CHAPTER THREE
(( The Seventeenth Century ))
A Quick Review of the Relevant
Facts about the Period:
•
The
death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 marks the beginning of this literary period.
•
Elizabeth
I, also known as the Virgin Queen, was childless. Her relation, James Stuart,
succeeded her on England's throne as King James I (in Scotland, his title was
King James VI).
•
Elizabeth
I's reign (1558-1603) is known as the Elizabethan period. James I's reign (1603-1625) is known as the
Jacobean period, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.
Charles I's reign (1625-1640) is known as the Caroline period, from the Latin
for Charles, Carolus.
•
James
I was an authoritarian who believed kings derived their powers from God, not
from the people. This belief caused political tension between the king, the
Parliament, and the common people—tension that intensified throughout James I's
reign, and culminated in the beheading of his son, Charles I, in 1649.
•
Between
1642 and 1649, Royalist and pro-parliamentary forces fought a bloody series of
civil wars on English soil.
•
Following
the execution of the king and the end of the English civil wars in 1649, the
general of the parliamentary forces, Oliver Cromwell, ruled England as a
commonwealth (a democratic state governed without a monarch). Cromwell was known as the "Lord
Protector" of England.
•
After
Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658, his son Richard ruled briefly and
ineffectually.
•
In
1660, Parliament invited King Charles I's eldest son to return from exile in
Europe to rule England as King Charles II. King Charles II's restoration to
power and England's restoration of monarchical rule give the period that
followed the name the "Restoration".
State and Church (1603-1640)
•
The
state's monetary difficulties during James I's reign were signs of conflict
between the king and his people. The king was not supposed to tax regularly,
except in time of war. However, declining Crown revenues, a demand for court
honors and rewards, and the high costs of a court obsessed with feasting,
drinking, and hunting all led King James I to impose illegal taxes.
•
King
James I's peace treaty with Spain (1604) made the Atlantic safe for English
ships and for exploration.
•
During
James's reign the first permanent English settlements were established in North
America (at Jamestown) and in the Caribbean. In 1611 the East India Company
established England's first outpost in India.
•
In
the north of England, coal mines developed; in the east, newly drained wetlands
yielded crops for the growing population. Appreciation for the practical arts
and technology as a means of improving human life influenced the scientific
theories of Francis Bacon, who in turn inspired other scientists and inventors.
•
Sixteenth
and seventeenth-century English people argued over many religious questions,
including the form of worship services, the qualifications of ministers, the
interpretation of Scripture, the form of prayer, and the meaning of Communion.
•
All
people were legally required to attend Church of England services, and the form
of the services was set out in the Book of Common Prayer.
•
In
the 1580s and 1590s, Catholic priests and those who harbored them were executed
for treason. Protestant religious
minorities had suffered persecution too.
Although his mother was the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, James I was
raised in the strict Reformed tradition of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk and
was consequently welcomed by both parties.
•
James
I's impulse towards religious toleration was halted by the Gunpowder Plot of
1605. A group of Catholics packed the cellar next to the Houses of Parliament
with gunpowder, intending to eliminate much of England's ruling class at a
single blast and leave England open to invasion by a foreign, Catholic
power.
•
Discovery
of the Gunpowder Plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in England.
•
The
most important religious event during James I's reign was his newly
commissioned, elegant, and diplomatic translation of the Bible, which remains
known as the "King James Bible" today.
•
James
I's second son, Charles, came to the throne upon his father's death in 1625
(James's first son, Henry, had died of typhoid fever years earlier).
•
King
Charles I was financially more prudent than his father, but his refusal to
allow powerful men and factions a share in the workings of the state alienated
them, and he became cut off from his people.
•
While
King Charles was an Anglican, his wife, the French princess Henrietta Maria,
was Catholic. Their love of splendor and ceremony led Puritans to suspect
Charles of popish sympathies.
•
Puritans
were followers of the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin. Puritans believed
that salvation depended upon faith in Christ, not good works; they also
believed that God predestined people to be saved or damned.
•
King
Charles I's appointment of William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury (the
ecclesiastical head of the English Church) further angered Puritans.
•
Laud
promoted the idea that God made redemption freely available to all humans, who
could then choose whether or not to accept God's grace and work toward their
salvation by acts of charity, devotion, and generosity to the church.
