Theatre and society
In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the
theatre was the focal point of the age. Public life was shot
through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious
pageantry, rank and status were defined in a rigid code of
dress—while on the stages the tensions and contradictions
working to change the nation were embodied and played out.
More than any other form, the drama addressed itself to the
total experience of its society. Playgoing was inexpensive,
and the playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices,
fishwives, labourers, and the like, but the same play that
was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would
often be restaged at court by night. The drama’s power to
activate complex, multiple perspectives on a single issue or
event resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices
and sympathies of this diverse audience.
Moreover, the theatre was fully responsive to the
developing technical sophistication of nondramatic
literature. In the hands of
Shakespeare, the blank verse
employed for translation by the earl of Surrey in the first
half of the 16th century became a medium infinitely mobile
between extremes of formality and intimacy, while prose
encompassed both the control of Hooker and the immediacy of
Nashe. This was above all a spoken drama, glorying in the
theatrical energies of language. And the stage was able to
attract the most technically accomplished writers of its day
because it offered, uniquely, a literary career with some
realistic prospect of financial return. The decisive event
was the opening of the Theatre, considered the first
purpose-built London playhouse, in 1576, and during the next
70 years some 20 theatres more are known to have operated.
The quantity and diversity of plays they commissioned are
little short of astonishing.
Theatres in London and the provinces
The London theatres were a meeting ground of humanism
and popular taste. They inherited, on the one hand, a
tradition of humanistic drama current at court, the
universities, and the Inns of Court (collegiate institutions
responsible for legal education). This tradition involved
the revival of Classical plays and attempts to adapt Latin
conventions to English, particularly to reproduce the type
of tragedy, with its choruses, ghosts, and sententiously
formal verse, associated with Seneca (10 tragedies by Seneca
in English translation appeared in 1581). A fine example of
the type is Gorboduc (1561), by
Thomas Sackville and Thomas
Norton, a tragedy based on British chronicle history that
draws for Elizabeth’s benefit a grave political moral about
irresponsible government. It is also the earliest known
English play in blank verse. On the other hand, all the
professional companies performing in London continued also
to tour in the provinces, and the stage was never allowed to
lose contact with its roots in country show, pastime, and
festival. The simple moral scheme that pitted virtues
against vices in the mid-Tudor interlude was never entirely
submerged in more sophisticated drama, and the Vice, the
tricksy villain of the morality play, survives, in
infinitely more amusing and terrifying form, in
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592–94). Another survival was
the clown or the fool, apt at any moment to step beyond the
play’s illusion and share jokes directly with the
spectators. The intermingling of traditions is clear in two
farces, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1553) and
the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1559), in which
academic pastiche is overlaid with country game; and what
the popular tradition did for tragedy is indicated in Thomas
Preston’s Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1560), a
blood-and-thunder tyrant play with plenty of energetic
spectacle and comedy.
A third tradition was that of revelry and masques,
practiced at the princely courts across Europe and preserved
in England in the witty and impudent productions of the
schoolboy troupes of choristers who sometimes played in
London alongside the professionals. An early play related to
this kind is the first English prose comedy, Gascoigne’s
Supposes (1566), translated from a reveling play in Italian.
Courtly revel reached its apogee in England in the ruinously
expensive court masques staged for James I and Charles I,
magnificent displays of song, dance, and changing scenery
performed before a tiny aristocratic audience and glorifying
the king. The principal masque writer was
Ben Jonson, the
scene designer Inigo Jones.
Nicholas Udall
born December 1505?, Southampton, Hampshire,
Eng.
died December 1556, Westminster
English playwright, translator, and schoolmaster
who wrote the first known English comedy, Ralph
Roister Doister.
Udall was educated at the University of Oxford,
where he became a lecturer and fellow. He became
a schoolmaster in 1529 and was teaching in
London in 1533 when he wrote “ditties and
interludes” for Anne Boleyn’s coronation. In
1534 he published Floures for Latine Spekynge
Selected and Gathered out of Terence . . .
Translated into Englysshe (dated 1533). That
same year he became headmaster of Eton College,
but he was later dismissed for sexually abusing
his pupils.
From 1542 to 1545 Udall seems to have been in
London, engaged in work as a translator. In 1542
he published a version of Erasmus’ Apopthegmes;
and he was employed by Catherine Parr, who
shared his enthusiasm for the Reformation, to
take charge of a translation of Erasmus’
paraphrase of the New Testament. The first
volume, containing the Gospels and Acts, was
published in 1548; the Gospel According to Luke
was translated by Udall, and the Gospel
According to John was translated by Princess
Mary (later Queen Mary I).
In 1549 Udall became tutor to the young
Edward Courtenay; in 1551 he obtained a prebend
at Windsor, and in 1553 he was given a living in
the Isle of Wight. Meanwhile he had become
famous as a playwright and translator. Even
under Queen Mary, his Protestant sympathies did
not cause him to fall into disfavour at court;
various documents refer to his connection with
plays presented before the queen. He became a
tutor in the household of Stephen Gardiner,
bishop of Winchester, and in December 1555 was
appointed headmaster of Westminster.
Although Udall is credited in John Bale’s
catalog of English writers with “many comedies,”
the only play extant that can certainly be
assigned to him is Ralph Roister Doister.
This must have been written, and probably was
performed, about 1553. The play marks the
emergence of English comedy from the medieval
morality plays, interludes, and farces. It is
modeled on Terence and Plautus: its central
idea—of a braggart soldier-hero, with an
impecunious parasite to flatter him, who thinks
every woman he sees falls in love with him and
is finally shown to be an arrant coward—is
derived from Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus. The
incidents, characters, and colloquial idiom,
however, are English. It was probably written as
a Christmas entertainment to be performed by
Udall’s pupils in London. The anonymous
interludes Jacke Jugeler and Thersites are also
sometimes attributed to him.
|
Professional playwrights
The first generation of professional playwrights in
England has become known collectively as the university
wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions,
but their drama was primarily middle class, patriotic, and
romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love
interest. At times, plot virtually evaporated;
George
Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and
Nashe’s
Summer’s Last
Will and Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming
medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and song.
Peele was a
civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike;
The Arraignment of Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment,
designed to compliment Elizabeth.
Greene’s speciality was
comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among
kings with comic action involving clowns. In his Friar Bacon
and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of
vulgar characters complement but also criticize the follies
of their betters. Only
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.
John Lyly
 |
English writer
born 1554?, Kent, Eng.
died November 1606, London
Main
author considered to be the first English prose stylist to leave an
enduring impression upon the language. As a playwright he also
contributed to the development of prose dialogue in English comedy.
Lyly was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went to London
about 1576. There he gained fame with the publication of two prose
romances, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England
(1580), which together made him the most fashionable English writer of
the 1580s. Euphues is a romantic intrigue told in letters interspersed
with general discussions on such topics as religion, love, and
epistolary style. Lyly’s preoccupation with the exact arrangement and
selection of words, his frequent use of similes drawn from classical
mythology, and his artificial and excessively elegant prose inspired a
short-lived Elizabethan literary style called “euphuism.” The Euphues
novels introduced a new concern with form into English prose.
|
 |
After 1580 Lyly devoted himself almost entirely to writing comedies.
In 1583 he gained control of the first Blackfriars Theatre, in which his
earliest plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, were produced. All of
Lyly’s comedies except The Woman in the Moon were presented by the
Children of Paul’s, a children’s company that was periodically favoured
by Queen Elizabeth. The performance dates of his plays are as follows:
Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, 1583–84; Gallathea, 1585–88; Endimion,
1588; Midas, 1589; Love’s Metamorphosis, 1590; Mother Bombie, 1590; and
The Woman in the Moon, 1595. All but one of these are in prose. The
finest is considered to be Endimion, which some critics hold a
masterpiece.
Lyly’s comedies mark an enormous advance upon those of his
predecessors in English drama. Their plots are drawn from classical
mythology and legend, and their characters engage in euphuistic speeches
redolent of Renaissance pedantry; but the charm and wit of the dialogues
and the light and skillful construction of the plots set standards that
younger and more gifted dramatists could not ignore.
Lyly’s popularity waned with the rise of Thomas Kyd, Christopher
Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, and his appeals to Queen Elizabeth for
financial relief went unheeded. He had hoped to succeed Edmund Tilney in
the court post of Master of the Revels, but Tilney outlived him, and
Lyly died a poor and bitter man.
|
Marlowe
Outshining all these is
Christopher Marlowe, who alone
realized the tragic potential inherent in the popular style,
with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of
towering ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented
(and occasionally monotonous) elevation, their “high
astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to
the orthodox values of the societies they disrupt. In
Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward
II (c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders
are overwhelmed by conquerors and politicians who ignore the
boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial
acumen and trickery give him unrestrained power;
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604)
depicts the overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant
regard for God. The main focus of all these plays is on the
uselessness of society’s moral and religious sanctions
against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address
themselves to the anxieties of an age being transformed by
new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the
sinister, ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by
Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was damned as atheist,
homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing
because his verse makes theatrical presence into the
expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus
present the spectator with dilemmas that can be neither
resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the
divided consciousness of their time. There is a similar
effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend
Thomas Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks
justice for the loss of his son but, in an unjust world, can
achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s
use of Senecan conventions (notably a ghost impatient for
revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine conflict
of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and
horrifying.
Christopher Marlowe
"The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus"
English writer
baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.
died May 30, 1593, Deptford, near London
Main
Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English
drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank
verse.
Early years
Marlowe was the second child and eldest son of John Marlowe, a
Canterbury shoemaker. Nothing is known of his first schooling, but on
Jan. 14, 1579, he entered the King’s School, Canterbury, as a scholar. A
year later he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Obtaining his
bachelor of arts degree in 1584, he continued in residence at
Cambridge—which may imply that he was intending to take Anglican orders.
In 1587, however, the university hesitated about granting him the
master’s degree; its doubts (arising from his frequent absences from the
university) were apparently set at rest when the Privy Council sent a
letter declaring that he had been employed “on matters touching the
benefit of his country”—apparently in Elizabeth I’s secret service.
Last years and literary career.
After 1587 Marlowe was in London, writing for the theatres, occasionally
getting into trouble with the authorities because of his violent and
disreputable behaviour, and probably also engaging himself from time to
time in government service. Marlowe won a dangerous reputation for
“atheism,” but this could, in Elizabeth I’s time, indicate merely
unorthodox religious opinions. In Robert Greene’s deathbed tract,
Greenes groats-worth of witte, Marlowe is referred to as a “famous
gracer of Tragedians” and is reproved for having said, like Greene
himself, “There is no god” and for having studied “pestilent Machiuilian
pollicie.” There is further evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the
denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the letter
of Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe’s death. Kyd
alleged that certain papers “denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that
were found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two
years before. Both Baines and Kyd suggested on Marlowe’s part atheism in
the stricter sense and a persistent delight in blasphemy. Whatever the
case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order for
Marlowe’s arrest; two days later the poet was ordered to give daily
attendance on their lordships “until he shall be licensed to the
contrary.” On May 30, however, Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer, in
the dubious company of Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, at a lodging
house in Deptford, where they had spent most of the day and where, it
was alleged, a fight broke out between them over the bill.
In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years,
Marlowe’s achievements were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving
Cambridge he had already written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts,
both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590). Almost certainly
during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had translated Ovid’s Amores
(The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the Latin.
About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage
(published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With
the production of Tamburlaine he received recognition and acclaim, and
playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay ahead.
Both parts of Tamburlaine were published anonymously in 1590, and the
publisher omitted certain passages that he found incongruous with the
play’s serious concern with history; even so, the extant Tamburlaine
text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe’s. No other of his plays
or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished
but splendid poem Hero and Leander—which is almost certainly the finest
nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund
Spenser—appeared in 1598.
There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the
plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. It is not uncommonly held
that Faustus quickly followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned
to a more neutral, more “social” kind of writing in Edward II and The
Massacre at Paris. His last play may have been The Jew of Malta, in
which he signally broke new ground. It is known that Tamburlaine,
Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the Admiral’s Men, a
company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly
played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.
Works.
In the earliest of Marlowe’s plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great
(c. 1587; published 1590), Marlowe’s characteristic “mighty line” (as
Ben Jonson called it) established blank verse as the staple medium for
later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. It appears that
originally Marlowe intended to write only the first part, concluding
with Tamburlaine’s marriage to Zenocrate and his making “truce with all
the world.” But the popularity of the first part encouraged Marlowe to
continue the story to Tamburlaine’s death. This gave him some
difficulty, as he had almost exhausted his historical sources in part I;
consequently the sequel has, at first glance, an appearance of padding.
Yet the effort demanded in writing the continuation made the young
playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the hero he had chosen,
and thus part II makes explicit certain notions that were below the
surface and insufficiently recognized by the dramatist in part I.
The play is based on the life and achievements of Timur (Timurlenk),
the bloody 14th-century conqueror of Central Asia and India. Tamburlaine
is a man avid for power and luxury and the possession of beauty: at the
beginning of part I he is only an obscure Scythian shepherd, but he wins
the crown of Persia by eloquence and bravery and a readiness to discard
loyalty. He then conquers Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey, he puts the town
of Damascus to the sword, and he conquers the sultan of Egypt; but, at
the pleas of the sultan’s daughter Zenocrate, the captive whom he loves,
he spares him and makes truce. In part II Tamburlaine’s conquests are
further extended; whenever he fights a battle, he must win, even when
his last illness is upon him. But Zenocrate dies, and their three sons
provide a manifestly imperfect means for ensuring the preservation of
his wide dominions; he kills Calyphas, one of these sons, when he
refuses to follow his father into battle. Always, too, there are more
battles to fight: when for a moment he has no immediate opponent on
earth, he dreams of leading his army against the powers of heaven,
though at other times he glories in seeing himself as “the scourge of
God”; he burns the Qurʾān, for he will have no intermediary between God
and himself, and there is a hint of doubt whether even God is to be
granted recognition. Certainly Marlowe feels sympathy with his hero,
giving him magnificent verse to speak, delighting in his dreams of power
and of the possession of beauty, as seen in the following of
Tamburlaine’s lines:
Nature, that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
But, especially in part II, there are other strains: the hero can be
absurd in his continual striving for more demonstrations of his power;
his cruelty, which is extreme, becomes sickening; his human weakness is
increasingly underlined, most notably in the onset of his fatal illness
immediately after his arrogant burning of the Qurʾān. In this early play
Marlowe already shows the ability to view a tragic hero from more than
one angle, achieving a simultaneous vision of grandeur and impotence.
Marlowe’s most famous play is The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus;
but it has survived only in a corrupt form, and its date of composition
has been much-disputed. It was first published in 1604, and another
version appeared in 1616. Faustus takes over the dramatic framework of
the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall,
and damnation and its free use of morality figures such as the good
angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along with the devils
Lucifer and Mephistopheles. In Faustus Marlowe tells the story of the
doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in
exchange for knowledge and power. The devil’s intermediary in the play,
Mephistopheles, achieves tragic grandeur in his own right as a fallen
angel torn between satanic pride and dark despair. The play gives
eloquent expression to this idea of damnation in the lament of
Mephistopheles for a lost heaven and in Faustus’ final despairing
entreaties to be saved by Christ before his soul is claimed by the
devil:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock
will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must
be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God!—Who pulls
me down?—
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in
the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop:
ah, my Christ!—
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ’tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his
ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall
on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
Just as in Tamburlaine Marlowe had seen the cruelty and absurdity of
his hero as well as his magnificence, so here he can enter into Faustus’
grandiose intellectual ambition, simultaneously viewing those ambitions
as futile, self-destructive, and absurd. The text is problematic in the
low comic scenes spuriously introduced by later hack writers, but its
more sober and consistent moments are certainly the uncorrupted work of
Marlowe.
In The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, Marlowe portrays
another power-hungry figure in the Jew Barabas, who in the villainous
society of Christian Malta shows no scruple in self-advancement. But
this figure is more closely incorporated within his society than either
Tamburlaine, the supreme conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely adventurer
against God. In the end Barabas is overcome, not by a divine stroke but
by the concerted action of his human enemies. There is a difficulty in
deciding how fully the extant text of The Jew of Malta represents
Marlowe’s original play, for it was not published until 1633. But The
Jew can be closely associated with The Massacre at Paris (1593), a
dramatic presentation of incidents from contemporary French history,
including the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, and with The
Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (published
1594), Marlowe’s great contribution to the Elizabethan plays on
historical themes.
