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In a tradition of literature remarkable for its exacting and brilliant achievements, the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods have been said to represent the most brilliant century of all. (The reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603; she was succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland, who took the title James I of England as well. English literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625, is properly called Jacobean.) These years produced a gallery of authors of genius, some of whom have never been surpassed, and conferred on scores of lesser talents the enviable ability to write with fluency, imagination, and verve. From one point of view, this sudden renaissance looks radiant, confident, heroic—and belated, but all the more dazzling for its belatedness. Yet, from another point of view, this was a time of unusually traumatic strain, in which English society underwent massive disruptions that transformed it on every front and decisively affected the life of every individual. In the brief, intense moment in which England assimilated the European Renaissance, the circumstances that made the assimilation possible were already disintegrating and calling into question the newly won certainties, as well as the older truths that they were dislodging. This doubleness, of new possibilities and new doubts simultaneously apprehended, gives the literature its unrivaled intensity.
In this period England's population doubled; prices rocketed, rents followed, old social loyalties dissolved, and new industrial, agricultural, and commercial veins were first tapped. Real wages hit an all-time low in the 1620s, and social relations were plunged into a state of unprecedented fluidity from which the merchant and the ambitious lesser gentleman profited at the expense of the aristocrat and the labourer, as satires and comedies current from the 1590s complain. Behind the Elizabethan vogue for pastoral poetry lies the fact of the prosperity of the enclosing sheep farmer, who aggressively sought to increase pasture at the expense of the peasantry. Tudor platitudes about order and degree could neither combat nor survive the challenge posed to rank by these arrivistes. The position of the crown, politically dominant yet financially insecure, had always been potentially unstable, and, when Charles I lost the confidence of his greater subjects in the 1640s, his authority crumbled. Meanwhile, the huge body of poor fell ever further behind the rich; the pamphlets of Thomas Harman (1566) and Robert Greene (1591–92), and as well as Shakespeare's King Lear (16051605–06), provide glimpses of a horrific world of vagabondage and crime, the Elizabethans' biggest, unsolvable social problem.
The barely disguised social ferment was accompanied by an intellectual revolution, as the medieval synthesis collapsed before the new science, new religion, and new humanism. While modern mechanical technologies were pressed into service by the Stuarts to create the scenic wonders of the court masque, the discoveries of astronomers and explorers were redrawing the cosmos in a way that was profoundly disturbing:And freely men confess that this world's spent,When in the planets, and the firmamentThey seek so many new new…. . .(John Donne, The First Anniversary, 1611)
The majority of people were more immediately affected by the religious revolutions of the 16th century. The man A person in early adulthood at the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 would, by her death in 1603, have been vouchsafed an unusually disillusioning insight into the duty owed by private conscience to the needs of the state. The Tudor church hierarchy was an instrument of social and political coercioncontrol, yet the mid-century controversies over the faith had already wrecked any easy confidence in the authority of doctrines and forms and had taught men people to question inquire carefully into the rationale of their own beliefs (as John Donne does in his third Satire, satire [c. 1596]). The Elizabethan ecclesiastical compromise was the object of continual criticism, both from radicals both within (who desired progressive reforms, such as the abolition of bishops) and from papists without (who desired the return of England to the Roman Catholic fold), but the incipient liberalism of individuals like such as John Milton and the scholar and churchman William Chillingworth was held in check by the majority's unwillingness to tolerate a plurality of religions in a supposedly unitary state. Nor was the Calvinist orthodoxy that cradled most English writers comforting, for it told them that they were corrupt, unfree, unable to earn their own salvations, and subject to heavenly judgments that were arbitrary and absolute. It Calvinism deeply informs affects the world of the Jacobean tragedies, whose heroes are not masters of their fates but victims of divine purposes that are terrifying yet inscrutable.