•
In
the 1630s, many Puritans immigrated to the colonies in New England, but those
who remained in England were discontented.
Literature and Culture (1603-1640),
Old and New Ideas
— Writers including John Donne,
Robert Burton, and Ben Jonson invoked inherited ideas even though they were
aware that these concepts were being questioned or displaced.
— Old ideas that resonated with these
writers included the Ptolemaic universe (in which the earth is fixed, and other
celestial bodies orbit it); the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air)
that were thought to comprise all matter; and the four humors (choler, blood,
phlegm, and black bile), which were believed to determine a person's
temperament and to cause physical and mental disease when out of balance.
— Analogy and order were important
concepts-e.g., the "chain of being" that ordered creation (God, angels,
humans, animals, plants, rocks) had its analogy in the state (king, nobles,
gentry, yeomen, laborers). Each level in this chain has its own peculiar
function, and each was connected to those above and below it by obligations and
dependencies.
— A poet who compares a king to the
king of the beasts is thus not forging an original metaphor so much as
describing something that seemed an obvious fact of nature within this system
of ideas.
— William Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of blood and Galileo's confirmation of Copernican astronomical
theories were among the new ideas that began to be embraced toward the end of
the period.
Patrons, Printers and acting
companies
— Tudor social institutions and
customary practices that supported and regulated writers changed only gradually
before 1640.
— The Church of England continued to
promote writings including devotional treatises, tracts, and sermons.
— Sermons were designed to explain
Scripture, to instruct and to move, and they reached a large audience both in
church and in print.
— Many writers depended upon
aristocratic patrons. Often patronage
took the form of an exchange of favors rather than that of a financial
transaction. A patron might give a poet a place to live, employment, or valuable
gifts of clothing.
— The reading public for
sophisticated literary works was small. This audience was concentrated at
court, in the universities, and the Inns of Court (law schools). Manuscript (handwritten) copies were an easy
and effective way to circulate works.
— Many writers' works appeared in
print posthumously (e.g., Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, and Marvell). This
practice, and the circulation of manuscript copies, often makes assigning
concise composition dates to seventeenth-century works difficult.
— Printing of literary works became
more common, especially after Ben Jonson collected and printed his own works in
an impressive folio.
— Almost all printed works-except
those printed at the universities—were printed in London, as a result of the
monopoly on printing granted to the London Stationer's Company by King Henry
VIII.
— In exchange for the monopoly on
printing, the Stationers were to submit all books for pre-publication
censorship. Responsibility for a printed work, and ownership of that work,
rested with the printer, not the author.
Authorial copyright was not recognized until the early eighteenth
century.
— Commercial theater enabled a few
writers (Thomas Dekker, William Shakespeare, and John Webster) to support
themselves professionally. Again, the theater companies, not the playwrights,
owned the texts. Acting companies also
had to submit works to the censor before public performance.
— James I also promoted theater at
court and acted as patron to Shakespeare's acting company, which became known
as the King's Men. The intimate indoor
spaces of court-affiliated theaters and the court's taste both affected the
repertoire of companies like the King's Men.
Jacobean Writers and Genres
— Poets and writers of prose alike
moved towards jagged, colloquial speech rhythms and short concentrated forms.
— Writers, most notably Ben Jonson,
John Donne, and George Herbert, promoted new forms including love elegy and
satire (modeled on classical works by Ovid and Horace), epigrams, verse
epistles, meditative religious lyrics, and country-house poems.
— Jonson, a Londoner, earned his living
from writing for the commercial and court theaters and receiving patronage for
his poems and his court masques. Jonson
became an influential figure through his decision to collect and print his
works, and his mentorship of a group of young poets (known as the Tribe, or
Sons, of Ben), which included Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Sir John
Suckling, Edmund Waller, Henry Vaughan and Robert Herrick.
— Donne, a friend of Jonson's who
also spent much of his life in or near London, wrote poems and sermons that are
intellectually challenging and characterized by learned terms and unusual
analogies. Donne's poems circulated in
manuscript, and most were printed after his death. Critics view Donne as the founder of a
metaphysical school of poets, which included George Herbert, Thomas Carew,
Richard Crashaw, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell.