As The Massacre introduces in the duke of Guise a figure
unscrupulously avid for power, so in the younger Mortimer of Edward II
Marlowe shows a man developing an appetite for power and increasingly
corrupted as power comes to him. In each instance the dramatist shares
in the excitement of the pursuit of glory, but all three plays present
such figures within a social framework: the notion of social
responsibility, the notion of corruption through power, and the notion
of the suffering that the exercise of power entails are all prominently
the dramatist’s concern. Apart from Tamburlaine and the minor work Dido,
Queen of Carthage (of uncertain date, published 1594 and written in
collaboration with Thomas Nashe), Edward II is the only one of Marlowe’s
plays whose extant text can be relied on as adequately representing the
author’s manuscript. And certainly Edward II is a major work, not merely
one of the first Elizabethan plays on an English historical theme. The
relationships linking the king, his neglected queen, the king’s
favourite, Gaveston, and the ambitious Mortimer are studied with
detached sympathy and remarkable understanding: no character here is
lightly disposed of, and the abdication and the brutal murder of Edward
show the same dark and violent imagination as appeared in Marlowe’s
presentation of Faustus’ last hour. Though this play, along with The Jew
and The Massacre, shows Marlowe’s fascinated response to the distorted
Elizabethan idea of Machiavelli, it more importantly shows Marlowe’s
deeply suggestive awareness of the nature of disaster, the power of
society, and the dark extent of an individual’s suffering.
In addition to translations (Ovid’s Amores and the first book of
Lucan’s Pharsalia), Marlowe’s nondramatic work includes the poem Hero
and Leander. This work was incomplete at his death and was extended by
George Chapman: the joint work of the two poets was published in 1598.
An authoritative edition of Marlowe’s works was edited by Fredson
Bowers, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd ed., 2 vol.
(1981).
Clifford Leech
|
|
|
Thomas Kyd
baptized Nov. 6, 1558, London, Eng.
died c. December 1594, London
English dramatist who, with his The
Spanish Tragedy (sometimes called Hieronimo,
or Jeronimo, after its protagonist), initiated
the revenge tragedy of his day. Kyd anticipated
the structure of many later plays, including the
development of middle and final climaxes. In
addition, he revealed an instinctive sense of
tragic situation, while his characterization of
Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy prepared
the way for Shakespeare’s psychological study of
Hamlet.
The son of a scrivener, Kyd was educated at
the Merchant Taylors School in London. There is
no evidence that he attended the university
before turning to literature. He seems to have
been in service for some years with a lord
(possibly Ferdinando, Lord Strange, the patron
of Lord Strange’s Men). The Spanish Tragedy was
entered in the Stationers’ Register in October
1592, and the undated first quarto edition
almost certainly appeared in that year. It is
not known which company first played it, nor
when; but Strange’s company played Hieronimo 16
times in 1592, and the Admiral’s Men revived it
in 1597, as apparently did the Chamberlain’s
Men. It remained one of the most popular plays
of the age and was often reprinted.
The only other play certainly by Kyd is
Cornelia (1594), an essay in Senecan tragedy,
translated from the French of Robert Garnier’s
academic Cornélie. He may also have written an
earlier version of Hamlet, known to scholars as
the Ur-Hamlet, and his hand has sometimes been
detected in the anonymous Arden of Feversham,
one of the first domestic tragedies, and in a
number of other plays.
About 1591 Kyd was sharing lodgings with
Christopher Marlowe, and on May 13, 1593, he was
arrested and then tortured, being suspected of
treasonable activity. His room had been searched
and certain “atheistical” disputations denying
the deity of Jesus Christ found there. He
probably averred then and certainly confirmed
later, in a letter, that these papers had
belonged to Marlowe. That letter is the source
for almost everything that is known about Kyd’s
life. He was dead by Dec. 30, 1594, when his
mother made a formal repudiation of her son’s
debt-ridden estate.
|
Shakespeare's works
Above all other dramatists stands
William Shakespeare, a
supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize
briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but
he remains elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the
poet John Keats called his “negative capability”—means that
his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or
ideology finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself
subject to criticism and interrogation. In part, Shakespeare
achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic,
by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in his
comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the
artful with the spontaneous; his plays imitate the
counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled
him to lead the English Renaissance without privileging or
prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as
actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s
players—was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every
level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded
exactly to the period of greatest literary flourishing, and
only in his work are the total possibilities of the
Renaissance fully realized.
William Shakespeare
PART I
"Sonnets"
PART II
"Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"
PART III
"The Tragedy of King Lear"
PART IV
"The Tragedy
of Macbeth"
PART V
"Othello, the
Moor of Venice"
PART VI
"Romeo and
Juliet"
English author
Shakespeare also spelled Shakspere, byname Bard of Avon or Swan of Avon
baptized April 26, 1564,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon
Overview
English poet and playwright, often considered the greatest writer in
world literature.
He spent his early life in
Stratford-upon-Avon, receiving at most a grammar-school education, and
at age 18 he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway. By 1594 he was
apparently a rising playwright in London and an actor in a leading
theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later King’s Men); the
company performed at the Globe Theatre from 1599. The order in which his
plays were written and performed is highly uncertain. His earliest plays
seem to date from the late 1580s to the mid-1590s and include the
comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; history plays based on the lives
of the English kings, including Henry VI (parts 1, 2, and 3), Richard
III, and Richard II; and the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The plays
apparently written between 1596 and 1600 are mostly comedies, including
The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About
Nothing, and As You Like It, and histories, including Henry IV (parts 1
and 2), Henry V, and Julius Caesar. Approximately between 1600 and 1607
he wrote the comedies Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure, as well as the great tragedies Hamlet (probably
begun in 1599), Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, which mark the summit
of his art. Among his later works (about 1607 to 1614) are the tragedies
Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, as well as the
fantastical romances The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. He probably also
is responsible for some sections of the plays Edward III and The Two
Noble Kinsmen.
Shakespeare’s plays, all of them written largely in iambic pentameter
verse, are marked by extraordinary poetry; vivid, subtle, and complex
characterizations; and a highly inventive use of English. His 154
sonnets, published in 1609 but apparently written mostly in the 1590s,
often express strong feeling within an exquisitely controlled form.
Shakespeare retired to Stratford before 1610 and lived as a country
gentleman until his death. The first collected edition of his plays, or
First Folio, was published in 1623. As with most writers of the time,
little is known about his life and work, and other writers, particularly
the 17th earl of Oxford, have frequently been proposed as the actual
authors of his plays and poems.
Shakespeare occupies a position unique in
world literature. Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists,
such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national
barriers; but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of
Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries for a small repertory theatre, are now performed and read more
often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great
contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare “was
not of an age, but for all time,” has been fulfilled.
It may be audacious even to attempt a
definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the
gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth
that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger
there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness,
and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but with
Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote
subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and
conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this
way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so
that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations,
finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively
stimulating. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his
creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid
stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting
vicarious participation. Thus Shakespeare’s merits can survive
translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of
Elizabethan England.
Shakespeare the man » Life
Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare
is surprisingly large for one of his station in life, many find it a
little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from documents of an
official character. Dates of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and burials;
wills, conveyances, legal processes, and payments by the court—these are
the dusty details. There are, however, many contemporary allusions to
him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of flesh and blood to
the biographical skeleton.
Shakespeare the man » Life » Early life in Stratford
The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire, shows that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his
birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John
Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough, who in 1565 was chosen an
alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor,
before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was
engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some
fluctuations in prosperity. His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote,
Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some
land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century,
this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John
Shakespeare.)
Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of
good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster’s
salary being paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the
school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to
suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy’s
education would consist mostly of Latin studies—learning to read, write,
and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical
historians, moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on to the
university, and indeed it is unlikely that the scholarly round of logic,
rhetoric, and other studies then followed there would have interested
him.
Instead, at age 18 he married. Where
and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester
preserves a bond dated November 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of
Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a security to the bishop
for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and
“Anne Hathaway of Stratford,” upon the consent of her friends and upon
once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after
Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of
Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, 2 miles
[3.2 km] from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the
records of the Stratford church, where a daughter, named Susanna, born
to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On February 2,
1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (Hamnet, Shakespeare’s
only son, died 11 years later.)
How Shakespeare spent the next eight
years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records,
is not known. There are stories—given currency long after his death—of
stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas
Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a
schoolmaster in the country; of going to London and gaining entry to the
world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers. It has also been
conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great
household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries. In
lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare’s life
have often been made from the internal “evidence” of his writings. But
this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot conclude, for example, from
his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer, for he was
clearly a writer who without difficulty could get whatever knowledge he
needed for the composition of his plays.
Shakespeare the man » Life » Career in the theatre
The first reference to Shakespeare in the literary world of London
comes in 1592, when a fellow dramatist, Robert Greene, declared in a
pamphlet written on his deathbed:
There is an upstart crow, beautified
with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of
you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the
only Shake-scene in a country.
What these words mean is difficult to
determine, but clearly they are insulting, and clearly Shakespeare is
the object of the sarcasms. When the book in which they appear (Greenes,
groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance, 1592) was
published after Greene’s death, a mutual acquaintance wrote a preface
offering an apology to Shakespeare and testifying to his worth. This
preface also indicates that Shakespeare was by then making important
friends. For, although the puritanical city of London was generally
hostile to the theatre, many of the nobility were good patrons of the
drama and friends of the actors. Shakespeare seems to have attracted the
attention of the young Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd earl of Southampton,
and to this nobleman were dedicated his first published poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
One striking piece of evidence that
Shakespeare began to prosper early and tried to retrieve the family’s
fortunes and establish its gentility is the fact that a coat of arms was
granted to John Shakespeare in 1596. Rough drafts of this grant have
been preserved in the College of Arms, London, though the final
document, which must have been handed to the Shakespeares, has not
survived. Almost certainly William himself took the initiative and paid
the fees. The coat of arms appears on Shakespeare’s monument
(constructed before 1623) in the Stratford church. Equally interesting
as evidence of Shakespeare’s worldly success was his purchase in 1597 of
New Place, a large house in Stratford, which he as a boy must have
passed every day in walking to school.
How his career in the theatre began is
unclear, but from roughly 1594 onward he was an important member of the
Lord Chamberlain’s company of players (called the King’s Men after the
accession of James I in 1603). They had the best actor, Richard Burbage;
they had the best theatre, the Globe (finished by the autumn of 1599);
they had the best dramatist, Shakespeare. It is no wonder that the
company prospered. Shakespeare became a full-time professional man of
his own theatre, sharing in a cooperative enterprise and intimately
concerned with the financial success of the plays he wrote.
Unfortunately, written records give
little indication of the way in which Shakespeare’s professional life
molded his marvelous artistry. All that can be deduced is that for 20
years Shakespeare devoted himself assiduously to his art, writing more
than a million words of poetic drama of the highest quality.
Shakespeare the man » Life » Private life
Shakespeare had little contact with officialdom, apart from
walking—dressed in the royal livery as a member of the King’s Men—at the
coronation of King James I in 1604. He continued to look after his
financial interests. He bought properties in London and in Stratford. In
1605 he purchased a share (about one-fifth) of the Stratford tithes—a
fact that explains why he was eventually buried in the chancel of its
parish church. For some time he lodged with a French Huguenot family
called Mountjoy, who lived near St. Olave’s Church in Cripplegate,
London. The records of a lawsuit in May 1612, resulting from a Mountjoy
family quarrel, show Shakespeare as giving evidence in a genial way
(though unable to remember certain important facts that would have
decided the case) and as interesting himself generally in the family’s
affairs.
No letters written by Shakespeare have
survived, but a private letter to him happened to get caught up with
some official transactions of the town of Stratford and so has been
preserved in the borough archives. It was written by one Richard Quiney
and addressed by him from the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, London, whither
he had gone from Stratford on business. On one side of the paper is
inscribed: “To my loving good friend and countryman, Mr. Wm.
Shakespeare, deliver these.” Apparently Quiney thought his fellow
Stratfordian a person to whom he could apply for the loan of £30—a large
sum in Elizabethan times. Nothing further is known about the
transaction, but, because so few opportunities of seeing into
Shakespeare’s private life present themselves, this begging letter
becomes a touching document. It is of some interest, moreover, that 18
years later Quiney’s son Thomas became the husband of Judith,
Shakespeare’s second daughter.
Shakespeare’s will (made on March 25,
1616) is a long and detailed document. It entailed his quite ample
property on the male heirs of his elder daughter, Susanna. (Both his
daughters were then married, one to the aforementioned Thomas Quiney and
the other to John Hall, a respected physician of Stratford.) As an
afterthought, he bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife; no one
can be certain what this notorious legacy means. The testator’s
signatures to the will are apparently in a shaky hand. Perhaps
Shakespeare was already ill. He died on April 23, 1616. No name was
inscribed on his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church of
Stratford-upon-Avon. Instead these lines, possibly his own, appeared:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
John Russell Brown
Terence John Bew Spencer
Shakespeare the man » Life » Sexuality
Like so many circumstances of Shakespeare’s personal life, the
question of his sexual nature is shrouded in uncertainty. At age 18, in
1582, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman who was eight years older than
he. Their first child, Susanna, was born on May 26, 1583, about six
months after the marriage ceremony. A license had been issued for the
marriage on November 27, 1582, with only one reading (instead of the
usual three) of the banns, or announcement of the intent to marry in
order to give any party the opportunity to raise any potential legal
objections. This procedure and the swift arrival of the couple’s first
child suggest that the pregnancy was unplanned, as it was certainly
premarital. The marriage thus appears to have been a “shotgun” wedding.
Anne gave birth some 21 months after the arrival of Susanna to twins,
named Hamnet and Judith, who were christened on February 2, 1585.
Thereafter William and Anne had no more children. They remained married
until his death in 1616.
Were they compatible, or did William
prefer to live apart from Anne for most of this time? When he moved to
London at some point between 1585 and 1592, he did not take his family
with him. Divorce was nearly impossible in this era. Were there medical
or other reasons for the absence of any more children? Was he present in
Stratford when Hamnet, his only son, died in 1596 at age 11? He bought a
fine house for his family in Stratford and acquired real estate in the
vicinity. He was eventually buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford,
where Anne joined him in 1623. He seems to have retired to Stratford
from London about 1612. He had lived apart from his wife and children,
except presumably for occasional visits in the course of a very busy
professional life, for at least two decades. His bequeathing in his last
will and testament of his “second best bed” to Anne, with no further
mention of her name in that document, has suggested to many scholars
that the marriage was a disappointment necessitated by an unplanned
pregnancy.
What was Shakespeare’s love life like
during those decades in London, apart from his family? Knowledge on this
subject is uncertain at best. According to an entry dated March 13,
1602, in the commonplace book of a law student named John Manningham,
Shakespeare had a brief affair after he happened to overhear a female
citizen at a performance of Richard III making an assignation with
Richard Burbage, the leading actor of the acting company to which
Shakespeare also belonged. Taking advantage of having overheard their
conversation, Shakespeare allegedly hastened to the place where the
assignation had been arranged, was “entertained” by the woman, and was
“at his game” when Burbage showed up. When a message was brought that
“Richard the Third” had arrived, Shakespeare is supposed to have “caused
return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the
Third. Shakespeare’s name William.” This diary entry of Manningham’s
must be regarded with much skepticism, since it is verified by no other
evidence and since it may simply speak to the timeless truth that actors
are regarded as free spirits and bohemians. Indeed, the story was so
amusing that it was retold, embellished, and printed in Thomas Likes’s A
General View of the Stage (1759) well before Manningham’s diary was
discovered. It does at least suggest, at any rate, that Manningham
imagined it to be true that Shakespeare was heterosexual and not averse
to an occasional infidelity to his marriage vows. The film Shakespeare
in Love (1998) plays amusedly with this idea in its purely fictional
presentation of Shakespeare’s torchy affair with a young woman named
Viola De Lesseps, who was eager to become a player in a professional
acting company and who inspired Shakespeare in his writing of Romeo and
Juliet—indeed, giving him some of his best lines.