The third complicating factor was the race to catch up with continental Continental developments in arts and philosophy. The Tudors badly needed to create a class of educated diplomats, statesmen, and officials and to dignify their court by making it a fount of cultural as well as political patronage. The new learning, widely disseminated through the Erasmian (after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus) educational programs of such men as John Colet and Sir Thomas Elyot, proposed to use a systematic schooling in Latin authors and some Greek to encourage in the social elites a flexibility of mind and civilized serviceableness by which that would allow enlightened princely government could to walk hand in hand with responsible scholarship. Humanism fostered an intimate familiarity with the classics that was a powerful incentive for the creation of an English literature of answerable dignity. It fostered as well a practical, secular piety that left its impress everywhere on Elizabethan writing. Humanism's effect, however, was modified by the simultaneous impact of the flourishing continental Continental cultures, particularly the Italian. Repeatedly, crucial innovations in English letters developed resources originating from Italy, such Italy—such as the sonnet of Petrarch, the epic of Ludovico Ariosto, the pastoral of Jacopo Sannazzaro, the canzone, and blank verse, and verse—and values imported with these forms were in competition with the humanists' ethical preoccupations. Social ideals of wit, many-sidedness, and sprezzatura (accomplishment mixed with unaffectedness) were imbibed from Baldassare Castiglione's Il cortegiano, translated as The Courtyer by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and Elizabethan court poetry is steeped in Castiglione's aristocratic Neoplatonism, his notions of universal proportion, and the love of beauty as the path to virtue. Equally significant was the welcome afforded to Niccolò Machiavelli, whose lessons were vilified publicly and absorbed in private. The Prince, written in 1513, was unavailable in English until 1640, but as early as the 1580s Gabriel Harvey, a friend of the poet Edmund Spenser, can be found enthusiastically hailing its author as the apostle of modern pragmatism. "We are much beholden to Machiavel and others," said Francis Bacon, "that write what men do, and not what they ought to do."
So the literary revival occurred in a society deeply torn and rife with tensions, uncertainties, and competing versions of order and authority, religion and status, sex and the self. The Elizabethan settlement was a compromise was exactly that; the Tudor pretense that all the nation thought the same the people of England were unified in belief disguised the actual fragmentation of the old consensus under the strain of change. The new scientific knowledge proved both man's littleness and his power to command nature; against the Calvinist idea of man's helplessness pulled the humanist faith in his dignity, especially that conviction, derived from the reading of Seneca and so characteristic of the period, of man's constancy and fortitude, his heroic and almost divine capacity for self-determination. It was still possible for Elizabeth to hold these divergent tendencies together in a single, heterogeneous culture, but under her successors they would eventually fly apart. The philosophers speaking for the new century would be Francis Bacon, who argued for the gradual advancement of science through patient accumulation of experiments, and the skeptic Michel de Montaigne (his Essais Essays translated from the French by John Florio , [1603]), who denied that it was possible to formulate any general principles of knowledge.
Cutting across all of these was the persistence of popular habits of thought and expression. Both humanism and puritanism Puritanism set themselves against vulgar ignorance and folk tradition, but, fortunately, neither could remain aloof for long from the robustness of popular taste. Sir Philip Sidney, in England's first neoclassical Neoclassical literary treatise, The Defence of Poesie (written c. 1578–1583 1578–83, published 1595), candidly admitted that "the old song [i.e., ballad] of Percy and Douglas" would move his heart "more than with a trumpet," and his Arcadia (final version published in 1593) is a representative instance of the continual, fruitful cross-fertilization of genres in this period—the contamination of aristocratic pastoral with popular tale, the lyric with the ballad, comedy with romance, tragedy with satire, and poetry with prose. The language, too, was undergoing a rapid expansion that all classes contributed to and benefited from, sophisticated literature borrowing without shame the idioms of colloquial speech. Macbeth's allusion An allusion in Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606–07) to heaven peeping "through the blanket of the dark" only became a problem in would become a "problem" only later, when, for instance, Samuel Johnson complained in 1751 that such words provoked laughter rather than awe. Johnson's was an age when tragic dignity implied politeness, when it was below the dignity of a tragic hero tragedy to mention so lowly an object as a blanket. The But the Elizabethans' ability to address themselves to several audiences simultaneously and to bring into relation opposed experiences, emphases, and worldviews invested their writing with complexity and power.
English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity by writers of every persuasion and calibre.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing confidence in the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education, which for the first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The Stationers' Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and Richard Tottel's Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly coterie. Edmund Spenser was the first considerable significant English poet deliberately to use print for the advertisement of to advertise his talents.
