History of the English literature

Elizabethan and early Stuart drama

Theatre and society

In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theatre was the focal point of the age. Public life was shot through with theatricality--monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and status were defined in a rigid code of dress--while on the stages the tensions and contradictions working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any other form, the drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, labourers, and the like, but the same play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at court by night. The drama's power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or event resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and sympathies of this diverse audience.

Moreover, the theatre was fully responsive to the developing technical sophistication of nondramatic literature. In the hands of

Shakespeare, the blank verse employed for translation by the earl of Surrey in the first half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose encompassed both the control of Hooker and the immediacy of Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to attract the most technically accomplished writers of its day because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some realistic prospect of financial return. The decisive event was the opening of the Theatre, considered the first purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next 70 years some 20 theatres more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are little short of astonishing.

Theatres in London and the provinces

The London theatres were a meeting ground of humanism and popular taste. They inherited, on the one hand, a tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the universities, and the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions responsible for legal education). This tradition involved the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin conventions to English, particularly to reproduce the type of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously formal verse, associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine example of the type is Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, a tragedy based on British chronicle history that draws for Elizabeth's benefit a grave political moral about irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known English play in blank verse. On the other hand, all the professional companies performing in London continued also to tour in the provinces, and the stage was never allowed to lose contact with its roots in country show, pastime, and festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues against vices in the mid-Tudor interlude was never entirely submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the tricksy villain of the morality play, survives, in infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in Shakespeare's Richard III (c. 1592-94). Another survival was the clown or the fool, apt at any moment to step beyond the play's illusion and share jokes directly with the spectators. The intermingling of traditions is clear in two farces, Nicholas Udall's

Ralph Roister Doister (1553) and the anonymous Gammer Gurton's Needle (1559), in which academic pastiche is overlaid with country game; and what the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas Preston's Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of energetic spectacle and comedy.

A third tradition was that of revelry and masques, practiced at the princely courts across Europe and preserved in England in the witty and impudent productions of the schoolboy troupes of choristers who sometimes played in London alongside the professionals. An early play related to this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne's Supposes (1566), translated from a reveling play in Italian. Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously expensive court masques staged for James I and Charles I, magnificent displays of song, dance, and changing scenery performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying the king. The principal masque writer was Ben Jonson, the scene designer Inigo Jones.

Professional playwrights

The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually evaporated; George Peele's Old Wives' Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene's speciality was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the choristers, endeavoured to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion (1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.

Marlowe

Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation, their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II (c. 1591;

published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589; published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God. The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society's moral and religious sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister, ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators' sympathies on the side of his gigantic villain-heroes.

His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe's friend Thomas Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands.

Kyd's use of Senecan conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine conflict of values, making the hero's success at once triumphant and horrifying.

Shakespeare's works

Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains elusive. His capacity for assimilation--what the poet John Keats called his “negative capability”--means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part, Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society. The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he--as actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's players--was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully realized.

The early histories

Shakespeare's early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence, comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589-94), begins as a patriotic celebration of English valour against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III--probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage--who boasts in Henry VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.” Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and the appeal of Richard's quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy moral judgments. The second sequence--Richard II (1595-96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 (1596-98), and Henry V (1599)--begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex's faction paid for a performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare's other history plays, King John (1594-96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through material drawn from Foxe's Actes and Monuments.

The early comedies

The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of comedy's fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group--The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589-94), The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589-94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597-98), and Twelfth Night (1600-01)--are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on wit. The plays of a second group--The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589-94), Love's Labour's Lost (1589-94), A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595-96), and As You Like It (1598-1600)--have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake themselves untrammeled by society's forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the fragmented individual may recover wholeness. All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four plays that approach tragicomedy--The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596-97), Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), All's Well That Ends Well (1601-05), and Measure for Measure (1603-04)--festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law, human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601-02) presents a kind of theatrical no-man's-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and savage farce. Shakespeare's reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a way that voices fully the fin-de-siecle sense of confused and divided individuality.