Apart from these intriguing
circumstances, little evidence survives other than the poems and plays
that Shakespeare wrote. Can anything be learned from them? The sonnets,
written perhaps over an extended period from the early 1590s into the
1600s, chronicle a deeply loving relationship between the speaker of the
sonnets and a well-born young man. At times the poet-speaker is greatly
sustained and comforted by a love that seems reciprocal. More often, the
relationship is one that is troubled by painful absences, by jealousies,
by the poet’s perception that other writers are winning the young man’s
affection, and finally by the deep unhappiness of an outright desertion
in which the young man takes away from the poet-speaker the dark-haired
beauty whose sexual favours the poet-speaker has enjoyed (though not
without some revulsion at his own unbridled lust; see Sonnet 129). This
narrative would seem to posit heterosexual desire in the poet-speaker,
even if of a troubled and guilty sort; but do the earlier sonnets
suggest also a desire for the young man? The relationship is portrayed
as indeed deeply emotional and dependent; the poet-speaker cannot live
without his friend and that friend’s returning the love that the
poet-speaker so ardently feels. Yet readers today cannot easily tell
whether that love is aimed at physical completion. Indeed, Sonnet 20
seems to deny that possibility by insisting that Nature’s having
equipped the friend with “one thing to my purpose nothing”—that is, a
penis—means that physical sex must be regarded as solely in the province
of the friend’s relationship with women: “But since she [Nature] pricked
thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use
their treasure.” The bawdy pun on “pricked” underscores the sexual
meaning of the sonnet’s concluding couplet. Critic Joseph Pequigney has
argued at length that the sonnets nonetheless do commemorate a
consummated physical relationship between the poet-speaker and the
friend, but most commentators have backed away from such a bold
assertion.
A significant difficulty is that one
cannot be sure that the sonnets are autobiographical. Shakespeare is
such a masterful dramatist that one can easily imagine him creating such
an intriguing story line as the basis for his sonnet sequence. Then,
too, are the sonnets printed in the order that Shakespeare would have
intended? He seems not to have been involved in their publication in
1609, long after most of them had been written. Even so, one can perhaps
ask why such a story would have appealed to Shakespeare. Is there a
level at which fantasy and dreamwork may be involved?
The plays and other poems lend
themselves uncertainly to such speculation. Loving relationships between
two men are sometimes portrayed as extraordinarily deep. Antonio in
Twelfth Night protests to Sebastian that he needs to accompany Sebastian
on his adventures even at great personal risk: “If you will not murder
me for my love, let me be your servant” (Act II, scene 1, lines 33–34).
That is to say, I will die if you leave me behind. Another Antonio, in
The Merchant of Venice, risks his life for his loving friend Bassanio.
Actors in today’s theatre regularly portray these relationships as
homosexual, and indeed actors are often incredulous toward anyone who
doubts that to be the case. In Troilus and Cressida, Patroclus is
rumoured to be Achilles’ “masculine whore” (V, 1, line 17), as is
suggested in Homer, and certainly the two are very close in friendship,
though Patroclus does admonish Achilles to engage in battle by saying,
A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loathed than an effeminate man
In time of action
Again, on the modern stage this
relationship is often portrayed as obviously, even flagrantly, sexual;
but whether Shakespeare saw it as such, or the play valorizes
homosexuality or bisexuality, is another matter.
Certainly his plays contain many warmly
positive depictions of heterosexuality, in the loves of Romeo and
Juliet, Orlando and Rosalind, and Henry V and Katharine of France, among
many others. At the same time, Shakespeare is astute in his
representations of sexual ambiguity. Viola—in disguise as a young man,
Cesario, in Twelfth Night—wins the love of Duke Orsino in such a
delicate way that what appears to be the love between two men morphs
into the heterosexual mating of Orsino and Viola. The ambiguity is
reinforced by the audience’s knowledge that in Shakespeare’s theatre
Viola/Cesario was portrayed by a boy actor of perhaps 16. All the
cross-dressing situations in the comedies, involving Portia in The
Merchant of Venice, Rosalind/Ganymede in As You Like It, Imogen in
Cymbeline, and many others, playfully explore the uncertain boundaries
between the genders. Rosalind’s male disguise name in As You Like It,
Ganymede, is that of the cupbearer to Zeus with whom the god was
enamoured; the ancient legends assume that Ganymede was Zeus’s catamite.
Shakespeare is characteristically delicate on that score, but he does
seem to delight in the frisson of sexual suggestion.
David Bevington
Shakespeare the man » Early posthumous documentation
Shakespeare’s family or friends, however, were not content with a
simple gravestone, and, within a few years, a monument was erected on
the chancel wall. It seems to have existed by 1623. Its epitaph, written
in Latin and inscribed immediately below the bust, attributes to
Shakespeare the worldly wisdom of Nestor, the genius of Socrates, and
the poetic art of Virgil. This apparently was how his contemporaries in
Stratford-upon-Avon wished their fellow citizen to be remembered.
Shakespeare the man » Early posthumous documentation » The tributes
of his colleagues
The memory of Shakespeare survived long in theatrical circles, for
his plays remained a major part of the repertory of the King’s Men until
the closing of the theatres in 1642. The greatest of Shakespeare’s great
contemporaries in the theatre, Ben Jonson, had a good deal to say about
him. To William Drummond of Hawthornden in 1619 he said that Shakespeare
“wanted art.” But, when Jonson came to write his splendid poem prefixed
to the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, he rose to the
occasion with stirring words of praise:
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one
to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
Besides almost retracting his earlier
gibe about Shakespeare’s lack of art, he gives testimony that
Shakespeare’s personality was to be felt, by those who knew him, in his
poetry—that the style was the man. Jonson also reminded his readers of
the strong impression the plays had made upon Queen Elizabeth I and King
James I at court performances:
Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it
were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
Shakespeare seems to have been on
affectionate terms with his theatre colleagues. His fellow actors John
Heminge and Henry Condell (who, with Burbage, were remembered in his
will) dedicated the First Folio of 1623 to the earl of Pembroke and the
earl of Montgomery, explaining that they had collected the plays
“without ambition either of self-profit or fame; only to keep the memory
of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare the man » Early posthumous documentation » Anecdotes and
documents
Seventeenth-century antiquaries began to collect anecdotes about
Shakespeare, but no serious life was written until 1709, when Nicholas
Rowe tried to assemble information from all available sources with the
aim of producing a connected narrative. There were local traditions at
Stratford: witticisms and lampoons of local characters; scandalous
stories of drunkenness and sexual escapades. About 1661 the vicar of
Stratford wrote in his diary: “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had
a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a
fever there contracted.” On the other hand, the antiquary John Aubrey
wrote in some notes about Shakespeare: “He was not a company keeper;
lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be debauched, and, if invited to, writ he
was in pain.” Richard Davies, archdeacon of Lichfield, reported, “He
died a papist.” How much trust can be put in such a story is uncertain.
In the early 18th century a story appeared that Queen Elizabeth had
obliged Shakespeare “to write a play of Sir John Falstaff in love” and
that he had performed the task (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in a
fortnight. There are other stories, all of uncertain authenticity and
some mere fabrications.
When serious scholarship began in the
18th century, it was too late to gain anything from traditions. But
documents began to be discovered. Shakespeare’s will was found in 1747
and his marriage license in 1836. The documents relating to the Mountjoy
lawsuit already mentioned were found and printed in 1910. It is
conceivable that further documents of a legal nature may yet be
discovered, but as time passes the hope becomes more remote. Modern
scholarship is more concerned to study Shakespeare in relation to his
social environment, both in Stratford and in London. This is not easy,
because the author and actor lived a somewhat detached life: a respected
tithe-owning country gentleman in Stratford, perhaps, but a rather
rootless artist in London.
John Russell Brown
Terence John Bew Spencer
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » The intellectual background
Shakespeare lived at a time when ideas and social structures
established in the Middle Ages still informed human thought and
behaviour. Queen Elizabeth I was God’s deputy on earth, and lords and
commoners had their due places in society under her, with
responsibilities up through her to God and down to those of more humble
rank. The order of things, however, did not go unquestioned. Atheism was
still considered a challenge to the beliefs and way of life of a
majority of Elizabethans, but the Christian faith was no longer single.
Rome’s authority had been challenged by Martin Luther, John Calvin, a
multitude of small religious sects, and, indeed, the English church
itself. Royal prerogative was challenged in Parliament; the economic and
social orders were disturbed by the rise of capitalism, by the
redistribution of monastic lands under Henry VIII, by the expansion of
education, and by the influx of new wealth from discovery of new lands.
An interplay of new and old ideas was
typical of the time: official homilies exhorted the people to obedience;
the Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was expounding a new,
practical code of politics that caused Englishmen to fear the Italian
“Machiavillain” and yet prompted them to ask what men do, rather than
what they should do. In Hamlet, disquisitions—on man, belief, a “rotten”
state, and times “out of joint”—clearly reflect a growing disquiet and
skepticism. The translation of Montaigne’s Essays in 1603 gave further
currency, range, and finesse to such thought, and Shakespeare was one of
many who read them, making direct and significant quotations in The
Tempest. In philosophical inquiry the question “How?” became the impulse
for advance, rather than the traditional “Why?” of Aristotle.
Shakespeare’s plays written between 1603 and 1606 unmistakably reflect a
new, Jacobean distrust. James I, who, like Elizabeth, claimed divine
authority, was far less able than she to maintain the authority of the
throne. The so-called Gunpowder Plot (1605) showed a determined
challenge by a small minority in the state; James’s struggles with the
House of Commons in successive Parliaments, in addition to indicating
the strength of the “new men,” also revealed the inadequacies of the
administration.
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » Poetic conventions and dramatic
traditions
The Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence were familiar in
Elizabethan schools and universities, and English translations or
adaptations of them were occasionally performed by students. Seneca’s
rhetorical and sensational tragedies, too, had been translated and often
imitated. But there was also a strong native dramatic tradition deriving
from the medieval miracle plays, which had continued to be performed in
various towns until forbidden during Elizabeth’s reign. This native
drama had been able to assimilate French popular farce, clerically
inspired morality plays on abstract themes, and interludes or short
entertainments that made use of the “turns” of individual clowns and
actors. Although Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors were known as
University wits, their plays were seldom structured in the manner of
those they had studied at Oxford or Cambridge; instead, they used and
developed the more popular narrative forms.
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » Poetic conventions and dramatic
traditions » Changes in language
The English language at this time was changing and extending its
range. The poet Edmund Spenser led with the restoration of old words,
and schoolmasters, poets, sophisticated courtiers, and travelers all
brought further contributions from France, Italy, and the Roman
classics, as well as from farther afield. Helped by the growing
availability of cheaper, printed books, the language began to become
standardized in grammar and vocabulary and, more slowly, in spelling.
Ambitious for a European and permanent reputation, the essayist and
philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in Latin as well as in English; but, if
he had lived only a few decades later, even he might have had total
confidence in his own tongue.
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » Poetic conventions and dramatic
traditions » Shakespeare’s literary debts
Shakespeare’s most obvious debt was to Raphael Holinshed, whose
Chronicles (the second edition, published in 1587) furnished story
material for several plays, including Macbeth and King Lear. In
Shakespeare’s earlier works other debts stand out clearly: to Plautus
for the structure of The Comedy of Errors; to the poet Ovid and to
Seneca for rhetoric and incident in Titus Andronicus; to morality drama
for a scene in which a father mourns his dead son and a son his father,
in Henry VI, Part 3; to Christopher Marlowe for sentiments and
characterization in Richard III and The Merchant of Venice; to the
Italian popular tradition of commedia dell’arte for characterization and
dramatic style in The Taming of the Shrew; and so on. Soon, however,
there was no line between their effects and his. In The Tempest (perhaps
the most original of all his plays in form, theme, language, and
setting) folk influences may also be traced, together with a newer and
more obvious debt to a courtly diversion known as the masque, as
developed by Ben Jonson and others at the court of King James.
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » Theatrical conditions
hereThe Globe and its predecessor, the Theatre, were public
playhouses run by the Chamberlain’s Men, a leading theatre company of
which Shakespeare was a member. Almost all classes of citizens,
excepting many Puritans and like-minded Reformers, came to them for
afternoon entertainment. The players were also summoned to court, to
perform before the monarch and assembled nobility. In times of plague,
usually in the summer, they might tour the provinces, and on occasion
they performed at London’s Inns of Court (associations of law students),
at universities, and in great houses. Popularity led to an insatiable
demand for plays: early in 1613 the King’s Men—as the Chamberlain’s Men
were then known—could present “fourteen several plays.” The theatre soon
became fashionable, too, and in 1608–09 the King’s Men started to
perform on a regular basis at the Blackfriars, a “private” indoor
theatre where high admission charges assured the company a more select
and sophisticated audience for their performances. (For more on theatre
in Shakespeare’s day, see Sidebar: Shakespeare and the Liberties.)
Shakespeare’s first associations with
the Chamberlain’s Men seem to have been as an actor. He is not known to
have acted after 1603, and tradition gives him only secondary roles,
such as the ghost in Hamlet and Adam in As You Like It, but his
continuous association must have given him direct working knowledge of
all aspects of theatre. Numerous passages in his plays show conscious
concern for theatre arts and audience reactions. Hamlet gives expert
advice to visiting actors in the art of playing. Prospero in The Tempest
speaks of the whole of life as a kind of “revels,” or theatrical show,
that, like a dream, will soon be over. The Duke of York in Richard II is
conscious of how
…in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
In Shakespeare’s day there was little
time for group rehearsals, and actors were given the words of only their
own parts. The crucial scenes in Shakespeare’s plays, therefore, are
between two or three characters only or else are played with one
character dominating a crowded stage. Most female parts were written for
young male actors or boys, so Shakespeare did not often write big roles
for them or keep them actively engaged onstage for lengthy periods.
Writing for the clowns of the company—who were important popular
attractions in any play—presented the problem of allowing them to use
their comic personalities and tricks and yet have them serve the
immediate interests of theme and action.
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » The chronology of Shakespeare’s
plays
Despite much scholarly argument, it is often impossible to date a
given play precisely. But there is a general consensus, especially for
plays written in 1588–1601, in 1605–07, and from 1609 onward. The
following list of dates of composition is based on external and internal
evidence, on general stylistic and thematic considerations, and on the
observation that an output of no more than two plays a year seems to
have been established in those periods when dating is rather clearer
than others.
1588–97 Love’s Labour’s Lost 1589–92
Henry VI, Part 1; Titus Andronicus 1589–94 The Comedy of Errors 1590–92
Henry VI, Part 2 1590–93 Henry VI, Part 3 1590–94 The Taming of the
Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1590–95 Edward III 1592–94 Richard
III 1594–96 King John, Romeo and Juliet 1595–96 A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Richard II 1596–97 The Merchant of Venice; Henry IV, Part 1
1597–98 Henry IV, Part 2 1597–1601 The Merry Wives of Windsor 1598–99
Much Ado About Nothing 1598–1600 As You Like It 1599 Henry V 1599–1600
Julius Caesar 1599–1601 Hamlet 1600–02 Twelfth Night 1601–02 Troilus and
Cressida 1601–05 All’s Well That Ends Well 1603–04 Measure for Measure,
Othello 1605–06 King Lear 1605–08 Timon of Athens 1606–07 Macbeth,
Antony and Cleopatra 1606–08 Pericles 1608 Coriolanus 1608–10 Cymbeline
1609–11 The Winter’s Tale 1611 The Tempest 1612–14 The Two Noble Kinsmen
1613 Henry VIII
Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece, can be dated with certainty to the years when the plague
stopped dramatic performances in London, in 1592–93 and 1593–94,
respectively, just before their publication. But the sonnets offer many
and various problems; they cannot have been written all at one time, and
most scholars set them within the period 1593–1600. The Phoenix and the
Turtle can be dated 1600–01.
Shakespeare the poet and dramatist » Publication
Acting companies in London during the Renaissance were perennially
in search of new plays. They usually paid on a piecework basis, to
freelance writers. Shakespeare was an important exception; as a member
of Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men, he wrote for his
company as a sharer in their capitalist enterprise.
The companies were not eager to sell
their plays to publishers, especially when the plays were still popular
and in the repertory. At certain times, however, the companies might be
impelled to do so: when a company disbanded or when it was put into
enforced inactivity by visitations of the plague or when the plays were
no longer current. (The companies owned the plays; the individual
authors had no intellectual property rights once the plays had been sold
to the actors.)
Such plays were usually published in
quarto form—that is, printed on both sides of large sheets of paper with
four printed pages on each side. When the sheet was folded twice and
bound, it yielded eight printed pages to each “gathering.” A few plays
were printed in octavo, with the sheet being folded thrice and yielding
16 smaller printed pages to each gathering.
Half of Shakespeare’s plays were
printed in quarto (at least one in octavo) during his lifetime.
Occasionally a play was issued in a seemingly unauthorized volume—that
is, not having been regularly sold by the company to the publisher. The
acting company might then commission its own authorized version. The
quarto title page of Romeo and Juliet (1599), known today as the second
quarto, declares that it is “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended, as
it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honorable the Lord
Chamberlain His Servants.” The second quarto of Hamlet (1604–05)
similarly advertises itself as “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost
as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy.”