The prevailing opinion of the language's inadequacy, its lack of "terms" and innate inferiority to the eloquent classical Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even archery argued in favour of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham's educational tract The Scholemaster Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art, translation, can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby's Castiglione (1561) and Sir Thomas North's Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took place in the middle of the century. The desire of Reformers reformers to address as comprehensive an audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as William Tyndale put it—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe's Actes Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the various English versions of Scripturethe Bible, from William Tyndale's New Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale's Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible (1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or King James's Version, 1611). The latter's combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it represents an idiom never spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed to Shakespeare the tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of the rather less capable Raphael Holinshed (1577). John Ponet's remarkable Short Treatise of Politic Power (1556) is a vigorous polemic against Mary Tudor, whom he saw as a papist tyrant.
In verse, Tottel's much reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by popularizing the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists include Nicholas Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most considerableprominent. The modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets, who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and didactic themes and favouring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy, restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben Jonson and Donne, to outlive the cult of elegance. The period's major project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions 1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality is uneven, but Thomas Sackville's "Induction" Induction and Thomas Churchyard's Legend of Shore's Wife are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to be influential on the drama.
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel's contributors suddenly began to look old-fashioned. Sir Philip Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance "universal man": a courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie included includes the first considered account of the state of English letters. Sidney's treatise defends literature on the ground of its unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as it is but as it ought to be. This quality of "forcefulness "forcibleness or energia" energia" he himself demonstrated in his sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written c. 1582, published 1591). His Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the first version were added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of heroism in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public fame was as an aristocratic champion of an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic warmongering, and thus his fictions abound with situations of inhibition and withheld satisfactions—unresolved conflicts of desire the unresolved conflicts in his poetry—desire against restraint, heroism against patience, rebellion against submission—that mirror submission—mirror his own position discomfort with his situation as an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in the Spenser's life of Edmund Spenser. He enjoyed the patronage of the Earl earl of Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic manifesto, The Shepheardes CalenderShepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser's masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590–16091590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists, the hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and the CalenderCalendar, an expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents and announced his epic ambitions, the . The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals being was voiced again in the marriage poems Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie Queene he achieved the central poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic epic; its purpose was "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." The plan was for 12 books (six 6 were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for Elizabeth herself. Arthur, in quest of Gloriana's love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court festivals and reworked it through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knight's knights' adventures and loves build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivaled sensuousness.
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the Queenqueen, and politically it echoed the hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser's increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the poem's later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Againe of Again (1591), voiced the fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, the beginning of that remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the "Mutabilitie Mutability Cantos," melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609), Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For Sidney's fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing one's relationship with the Queenqueen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal.
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably in the latter's Rosalynde, [1590], the source for Shakespeare's As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]), and in the theatres plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare's). The most important influence on lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs (four Bookes Books of AyresAirs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceals conceal a consciously ordered and laboured artifice, attentive to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor's mind and attuning it to the discipline of reason and virtue. This necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593), Englands England's Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
The publication of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidney's principal imitators being Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare, and ; his lesser , imitators were Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the Elder, Thomas Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and many more. Astrophel had re-created the Petrarchan world of proud beauty and despairing lover in a single, brilliant stroke, though in English hands the preferred division of the sonnet into three quatrains and a couplet gave Petrarch's contemplative form a more forensic turn, investing it with an argumentative terseness and epigrammatic sting. Within the common ground shared by the sequences, there is much diversity. Only Sidney's sequence endeavours to tell a story, the others being more loosely organized as variations focusing on a central (usually fictional) relationship. Daniel's Delia (1592) is eloquent and elegant, dignified and high-minded; Drayton's Ideas MirrourMirror (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to a strongly imagined, passionate intensity; Spenser's Amoretti (1595) celebrates, eccentricallyunusually, fulfilled sexual love achieved within marriage. Shakespeare's sonnets (published 1609) present a different world altogether, the conventions upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and treacherous, the loved one genuinely beyond considerations of sexual possession because he is a boymale. The sonnet tended to gravitate toward correctness or politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical, in its forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but, under the pressure of Shakespeare's urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and shifting and highly charged ironies, the form's conventional limits were exploded.