The tragedies

The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare's age find their highest expression in his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested and found wanting, and all society's latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies Titus Andronicus (1589-94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594-96), with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments. In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare's practice cannot be confined to a single general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599-1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603-04), social tragedy in King Lear (1605-06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606-07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and Cleopatra (1606-07). In each category Shakespeare's play is exemplary and defines its type; the range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare's heroes are collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence. The ultimate insight is Lear's irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest single product.

Shakespeare's later works

In his last period Shakespeare's astonishingly fertile invention returned to experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot (not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605-08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last group of plays comprises the four romances--Pericles (c. 1606-08), Cymbeline (c. 1608-10), The Winter's Tale (c. 1609-11), and The Tempest (1611)--which develop a long, philosophical perspective on fortune and suffering. (Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613-14], was written in collaboration with John

Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In

these plays Shakespeare's imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical themes--wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and Shakespeare's subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is maintained between the artist's delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own disillusionment.

Playwrights after Shakespeare

Shakespeare's perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theatres in 1642. The prevailing manner of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh, “Machiavel's two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.

On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes, spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in his Shoemakers' Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society at large.

Jonson

The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s; they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time's deformities,” the language, habits, and humours of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings; but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice. Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating Jonson's wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London's multifarious ephemera. After 1616 Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made a hard-won return to the theatres. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub (1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.

Other Jacobean dramatists

Of Jonson's successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All values are mocked by Marston's bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson's moral concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as the dominant modes of social interaction. His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson's; the misbehaviour that Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of circumstance.

Middleton's social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic libertine D'Amville in Cyril Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence.

In The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal absolutism. In Jonson's Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat, whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy; Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are John Webster's, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the experience of its women.

The last Renaissance dramatists

Already in the Jacobean period, signs of a politer drama such as would prevail after 1660 were beginning to appear. Simply in terms of productivity and longevity, the most successful Jacobean playwright was John Fletcher, whose ingenious tragicomedies and sometimes bawdy comedies were calculated to attract the applause of the emerging Stuart leisured classes. With plays such as The Faithful Shepherdess (1609 or 1610), Fletcher caught up with the latest in avant-garde Italianate drama, while his most dazzling comedy, The Wild Goose Chase (produced 1621, printed 1652), is a battle of the sexes set among Parisian gallants and their ladies; it anticipates the Restoration comedy of manners. Fletcher's successor in the reign of Charles I was James Shirley, who showed even greater facility with romantic comedy and the mirroring of fashions and foibles. In The Lady of Pleasure (1635) and Hyde Park (1637), Shirley presented the fashionable world to itself in its favourite haunts and situations.

However, the underlying tensions of the time continued to preoccupy the drama of the other major Caroline playwrights: John Ford, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome. The plays of Ford, the last major tragic dramatist of the Renaissance, focus on profoundly conservative societies whose values are in crisis. In 'Tis Pity She's a

Whore (1633?), a seemingly typical middle-class family is destroyed by the discovery of incest. In The Broken Heart (1633?), a courtly society collapses under the pressure of hidden political maladies. Massinger, too, wrote some fine tragedies (The Roman Actor, 1626), but his best plays are comedies and tragicomedies preoccupied with political themes, such as The Bondman (1623), which deals with issues of liberty and obedience, and A New Way to Pay Old Debts (performed 1625, printed 1633), which satirizes the behaviour and outlook of the provincial gentry. The tradition of subversive domestic satire was carried down to the English Civil Wars in the plays of Brome, whose anarchic and popular comedies, such as The Antipodes (1640) and A Jovial Crew (produced 1641, printed 1652), poke fun at all levels of society and include caustic and occasionally libelous humour. The outbreak of fighting in 1642 forced the playhouses to close, but this was not because the theatre had become identified with the court. Rather, a theatre of complex political sympathies was still being produced. The crisis in which the playhouses had become embroiled had been the drama's preoccupation for three generations.