Indeed, the first quarto of Hamlet (1603) is considerably shorter than
the second, and the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet lacks some 800
lines found in its successor. Both contain what appear to be misprints
or other errors that are then corrected in the second quarto. The first
quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) presents itself as “Newly
corrected and augmented,” implying perhaps that it, too, corrects an
earlier, unauthorized version of the play, though none today is known to
exist.
The status of these and other seemingly
unauthorized editions is much debated today. The older view of A.W.
Pollard, W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, and other practitioners of the
so-called New Bibliography generally regards these texts as suspect and
perhaps pirated, either by unscrupulous visitors to the theatre or by
minor actors who took part in performance and who then were paid to
reconstruct the plays from memory. The unauthorized texts do contain
elements that sound like the work of eyewitnesses or actors (and are
valuable for that reason). In some instances, the unauthorized text is
notably closer to the authorized text when certain minor actors are
onstage than at other times, suggesting that these actors may have been
involved in a memorial reconstruction. The plays Henry VI, Part 2 and
Henry VI, Part 3 originally appeared in shorter versions that may have
been memorially reconstructed by actors.
A revisionary school of textual
criticism that gained favour in the latter part of the 20th century
argued that these texts might have been earlier versions with their own
theatrical rationale and that they should be regarded as part of a
theatrical process by which the plays evolved onstage. Certainly the
situation varies from quarto to quarto, and unquestionably the
unauthorized quartos are valuable to the understanding of stage history.
Several years after Shakespeare died in
1616, colleagues of his in the King’s Men, John Heminge and Henry
Condell, undertook the assembling of a collected edition. It appeared in
1623 as Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies,
Published According to the True Original Copies. It did not contain the
poems and left out Pericles as perhaps of uncertain authorship; nor did
it include The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, or the portion of The Book
of Sir Thomas More that Shakespeare may have contributed. It did
nonetheless include 36 plays, half of them appearing in print for the
first time.
Heminge and Condell had the burdensome
task of choosing what materials to present to the printer, for they had
on hand a number of authorial manuscripts, other documents that had
served as promptbooks for performance (these were especially valuable
since they bore the license for performance), and some 18 plays that had
appeared in print. Fourteen of these had been published in what the
editors regarded as more or less reliable texts (though only two were
used unaltered): Titus Andronicus; Romeo and Juliet (the second quarto);
Richard II; Richard III; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry
IV, Part 2; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Merchant of Venice; Much Ado
About Nothing; Hamlet; King Lear; Troilus and Cressida; and Othello.
Henry VI, Part 1 and Henry VI, Part 2 had been published in quarto in
shortened form and under different titles (The First Part of the
Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The
True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York) but were not used in this form by
Heminge and Condell for the 1623 Folio.
Much was discovered by textual
scholarship after Heminge and Condell did their original work, and the
result was a considerable revision in what came to be regarded as the
best choice of original text from which an editor ought to work. In
plays published both in folio and quarto (or octavo) format, the task of
choosing was immensely complicated. King Lear especially became a
critical battleground in which editors argued for the superiority of
various features of the 1608 quarto or the folio text. The two differ
substantially and must indeed represent different stages of composition
and of staging, so that both are germane to an understanding of the
play’s textual and theatrical history. The same is true of Hamlet, with
its unauthorized quarto of 1603, its corrected quarto of 1604–05, and
the folio text, all significantly at variance with one another. Other
plays in which the textual relationship of quarto to folio is highly
problematic include Troilus and Cressida; Othello; Henry IV, Part 2;
Henry VI, Part 1 and Henry VI, Part 2; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Henry
V; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most of the cases where there are both
quarto and folio originals are problematic in some interesting way.
Individual situations are too complex to be described here, but
information is readily available in critical editions of Shakespeare’s
plays and poems, especially in The Oxford Shakespeare, in a collected
edition and in individual critical editions; The New Cambridge
Shakespeare; and the third series of The Arden Shakespeare.
John Russell Brown
Terence John Bew Spencer
David Bevington
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » The early plays
Shakespeare arrived in London probably sometime in the late 1580s.
He was in his mid-20s. It is not known how he got started in the theatre
or for what acting companies he wrote his early plays, which are not
easy to date. Indicating a time of apprenticeship, these plays show a
more direct debt to London dramatists of the 1580s and to Classical
examples than do his later works. He learned a great deal about writing
plays by imitating the successes of the London theatre, as any young
poet and budding dramatist might do.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » The early plays » Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus (c. 1589–92) is a case in point. As Shakespeare’s
first full-length tragedy, it owes much of its theme, structure, and
language to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which was a huge success
in the late 1580s. Kyd had hit on the formula of adopting the dramaturgy
of Seneca (the younger), the great Stoic philosopher and statesman, to
the needs of a burgeoning new London theatre. The result was the revenge
tragedy, an astonishingly successful genre that was to be refigured in
Hamlet and many other revenge plays. Shakespeare also borrowed a leaf
from his great contemporary Christopher Marlowe. The Vice-like
protagonist of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas, may have inspired
Shakespeare in his depiction of the villainous Aaron the Moor in Titus
Andronicus, though other Vice figures were available to him as well.
The Senecan model offered Kyd, and then
Shakespeare, a story of bloody revenge, occasioned originally by the
murder or rape of a person whose near relatives (fathers, sons,
brothers) are bound by sacred oath to revenge the atrocity. The avenger
must proceed with caution, since his opponent is canny, secretive, and
ruthless. The avenger becomes mad or feigns madness to cover his intent.
He becomes more and more ruthless himself as he moves toward his goal of
vengeance. At the same time he is hesitant, being deeply distressed by
ethical considerations. An ethos of revenge is opposed to one of
Christian forbearance. The avenger may see the spirit of the person
whose wrongful death he must avenge. He employs the device of a play
within the play in order to accomplish his aims. The play ends in a
bloodbath and a vindication of the avenger. Evident in this model is the
story of Titus Andronicus, whose sons are butchered and whose daughter
is raped and mutilated, as well as the story of Hamlet and still others.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » The early plays » The early romantic
comedies
Other than Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare did not experiment with
formal tragedy in his early years. (Though his English history plays
from this period portrayed tragic events, their theme was focused
elsewhere.) The young playwright was drawn more quickly into comedy, and
with more immediate success. For this his models include the dramatists
Robert Greene and John Lyly, along with Thomas Nashe. The result is a
genre recognizably and distinctively Shakespearean, even if he learned a
lot from Greene and Lyly: the romantic comedy. As in the work of his
models, Shakespeare’s early comedies revel in stories of amorous
courtship in which a plucky and admirable young woman (played by a boy
actor) is paired off against her male wooer. Julia, one of two young
heroines in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590–94), disguises herself
as a man in order to follow her lover, Proteus, when he is sent from
Verona to Milan. Proteus (appropriately named for the changeable Proteus
of Greek myth), she discovers, is paying far too much attention to
Sylvia, the beloved of Proteus’s best friend, Valentine. Love and
friendship thus do battle for the divided loyalties of the erring male
until the generosity of his friend and, most of all, the enduring chaste
loyalty of the two women bring Proteus to his senses. The motif of the
young woman disguised as a male was to prove invaluable to Shakespeare
in subsequent romantic comedies, including The Merchant of Venice, As
You Like It, and Twelfth Night. As is generally true of Shakespeare, he
derived the essentials of his plot from a narrative source, in this case
a long Spanish prose romance, the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.
Shakespeare’s most classically inspired
early comedy is The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94). Here he turned
particularly to Plautus’s farcical play called the Menaechmi (Twins).
The story of one twin (Antipholus) looking for his lost brother,
accompanied by a clever servant (Dromio) whose twin has also
disappeared, results in a farce of mistaken identities that also
thoughtfully explores issues of identity and self-knowing. The young
women of the play, one the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus (Adriana) and
the other her sister (Luciana), engage in meaningful dialogue on issues
of wifely obedience and autonomy. Marriage resolves these difficulties
at the end, as is routinely the case in Shakespearean romantic comedy,
but not before the plot complications have tested the characters’ needs
to know who they are and what men and women ought to expect from one
another.
Shakespeare’s early romantic comedy
most indebted to John Lyly is Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1588–97), a
confection set in the never-never land of Navarre where the King and his
companions are visited by the Princess of France and her
ladies-in-waiting on a diplomatic mission that soon devolves into a game
of courtship. As is often the case in Shakespearean romantic comedy, the
young women are sure of who they are and whom they intend to marry; one
cannot be certain that they ever really fall in love, since they begin
by knowing what they want. The young men, conversely, fall all over
themselves in their comically futile attempts to eschew romantic love in
favour of more serious pursuits. They perjure themselves, are shamed and
put down, and are finally forgiven their follies by the women.
Shakespeare brilliantly portrays male discomfiture and female
self-assurance as he explores the treacherous but desirable world of
sexual attraction, while the verbal gymnastics of the play emphasize the
wonder and the delicious foolishness of falling in love.
In The Taming of the Shrew (c.
1590–94), Shakespeare employs a device of multiple plotting that is to
become a standard feature of his romantic comedies. In one plot, derived
from Ludovico Ariosto’s I suppositi (Supposes, as it had been translated
into English by George Gascoigne), a young woman (Bianca) carries on a
risky courtship with a young man who appears to be a tutor, much to the
dismay of her father, who hopes to marry her to a wealthy suitor of his
own choosing. Eventually the mistaken identities are straightened out,
establishing the presumed tutor as Lucentio, wealthy and suitable
enough. Simultaneously, Bianca’s shrewish sister Kate denounces (and
terrorizes) all men. Bianca’s suitors commission the self-assured
Petruchio to pursue Kate so that Bianca, the younger sister, will be
free to wed. The wife-taming plot is itself based on folktale and ballad
tradition in which men assure their ascendancy in the marriage
relationship by beating their wives into submission. Shakespeare
transforms this raw, antifeminist material into a study of the struggle
for dominance in the marriage relationship. And, whereas he does opt in
this play for male triumph over the female, he gives to Kate a sense of
humour that enables her to see how she is to play the game to her own
advantage as well. She is, arguably, happy at the end with a
relationship based on wit and companionship, whereas her sister Bianca
turns out to be simply spoiled.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » The early plays » The early histories
In Shakespeare’s explorations of English history, as in romantic
comedy, he put his distinctive mark on a genre and made it his. The
genre was, moreover, an unusual one. There was as yet no definition of
an English history play, and there were no aesthetic rules regarding its
shaping. The ancient Classical world had recognized two broad categories
of genre, comedy and tragedy. (This account leaves out more specialized
genres like the satyr play.) Aristotle and other critics, including
Horace, had evolved, over centuries, Classical definitions. Tragedy
dealt with the disaster-struck lives of great persons, was written in
elevated verse, and took as its setting a mythological and ancient world
of gods and heroes: Agamemnon, Theseus, Oedipus, Medea, and the rest.
Pity and terror were the prevailing emotional responses in plays that
sought to understand, however imperfectly, the will of the supreme gods.
Classical comedy, conversely, dramatized the everyday. Its chief figures
were citizens of Athens and Rome—householders, courtesans, slaves,
scoundrels, and so forth. The humour was immediate, contemporary,
topical; the lampooning was satirical, even savage. Members of the
audience were invited to look at mimetic representations of their own
daily lives and to laugh at greed and folly.
The English history play had no such
ideal theoretical structure. It was an existential invention: the
dramatic treatment of recent English history. It might be tragic or
comic or, more commonly, a hybrid. Polonius’s list of generic
possibilities captures the ludicrous potential for endless
hybridizations: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” and so on (Hamlet, Act II, scene
2, lines 397–399). (By “pastoral,” Polonius presumably means a play
based on romances telling of shepherds and rural life, as contrasted
with the corruptions of city and court.) Shakespeare’s history plays
were so successful in the 1590s’ London theatre that the editors of
Shakespeare’s complete works, in 1623, chose to group his dramatic
output under three headings: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The
genre established itself by sheer force of its compelling popularity.
Shakespeare in 1590 or thereabouts had
really only one viable model for the English history play, an anonymous
and sprawling drama called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth
(1583–88) that told the saga of Henry IV’s son, Prince Hal, from the
days of his adolescent rebellion down through his victory over the
French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415—in other words, the material
that Shakespeare would later use in writing three major plays, Henry IV,
Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V. Shakespeare chose to start not
with Prince Hal but with more recent history in the reign of Henry V’s
son Henry VI and with the civil wars that saw the overthrow of Henry VI
by Edward IV and then the accession to power in 1483 of Richard III.
This material proved to be so rich in themes and dramatic conflicts that
he wrote four plays on it, a “tetralogy” extending from Henry VI in
three parts (c. 1589–93) to Richard III (c. 1592–94).
These plays were immediately
successful. Contemporary references indicate that audiences of the early
1590s thrilled to the story (in Henry VI, Part 1) of the brave Lord
Talbot doing battle in France against the witch Joan of Arc and her
lover, the French Dauphin, but being undermined in his heroic effort by
effeminacy and corruption at home. Henry VI himself is, as Shakespeare
portrays him, a weak king, raised to the kingship by the early death of
his father, incapable of controlling factionalism in his court, and
enervated personally by his infatuation with a dangerous Frenchwoman,
Margaret of Anjou. Henry VI is cuckolded by his wife and her lover, the
Duke of Suffolk, and (in Henry VI, Part 2) proves unable to defend his
virtuous uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, against opportunistic enemies.
The result is civil unrest, lower-class rebellion (led by Jack Cade),
and eventually all-out civil war between the Lancastrian faction,
nominally headed by Henry VI, and the Yorkist claimants under the
leadership of Edward IV and his brothers. Richard III completes the saga
with its account of the baleful rise of Richard of Gloucester through
the murdering of his brother the Duke of Clarence and of Edward IV’s two
sons, who were also Richard’s nephews. Richard’s tyrannical reign yields
eventually and inevitably to the newest and most successful claimant of
the throne, Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond. This is the man who becomes
Henry VII, scion of the Tudor dynasty and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth
I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603 and hence during the entire first
decade and more of Shakespeare’s productive career.
The Shakespearean English history play
told of the country’s history at a time when the English nation was
struggling with its own sense of national identity and experiencing a
new sense of power. Queen Elizabeth had brought stability and a relative
freedom from war to her decades of rule. She had held at bay the Roman
Catholic powers of the Continent, notably Philip II of Spain, and, with
the help of a storm at sea, had fought off Philip’s attempts to invade
her kingdom with the great Spanish Armada of 1588. In England the
triumph of the nation was viewed universally as a divine deliverance.
The second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles was at hand as a vast
source for Shakespeare’s historical playwriting. It, too, celebrated the
emergence of England as a major Protestant power, led by a popular and
astute monarch.
From the perspective of the 1590s, the
history of the 15th century also seemed newly pertinent. England had
emerged from a terrible civil war in 1485, with Henry Tudor’s victory
over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The chief personages
of these wars, known as the Wars of the Roses—Henry Tudor, Richard III,
the duke of Buckingham, Hastings, Rivers, Gray, and many more—were very
familiar to contemporary English readers.
Because these historical plays of
Shakespeare in the early 1590s were so intent on telling the saga of
emergent nationhood, they exhibit a strong tendency to identify villains
and heroes. Shakespeare is writing dramas, not schoolbook texts, and he
freely alters dates and facts and emphases. Lord Talbot in Henry VI,
Part 1 is a hero because he dies defending English interests against the
corrupt French. In Henry VI, Part 2 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, is cut
down by opportunists because he represents the best interests of the
commoners and the nation as a whole. Most of all, Richard of Gloucester
is made out to be a villain epitomizing the very worst features of a
chaotic century of civil strife. He foments strife, lies, and murders
and makes outrageous promises he has no intention of keeping. He is a
brilliantly theatrical figure because he is so inventive and clever, but
he is also deeply threatening. Shakespeare gives him every defect that
popular tradition imagined: a hunchback, a baleful glittering eye, a
conspiratorial genius. The real Richard was no such villain, it seems;
at least, his politically inspired murders were no worse than the
systematic elimination of all opposition by his successor, the
historical Henry VII. The difference is that Henry VII lived to
commission historians to tell the story his way, whereas Richard lost
everything through defeat. As founder of the Tudor dynasty and
grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, Henry VII could command a respect that
even Shakespeare was bound to honour, and accordingly the Henry Tudor
that he portrays at the end of Richard III is a God-fearing patriot and
loving husband of the Yorkist princess who is to give birth to the next
generation of Tudor monarchs.