Sonnet and lyric represent one tradition of verse within the period, that most conventionally delineated as Elizabethan, but the picture is complicated by the coexistence of other poetic styles in which ornament was distrusted or turned to different purposes; the sonnet was even parodied by Sir John Davies in his Gulling Sonnets (c. 1594) and by the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell. A particular stimulus to experiment was the variety of new possibilities made available by verse translation, from Richard Stanyhurst's extraordinary Aeneid (1582), in quantitative hexameter and littered with obscure or invented diction, and Sir John Harington's version of Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1591), with its Byronic ease and narrative fluency, to Christopher Marlowe's blank verse rendering of Lucan's First Book (published 1600), probably the finest Elizabethan translation.
The genre to benefit most from translation was the epyllion, or little epic. This short narrative in verse was usually on a mythological subject, taking most of its material from Ovid, either his Metamorphoses (English version by Arthur Golding, 1565–67) or his Heroides (English version by Turberville, 1567). This form flourished from Thomas Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) to Francis Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602) and is best represented by Marlowe's Hero and Leander (published 1598) and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593). Ovid's reputation as an esoteric philosopher left its mark on George Chapman's Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595) and Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe (1595), in which the love of mortal for goddess becomes a parable of wisdom. But his Ovid's real attraction was as an authority on the erotic, and most epyllia treat physical love with sophistication and sympathy, unrelieved by the gloss of allegory—a tendency culminating in John Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image (1598), a poem that has shocked tender sensibilities. Inevitably, the shift of attitude had an effect on style: for Marlowe the experience of translating (inaccurately) Ovid's Amores meant a gain for Hero and Leander in terms of urbanity and, more important, wit.
With the epyllion comes a hint of the tastes of the following reign, and a similar shift of taste can be felt among those poets of the 1590s who began to modify the ornamental style in the direction of native plainness or classical Classical restraint. An astute courtier like Sir John such as Davies might, in his Orchestra (1596) and Hymns of Astraea (1599), write confident panegyrics to the aging Elizabeth, but in Sir Walter Raleigh's "Eleventh Eleventh Book of the Ocean to Cynthia," a kind of broken pastoral eclogue, praise of the Queen queen is undermined by an obscure but eloquent sense of hopelessness and disillusionment. For Raleigh, the complimental manner seems to be disintegrating under the weight of disgrace and isolation at court; his scattered lyrics, notably that lyrics—notably The Lie, a contemptuous dismissal of the court, "The Lie," often court—often draw their resonance from the resources of the plain style. Another courtier whose writing suggests similar pressures is Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Greville's His Caelica (published 1633) begins as a conventional sonnet sequence but gradually abandons Neoplatonism for pessimistic reflections on religion and politics. Other works in his sinewy and demanding verse include philosophical treatises and unperformed melodramas (Alaham and Mustapha) that have a sombre Calvinist tone, presenting man as a vulnerable creature inhabiting a world of unresolved contradictions:Oh wearisome condition of humanity!Born under one law, to another bound;Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,Created sick, commanded to be sound.(Mustapha, chorus)
Greville was a friend of the Earl Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, whose revolt against Elizabeth ended in 1601 on the scaffold, and other poets on the edge of the Essex circle fueled the taste for aristocratic heroism and individualist ethics. George Chapman's masterpiece, his translation of Homer (1598), is dedicated to Essex, and his original poems are intellectual and recondite, often deliberately cultivating obscuritiesdifficult and obscure; his abstruseness is a means of restricting his audience to a worthy, understanding elite. Samuel Daniel, in his verse Epistles (1603) written to various noblemen, strikes a mean between plainness and compliment; his Musophilus (1599), dedicated to Greville, defends the worth of poetry but says there are too many frivolous wits writing. The cast of Daniel's mind is stoical, and his language is classically precise. His major project was a verse history of The Civil Wars between Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York (1595–1609), and versified history is also strongly represented in the Drayton's Legends (1593–1607), Barons' Wars (1596, 1603), and Englands Heroicall England's Heroical Epistles (1597) of Michael Drayton.