Early Stuart poetry and prose

In the early Stuart period the failure of consensus was dramatically demonstrated in the political collapse of the 1640s and in the growing sociocultural divergences of the immediately preceding years. While it was still possible for the theatres to address the nation very much as a single audience, the court--with the Baroque style, derived from the Continent, that it encouraged in painting, masque, and panegyric--was becoming more remote from the country at large and was regarded with increasing distrust. In fact, a growing separation between polite and vulgar literature was to dispel many of the characteristic strengths of Elizabethan writing. Simultaneously, long-term intellectual changes were beginning to impinge on the status of poetry and prose. Sidney's defense of poetry, which maintained that poetry depicted what was ideally rather than actually true, was rendered redundant by the loss of agreement over transcendent absolutes; the scientist, the Puritan with his inner light, and the skeptic differed equally over the criteria by which truth was to be established. From the circle of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at Great Tew in Oxfordshire--which included poets such as Edmund Waller, Thomas Carew, and Sidney Godolphin--William

Chillingworth argued that it was unreasonable for any individual to force his opinions onto any other, while Thomas Hobbes

reached the opposite conclusion (in his Leviathan, 1651) that all must be as the state pleases. In this context, the old idea of poetry as a persuader to virtue fell obsolete, and the century as a whole witnessed a massive transfer of energy into new literary forms, particularly into the rationally balanced couplet, the autobiography, and the embryonic novel. At the same time, these influences were neither uniform nor consistent; Hobbes might repudiate the use of metaphor as senseless and ambiguous, yet his own prose was frequently enlivened by half-submerged metaphors.

The Metaphysical poets

Writers responded to these conditions in different ways, and in poetry three main traditions may broadly be distinguished, which have been coupled with the names of Spenser, Jonson, and John Donne. Donne heads the tradition that 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson labeled for all time as the Metaphysicals; what unites these poets as a group is less the violent yoking of unlike ideas to which Johnson objected than that they were all poets of personal and individual feeling, responding to their time's pressures privately or introspectively. This privateness, of course, was not new, but the period in general experienced a huge upsurge of contemplative or devotional verse.

Donne

Donne has been taken to be the apex of the 16th-century tradition of plain poetry, and certainly the love lyrics of his that parade their cynicism, indifference, and libertinism pointedly invert and parody the conventions of Petrarchan lyric, though he courts admiration for his poetic virtuosity no less than the Petrarchans. A “great haunter of plays” in his youth, he is always dramatic; his verse cultivates “strong lines,” dissonance, and colloquiality. Carew praised him for avoiding poetic myths and excluding from his verse the “train of gods and goddesses”; what fills it instead is a dazzling battery of language and argument drawn from science, law and trade, court and city. Donne is the first London poet: his early satires and elegies are packed with the busy metropolitan milieu, and his songs and sonnets, which include his best writing, with their kaleidoscope of contradictory attitudes, ironies, and contingencies, explore the alienation and ennui of urban living. Donne treats experience as relative, a matter of individual point of view; the personality is multiple, quizzical, and inconsistent, eluding definition. His love poetry is that of the frustrated careerist. By inverting normal perspectives and making the mistress the centre of his being--he boasts that she is “all states, and all princes, I, nothing else is”--he belittles the public world, defiantly asserting the superior validity of his private experience, and frequently he erodes the traditional dichotomy of body and soul, outrageously praising the mistress in language reserved for platonic or religious contexts. The defiance is complicated, however, by a recurrent conviction of personal unworthiness that culminates in the Anniversaries (1611-12), two long commemorative poems written on the death of a patron's daughter. These expand into the classic statement of Jacobean melancholy, an intense meditation on the vanity of the world and the collapse of traditional certainties. Donne would, reluctantly, find respectability in a church career, but even his religious poems are torn between the same tense self-assertion and self-abasement that mark his secular poetry.