Richard III is a tremendous play, both
in length and in the bravura depiction of its titular protagonist. It is
called a tragedy on its original title page, as are other of these early
English history plays. Certainly they present us with brutal deaths and
with instructive falls of great men from positions of high authority to
degradation and misery. Yet these plays are not tragedies in the
Classical sense of the term. They contain so much else, and notably they
end on a major key: the accession to power of the Tudor dynasty that
will give England its great years under Elizabeth. The story line is one
of suffering and of eventual salvation, of deliverance by mighty forces
of history and of divine oversight that will not allow England to
continue to suffer once she has returned to the true path of duty and
decency. In this important sense, the early history plays are like
tragicomedies or romances.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » The poems
Shakespeare seems to have wanted to be a poet as much as he sought
to succeed in the theatre. His plays are wonderfully and poetically
written, often in blank verse. And when he experienced a pause in his
theatrical career about 1592–94, the plague having closed down much
theatrical activity, he wrote poems. Venus and Adonis (1593) and The
Rape of Lucrece (1594) are the only works that Shakespeare seems to have
shepherded through the printing process. Both owe a good deal to Ovid,
the Classical poet whose writings Shakespeare encountered repeatedly in
school. These two poems are the only works for which he wrote dedicatory
prefaces. Both are to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. This young
man, a favourite at court, seems to have encouraged Shakespeare and to
have served for a brief time at least as his sponsor. The dedication to
the second poem is measurably warmer than the first. An unreliable
tradition supposes that Southampton gave Shakespeare the stake he needed
to buy into the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s acting company in 1594.
Shakespeare became an actor-sharer, one of the owners in a capitalist
enterprise that shared the risks and the gains among them. This company
succeeded brilliantly; Shakespeare and his colleagues, including Richard
Burbage, John Heminge, Henry Condell, and Will Sly, became wealthy
through their dramatic presentations.
Shakespeare may also have written at
least some of his sonnets to Southampton, beginning in these same years
of 1593–94 and continuing on through the decade and later. The question
of autobiographical basis in the sonnets is much debated, but
Southampton at least fits the portrait of a young gentleman who is being
urged to marry and produce a family. (Southampton’s family was eager
that he do just this.) Whether the account of a strong, loving
relationship between the poet and his gentleman friend is
autobiographical is more difficult still to determine. As a narrative,
the sonnet sequence tells of strong attachment, of jealousy, of grief at
separation, of joy at being together and sharing beautiful experiences.
The emphasis on the importance of poetry as a way of eternizing human
achievement and of creating a lasting memory for the poet himself is
appropriate to a friendship between a poet of modest social station and
a friend who is better-born. When the sonnet sequence introduces the
so-called “Dark Lady,” the narrative becomes one of painful and
destructive jealousy. Scholars do not know the order in which the
sonnets were composed—Shakespeare seems to have had no part in
publishing them—but no order other than the order of publication has
been proposed, and, as the sonnets stand, they tell a coherent and
disturbing tale. The poet experiences sex as something that fills him
with revulsion and remorse, at least in the lustful circumstances in
which he encounters it. His attachment to the young man is a love
relationship that sustains him at times more than the love of the Dark
Lady can do, and yet this loving friendship also dooms the poet to
disappointment and self-hatred. Whether the sequence reflects any
circumstances in Shakespeare’s personal life, it certainly is told with
an immediacy and dramatic power that bespeak an extraordinary gift for
seeing into the human heart and its sorrows.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
Romantic comedies
In the second half of the 1590s, Shakespeare brought to perfection
the genre of romantic comedy that he had helped to invent. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), one of the most successful of all his plays,
displays the kind of multiple plotting he had practiced in The Taming of
the Shrew and other earlier comedies. The overarching plot is of Duke
Theseus of Athens and his impending marriage to an Amazonian warrior,
Hippolyta, whom Theseus has recently conquered and brought back to
Athens to be his bride. Their marriage ends the play. They share this
concluding ceremony with the four young lovers Hermia and Lysander,
Helena and Demetrius, who have fled into the forest nearby to escape the
Athenian law and to pursue one another, whereupon they are subjected to
a complicated series of mix-ups. Eventually all is righted by fairy
magic, though the fairies are no less at strife. Oberon, king of the
fairies, quarrels with his Queen Titania over a changeling boy and
punishes her by causing her to fall in love with an Athenian artisan who
wears an ass’s head. The artisans are in the forest to rehearse a play
for the forthcoming marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. Thus four
separate strands or plots interact with one another. Despite the play’s
brevity, it is a masterpiece of artful construction.
The use of multiple plots encourages a
varied treatment of the experiencing of love. For the two young human
couples, falling in love is quite hazardous; the long-standing
friendship between the two young women is threatened and almost
destroyed by the rivalries of heterosexual encounter. The eventual
transition to heterosexual marriage seems to them to have been a process
of dreaming, indeed of nightmare, from which they emerge miraculously
restored to their best selves. Meantime the marital strife of Oberon and
Titania is, more disturbingly, one in which the female is humiliated
until she submits to the will of her husband. Similarly, Hippolyta is an
Amazon warrior queen who has had to submit to the authority of a
husband. Fathers and daughters are no less at strife until, as in a
dream, all is resolved by the magic of Puck and Oberon. Love is
ambivalently both an enduring ideal relationship and a struggle for
mastery in which the male has the upper hand.
The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97)
uses a double plot structure to contrast a tale of romantic wooing with
one that comes close to tragedy. Portia is a fine example of a romantic
heroine in Shakespeare’s mature comedies: she is witty, rich, exacting
in what she expects of men, and adept at putting herself in a male
disguise to make her presence felt. She is loyally obedient to her
father’s will and yet determined that she shall have Bassanio. She
triumphantly resolves the murky legal affairs of Venice when the men
have all failed. Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, is at the point of
exacting a pound of flesh from Bassanio’s friend Antonio as payment for
a forfeited loan. Portia foils him in his attempt in a way that is both
clever and shystering. Sympathy is uneasily balanced in Shakespeare’s
portrayal of Shylock, who is both persecuted by his Christian opponents
and all too ready to demand an eye for an eye according to ancient law.
Ultimately Portia triumphs, not only with Shylock in the court of law
but in her marriage with Bassanio.
Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–99)
revisits the issue of power struggles in courtship, again in a
revealingly double plot. The young heroine of the more conventional
story, derived from Italianate fiction, is wooed by a respectable young
aristocrat named Claudio who has won his spurs and now considers it his
pleasant duty to take a wife. He knows so little about Hero (as she is
named) that he gullibly credits the contrived evidence of the play’s
villain, Don John, that she has had many lovers, including one on the
evening before the intended wedding. Other men as well, including
Claudio’s senior officer, Don Pedro, and Hero’s father, Leonato, are all
too ready to believe the slanderous accusation. Only comic circumstances
rescue Hero from her accusers and reveal to the men that they have been
fools. Meantime, Hero’s cousin, Beatrice, finds it hard to overcome her
skepticism about men, even when she is wooed by Benedick, who is also a
skeptic about marriage. Here the barriers to romantic understanding are
inner and psychological and must be defeated by the good-natured
plotting of their friends, who see that Beatrice and Benedick are truly
made for one another in their wit and candour if they can only overcome
their fear of being outwitted by each other. In what could be regarded
as a brilliant rewriting of The Taming of the Shrew, the witty battle of
the sexes is no less amusing and complicated, but the eventual
accommodation finds something much closer to mutual respect and equality
between men and women.
Rosalind, in As You Like It (c.
1598–1600), makes use of the by-now familiar device of disguise as a
young man in order to pursue the ends of promoting a rich and
substantial relationship between the sexes. As in other of these plays,
Rosalind is more emotionally stable and mature than her young man,
Orlando. He lacks formal education and is all rough edges, though
fundamentally decent and attractive. She is the daughter of the banished
Duke who finds herself obliged, in turn, to go into banishment with her
dear cousin Celia and the court fool, Touchstone. Although Rosalind’s
male disguise is at first a means of survival in a seemingly
inhospitable forest, it soon serves a more interesting function. As
“Ganymede,” Rosalind befriends Orlando, offering him counseling in the
affairs of love. Orlando, much in need of such advice, readily accepts
and proceeds to woo his “Rosalind” (“Ganymede” playing her own self) as
though she were indeed a woman. Her wryly amusing perspectives on the
follies of young love helpfully puncture Orlando’s inflated and
unrealistic “Petrarchan” stance as the young lover who writes poems to
his mistress and sticks them up on trees. Once he has learned that love
is not a fantasy of invented attitudes, Orlando is ready to be the
husband of the real young woman (actually a boy actor, of course) who is
presented to him as the transformed Ganymede-Rosalind. Other figures in
the play further an understanding of love’s glorious foolishness by
their various attitudes: Silvius, the pale-faced wooer out of pastoral
romance; Phoebe, the disdainful mistress whom he worships; William, the
country bumpkin, and Audrey, the country wench; and, surveying and
commenting on every imaginable kind of human folly, the clown Touchstone
and the malcontent traveler Jaques.
Twelfth Night (c. 1600–02) pursues a
similar motif of female disguise. Viola, cast ashore in Illyria by a
shipwreck and obliged to disguise herself as a young man in order to
gain a place in the court of Duke Orsino, falls in love with the duke
and uses her disguise as a cover for an educational process not unlike
that given by Rosalind to Orlando. Orsino is as unrealistic a lover as
one could hope to imagine; he pays fruitless court to the Countess
Olivia and seems content with the unproductive love melancholy in which
he wallows. Only Viola, as “Cesario,” is able to awaken in him a genuine
feeling for friendship and love. They become inseparable companions and
then seeming rivals for the hand of Olivia until the presto change of
Shakespeare’s stage magic is able to restore “Cesario” to her woman’s
garments and thus present to Orsino the flesh-and-blood woman whom he
has only distantly imagined. The transition from same-sex friendship to
heterosexual union is a constant in Shakespearean comedy. The woman is
the self-knowing, constant, loyal one; the man needs to learn a lot from
the woman. As in the other plays as well, Twelfth Night neatly plays off
this courtship theme with a second plot, of Malvolio’s self-deception
that he is desired by Olivia—an illusion that can be addressed only by
the satirical devices of exposure and humiliation.
The Merry Wives of Windsor (c.
1597–1601) is an interesting deviation from the usual Shakespearean
romantic comedy in that it is set not in some imagined far-off place
like Illyria or Belmont or the forest of Athens but in Windsor, a
solidly bourgeois village near Windsor Castle in the heart of England.
Uncertain tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth wanted to see Falstaff
in love. There is little, however, in the way of romantic wooing (the
story of Anne Page and her suitor Fenton is rather buried in the midst
of so many other goings-on), but the play’s portrayal of women, and
especially of the two “merry wives,” Mistress Alice Ford and Mistress
Margaret Page, reaffirms what is so often true of women in these early
plays, that they are good-hearted, chastely loyal, and wittily
self-possessed. Falstaff, a suitable butt for their cleverness, is a
scapegoat figure who must be publicly humiliated as a way of
transferring onto him the human frailties that Windsor society wishes to
expunge.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
Completion of the histories
Concurrent with his writing of these fine romantic comedies,
Shakespeare also brought to completion (for the time being, at least)
his project of writing 15th-century English history. After having
finished in 1589–94 the tetralogy about Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard
III, bringing the story down to 1485, and then circa 1594–96 a play
about John that deals with a chronological period (the 13th century)
that sets it quite apart from his other history plays, Shakespeare
turned to the late 14th and early 15th centuries and to the chronicle of
Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry’s legendary son Henry V. This inversion
of historical order in the two tetralogies allowed Shakespeare to finish
his sweep of late medieval English history with Henry V, a hero king in
a way that Richard III could never pretend to be.
Richard II (c. 1595–96), written
throughout in blank verse, is a sombre play about political impasse. It
contains almost no humour, other than a wry scene in which the new king,
Henry IV, must adjudicate the competing claims of the Duke of York and
his Duchess, the first of whom wishes to see his son Aumerle executed
for treason and the second of whom begs for mercy. Henry is able to be
merciful on this occasion, since he has now won the kingship, and thus
gives to this scene an upbeat movement. Earlier, however, the mood is
grim. Richard, installed at an early age into the kingship, proves
irresponsible as a ruler. He unfairly banishes his own first cousin,
Henry Bolingbroke (later to be Henry IV), whereas the king himself
appears to be guilty of ordering the murder of an uncle. When Richard
keeps the dukedom of Lancaster from Bolingbroke without proper legal
authority, he manages to alienate many nobles and to encourage
Bolingbroke’s return from exile. That return, too, is illegal, but it is
a fact, and, when several of the nobles (including York) come over to
Bolingbroke’s side, Richard is forced to abdicate. The rights and wrongs
of this power struggle are masterfully ambiguous. History proceeds
without any sense of moral imperative. Henry IV is a more capable ruler,
but his authority is tarnished by his crimes (including his seeming
assent to the execution of Richard), and his own rebellion appears to
teach the barons to rebel against him in turn. Henry eventually dies a
disappointed man.
The dying king Henry IV must turn royal
authority over to young Hal, or Henry, now Henry V. The prospect is
dismal both to the dying king and to the members of his court, for
Prince Hal has distinguished himself to this point mainly by his
penchant for keeping company with the disreputable if engaging Falstaff.
The son’s attempts at reconciliation with the father succeed
temporarily, especially when Hal saves his father’s life at the battle
of Shrewsbury, but (especially in Henry IV, Part 2) his reputation as
wastrel will not leave him. Everyone expects from him a reign of
irresponsible license, with Falstaff in an influential position. It is
for these reasons that the young king must publicly repudiate his old
companion of the tavern and the highway, however much that repudiation
tugs at his heart and the audience’s. Falstaff, for all his debauchery
and irresponsibility, is infectiously amusing and delightful; he
represents in Hal a spirit of youthful vitality that is left behind only
with the greatest of regret as the young man assumes manhood and the
role of crown prince. Hal manages all this with aplomb and goes on to
defeat the French mightily at the Battle of Agincourt. Even his high
jinks are a part of what is so attractive in him. Maturity and position
come at a great personal cost: Hal becomes less a frail human being and
more the figure of royal authority.
Thus, in his plays of the 1590s, the
young Shakespeare concentrated to a remarkable extent on romantic
comedies and English history plays. The two genres are nicely
complementary: the one deals with courtship and marriage, while the
other examines the career of a young man growing up to be a worthy king.
Only at the end of the history plays does Henry V have any kind of
romantic relationship with a woman, and this one instance is quite
unlike courtships in the romantic comedies: Hal is given the Princess of
France as his prize, his reward for sturdy manhood. He takes the lead in
the wooing scene in which he invites her to join him in a political
marriage. In both romantic comedies and English history plays, a young
man successfully negotiates the hazardous and potentially rewarding
paths of sexual and social maturation.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
Romeo and Juliet
Apart from the early Titus Andronicus, the only other play that
Shakespeare wrote prior to 1599 that is classified as a tragedy is Romeo
and Juliet (c. 1594–96), which is quite untypical of the tragedies that
are to follow. Written more or less at the time when Shakespeare was
writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet shares many of the
characteristics of romantic comedy. Romeo and Juliet are not persons of
extraordinary social rank or position, like Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,
and Macbeth. They are the boy and girl next door, interesting not for
their philosophical ideas but for their appealing love for each other.
They are character types more suited to Classical comedy in that they do
not derive from the upper class. Their wealthy families are essentially
bourgeois. The eagerness with which Capulet and his wife court Count
Paris as their prospective son-in-law bespeaks their desire for social
advancement.
Accordingly, the first half of Romeo
and Juliet is very funny, while its delight in verse forms reminds us of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The bawdry of Mercutio and of the Nurse is
richly suited to the comic texture of the opening scenes. Romeo,
haplessly in love with a Rosaline whom we never meet, is a partly comic
figure like Silvius in As You Like It. The plucky and self-knowing
Juliet is much like the heroines of romantic comedies. She is able to
instruct Romeo in the ways of speaking candidly and unaffectedly about
their love rather than in the frayed cadences of the Petrarchan wooer.