The form that really to set its face against Elizabethan politeness was the satire. Satire was related to the complaint, of which there were notable examples by Daniel (The Complaint of Rosamond, 1592) and Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece, 1594) , and these that are dignified and tragic laments in supple verse, but . But the Elizabethans mistakenly held the term satire to derive from the Greek satyros, a satyr, and so set out to match their manner to their matter and make their verses snarl. In the works of the principal satirists, John Donne (five satires, 1593–98), Joseph Hall (Virgidemiarum, 1597–98), and John Marston (Certaine Satyres Certain Satires and The Scourge of Villainy, 1598), the denunciation of vice and folly repeatedly tips into invective, raillery, and sheer abuse. The versification of Donne's satires is frequently so rough as barely to be verse at all; Hall apologized for not being harsh enough, and Marston was himself pilloried in Ben Jonson's play Poetaster (1601) for using ridiculously difficult language. "Vex all the world," wrote Marston to himself, "so that thyself be pleased." The satirists popularized a new persona, that of the malcontent who denounces his society not from above but from within, and their . Their continuing attraction resides in their self-contradictory delight in the world they profess to abhor and their evident fascination with the minutiae of life in court and city. They were enthusiastically followed by Everard Guilpin, Samuel Rowlands, Thomas Middleton, and Cyril Tourneur, and so scandalous was the flood of satires that in 1599 their printing was banned. Thereafter the form survived in Jonson's classically balanced epigrams and poems of the good life, but its more immediate impact was on the drama, in helping to create the vigorously skeptical voices that people The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) and Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1599–1601).
Prose was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-century uncertainties over the language's weaknesses and strengths—whether coined and imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of "choiceness of phrase" at the expense of "soundness of argument"—the general attainment of prose writing was uniformly high, as is often manifested in contexts not conventionally imaginative or "literary," such as tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard Hakluyt's Principall Principal Navigations, VoiagesVoyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; expanded 1598–1600), a massive collection of travelers' tales, of which some are highly accomplished narratives. William Harrison's gossipy, entertaining Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes's excitable and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot's anecdotal Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow's invaluable Survey of London (1598) also deserve passing mention. William Kempe's account of his morris dance from London to Norwich, Kempe's Nine Days' Wonder (1600), has great charmexemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary; the early prose fiction, on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the expense of narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds room for debate, song, and the conscious elaboration of style. The unique exception is George Gascoigne's "Adventures Adventures of Master F.J." (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great house, which is the first success in English imaginative prose. Gascoigne's story has a surprising authenticity and almost psychological realism (it may be autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was signaled in the collections of stories imported from France and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care "to displease twenty men to please one woman," believed his readership was substantially female. There were later collections by Barnaby Rich (1581) and George Whetstone (1583); historically, their importance was as sources of plots for many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His England (1580), set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical mannerism that came to be known as "euphuismeuphuism. " The priggish plot of Euphues—a rake's fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an excuse for a series of debates, letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance and displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly's style was to would be successful on the stage, but in fiction its density and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s, Sidney's Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The Arcadian Rhetoric, [1588, ] almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia), but with Sidney rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel Forde, and others; none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its involvement in the bitter and learned controversies of the 1570s and '80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the controversies raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for further reformation made by Elizabeth's more godly subjects for further reformation, and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first English classic of serious prose. Hooker's is a monumental work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly recreating re-creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to modern tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy. On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame onto his enemies, and even his account (in books Books VI–VIII) of the relationship of church and state was deemed too sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of the "Martin Marprelate" tracts of 1588–90. These seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an unpuritanical un-Puritanical scurrility and created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth's bishops with comical gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Thomas Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous Marprelate, and the consequence may be read in Nashe's prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Nashe's Lenten StuffeStuff (1599), the latter a mock encomium on red pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe's "extemporal vein" makes fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is probably the most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers', and he makes even makes the Greene's low-life pamphlets of Robert Greene (1591–92), with their sensational tales from the underworld, look conventional. His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading (1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of the lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale. Deloney's entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theatre in Elizabethan London. In this respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was crucial.
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 diversely minded 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 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 is are little short of astonishing.
So the 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 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 first 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 "ViceVice, " 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.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England was has become known collectively as the "university 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 pageant-likepageantlike; The Arraignment of Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Robert 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 John 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.
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 norms and limitations 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) shows depicts the overthrow of a man whose learning and atheism threaten even 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" 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.
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 as he—as actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's players he was players—was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) was corresponded exactly coterminous with to the period of greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully realized.