— Herbert left a privileged social
position to become an Anglican priest in the small rural parish of
Bemerton. Unlike Jonson's aspiration to
monumental status in print or Donne's showy performances of witty self-doubt,
Herbert's writing promotes other models of poetic agency: the secretary taking dictation from a master
or a musician playing in harmonious consort. Herbert destroyed his secular
verse and left his religious verse to a friend to publish after Herbert's
death.
— The prose essay, invented by Michel
de Montaigne, first appeared in English translation in 1603 and influenced
writers including Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne.
— Female writers from the nobility
and gentry, who were better educated than most women of the period, began to
appear in print, too. These women included Aemilia Lanyer, the first English
woman to publish a volume of original poems, and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland,
the first English woman to publish a tragedy.
The Caroline Era (1625-1640)
— King Charles I and his wife
Henrietta Maria, patronized artists including Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony
Van Dyke.
— Court masques during this era
emphasized chivalric virtue and divine beauty or love, as symbolized in the
marriage of the royal pair.
— While courtier poets wrote love
lyrics that celebrated both platonic and physical love, in the world outside
the court, Puritans opposed what they saw as the court's immoral excesses.
— William Prynne exemplifies the most
extreme Puritan views, as well as the inseparability of literature and politics
in this period. Prynne wrote against stage plays, court masques, mixed dancing,
and other forms of entertainment promoted by the court. For expressing these
views in print, Prynne was severely punished: he lost his academic degrees and
his job, was imprisoned, had his books burned and his ears cut off.
The Revolutionary Era (1640-1660)
— The beheading of King Charles I,
which took place on 30 January 1649, was a cataclysmic event in English
history. The assumption that kings ruled by divine right was overturned as
commoners accused the king of treason and executed him.
— Some historians believe that
long-term social and economic changes led to rising social tensions and
conflict, particularly among the educated, affluent gentry class, who were
below nobles but above artisans and yeomen in the social order. This class was
growing, but traditional social hierarchies did not grant them the economic,
political, and religious freedoms they desired.
— Other historians (the
"revisionists") believe that short-term avoidable causes of the
English civil wars included luck, personal idiosyncrasies, and poor decisions
made by individuals.
— Between 1640 and 1660, new concepts
emerged that became central to bourgeois liberal thought for centuries to come―that
is, religious toleration, freedom from press censorship, and the separation of
church and state.
— These ideas came from three
disputed questions: 1) what is the
ultimate source of political power? 2) What kind of church government is laid
down in Scripture and therefore ought to be established in England? 3) What
should the relation be between church and state?
— Frustrated with Parliament's
frequent refusal to endorse taxes that would help the Crown, King Charles I had
dissolved Parliament three times by 1629 and subsequently ruled for more than
ten years without a Parliament at all.
— In 1640, the so-called Long
Parliament convened to assert its rights. Parliament did not disband when the
king would have liked but instead remained in session, abolishing extralegal
taxes, trimming the bishops' powers, and arresting, trying, and executing
Archbishop Laud and the king's minister, the Earl of Strafford.
— Parliament disrupted not only the
usual governance of the state and but also the usual censorship of the
press. Weekly news books that reported
on current domestic events from various religious and political perspectives
flourished.
— In July 1642, Parliament voted to
raise an army, and by August, England's First Civil War (1642-1646) had begun.
CHAPTER FOUR
(( The Eighteenth Century ))
A Quick Review of the Relevant
Facts of the Period:
— The Restoration period begins in
1660, the year in which King Charles II (the exiled Stuart king) was restored
to the English throne.
— England, Scotland, and Wales were
united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.
— The period is one of increasing
commercial prosperity and global trade for Britain.
— Literacy expanded to include the
middle classes and even some of the poor.
— Emerging social ideas included
politeness-a behavioral standard to which anyone might aspire-and new rhetoric
of liberty and rights, sentiment and sympathy.
Religion and Politics
— The monarchical restoration was
accompanied by the re-opening of English theatres (closed during Cromwell's
Puritan regime) and the restoration of the Church of England as the national
church.