The play is ultimately a tragedy, of
course, and indeed warns its audience at the start that the lovers are
“star-crossed.” Yet the tragic vision is not remotely that of Hamlet or
King Lear. Romeo and Juliet are unremarkable, nice young people doomed
by a host of considerations outside themselves: the enmity of their two
families, the misunderstandings that prevent Juliet from being able to
tell her parents whom it is that she has married, and even unfortunate
coincidence (such as the misdirection of the letter sent to Romeo to
warn him of the Friar’s plan for Juliet’s recovery from a deathlike
sleep). Yet there is the element of personal responsibility upon which
most mature tragedy rests when Romeo chooses to avenge the death of
Mercutio by killing Tybalt, knowing that this deed will undo the soft
graces of forbearance that Juliet has taught him. Romeo succumbs to the
macho peer pressure of his male companions, and tragedy results in part
from this choice. Yet so much is at work that the reader ultimately sees
Romeo and Juliet as a love tragedy—celebrating the exquisite brevity of
young love, regretting an unfeeling world, and evoking an emotional
response that differs from that produced by the other tragedies. Romeo
and Juliet are, at last, “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” (Act V, scene
3, line 304). The emotional response the play evokes is a strong one,
but it is not like the response called forth by the tragedies after
1599.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
The “problem” plays
Whatever his reasons, about 1599–1600 Shakespeare turned with
unsparing intensity to the exploration of darker issues such as revenge,
sexual jealousy, aging, midlife crisis, and death. Perhaps he saw that
his own life was moving into a new phase of more complex and vexing
experiences. Perhaps he felt, or sensed, that he had worked through the
romantic comedy and history play and the emotional trajectories of
maturation that they encompassed. At any event, he began writing not
only his great tragedies but a group of plays that are hard to classify
in terms of genre. They are sometimes grouped today as “problem” plays
or “problem” comedies. An examination of these plays is crucial to
understanding this period of transition from 1599 to 1605.
The three problem plays dating from
these years are All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and
Troilus and Cressida. All’s Well is a comedy ending in acceptance of
marriage, but in a way that poses thorny ethical issues. Count Bertram
cannot initially accept his marriage to Helena, a woman of lower social
station who has grown up in his noble household and has won Bertram as
her husband by her seemingly miraculous cure of the French king.
Bertram’s reluctance to face the responsibilities of marriage is all the
more dismaying when he turns his amorous intentions to a Florentine
maiden, Diana, whom he wishes to seduce without marriage. Helena’s
stratagem to resolve this difficulty is the so-called bed trick,
substituting herself in Bertram’s bed for the arranged assignation and
then calling her wayward husband to account when she is pregnant with
his child. Her ends are achieved by such morally ambiguous means that
marriage seems at best a precarious institution on which to base the
presumed reassurances of romantic comedy. The pathway toward resolution
and emotional maturity is not easy; Helena is a more ambiguous heroine
than Rosalind or Viola.
Measure for Measure (c. 1603–04)
similarly employs the bed trick, and for a similar purpose, though in
even murkier circumstances. Isabella, on the verge of becoming a nun,
learns that she has attracted the sexual desire of Lord Angelo, the
deputy ruler of Vienna serving in the mysterious absence of the Duke.
Her plea to Angelo for her brother’s life, when that brother (Claudio)
has been sentenced to die for fornication with his fiancée, is met with
a demand that she sleep with Angelo or forfeit Claudio’s life. This
ethical dilemma is resolved by a trick (devised by the Duke, in
disguise) to substitute for Isabella a woman (Mariana) whom Angelo was
supposed to marry but refused when she could produce no dowry. The
Duke’s motivations in manipulating these substitutions and false
appearances are unclear, though arguably his wish is to see what the
various characters of this play will do when faced with seemingly
impossible choices. Angelo is revealed as a morally fallen man, a
would-be seducer and murderer who is nonetheless remorseful and
ultimately glad to have been prevented from carrying out his intended
crimes; Claudio learns that he is coward enough to wish to live by any
means, including the emotional and physical blackmail of his sister; and
Isabella learns that she is capable of bitterness and hatred, even if,
crucially, she finally discovers that she can and must forgive her
enemy. Her charity, and the Duke’s stratagems, make possible an ending
in forgiveness and marriage, but in that process the nature and meaning
of marriage are severely tested.
Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02) is
the most experimental and puzzling of these three plays. Simply in terms
of genre, it is virtually unclassifiable. It can hardly be a comedy,
ending as it does in the deaths of Patroclus and Hector and the looming
defeat of the Trojans. Nor is the ending normative in terms of romantic
comedy: the lovers, Troilus and Cressida, are separated from one another
and embittered by the failure of their relationship. The play is a
history play in a sense, dealing as it does with the great Trojan War
celebrated in Homer’s Iliad, and yet its purpose is hardly that of
telling the story of the war. As a tragedy, it is perplexing in that the
chief figures of the play (apart from Hector) do not die at the end, and
the mood is one of desolation and even disgust rather than tragic
catharsis. Perhaps the play should be thought of as a satire; the choric
observations of Thersites and Pandarus serve throughout as a mordant
commentary on the interconnectedness of war and lechery. With fitting
ambiguity, the play was placed in the Folio of 1623 between the
histories and the tragedies, in a category all by itself. Clearly, in
these problem plays Shakespeare was opening up for himself a host of new
problems in terms of genre and human sexuality.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
Julius Caesar
Written in 1599 (the same year as Henry V) or 1600, probably for the
opening of the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, Julius
Caesar illustrates similarly the transition in Shakespeare’s writing
toward darker themes and tragedy. It, too, is a history play in a sense,
dealing with a non-Christian civilization existing 16 centuries before
Shakespeare wrote his plays. Roman history opened up for Shakespeare a
world in which divine purpose could not be easily ascertained. (Click
here for a video clip of Caesar’s well-known speech.) The characters of
Julius Caesar variously interpret the great event of the assassination
of Caesar as one in which the gods are angry or disinterested or
capricious or simply not there. The wise Cicero observes, “Men may
construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the
things themselves” (Act I, scene 3, lines 34–35).
Human history in Julius Caesar seems to
follow a pattern of rise and fall, in a way that is cyclical rather than
divinely purposeful. Caesar enjoys his days of triumph, until he is cut
down by the conspirators; Brutus and Cassius succeed to power, but not
for long. Brutus’s attempts to protect Roman republicanism and the
freedom of the city’s citizens to govern themselves through senatorial
tradition end up in the destruction of the very liberties he most
cherished. He and Cassius meet their destiny at the Battle of Philippi.
They are truly tragic figures, especially Brutus, in that their
essential characters are their fate; Brutus is a good man but also proud
and stubborn, and these latter qualities ultimately bring about his
death. Shakespeare’s first major tragedy is Roman in spirit and
Classical in its notion of tragic character. It shows what Shakespeare
had to learn from Classical precedent as he set about looking for
workable models in tragedy.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
The tragedies
Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), on the other hand, chooses a tragic model
closer to that of Titus Andronicus and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. In
form, Hamlet is a revenge tragedy. It features characteristics found in
Titus as well: a protagonist charged with the responsibility of avenging
a heinous crime against the protagonist’s family, a cunning antagonist,
the appearance of the ghost of the murdered person, the feigning of
madness to throw off the villain’s suspicions, the play within the play
as a means of testing the villain, and still more.
Yet to search out these comparisons is
to highlight what is so extraordinary about Hamlet, for it refuses to be
merely a revenge tragedy. Shakespeare’s protagonist is unique in the
genre in his moral qualms, and most of all in his finding a way to carry
out his dread command without becoming a cold-blooded murderer. Hamlet
does act bloodily, especially when he kills Polonius, thinking that the
old man hidden in Gertrude’s chambers must be the King whom Hamlet is
commissioned to kill. The act seems plausible and strongly motivated,
and yet Hamlet sees at once that he has erred. He has killed the wrong
man, even if Polonius has brought this on himself with his incessant
spying. Hamlet sees that he has offended heaven and that he will have to
pay for his act. When, at the play’s end, Hamlet encounters his fate in
a duel with Polonius’s son, Laertes, Hamlet interprets his own tragic
story as one that Providence has made meaningful. By placing himself in
the hands of Providence and believing devoutly that “There’s a divinity
that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (Act V, scene 2,
lines 10–11), Hamlet finds himself ready for a death that he has longed
for. He also finds an opportunity for killing Claudius almost
unpremeditatedly, spontaneously, as an act of reprisal for all that
Claudius has done.
Hamlet thus finds tragic meaning in his
own story. More broadly, too, he has searched for meaning in dilemmas of
all sorts: his mother’s overhasty marriage, Ophelia’s weak-willed
succumbing to the will of her father and brother, his being spied on by
his erstwhile friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and much more. His
utterances are often despondent, relentlessly honest, and
philosophically profound, as he ponders the nature of friendship,
memory, romantic attachment, filial love, sensuous enslavement,
corrupting habits (drinking, sexual lust), and almost every phase of
human experience.
One remarkable aspect about
Shakespeare’s great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and
Antony and Cleopatra most of all) is that they proceed through such a
staggering range of human emotions, and especially the emotions that are
appropriate to the mature years of the human cycle. Hamlet is 30, one
learns—an age when a person is apt to perceive that the world around him
is “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in
nature / Possess it merely” (Act I, scene 2, lines 135–137). Shakespeare
was about 36 when he wrote this play. Othello (c. 1603–04) centres on
sexual jealousy in marriage. King Lear (c. 1605–06) is about aging,
generational conflict, and feelings of ingratitude. Macbeth (c. 1606–07)
explores ambition mad enough to kill a father figure who stands in the
way. Antony and Cleopatra, written about 1606–07 when Shakespeare was 42
or thereabouts, studies the exhilarating but ultimately dismaying
phenomenon of midlife crisis. Shakespeare moves his readers vicariously
through these life experiences while he himself struggles to capture, in
tragic form, their terrors and challenges.
These plays are deeply concerned with
domestic and family relationships. In Othello Desdemona is the only
daughter of Brabantio, an aging senator of Venice, who dies heartbroken
because his daughter has eloped with a dark-skinned man who is her
senior by many years and is of another culture. With Othello, Desdemona
is briefly happy, despite her filial disobedience, until a terrible
sexual jealousy is awakened in him, quite without cause other than his
own fears and susceptibility to Iago’s insinuations that it is only
“natural” for Desdemona to seek erotic pleasure with a young man who
shares her background. Driven by his own deeply irrational fear and
hatred of women and seemingly mistrustful of his own masculinity, Iago
can assuage his own inner torment only by persuading other men like
Othello that their inevitable fate is to be cuckolded. As a tragedy, the
play adroitly exemplifies the traditional Classical model of a good man
brought to misfortune by hamartia, or tragic flaw; as Othello grieves,
he is one who has “loved not wisely, but too well” (Act V, scene 2, line
354). It bears remembering, however, that Shakespeare owed no loyalty to
this Classical model. Hamlet, for one, is a play that does not work well
in Aristotelian terms. The search for an Aristotelian hamartia has led
all too often to the trite argument that Hamlet suffers from melancholia
and a tragic inability to act, whereas a more plausible reading of the
play argues that finding the right course of action is highly
problematic for him and for everyone. Hamlet sees examples on all sides
of those whose forthright actions lead to fatal mistakes or absurd
ironies (Laertes, Fortinbras), and indeed his own swift killing of the
man he assumes to be Claudius hidden in his mother’s chambers turns out
to be a mistake for which he realizes heaven will hold him accountable.
Daughters and fathers are also at the
heart of the major dilemma in King Lear. In this configuration,
Shakespeare does what he often does in his late plays: erase the wife
from the picture, so that father and daughter(s) are left to deal with
one another. (Compare Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The
Tempest, and perhaps the circumstances of Shakespeare’s own life, in
which his relations with his daughter Susanna especially seem to have
meant more to him than his partly estranged marriage with Anne.) Lear’s
banishing of his favourite daughter, Cordelia, because of her laconic
refusal to proclaim a love for him as the essence of her being, brings
upon this aging king the terrible punishment of being belittled and
rejected by his ungrateful daughters, Goneril and Regan. Concurrently,
in the play’s second plot, the Earl of Gloucester makes a similar
mistake with his good-hearted son, Edgar, and thereby delivers himself
into the hands of his scheming bastard son, Edmund. Both these erring
elderly fathers are ultimately nurtured by the loyal children they have
banished, but not before the play has tested to its absolute limit the
proposition that evil can flourish in a bad world.
The gods seem indifferent, perhaps
absent entirely; pleas to them for assistance go unheeded while the
storm of fortune rains down on the heads of those who have trusted in
conventional pieties. Part of what is so great in this play is that its
testing of the major characters requires them to seek out philosophical
answers that can arm the resolute heart against ingratitude and
misfortune by constantly pointing out that life owes one nothing. The
consolations of philosophy preciously found out by Edgar and Cordelia
are those that rely not on the suppositious gods but on an inner moral
strength demanding that one be charitable and honest because life is
otherwise monstrous and subhuman. The play exacts terrible prices of
those who persevere in goodness, but it leaves them and the reader, or
audience, with the reassurance that it is simply better to be a Cordelia
than to be a Goneril, to be an Edgar than to be an Edmund.
Macbeth is in some ways Shakespeare’s
most unsettling tragedy, because it invites the intense examination of
the heart of a man who is well-intentioned in most ways but who
discovers that he cannot resist the temptation to achieve power at any
cost. (Click here for a video clip of the opening scene from Macbeth.)
Macbeth is a sensitive, even poetic person, and as such he understands
with frightening clarity the stakes that are involved in his
contemplated deed of murder. Duncan is a virtuous king and his guest.
The deed is regicide and murder and a violation of the sacred
obligations of hospitality. Macbeth knows that Duncan’s virtues, like
angels, “trumpet-tongued,” will plead against “the deep damnation of his
taking-off” (Act I, scene 7, lines 19–20). The only factor weighing on
the other side is personal ambition, which Macbeth understands to be a
moral failing. The question of why he proceeds to murder is partly
answered by the insidious temptations of the three Weird Sisters, who
sense Macbeth’s vulnerability to their prophecies, and the terrifying
strength of his wife, who drives him on to the murder by describing his
reluctance as unmanliness. (Click here for a video clip of Lady Macbeth
goading her husband.) Ultimately, though, the responsibility lies with
Macbeth. His collapse of moral integrity confronts the audience and
perhaps implicates it. The loyalty and decency of such characters as
Macduff hardly offset what is so painfully weak in the play’s
protagonist.
Antony and Cleopatra approaches human
frailty in terms that are less spiritually terrifying. The story of the
lovers is certainly one of worldly failure. Plutarch’s Lives gave to
Shakespeare the object lesson of a brave general who lost his reputation
and sense of self-worth through his infatuation with an admittedly
attractive but nonetheless dangerous woman. Shakespeare changes none of
the circumstances: Antony hates himself for dallying in Egypt with
Cleopatra, agrees to marry with Octavius Caesar’s sister Octavia as a
way of recovering his status in the Roman triumvirate, cheats on Octavia
eventually, loses the battle of Actium because of his fatal attraction
for Cleopatra, and dies in Egypt a defeated, aging warrior. Shakespeare
adds to this narrative a compelling portrait of midlife crisis. Antony
is deeply anxious about his loss of sexual potency and position in the
world of affairs. His amorous life in Egypt is manifestly an attempt to
affirm and recover his dwindling male power.
Yet the Roman model is not in
Shakespeare’s play the unassailably virtuous choice that it is in
Plutarch. In Antony and Cleopatra Roman behaviour does promote
attentiveness to duty and worldly achievement, but, as embodied in young
Octavius, it is also obsessively male and cynical about women. Octavius
is intent on capturing Cleopatra and leading her in triumph back to
Rome—that is, to cage the unruly woman and place her under male control.
When Cleopatra perceives that aim, she chooses a noble suicide rather
than humiliation by a patriarchal male. In her suicide, Cleopatra avers
that she has called “great Caesar ass / Unpolicied” (Act V, scene 2,
lines 307–308). Vastly to be preferred is the fleeting dream of
greatness with Antony, both of them unfettered, godlike, like Isis and
Osiris, immortalized as heroic lovers even if the actual circumstances
of their lives were often disappointing and even tawdry. The vision in
this tragedy is deliberately unstable, but at its most ethereal it
encourages a vision of human greatness that is distant from the
soul-corrupting evil of Macbeth or King Lear.
Two late tragedies also choose the
ancient Classical world as their setting but do so in a deeply
dispiriting way. Shakespeare appears to have been much preoccupied with
ingratitude and human greed in these years. Timon of Athens (c.
1605–08), probably an unfinished play and possibly never produced,
initially shows us a prosperous man fabled for his generosity. When he
discovers that he has exceeded his means, he turns to his seeming
friends for the kinds of assistance he has given them, only to discover
that their memories are short. Retiring to a bitter isolation, Timon
rails against all humanity and refuses every sort of consolation, even
that of well-meant companionship and sympathy from a former servant. He
dies in isolation. The unrelieved bitterness of this account is only
partly ameliorated by the story of the military captain Alcibiades, who
has also been the subject of Athenian ingratitude and forgetfulness but
who manages to reassert his authority at the end. Alcibiades resolves to
make some accommodation with the wretched condition of humanity; Timon
will have none of it. Seldom has a more unrelievedly embittered play
been written.