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 (1589–921589–94), 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." Ostensibly 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, sequence—Richard II (15951595–96), Henry IV (two parts, , Part 1 and Part 2 (1596–98), and Henry V (1599), begins —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 earl of Essex' 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 to create , 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 (c. 15911594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through material drawn from John Foxe's Actes and Monuments.
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. One group, The The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590–94 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–1601 1597–98), and Twelfth Night (16011600–01), are —are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on wit. A second group, The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1592–93 1589–94), Love's Labour's Lost (c. 15951589–94), A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (15991598–1600), have —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, and in . In the four plays that approach tragicomedy, tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About Nothing (1598–99), All's Well That Ends Well (1602–031601–05), and Measure for Measure (16041603–04), festivity —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. 1601–03 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-siècle sense of man's confused and divided individuality.
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 (c. 1592–941589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (c. 15951594–96), 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 (1600c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (c. 1603–04), social tragedy in King Lear (16051605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (16061606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and Cleopatra (16071606–07). In each category Shakespeare's play is exemplary and defines its type; the range and brilliance of this achievement is 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.
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 (1607–081605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragical tragic satire. The last group of plays comprises the four romances, romances—Pericles (c. 1607–08 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1609–10 1608–10), The Winter's Tale (c. 1610–11 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611), which —which develop a long, philosophical perspective on fortune and suffering. (A final work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], 1613, was written in collaboration with John Fletcher.) 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.
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 comedies and tragedies 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 both "city comedy" and "tragedy 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 Kilde Killed with KindnesseKindness (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, which ; 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 aggressionself-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society at large.
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what has subsequently been 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, aristocratic, socially conservative but intellectually radical, and authoritarian, 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 complete 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.
Of Jonson's successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing their its taste for romantic plays. John Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays in this genre frequently border on tragedy. All values are mocked by Marston's bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch Courtezan (16041605), set in London, quotes a defense explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism from Montaigne. 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 accepts presents the pursuit of money as , inevitably, the sole human absolute and presents 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 TermeTerm (1605) and A Tricke 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 to characterize the individual with characterizing individuals in depth than to examine with examining the inequalities and injustices of the world that cause him them to behave as he doesthey do. His The Roaring GirleGirl (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 operative 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 TragedieTragedy (c. 1611). Here , where the breakdown of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence, and in . 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 DivelDevil (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.
Already in the Jacobean period, signs of a more polite politer drama , such as would prevail after 1660 , were already 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 of fashionable manners written by John Fletcher and James Shirley, but even these playwrights lampooned courtiers and their overbearing ways. The traditions of a socially and politically critical theatre were carried down to the Civil War in the tragedies of John Ford ('Tis Pitty Shee's a Whore, 1633) and Philip Massinger (Believe as You List, 1631) and in comedies by Massinger (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, 1624; The City Madam, 1632) and Richard Brome (The Antipodes, 1638), which continued to probe at the tensions that were soon completely to undermine the basis of Stuart government (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 brought about forced the closing of the playhouses to close, but this was not because of any hostility by dramatists to politics or to change; rather, the crisis in which they were embroiled was one that 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 continuing preoccupation for three generations.
In the early Stuart period the failure of consensus was dramatically announced 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, absolutist style court—with the Baroque style, derived from the Continent, that it encouraged in painting, masque, and panegyric, was panegyric—was becoming increasingly more remote from the country at large and was regarded with justifiable 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 or meaning was to be established. From the circle of Lord Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at Great Tew , which in Oxfordshire—which included poets such as Edmund Waller, Thomas Carew, and Sidney Godolphin, William 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 is was frequently enlivened by half-submerged metaphors.
Writers responded to these conditions in different ways, and in poetry three types of practice main traditions may broadly be distinguished, which have been coupled with the names of Spenser, Jonson, and John Donne. John Donne heads the tradition that 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson typified labeled for all time as the Metaphysicals; what unites them 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 very . This privateness, of course, was not new; , but the period in general experienced a massive trend toward huge upsurge of contemplative or devotional verse).