Donne's influence

Donne's influence was vast; the taste for wit and conceits reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them courtiers such as Aurelian Townshend and William Habington, academics such as William Cartwright, and religious poets such as Francis Quarles and Henry King. The only true Metaphysical, in the sense of a poet with genuinely philosophical pretensions, was Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), important as an early proponent of religion formulated by the light of reason. Donne's most enduring followers were the three major religious poets George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. Herbert, a Cambridge academic who buried his courtly ambitions in the quiet life of a country parsonage, wrote some of the most resonant and attractive religious verse in the language. Though not devoid of tension, his poems substitute for Donne's tortured selfhood a humane, meditative assurance. They evoke a practical piety and a richly domestic world, but they dignify it with a musicality and a feeling for the beauty of holiness that bespeak Herbert's identification with the nascent Anglican church of Archbishop William Laud. By contrast, the poems of Crashaw (a Roman Catholic) and the Welsh recluse Vaughan move in alternative traditions: the former toward the sensuous ecstasies and effusions of the Continental Baroque, the latter toward hermetic naturalism and mystical raptures.

However, in the context of the Civil Wars, Vaughan's and Crashaw's introspection began to look like retreat, and, when the satires of John Cleveland and the lyrics of Abraham Cowley took the Donne manner to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it was symptomatic of a loss of control in the face of political and social traumas. The one poet for whom metaphysical wit became a strategy for holding together conflicting allegiances was Donne's outstanding heir, Andrew Marvell. Marvell's writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and precise, uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with Puritanical economy of statement. His finest work seems to have been done at the time of greatest strain, in about 1650-53, and under the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax, parliamentarian general but opponent of King Charles I's execution, to whose retirement from politics to his country estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in Upon Appleton House. His lyrics are poems of the divided mind, sensitive to all the major conflicts of their society--body against soul, action against retirement, experience against innocence, Oliver Cromwell against the king--but Marvell sustains the conflict of irreconcilables through paradox and wit rather than attempting to decide or transcend it. In this situation, irresolution has become a strength; in a poem like An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, which weighs the claims of King Charles and Cromwell, the poet's reserve was the only effective way of confronting the unprecedented demise of traditional structures of politics and morality.

Jonson and the Cavalier poets

By contrast, the Jonsonian tradition was, broadly, that of social verse, written with a Classical clarity and weight and deeply informed by ideals of civilized reasonableness, ceremonious respect, and inner self-sufficiency derived from Seneca; it is a poetry of publicly shared values and norms. Jonson's own verse was occasional; it addresses other individuals, distributes praise and blame, and promulgates sober and judicious ethical attitudes. His favoured forms were the ode, elegy, satire, epistle, and epigram, and they are always beautifully crafted objects, achieving a Classical symmetry and monumentality. For Jonson, the unornamented style meant not colloquiality but labour, restraint, and control; a good poet had first to be a good man, and his verses lead his society toward an ethic of gracious but responsible living.

With the Cavalier poets who succeeded Jonson, the element of urbanity and conviviality tended to loom larger. Robert Herrick was perhaps England's first poet to express impatience with the tediousness of country life. However, Herrick's The Country Life and The Hock Cart rival Jonson's To Penshurst as panegyrics to the Horatian ideal of the “good life,” calm and retired, but Herrick's poems gain retrospective poignancy by their implied contrast with the disruptions of the Civil Wars. The courtiers Carew, Sir John

Suckling, and Richard Lovelace developed a manner of ease and naturalness suitable to the world of gentlemanly pleasure in which they moved; Suckling's A Session of the Poets (1637; published 1646) lists more than 20 wits then in town. The Cavalier poets were writing England's first vers de societe, lyrics of compliments and casual liaisons, often cynical, occasionally obscene; this was a line to be picked up again after 1660, as were the heroic verse and attitudinizing drama of Jonson's successor as poet laureate, Sir William Davenant. A different contribution was the elegance and smoothness that came to be associated with Sir John Denham and Edmund Waller, whom the poet John Dryden named as the first exponents of “good writing.” Waller's inoffensive lyrics are the epitome of polite taste, and Denham's topographical poem Cooper's Hill (1641), a significant work in its own right, is an important precursor of the balanced Augustan couplet (as is the otherwise slight oeuvre of Viscount Falkland). The growth of Augustan gentility was further encouraged by work done on translations in mid-century, particularly by Sir Richard Fanshawe and Thomas Stanley.

