp. 151–153.
    20. ^ Bradley 1991, p. 85; Muir 2005, pp. 12–16.
    21. ^ Bradley 1991, pp. 40, 48.
    22. ^ Dowden 1881, p. 57.
    23. ^ Wells et al. 2005, pp. 1247, 1279
    24. ^ Clifford, Leech. "Christopher Marlowe". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
    25. ^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1996), pp. 266–7.

    Works cited

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