The Revival of Learning (before Elizabethan Period)

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The Revival of Learning (before Elizabethan
Period)

• BBL 3102
• WEEK 5

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HISTORY OF THE PERIOD Political Changes

• The century and a half following the death of
  Chaucer (1400-1550) is the most volcanic period
  of English history. The land is swept by vast
  changes, inseparable from the rapid accumulation
  of national power but since power is the most
  dangerous of gifts until men have learned to
  control it, these changes seem at first to have
  no specific aim or direction.
• Henry V, whose unpredictable yet energetic life,
  as depicted by Shakespeare, was typical of the
  life of his times.
• Henry led his army abroad, in the apparently
  impossible attempt to gain for himself three
  things a French wife, a French income, and the
  French crown itself.

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• The battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, and
  five years later, by the Treaty of Troyes, France
  acknowledged his right to all his outrageous
  demands.
• In the long reign of Henry VIII the changes are
  less violent, but have more purpose and
  significance. His age is marked by a steady
  increase in the national power at home and
  abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation, and
  by the final separation of England from all
  religious bondage.
• In previous reigns chivalry and the old feudal
  system had practically been banished now
  monasticism, the third mediæval institution with
  its mixed evil and good, monasteries and the
  removal of abbots from the House of Lords was
  expected.

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• While England during this period was in constant
  political strife, yet rising slowly to heights of
  national greatness was the introduction of the
  printing press.
• Printing was brought to England by Caxton (c.
  1476), and for the first time in history it was
  possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole
  nation.
• Schools and universities were established in
  place of the old monasteries Greek ideas and
  Greek culture came to England in the Renaissance,
  and man's spiritual freedom was proclaimed in the
  Reformation.

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• The great names of the period are numerous and
  significant, but literature is strangely silent.
• Probably the very turmoil of the age prevented
  any literary development, for literature is one
  of the arts of peace it requires quiet and
  meditation rather than activity, and the stirring
  life of the Renaissance had first to be lived
  before it could express itself in the new
  literature of the Elizabethan period.

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• The term Renaissance, though used by many writers
  "to denote the whole transition from the Middle
  Ages to the modern world,"is more correctly
  applied to the revival of art resulting from the
  discovery and imitation of classic models in the
  fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
• Humanism applies to the revival of classic
  literature, and was so called by its leaders,
  following the example of Petrarch, because they
  held that the study of the classics, literae
  humaniores,--i.e. the "more human writings,"
  rather than the old theology,--was the best means
  of promoting the largest human interests. 

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• The two greatest books which appeared in England
  during this period are undoubtedly Erasmus's
  Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae) and
  More's Utopia, the famous "Kingdom of Nowhere."
  Both were written in Latin, but were speedily
  translated into all European languages.
• The Praise of Folly is like a song of victory for
  the New Learning, which had driven away vice,
  ignorance, and superstition, the three foes of
  humanity. It was published in 1511 after the
  accession of Henry VIII. Folly is represented as
  donning cap and bells and mounting a platform,
  where the vice and cruelty of kings, the
  selfishness and ignorance of the clergy, and the
  foolish standards of education are satirized
  without mercy.

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• More's Utopia, published in 1516, is a powerful
  and original study of social conditions, unlike
  anything which had ever appeared in any
  literature. More learns from a sailor, one of
  Amerigo Vespucci's companions, of a wonderful
  Kingdom of Nowhere, in which all questions of
  labor, government, society, and religion have
  been easily settled by simple justice and common
  sense.
• In this Utopia we find for the first time, as the
  foundations of civilized society, the three great
  words, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, which
  retained their inspiration through all the
  violence of the French Revolution and which are
  still the unrealized ideal of every free
  government.

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• As he hears of this wonderful country More
  wonders why, after fifteen centuries of
  Christianity, his own land is so little
  civilized and as we read the book to-day we ask
  ourselves the same question.
• The splendid dream is still far from being
  realized yet it seems as if any nation could
  become Utopia in a single generation, so simple
  and just are the requirements.
• Greater than either of these books, in its
  influence upon the common people, is Tyndale's
  translation of the New Testament (1525), which
  fixed a standard of good English, and at the same
  time brought that standard not only to scholars
  but to the homes of the common people.

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• Tyndale made his translation from the original
  Greek, and later translated parts of the Old
  Testament from the Hebrew.
• Much of Tyndale's work was included in Cranmer's
  Bible, known also as the Great Bible, in 1539,
  and was read in every parish church in England.
• It was the foundation for the Authorized Version,
  which appeared nearly a century later and became
  the standard for the whole English-speaking race.