— Church and state continued to be
closely intertwined. The Test Act of 1673 required all holders of civil and
military offices to take the sacrament in the Anglican Church and deny
transubstantiation; those who refused (e.g., Protestant Dissenters and Roman
Catholics) were not allowed to attend university or hold public office.
— King Charles II, though he
outwardly conformed to Anglicanism, had Catholic sympathies that placed him at
odds with his strongly anti-Catholic Parliament.
— Charles had no legitimate heir. His
brother James (a Catholic) was next in line to the throne. Parliament tried to
force Charles to exclude his brother from the line of succession. Charles ended
this "Exclusion Crisis" by dissolving Parliament.
— The Exclusion Crisis in a sense
created modern political parties: the Tories, who supported the king, and the
Whigs, who opposed him.
— Once crowned, King James II quickly
suspended the Test Act. In 1688, the birth of James's son so alarmed the
country with the prospect of a new succession of Catholic monarchs that secret
negotiations began to bring a new Protestant ruler from Europe to oust James.
— In 1688, William of Orange and his
wife Mary (James's daughter) landed in England with a small army and seized
power-an event known as the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution.
— James II fled to exile in France. For
over 50 years his supporters (called Jacobites, from the Latin Jacobus, for James) mounted
unsuccessful attempts to restore the Stuart line of Catholic kings to the
British throne.
— Queen Anne, another of James II's
daughters, was the next monarch (1702-1714). Anne's reign was a prosperous time
for Britain, as the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) created new trade
opportunities.
— England, Scotland, and Wales were
united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.
— As Anne, like Mary, had no heirs,
the succession was settled upon the royal house of Hanover. A long line of King
Georges (I-IV) ensued, which is why the eighteenth century is also known as the
Georgian period.
— We now associate the term
"Whig" with liberalism and "Tory" with conservatism, but
the principles behind these two parties remained fluid and responsive to
political circumstance throughout the period.
— Robert Walpole, a Whig politician
who served under both King George I and George II, held a parliamentary seat
from 1701 until 1742. Walpole was the first man to be described as a
"prime" minister.
— During King George III's long rule
(1760-1820) Britain became a major colonial power. At home and abroad, George
III's subjects engaged with a new rhetoric of liberty and radical reform, as
they witnessed and reacted to the revolutions in France and America.
The Context of Ideas
— The court of King Charles II
championed the right of England's social elite to pursue pleasure and
libertinism.
— King Charles II authorized two new
companies of actors. Women began to appear on stage in female roles.
— Dogmatism, or the acceptance of
received religious beliefs, was widely regarded as dangerous.
— Charles II approved the Royal
Society for London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1662). The Royal
Society revolutionized scientific method and the dispersal of knowledge.
The specialized modern
"scientist" did not exist; Royal Society members studied natural
history (the collection and description of facts of nature), natural philosophy
(study of the causes of what happens in nature), and natural religion (study of
nature as a book written by God).
— The major idea of the period
(founded on Francis Bacon's earlier work) was that of empiricism.
— Empiricism is the direct
observation of experience, which infers that experience (including
experimentation) is a reliable source of knowledge. John Locke, George
Berkeley, and David Hume all pursued differing interpretations of empiricism,
and the concept itself had a profound impact on society and literature.
— Writers (including women such as
Mary Astell) began to advocate for improved education for women during this
period.
— Around 1750, the word
"sentiment" evolved to describe social behavior based in instinctual
feeling. Sentiment, and the related notions of sensibility and sympathy, all
contributed to a growing sense of the desirability of public philanthropy and
social reforms (such as charities for orphans).
— Increased importance was placed on
the private, individual life, as is evident in literary forms such as diaries,
letters, and the novel.
Conditions of Literary Production
— The Stage Licensing Act (1737)
established a form of dramatic censorship in which the Lord Chamberlain
preapproved and licensed all plays for performance in London.
— Censorship of other print material
changed radically with the 1710 Statute of Anne, the first British copyright
law not tied to government approval of a book's contents.
— Copyrights were typically held by
booksellers.
— The term "public sphere"
refers to the material texts concerning matters of national interest and also
to the public venues (including coffeehouses, clubs, taverns, parks, etc.)
where readers circulated and discussed these texts.