Coriolanus (c. 1608) similarly portrays
the ungrateful responses of a city toward its military hero. The problem
is complicated by the fact that Coriolanus, egged on by his mother and
his conservative allies, undertakes a political role in Rome for which
he is not temperamentally fitted. His friends urge him to hold off his
intemperate speech until he is voted into office, but Coriolanus is too
plainspoken to be tactful in this way. His contempt for the plebeians
and their political leaders, the tribunes, is unsparing. His political
philosophy, while relentlessly aristocratic and snobbish, is consistent
and theoretically sophisticated; the citizens are, as he argues,
incapable of governing themselves judiciously. Yet his fury only makes
matters worse and leads to an exile from which he returns to conquer his
own city, in league with his old enemy and friend, Aufidius. When his
mother comes out for the city to plead for her life and that of other
Romans, he relents and thereupon falls into defeat as a kind of mother’s
boy, unable to assert his own sense of self. As a tragedy, Coriolanus is
again bitter, satirical, ending in defeat and humiliation. It is an
immensely powerful play, and it captures a philosophical mood of
nihilism and bitterness that hovers over Shakespeare’s writings
throughout these years in the first decade of the 1600s.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
The romances
Concurrently, nonetheless, and then in the years that followed,
Shakespeare turned again to the writing of comedy. The late comedies are
usually called romances or tragicomedies because they tell stories of
wandering and separation leading eventually to tearful and joyous
reunion. They are suffused with a bittersweet mood that seems eloquently
appropriate to a writer who has explored with such unsparing honesty the
depths of human suffering and degradation in the great tragedies.
Pericles, written perhaps in 1606–08
and based on the familiar tale of Apollonius of Tyre, may involve some
collaboration of authorship; the text is unusually imperfect, and it did
not appear in the Folio of 1623. It employs a chorus figure, John Gower
(author of an earlier version of this story), to guide the reader or
viewer around the Mediterranean on Pericles’ various travels, as he
avoids marriage with the daughter of the incestuous King Antiochus of
Antioch; marries Thaisa, the daughter of King Simonides of Pentapolis;
has a child by her; believes his wife to have died in childbirth during
a storm at sea and has her body thrown overboard to quiet the
superstitious fears of the sailors; puts his daughter Marina in the care
of Cleon of Tarsus and his wicked wife, Dionyza; and is eventually
restored to his wife and child after many years. The story is typical
romance. Shakespeare adds touching scenes of reunion and a perception
that beneath the naive account of travel lies a subtle dramatization of
separation, loss, and recovery. Pericles is deeply burdened by his loss
and perhaps, too, a sense of guilt for having consented to consign his
wife’s body to the sea. He is recovered from his despair only by the
ministrations of a loving daughter, who is able to give him a reason to
live again and then to be reunited with his wife.
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11) is in
some ways a replaying of this same story, in that King Leontes of
Sicilia, smitten by an irrational jealousy of his wife, Hermione, brings
about the seeming death of that wife and the real death of their son.
The resulting guilt is unbearable for Leontes and yet ultimately
curative over a period of many years that are required for his only
daughter, Perdita (whom he has nearly killed also), to grow to maturity
in distant Bohemia. This story, too, is based on a prose romance, in
this case Robert Greene’s Pandosto. The reunion with daughter and then
wife is deeply touching as in Pericles, with the added magical touch
that the audience does not know that Hermione is alive and in fact has
been told that she is dead. Her wonderfully staged appearance as a
statue coming to life is one of the great theatrical coups in
Shakespeare, playing as it does with favourite Shakespearean themes in
these late plays of the ministering daughter, the guilt-ridden husband,
and the miraculously recovered wife. The story is all the more moving
when one considers that Shakespeare may have had, or imagined, a similar
experience of attempting to recover a relationship with his wife, Anne,
whom he had left in Stratford during his many years in London.
In Cymbeline (c. 1608–10) King
Cymbeline drives his virtuous daughter Imogen into exile by his
opposition to her marriage with Posthumus Leonatus. The wife in this
case is Cymbeline’s baleful Queen, a stereotypical wicked stepmother
whose witless and lecherous son Cloten (Imogen’s half brother) is the
embodiment of everything that threatens and postpones the eventual happy
ending of this tale. Posthumus, too, fails Imogen by being irrationally
jealous of her, but he is eventually recovered to a belief in her
goodness. The dark portraiture of the Queen illustrates how ambivalent
is Shakespeare’s view of the mother in his late plays. This Queen is the
wicked stepmother, like Dionyza in Pericles; in her relentless desire
for control, she also brings to mind Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters
in Macbeth, as well as Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia. The devouring
mother is a forbidding presence in the late plays, though she is
counterbalanced by redeeming maternal figures such as Hermione in The
Winter’s Tale and Thaisa in Pericles.
The Tempest (c. 1611) sums up much of
what Shakespeare’s mature art was all about. Once again we find a
wifeless father with a daughter, in this case on a deserted island where
the father, Prospero, is entirely responsible for his daughter’s
education. He behaves like a dramatist in charge of the whole play as
well, arranging her life and that of the other characters. He employs a
storm at sea to bring young Ferdinand into the company of his daughter;
Ferdinand is Prospero’s choice, because such a marriage will resolve the
bitter dispute between Milan and Naples—arising after the latter
supported Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio in his claim to the
dukedom of Milan—that has led to Prospero’s banishment. At the same
time, Ferdinand is certainly Miranda’s choice as well; the two fall
instantly in love, anticipating the desired romantic happy ending. The
ending will also mean an end to Prospero’s career as artist and
dramatist, for he is nearing retirement and senses that his gift will
not stay with him forever. The imprisoned spirit Ariel, embodiment of
that temporary and precious gift, must be freed in the play’s closing
moments. Caliban, too, must be freed, since Prospero has done what he
could to educate and civilize this Natural Man. Art can only go so far.
The Tempest seems to have been intended
as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre. It contains moving passages of
reflection on what his powers as artist have been able to accomplish,
and valedictory themes of closure. As a comedy, it demonstrates
perfectly the way that Shakespeare was able to combine precise artistic
construction (the play chooses on this farewell occasion to observe the
Classical unities of time, place, and action) with his special flair for
stories that transcend the merely human and physical: The Tempest is
peopled with spirits, monsters, and drolleries. This, it seems, is
Shakespeare’s summation of his art as comic dramatist.
But The Tempest proved not to be
Shakespeare’s last play after all. Perhaps he discovered, as many people
do, that he was bored in retirement in 1613 or thereabouts. No doubt his
acting company was eager to have him back. He wrote a history play
titled Henry VIII (1613), which is extraordinary in a number of ways: it
relates historical events substantially later chronologically than those
of the 15th century that had been his subject in his earlier historical
plays; it is separated from the last of those plays by perhaps 14 years;
and, perhaps most significant, it is as much romance as history play.
History in this instance is really about the birth of Elizabeth I, who
was to become England’s great queen. The circumstances of Henry VIII’s
troubled marital affairs, his meeting with Anne Boleyn, his
confrontation with the papacy, and all the rest turn out to be the
humanly unpredictable ways by which Providence engineers the miracle of
Elizabeth’s birth. The play ends with this great event and sees in it a
justification and necessity of all that has proceeded. Thus history
yields its providential meaning in the shape of a play that is both
history and romance.
Shakespeare’s plays and poems » Plays of the middle and late years »
Collaborations and spurious attributions
The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1612–14) brought Shakespeare into
collaboration with John Fletcher, his successor as chief playwright for
the King’s Men. (Fletcher is sometimes thought also to have helped
Shakespeare with Henry VIII.) The story, taken out of Chaucer’s Knight’s
Tale, is essentially another romance, in which two young gallants
compete for the hand of Emilia and in which deities preside over the
choice. Shakespeare may have had a hand earlier as well in Edward III, a
history play of about 1590–95, and he seems to have provided a scene or
so for The Book of Sir Thomas More (c. 1593–1601) when that play
encountered trouble with the censor. Collaborative writing was common in
the Renaissance English stage, and it is not surprising that Shakespeare
was called upon to do some of it. Nor is it surprising that, given his
towering reputation, he was credited with having written a number of
plays that he had nothing to do with, including those that were
spuriously added to the third edition of the Folio in 1664: Locrine
(1591–95), Sir John Oldcastle (1599–1600), Thomas Lord Cromwell
(1599–1602), The London Prodigal (1603–05), The Puritan (1606), and A
Yorkshire Tragedy (1605–08). To a remarkable extent, nonetheless, his
corpus stands as a coherent body of his own work. The shape of the
career has a symmetry and internal beauty not unlike that of the
individual plays and poems.
David Bevington
Shakespeare’s sources
With a few exceptions, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his
plays. Sometimes he used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles). Sometimes he
worked from the stories of comparatively recent Italian writers, such as
Giovanni Boccaccio—using both well-known stories (Romeo and Juliet, Much
Ado About Nothing) and little-known ones (Othello). He used the popular
prose fictions of his contemporaries in As You Like It and The Winter’s
Tale. In writing his historical plays, he drew largely from Sir Thomas
North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
for the Roman plays and the chronicles of Edward Hall and Holinshed for
the plays based upon English history. Some plays deal with rather remote
and legendary history (King Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth). Earlier
dramatists had occasionally used the same material (there were, for
example, the earlier plays called The Famous Victories of Henry the
Fifth and King Leir). But, because many plays of Shakespeare’s time have
been lost, it is impossible to be sure of the relation between an
earlier, lost play and Shakespeare’s surviving one: in the case of
Hamlet it has been plausibly argued that an “old play,” known to have
existed, was merely an early version of Shakespeare’s own.
Shakespeare was probably too busy for
prolonged study. He had to read what books he could, when he needed
them. His enormous vocabulary could only be derived from a mind of great
celerity, responding to the literary as well as the spoken language. It
is not known what libraries were available to him. The Huguenot family
of Mountjoys, with whom he lodged in London, presumably possessed French
books. Moreover, he seems to have enjoyed an interesting connection with
the London book trade. The Richard Field who published Shakespeare’s two
poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in 1593–94, seems to
have been (as an apprenticeship record describes him) the “son of Henry
Field of Stratford-upon-Avon in the County of Warwick, tanner.” When
Henry Field the tanner died in 1592, John Shakespeare the glover was one
of the three appointed to value his goods and chattels. Field’s son,
bound apprentice in 1579, was probably about the same age as
Shakespeare. From 1587 he steadily established himself as a printer of
serious literature—notably of North’s translation of Plutarch (1595,
reprinted in 1603 and 1610). There is no direct evidence of any close
friendship between Field and Shakespeare. Still, it cannot escape notice
that one of the important printer-publishers in London at the time was
an exact contemporary of Shakespeare at Stratford, that he can hardly
have been other than a schoolmate, that he was the son of a close
associate of John Shakespeare, and that he published Shakespeare’s first
poems. Clearly, a considerable number of literary contacts were
available to Shakespeare, and many books were accessible.
That Shakespeare’s plays had “sources”
was already apparent in his own time. An interesting contemporary
description of a performance is to be found in the diary of a young
lawyer of the Middle Temple, John Manningham, who kept a record of his
experiences in 1602 and 1603. On February 2, 1602, he wrote:
At our feast we had a play called
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, much like The Comedy of Errors, or
Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called
Inganni.
The first collection of information
about sources of Elizabethan plays was published in the 17th
century—Gerard Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691)
briefly indicated where Shakespeare found materials for some plays. But,
during the course of the 17th century, it came to be felt that
Shakespeare was an outstandingly “natural” writer, whose intellectual
background was of comparatively little significance: “he was naturally
learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature,” wrote
John Dryden in 1668. It was nevertheless obvious that the intellectual
quality of Shakespeare’s writings was high and revealed a remarkably
perceptive mind. The Roman plays, in particular, gave evidence of
careful reconstruction of the ancient world.
The first collection of source
materials, arranged so that they could be read and closely compared with
Shakespeare’s plays, was made by Charlotte Lennox in the 18th century.
More complete collections appeared later, notably those of John Payne
Collier (Shakespeare’s Library, 1843; revised by W. Carew Hazlitt,
1875). These earlier collections have been superseded by a seven-volume
version edited by Geoffrey Bullough as Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare (1957–72).
It has become steadily more possible to
see what was original in Shakespeare’s dramatic art. He achieved
compression and economy by the exclusion of undramatic material. He
developed characters from brief suggestions in his source (Mercutio,
Touchstone, Falstaff, Pandarus), and he developed entirely new
characters (the Dromio brothers, Beatrice and Benedick, Sir Toby Belch,
Malvolio, Paulina, Roderigo, Lear’s fool). He rearranged the plot with a
view to more-effective contrasts of character, climaxes, and conclusions
(Macbeth, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It). A wider
philosophical outlook was introduced (Hamlet, Coriolanus, All’s Well
That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida). And everywhere an intensification
of the dialogue and an altogether higher level of imaginative writing
transformed the older work.
But, quite apart from evidence of the
sources of his plays, it is not difficult to get a fair impression of
Shakespeare as a reader, feeding his own imagination by a moderate
acquaintance with the literary achievements of other men and of other
ages. He quotes his contemporary Christopher Marlowe in As You Like It.
He casually refers to the Aethiopica (“Ethiopian History”) of Heliodorus
(which had been translated by Thomas Underdown in 1569) in Twelfth
Night. He read the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur
Golding, which went through seven editions between 1567 and 1612. George
Chapman’s vigorous translation of Homer’s Iliad impressed him, though he
used some of the material rather sardonically in Troilus and Cressida.
He derived the ironical account of an ideal republic in The Tempest from
one of Montaigne’s essays. He read (in part, at least) Samuel Harsnett’s
Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostors and remembered lively passages
from it when he was writing King Lear. The beginning lines of one sonnet
(106) indicate that he had read Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene
or comparable romantic literature.
He was acutely aware of the varieties
of poetic style that characterized the work of other authors. A
brilliant little poem he composed for Prince Hamlet (Act V, scene 2,
line 115) shows how ironically he perceived the qualities of poetry in
the last years of the 16th century, when poets such as John Donne were
writing love poems uniting astronomical and cosmogenic imagery with
skepticism and moral paradoxes. The eight-syllable lines in an archaic
mode written for the 14th-century poet John Gower in Pericles show his
reading of that poet’s Confessio amantis. The influence of the great
figure of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Arcadia was first printed in 1590 and
was widely read for generations, is frequently felt in Shakespeare’s
writings. Finally, the importance of the Bible for Shakespeare’s style
and range of allusion is not to be underestimated. His works show a
pervasive familiarity with the passages appointed to be read in church
on each Sunday throughout the year, and a large number of allusions to
passages in Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach) indicates
a personal interest in one of the deuterocanonical books.
John Russell Brown
Terence John Bew Spencer
Understanding Shakespeare » Questions of authorship
Readers and playgoers in Shakespeare’s own lifetime, and indeed
until the late 18th century, never questioned Shakespeare’s authorship
of his plays. He was a well-known actor from Stratford who performed in
London’s premier acting company, among the great actors of his day. He
was widely known by the leading writers of his time as well, including
Ben Jonson and John Webster, both of whom praised him as a dramatist.
Many other tributes to him as a great writer appeared during his
lifetime. Any theory that supposes him not to have been the writer of
the plays and poems attributed to him must suppose that Shakespeare’s
contemporaries were universally fooled by some kind of secret
arrangement.
Yet suspicions on the subject gained
increasing force in the mid-19th century. One Delia Bacon proposed that
the author was her claimed ancestor Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St.
Albans, who was indeed a prominent writer of the Elizabethan era. What
had prompted this theory? The chief considerations seem to have been
that little is known about Shakespeare’s life (though in fact more is
known about him than about his contemporary writers), that he was from
the country town of Stratford-upon-Avon, that he never attended one of
the universities, and that therefore it would have been impossible for
him to write knowledgeably about the great affairs of English courtly
life such as we find in the plays.
The theory is suspect on a number of
counts. University training in Shakespeare’s day centred on theology and
on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts of a sort that would not have greatly
improved Shakespeare’s knowledge of contemporary English life. By the
19th century, a university education was becoming more and more the mark
of a broadly educated person, but university training in the 16th
century was quite a different matter. The notion that only a
university-educated person could write of life at court and among the
gentry is an erroneous and indeed a snobbish assumption. Shakespeare was
better off going to London as he did, seeing and writing plays,
listening to how people talked. He was a reporter, in effect. The great
writers of his era (or indeed of most eras) are not usually aristocrats,
who have no need to earn a living by their pens. Shakespeare’s social
background is essentially like that of his best contemporaries. Edmund
Spenser went to Cambridge, it is true, but he came from a sail-making
family. Christopher Marlowe also attended Cambridge, but his kindred
were shoemakers in Canterbury. John Webster, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas
Middleton came from similar backgrounds. They discovered that they were
writers, able to make a living off their talent, and they (excluding the
poet Spenser) flocked to the London theatres where customers for their
wares were to be found. Like them, Shakespeare was a man of the
commercial theatre.