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THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1550-1620)POLITICAL SUMMARY

• In the Age of Elizabeth all doubt seems to vanish
  from English history.
• After the reigns of Edward and Mary, with defeat
  and humiliation abroad and persecutions and
  rebellion at home, the accession of a popular
  sovereign was like the sunrise after a long
  night, and, in Milton's words, we suddenly see
  England, "a noble and puissant nation, rousing
  herself, like a strong man after sleep, and
  shaking her invincible locks."
• It is the national life that concerns the
  literary student, since even a beginner must
  notice that any great development of the national
  life is invariably associated with a development
  of the national literature.

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• It is enough therefore, to point out two facts
  that Elizabeth, with all her vanity and
  inconsistency, steadily loved England and
  England's greatness and that she inspired all
  her people with the unbounded patriotism which
  exults in Shakespeare, and with the personal
  devotion which finds a voice in the Faery Queen.
• Under her administration the English national
  life progressed by gigantic leaps rather than by
  slow historical process, and English literature
  reached the very highest point of its
  development.
• It is possible to indicate only a few general
  characteristics of this great age which had a
  direct bearing upon its literature.

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Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age

• The most characteristic feature of the age was
  the comparative religious tolerance, which was
  due largely to the queen's influence.
• The frightful excesses of the religious war known
  as the Thirty Years' War on the Continent found
  no parallel in England.
• Upon her accession Elizabeth found the whole
  kingdom divided against itself the North was
  largely Catholic, while the southern counties
  were as strongly Protestant.

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• Scotland had followed the Reformation in its own
  intense way, while Ireland remained true to its
  old religious traditions, and both countries were
  openly rebellious.
• The court, made up of both parties, witnessed
  the rival intrigues of those who sought to gain
  the royal favor.
• It was due partly to the intense absorption of
  men's minds in religious questions that the
  preceding century, though an age of advancing
  learning, produced scarcely any literature worthy
  of the name.

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• Elizabeth favored both religious parties, and
  presently the world saw with amazement Catholics
  and Protestants acting together as trusted
  counselors of a great sovereign. The defeat of
  the Spanish Armada established the Reformation as
  a fact in England, and at the same time united
  all Englishmen in a magnificent national
  enthusiasm.
• For the first time since the Reformation began,
  the fundamental question of religious toleration
  seemed to be settled, and the mind of man, freed
  from religious fears and persecutions, turned
  with a great creative impulse to other forms of
  activity. It is partly from this new freedom of
  the mind that the Age of Elizabeth received its
  great literary stimulus.

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• It was an age of comparative social contentment,
  in strong contrast with the days of Langland. The
  rapid increase of manufacturing towns gave
  employment to thousands who had before been idle
  and discontented. Increasing trade brought
  enormous wealth to England, and this wealth was
  shared to this extent, at least, that for the
  first time some systematic care for the needy was
  attempted.
• Parishes were made responsible for their own
  poor, and the wealthy were taxed to support them
  or give them employment. The increase of wealth,
  the improvement in living, the opportunities for
  labor, the new social content--these also are
  factors which help to account for the new
  literary activity.

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• It is an age of dreams, of adventure, of
  unbounded enthusiasm springing from the new lands
  of fabulous riches revealed by English explorers.
  
• Drake sails around the world, shaping the mighty
  course which English colonizers shall follow
  through the centuries and presently the young
  philosopher Bacon is saying confidently, "I have
  taken all knowledge for my province."
• The mind must search farther than the eye with
  new, rich lands opened to the sight, the
  imagination must create new forms to people the
  new worlds.
• Hakluyt's famous Collection of Voyages,
  and Purchas, His Pilgrimage, were even more
  stimulating to the English imagination than to
  the English acquisitiveness.

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• While her explorers search the new world for the
  Fountain of Youth, her poets are creating
  literary works that are young forever. Marston
  writes "Why, man, all their dripping pans are
  pure gold.
• The prisoners they take are fettered in gold and
  as for rubies and diamonds, they goe forth on
  holydayes and gather 'hem by the seashore to hang
  on their children's coates."
• This comes nearer to being a description of
  Shakespeare's poetry than of the Indians in
  Virginia. Prospero, in The Tempest, with his
  control over the mighty powers and harmonies of
  nature, is only the literary dream of that
  science which had just begun to grapple with the
  forces of the universe.
• Cabot, Drake, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh,
  Willoughby, Hawkins,--a score of explorers reveal
  a new earth to men's eyes, and instantly
  literature creates a new heaven to match it. So
  dreams and deeds increase side by side, and the
  dream is ever greater than the deed. That is the
  meaning of literature.