— Thanks to greatly increased
literacy rates (by 1800, 60-70 percent of adult men could read, versus 25
percent in 1600), the eighteenth century was the first to sustain a large
number of professional authors. Genteel writers could benefit from both
patronage and the subscription system; "Grub Street" hacks at the
lower end of the profession were employed on a piecework basis.
— Women published widely.
— Reading material, though it
remained unaffordable to the laboring classes, was frequently shared.
Circulating libraries began in the 1740s.
— Capital letters began to be used
only at the beginnings of sentences and for proper names, and the use of
italics was reduced.
Literary Principles
— Literature from 1660 to 1785
divides into three shorter periods of 40 years each, which can be characterized
as shown below.
— 1660-1700 (death of John Dryden):
emphasis on "decorum," or critical principles based on what is elegant,
fit, and right.
— 1700-1745 (deaths of Jonathan
Swift, Alexander Pope in 1744): emphasis on satire and on a wider public
readership.
— 1745-1784 (death of Samuel
Johnson): emphasis on revolutionary ideas.
— England's Augustan age was modeled
on that of Rome, when Augustus Caesar re-established stability after civil war
following Julius Caesar's assassination. English writers, following the
restoration of King Charles II, felt themselves to be in a similar situation,
in which the arts (repressed under Cromwell) could now flourish.
— English writers endeavored to
formulate rules of good writing, modeled on classical works, but with a new
appeal to the passions, in simple, often highly visual, language. This embrace
of new (neo) aims and old models is
called
"neoclassicism."
— Horace's phrase, ut picture poesis (meaning "as in
painting, so in poetry") was interpreted to mean that poetry ought to be a
visual as well as a verbal art.
— Augustan poets began the century's
focus on nature, by examining the enduring truths of human nature.
— The classical genres from which
Augustan writers sought to learn included epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral,
satire, and ode. Ensuring a good fit between the genre and its style, language,
and tone was crucial.
— Augustan writing celebrates wit, or
inventiveness, quickness of thought, and aptness of descriptive images or
metaphors.
— The heroic couplet (two lines of
rhymed iambic pentameter) was the most important verse form of Pope's age, for
it combined elegance and wit. Poets also continued to use blank verse (unrhymed
iambic pentameter, not closed in couplets).
— Not just aristocrats and
classically educated scholars wrote verse: ordinary people also began to write
poetry, often featuring broad humor and burlesque, thereby creating a
distinction between high and low verse.
The Restoration and the Eighteenth
Century (1660-1785)
The England to which Charles Stuart
returned in 1660 was a nation divided against itself, exhausted by twenty years
of civil wars and revolution. It is of note that many of the great British
writers of the 18th century, like Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke,
Richard Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith, came from Ireland; many, like James
Thomson, James Boswell, and David Hume came from Scotland. One important result
of the political and religious turmoils of the decade following the Popish Plot
was the emergence of two clearly defined political parties: Whig and Tory. The
coming in of William and Mary and the settlement achieved in 1689 were known as
the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution.
In 1662 the Royal Society of London
for the Improving of Natural Knowledge was founded to give official approval to
the scientific movement that Sir Francis Bacon had initiated earlier. The new
science, advanced by members of the Royal Society, was rapidly altering the
views of nature. Indeed, Deism or Natural Religion became of wide appeal to
“enlightened” minds. But if the 18th century brought a recognition
of human limitations, it also took an optimistic view of human nature.
Rejecting Hobbes and his materialism, some 18th century philosophers
asserted that human beings are naturally good. Such a view of human nature is
labeled as “sentimental”. This doctrine of natural goodness seemed to suggest
that it is civilization that corrupts us. As the wave of sentimentalism
mounted, a parallel rise of religious feeling occurred after about 1740. The
great religious revival known as Methodism was led by John and Charles
Wesley.
The literature of the period
between 1660 and 1785 can be divided to 3 lesser periods of about 40 years each:
the first, extending to the death of Dryden in 1700, may be thought of as the
period in which English neoclassical literature came into being; the
second, ending with the death of Pope in 1744 and of Swift in 1745, brought to
its culmination the literary movement initiated by Dryden and his generation;
the third, concluding with the death of Samuel Johnson in 1784 and the
publication of William Cowper’s The Task
in 1785, was a period that contained the origins of the romantic movement
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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