Continued influence of Spenser

Donne had shattered Spenser's leisurely ornamentation, and Jonson censured his archaic language, but the continuing regard for Spenser at this time was significant. Variants of the Spenserian stanza were used by the brothers Giles Fletcher and Phineas Fletcher, the former in his long religious poem Christ's Victory (1610), which is also indebted to Josuah Sylvester's highly popular translations from the French Calvinist poet Guillaume du Bartas, the Divine Weeks and Works (1605). Similarly, Spenserian pastorals still flowed from the pens of William Browne (Britannia's Pastorals, 1613-16), George Wither (The Shepherd's Hunting, 1614), and Michael Drayton, who at the end of his life returned nostalgically to portraying an idealized Elizabethan golden age (The Muses Elizium, 1630). Nostalgia was a dangerous quality under the progressive and absolutist Stuarts; the taste for Spenser involved a respect for values--traditional, patriotic, and Protestant--that were popularly, if erroneously, linked with the Elizabethan past but thought to be disregarded by the new regime. These poets believed they had a spokesman at court in the heroic and promising Prince Henry, but his death in 1612 disappointed many expectations, intellectual, political, and religious, and this group in particular was forced further toward the Puritan position. Increasingly, their pastorals and fervently Protestant poetry made them seem out of step with a court whose sympathies in foreign affairs were pro-Spanish and pro-Catholic; so sharp became Wither's satires that he earned imprisonment and was lampooned by Jonson in a court masque. The failure of the Stuarts to conciliate attitudes such as these was to be crucial to their inability to prevent the collapse of the Elizabethan compromise in the next generation. The nearest affinities, both in style and substance, of John Milton's early poetry would be with the Spenserians; in Areopagitica (1644) Milton praised “our sage and serious poet Spenser” as “a better teacher than [the philosophers] Scotus or Aquinas.”

Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose

Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent's Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly's Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan's first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope, repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and '50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society (founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.

The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others. The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning (i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God's glory). The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose, however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended complications.

The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600-01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson (Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,” a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle's (Micro-cosmography, 1628). Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker. Walton's biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville's tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter Raleigh's unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and sombre skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh's providential framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in pragmatism.

Prose styles

The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-endedness. The age's professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher's exegesis into tiny, hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the loose style is Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human psychopathology. Burton's compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In the Religio Medici (1635) and in The Garden of Cyrus and Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation, content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne's majestic prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.

These were all learned styles, Latinate and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of the first corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years' War, heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. The search for new kinds of political order and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as voices were heard that had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with writers who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste--Levelers, such as John Lilburne and Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, such as Gerrard Winstanley in his Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are Milton's tracts against the bishops (1641-42), which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm. Milton's later pamphlets--on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649)--adopt a loosely

Ciceronian sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.

Milton

John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the foundations for the emerging aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a concept of the public role of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson's; he early declared his hope to do for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy” had done for theirs. But where Jonson's humanism had led him into court service, Milton's was complicated by a respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that it, individually, knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him, poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; Lycidas (1637), a pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus (1634), a masque against “masquing,” performed privately in the country and opposing a private heroism in chastity and virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he was also well read in Latin and modern Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with Virgil's Aeneid.

During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642-60), Milton saw his role as the intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize, and the Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning monarchy. Milton showed himself virtually the last defender of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but desperate program for a permanent oligarchy of the Puritan elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal slavery.