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 no less than the Petrarchans 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. Thomas Carew praised him for exiling from poetry 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 the his songs and sonnets, which include his best writing, with their kaleidoscope of contradictory attitudes, ironies, and contingencies, are authentic to the modern phenomenon 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 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 was vast; the taste for wit and conceits reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them courtiers such as Aurelian Townshend , and William Habington, and 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 interesting imitators enduring followers were the three major religious poets—George poets George Herbert, with his practical piety and richly domestic world, who substituted 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; the Roman Catholic Richard Crashaw, whose hymns introduced the . 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; and Henry Vaughan, with his Continental Baroque, the latter toward hermetic naturalism and mystical raptures.
In However, in the context of the Civil WarWars, however, Vaughan's and Crashaw's introspection begins began to look like retreat, and, when the satires of John Cleveland and the lyrics of Abraham Cowley take took the Donne manner to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it suggests 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 enforcing accommodations between holding together conflicting allegiances was Donne's outstanding heir, Andrew Marvell. Marvell's finest writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and precise, uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with puritanical Puritanical economy of statement. It 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 the King's King Charles I's execution, to whose retirement from politics to his country estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in "Upon 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 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 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.
By contrast, the Jonsonian tradition was, broadly, that of social verse, written with a classical 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 as exactly articulated objects, achieving a classical Classical symmetry and monumentality. For Jonson, the plain 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 aristocratic ethic of gracious but responsible living.
With the Cavalier poets who succeeded himJonson, 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 The Country Life" Life and "The The Hock Cart" Cart rival Jonson's "To Penshurst" 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 WarWars. The courtiers Thomas 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 société, lyrics of compliments and casual liaisons, often cynical, occasionally obscene; this was a line to be picked up again after 1660, as was 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 polite lyrics now seem rather insipid, but inoffensive lyrics are the epitome of polite taste, and Denham's topographical poem "Cooper's Hill" Cooper's Hill (1641), a considerable significant work in its own right, is plainly an important precursor of the balanced Augustan couplet (as is the otherwise slight oeuvre of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland). The growth of Augustan gentility was further encouraged by work done on translations in mid-century, particularly by Sir Richard Fanshawe (Il Pastor Fido, 1647) and Thomas Stanley.
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 Christs Victorie 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 puritanical Puritan position. Increasingly, their pastorals and fervently Protestant poetry aligned them in opposition to a court of Cavalier wits and of suspiciously made them seem out of step with a court whose sympathies in foreign affairs were pro-Spanish and pro-Catholic sympathies in foreign affairs; so sharp became Wither's satires that he earned imprisonment and was lampooned by Ben Jonson in a court masque. The failure of the Stuarts to conciliate attitudes such as these was to be crucial to their inability to maintain prevent the cohesion 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."
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, like 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), the 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 profitable edifying treatment of doctrine, though equally some famous godly preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping factor prose was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian prose 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 (incorporated 1662founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier prosewriting, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in the 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, by which aimed to establish scientific principles were to be established 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 Essayes Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended complications.
The Essayes Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essais Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson (his posthumous 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 Vertues Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle's (Micro-cosmographiecosmography, 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 hagiographies biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated the facts shamelessly; his biographies these texts seem lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville's tragical 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 periods 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 Raigne Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in pragmatism.
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 and John Donne 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 François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even Rabelaisits author in invention. In the Religio Medici (1635) , and in The Garden of Cyrus, and Hydriotaphia, Urne-buriall, or A discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes 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 effected 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 Thomas Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were advanced within the traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition with vulgar writers who deliberately breached the literary canons of good taste—Levellerstaste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers, like such as Gerrard Winstanley with in his call for a general Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples were 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 pamphlets—on divorce, education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649), adopt —adopt a loosely Ciceronian sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
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 toward a classical absolutisminto court service, Milton's was crossed 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" 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. During the interregnum, between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of Charles IIBut 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 . He devoted his energies to pamphleteering, first in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Oliver Cromwell's Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State. But the republic of virtue failed to materialize; Milton's courageous voice was the last before the Restoration to propose , 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 Puritan elect, intended to avert the only device he could suggest to prevent the return to royal slavery. His
Milton's greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, did were not appear published until several years after the Restoration, but . But their roots are were deep in the radical experience of the 1640s and '50s and in the ensuing transformations in politics and society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine monarchy, Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human protagonists, turned out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings have been changed, the old public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and provisional. For Milton and his contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that was to necessitate necessitated a complete rethinking of expectations assumptions and ideas and a corresponding reassessment of the literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to the new age.