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• To sum up, the Age of Elizabeth was a time of
  intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and
  comfort among all classes, of unbounded
  patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad. For
  a parallel we must go back to the Age of Pericles
  in Athens, or of Augustus in Rome, or go forward
  a little to the magnificent court of Louis XIV,
  when Corneille, Racine, and Molière brought the
  drama in France to the point where Marlowe,
  Shakespeare, and Jonson had left it in England
  half a century earlier.
• Such an age of great thought and great action,
  appealing to the eyes as well as to the
  imagination and intellect, finds but one adequate
  literary expression neither poetry nor the story
  can express the whole man,--his thought, feeling,
  action, and the resulting character hence in the
  Age of Elizabeth literature turned instinctively
  to the drama and brought it rapidly to the
  highest stage of its development.

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JACOBEAN PERIODS
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• The Jacobean era refers to a period
  in English and Scottish history that coincides
  with the reign of King James I (1603-1625). The
  Jacobean era succeeds the Elizabethan era and
  precedes the Caroline era, and specifically
  denotes a style of architecture, visual arts,
  decorative arts, and literature that is
  predominant of that period.
• James I ruled at a time when the fallout from the
  Reformation was still impacting on society, with
  rulers changing from one Church to another, and
  insisting on religious conformity.
• James I was caught up in this situation of flux.
  He was, however, a committed Protestant and the
  Bible translation that he commissioned, known as
  the King James' or the Authorized Version, has
  subsequently given millions of English-speakers
  direct access to the Bible instead of having to
  rely on a priest explaining the text to them in
  Latin.
• The impact on Western culture has been
  inestimable.
• The word "Jacobean" is derived from the Hebrew
  name Jacob, which is the original form of the
  English name James.

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• Jacobean literature begins with the drama,
  including some of Shakespeare's greatest, and
  darkest, plays.
• Some of Shakespeares plays during this time
  were-The Tempest, Macbeth and King Lear.
• The dominant literary figure of James's reign was
  Ben Jonson, whose varied and dramatic works
  followed classical models and was enriched by his
  worldly, peculiarly English wit. His satiric
  dramas, notably the great Volpone (1606), all
  take a cynical view of human nature. Also cynical
  were the horrific revenge tragedies of John Ford,
  Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and John
  Webster (the best poet of this grim genre).

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• Novelty was in great demand, and the
  possibilities of plot and genre were exploited
  almost to exhaustion. Still, many excellent plays
  were written by men such as George Chapman, the
  masters of comedy Thomas Dekker and Philip
  Massinger, and the team of Francis Beaumont and
  John Fletcher.
• Drama continued to flourish until the closing of
  the theatres at the onset of the English
  Revolution in 1642.

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• The foremost poets of the Jacobean era, Ben
  Jonson and John Donne, are regarded as the
  originators of two diverse poetic traditionsthe
  Cavalier and the metaphysical (see Cavalier poets
  and metaphysical poets).
• Jonson and Donne shared not only a common fund of
  literary resources, but also a dryness of wit and
  precision of expression. Donne's poetry is
  distinctive for its passionate intellection,
  Jonson's for its classicism and urbane guidance
  of passion.

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BEN JONSON

• Jonson joined the theatrical company of Philip
  Henslowe in London as an actor and playwright on
  or before 1597, when he is identified in the
  papers of Henslowe. In 1597 he was imprisoned in
  the Fleet Prison for his involvement in a satire
  entitled The Isle of Dogs, declared seditious by
  the authorities. 
• Jonson's second known play, Every Man in His
  Humour, was performed in 1598 by the Lord
  Chamberlain's Men at the Globe with William
  Shakespeare in the cast. Jonson became a
  celebrity, and there was a brief fashion for
  'humours' comedy, a kind of topical comedy
  involving eccentric characters, each of whom
  represented a temperament, or humor, of humanity.
  His next play,Every Man Out of His Humour (1599),
  was less successful. Every Man Out of His
  Humour andCynthia's Revels (1600) were satirical
  comedies displaying Jonson's classical learning
  and his interest in formal experiment. 

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• Jonson's enduring reputation rests on the
  comedies written between 1605 and 1614. The first
  of these, Volpone, or The Fox (performed in
  1605-1606, first published in 1607) is often
  regarded as his masterpiece.
• The play, though set in Venice, directs its
  scrutiny on the rising merchant classes of
  Jacobean London. The following plays, Epicoene
  or, The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist(1610),
  and Bartholomew Fair (1614) are all peopled with
  dupes and those who deceive them.
• Jonson's keen sense of his own stature as author
  is represented by the unprecedented publication
  of his Works, in folio, in 1616. He was appointed
  as poet laureate and rewarded a substantial
  pension in the same year.