Other candidates—William Stanley, 6th
earl of Derby, and Christopher Marlowe among them—have been proposed,
and indeed the very fact of so many candidates makes one suspicious of
the claims of any one person. The late 20th-century candidate for the
writing of Shakespeare’s plays, other than Shakespeare himself, was
Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. Oxford did indeed write verse, as
did other gentlemen; sonneteering was a mark of gentlemanly distinction.
Oxford was also a wretched man who abused his wife and drove his
father-in-law to distraction. Most seriously damaging to Oxford’s
candidacy is the fact that he died in 1604. The chronology presented
here, summarizing perhaps 200 years of assiduous scholarship,
establishes a professional career for Shakespeare as dramatist that
extends from about 1589 to 1614. Many of his greatest plays—King Lear,
Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, to name but three—were written
after 1604. To suppose that the dating of the canon is totally out of
whack and that all the plays and poems were written before 1604 is a
desperate argument. Some individual dates are uncertain, but the overall
pattern is coherent. The growth in poetic and dramatic styles, the
development of themes and subjects, along with objective evidence, all
support a chronology that extends to about 1614. To suppose
alternatively that Oxford wrote the plays and poems before 1604 and then
put them away in a drawer, to be brought out after his death and updated
to make them appear timely, is to invent an answer to a nonexistent
problem.
When all is said, the sensible question
one must ask is, why would Oxford want to write the plays and poems and
then not claim them for himself? The answer given is that he was an
aristocrat and that writing for the theatre was not elegant; hence he
needed a front man, an alias. Shakespeare, the actor, was a suitable
choice. But is it plausible that a cover-up like this could have
succeeded?
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, after
all, wrote of him unequivocally as the author of the plays. Ben Jonson,
who knew him well, contributed verses to the First Folio of 1623, where
(as elsewhere) he criticizes and praises Shakespeare as the author. John
Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors and theatre owners with
Shakespeare, signed the dedication and a foreword to the First Folio and
described their methods as editors. In his own day, therefore, he was
accepted as the author of the plays. In an age that loved gossip and
mystery as much as any, it seems hardly conceivable that Jonson and
Shakespeare’s theatrical associates shared the secret of a gigantic
literary hoax without a single leak or that they could have been imposed
upon without suspicion. Unsupported assertions that the author of the
plays was a man of great learning and that Shakespeare of Stratford was
an illiterate rustic no longer carry weight, and only when a believer in
Bacon or Oxford or Marlowe produces sound evidence will scholars pay
close attention.
Understanding Shakespeare » Linguistic, historical, textual, and
editorial problems
Since the days of Shakespeare, the English language has changed, and
so have audiences, theatres, actors, and customary patterns of thought
and feeling. Time has placed an ever-increasing cloud before the mirror
he held up to life, and it is here that scholarship can help.
Problems are most obvious in single
words. In the 21st century, presently, for instance, does not mean
“immediately,” as it usually did for Shakespeare, or will mean “lust,”
or rage mean “folly,” or silly denote “innocence” and “purity.” In
Shakespeare’s day, words sounded different, too, so that ably could
rhyme with eye or tomb with dumb. Syntax was often different, and, far
more difficult to define, so was response to metre and phrase. What
sounds formal and stiff to a modern hearer might have sounded fresh and
gay to an Elizabethan.
Ideas have changed, too, most obviously
political ones. Shakespeare’s contemporaries almost unanimously believed
in authoritarian monarchy and recognized divine intervention in history.
Most of them would have agreed that a man should be burned for ultimate
religious heresies. It is the office of linguistic and historical
scholarship to aid the understanding of the multitude of factors that
have significantly affected the impressions made by Shakespeare’s plays.
None of Shakespeare’s plays has
survived in his handwritten manuscript, and, in the printed texts of
some plays, notably King Lear and Richard III, there are passages that
are manifestly corrupt, with only an uncertain relationship to the words
Shakespeare once wrote. Even if the printer received a good manuscript,
small errors could still be introduced. Compositors were less than
perfect; they often “regularized” the readings of their copy, altered
punctuation in accordance with their own preferences or “house” style or
because they lacked the necessary pieces of type, or made mistakes
because they had to work too hurriedly. Even the correction of proof
sheets in the printing house could further corrupt the text, since such
correction was usually effected without reference to the author or to
the manuscript copy; when both corrected and uncorrected states are
still available, it is sometimes the uncorrected version that is
preferable. Correctors are responsible for some errors now impossible to
right.
John Russell Brown
Terence John Bew Spencer
David Bevington
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism
During his own lifetime and shortly afterward, Shakespeare enjoyed
fame and considerable critical attention. The English writer Francis
Meres, in 1598, declared him to be England’s greatest writer in comedy
and tragedy. Writer and poet John Weever lauded “honey-tongued
Shakespeare.” Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and a literary
critic in his own right, granted that Shakespeare had no rival in the
writing of comedy, even in the ancient Classical world, and that he
equaled the ancients in tragedy as well, but Jonson also faulted
Shakespeare for having a mediocre command of the Classical languages and
for ignoring Classical rules. Jonson objected when Shakespeare
dramatized history extending over many years and moved his dramatic
scene around from country to country, rather than focusing on 24 hours
or so in a single location. Shakespeare wrote too glibly, in Jonson’s
view, mixing kings and clowns, lofty verse with vulgarity, mortals with
fairies.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Seventeenth century
Jonson’s Neoclassical perspective on Shakespeare was to govern the
literary criticism of the later 17th century as well. John Dryden, in
his essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) and other essays, condemned the
improbabilities of Shakespeare’s late romances. Shakespeare lacked
decorum, in Dryden’s view, largely because he had written for an
ignorant age and poorly educated audiences. Shakespeare excelled in
“fancy” or imagination, but he lagged behind in “judgment.” He was a
native genius, untaught, whose plays needed to be extensively rewritten
to clear them of the impurities of their frequently vulgar style. And in
fact most productions of Shakespeare on the London stage during the
Restoration did just that: they rewrote Shakespeare to make him more
refined.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Eighteenth century
This critical view persisted into the 18th century as well. Alexander
Pope undertook to edit Shakespeare in 1725, expurgating his language and
“correcting” supposedly infelicitous phrases. Samuel Johnson also edited
Shakespeare’s works (1765), defending his author as one who “holds up to
his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life”; but, though he
pronounced Shakespeare an “ancient” (supreme praise from Johnson), he
found Shakespeare’s plays full of implausible plots quickly huddled
together at the end, and he deplored Shakespeare’s fondness for punning.
Even in his defense of Shakespeare as a great English writer, Johnson
lauded him in classical terms, for his universality, his ability to
offer a “just representation of general nature” that could stand the
test of time.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Romantic critics
For Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early 19th
century, Shakespeare deserved to be appreciated most of all for his
creative genius and his spontaneity. For Goethe in Germany as well,
Shakespeare was a bard, a mystical seer. Most of all, Shakespeare was
considered supreme as a creator of character. Maurice Morgann wrote such
character-based analyses as appear in his book An Essay on the Dramatic
Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), where Falstaff is envisaged as
larger than life, a humane wit and humorist who is no coward or liar in
fact but a player of inspired games. Romantic critics, including Charles
Lamb, Thomas De Quincey (who wrote Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on
Shakespeare for the eighth edition), and William Hazlitt, extolled
Shakespeare as a genius able to create an imaginative world of his own,
even if Hazlitt was disturbed by what he took to be Shakespeare’s
political conservatism. In the theatre of the Romantic era, Shakespeare
fared less well, but as an author he was much touted and even venerated.
In 1769 the famous actor David Garrick had instituted a Shakespeare
Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday.
Shakespeare had become England’s national poet.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Twentieth century and
beyond » Increasing importance of scholarship
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw major increases in the
systematic and scholarly exploration of Shakespeare’s life and works.
Philological research established a more reliable chronology of the work
than had been hitherto available. Edward Dowden, in his Shakspere: A
Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), analyzed the shape of
Shakespeare’s career in a way that had not been possible earlier. A.C.
Bradley’s magisterial Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), a book that remains
highly readable, showed how the achievements of scholarship could be
applied to a humane and moving interpretation of Shakespeare’s greatest
work. As in earlier studies of the 19th century, Bradley’s approach
focused largely on character.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Twentieth century
and beyond » Historical criticism
Increasingly in the 20th century, scholarship furthered an understanding
of Shakespeare’s social, political, economic, and theatrical milieu.
Shakespeare’s sources came under new and intense scrutiny. Elmer Edgar
Stoll, in Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (1933), stressed the ways in
which the plays could be seen as constructs intimately connected with
their historical environment. Playacting depends on conventions, which
must be understood in their historical context. Costuming signals
meaning to the audience; so does the theatre building, the props, the
actors’ gestures.
Accordingly, historical critics sought to know more about the history
of London’s theatres (as in John Cranford Adams’s well-known model of
the Globe playhouse or in C. Walter Hodges’s The Globe Restored [1953]),
about audiences (Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It [1947]; and Ann
Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London,
1576–1642 [1981]), about staging methods (Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare
at the Globe 1599–1609 [1962]), and much more. Other scholarly studies
examined censorship, the religious controversies of the Elizabethan era
and how they affected playwriting, and the heritage of native medieval
English drama. Studies in the history of ideas have examined Elizabethan
cosmology, astrology, philosophical ideas such as the Great Chain of
Being, physiological theories about the four bodily humours, political
theories of Machiavelli and others, the skepticism of Montaigne, and
much more. See also Sidebar: Shakespeare on Theatre; Sidebar:
Shakespeare and the Liberties; and Sidebar: Music in Shakespeare’s
Plays.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Twentieth century
and beyond » New Criticism
As valuable as it is, historical criticism has not been without its
opponents. A major critical movement of the 1930s and ’40s was the
so-called New Criticism of F.R. Leavis, L.C. Knights, Derek Traversi,
Robert Heilman, and many others, urging a more formalist approach to the
poetry. “Close reading” became the mantra of this movement. At its most
extreme, it urged the ignoring of historical background in favour of an
intense and personal engagement with Shakespeare’s language: tone,
speaker, image patterns, and verbal repetitions and rhythms. Studies of
imagery, rhetorical patterns, wordplay, and still more gave support to
the movement. At the commencement of the 21st century, close reading
remained an acceptable approach to the Shakespearean text.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Twentieth century
and beyond » New interpretive approaches
Shakespeare criticism of the 20th and 21st centuries has seen an
extraordinary flourishing of new schools of critical approach.
Psychological and psychoanalytic critics such as Ernest Jones have
explored questions of character in terms of Oedipal complexes,
narcissism, and psychotic behaviour or, more simply, in terms of the
conflicting needs in any relationship for autonomy and dependence.
Mythological and archetypal criticism, especially in the influential
work of Northrop Frye, has examined myths of vegetation having to do
with the death and rebirth of nature as a basis for great cycles in the
creative process. Christian interpretation seeks to find in
Shakespeare’s plays a series of deep analogies to the Christian story of
sacrifice and redemption.
Conversely, some criticism has pursued a vigorously iconoclastic line
of interpretation. Jan Kott, writing in the disillusioning aftermath of
World War II and from an eastern European perspective, reshaped
Shakespeare as a dramatist of the absurd, skeptical, ridiculing, and
antiauthoritarian. Kott’s deeply ironic view of the political process
impressed filmmakers and theatre directors such as Peter Brook (King
Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream). (For further discussion of later
interpretations of Shakespeare, see Sidebar: Viewing Shakespeare on Film
and Sidebar: Shakespeare and Opera.) He also caught the imagination of
many academic critics who were chafing at a modern political world
increasingly caught up in image making and the various other
manipulations of the powerful new media of television and electronic
communication.
A number of the so-called New Historicists (among them Stephen
Greenblatt, Stephen Orgel, and Richard Helgerson) read avidly in
cultural anthropology, learning from Clifford Geertz and others how to
analyze literary production as a part of a cultural exchange through
which a society fashions itself by means of its political ceremonials.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) provided an
energizing model for the ways in which literary criticism could analyze
the process. Mikhail Bakhtin was another dominant influence. In Britain
the movement came to be known as Cultural Materialism; it was a first
cousin to American New Historicism, though often with a more
class-conscious and Marxist ideology. The chief proponents of this
movement with regard to Shakespeare criticism are Jonathan Dollimore,
Alan Sinfield, John Drakakis, and Terry Eagleton.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Twentieth century
and beyond » Feminist criticism and gender studies
Feminist and gender-study approaches to Shakespeare criticism made
significant gains after 1980. Feminists, like New Historicists, were
interested in contextualizing Shakespeare’s writings rather than
subjecting them to ahistorical formalist analysis. Turning to
anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, feminist critics
illuminated the extent to which Shakespeare inhabited a patriarchal
world dominated by men and fathers, in which women were essentially the
means of exchange in power relationships among those men. Feminist
criticism is deeply interested in marriage and courtship customs, gender
relations, and family structures. In The Tempest, for example, feminist
interest tends to centre on Prospero’s dominating role as father and on
the way in which Ferdinand and Miranda become engaged and, in effect,
married when they pledge their love to one another in the presence of a
witness—Miranda’s father. Plays and poems dealing with domestic strife
(such as Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece) take on a new centrality in
this criticism. Diaries, marriage-counseling manuals, and other such
documents become important to feminist study. Revealing patterns emerge
in Shakespeare’s plays as to male insecurities about women, men’s need
to dominate and possess women, their fears of growing old, and the like.
Much Ado About Nothing can be seen as about men’s fears of being
cuckolded; Othello treats the same male weakness with deeply tragic
consequences. The tragedy in Romeo and Juliet depends in part on Romeo’s
sensitivity to peer pressure that seemingly obliges him to kill Tybalt
and thus choose macho male loyalties over the more gentle and forgiving
model of behaviour he has learned from Juliet. These are only a few
examples. Feminist critics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries
included, among many others, Lynda Boose, Lisa Jardine, Gail Paster,
Jean Howard, Karen Newman, Carol Neely, Peter Erickson, and Madelon
Sprengnether.
Gender studies such as those of Bruce R. Smith and Valerie Traub also
dealt importantly with issues of gender as a social construction and
with changing social attitudes toward “deviant” sexual behaviour:
cross-dressing, same-sex relationships, and bisexuality.
Understanding Shakespeare » Literary criticism » Twentieth century
and beyond » Deconstruction
The critical movement generally known as deconstruction centred on the
instability and protean ambiguity of language. It owed its origins in
part to the linguistic and other work of French philosophers and critics
such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Some of the earliest practitioners and devotees of the method in the
United States were Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man,
all of Yale University. Deconstruction stressed the extent to which
“meaning” and “authorial intention” are virtually impossible to fix
precisely. Translation and paraphrase are exercises in approximation at
best.
The implications of deconstruction for Shakespeare criticism have to
do with language and its protean flexibility of meanings. Patricia
Parker’s Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context
(1996), for example, offers many brilliant demonstrations of this, one
of which is her study of the word preposterous, a word she finds
throughout the plays. It means literally behind for before, back for
front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning. It suggests the
cart before the horse, the last first, and “arsie versie,” with obscene
overtones. It is thus a term for disorder in discourse, in sexual
relationships, in rights of inheritance, and much more. Deconstruction
as a philosophical and critical movement aroused a good deal of
animosity because it questioned the fixity of meaning in language. At
the same time, however, deconstruction attuned readers to verbal
niceties, to layers of meaning, to nuance.
Late 20th-century and early 21st-century scholars were often
revolutionary in their criticism of Shakespeare. To readers the result
frequently appeared overly postmodern and trendy, presenting Shakespeare
as a contemporary at the expense of more traditional values of tragic
intensity, comic delight, and pure insight into the human condition. No
doubt some of this criticism, as well as some older criticism, was too
obscure and ideologically driven. Yet deconstructionists and feminists,
for example, at their best portray a Shakespeare of enduring greatness.
His durability is demonstrable in the very fact that so much modern
criticism, despite its mistrust of canonical texts written by “dead
white European males,” turns to Shakespeare again and again. He is dead,
white, European, and male, and yet he appeals irresistibly to readers
and theatre audiences all over the world. In the eyes of many feminist
critics, he portrays women with the kind of fullness and depth found in
authors such as Virginia Woolf and George Eliot.
David Bevington
|
The early histories
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and
comedies. About a fifth of all Elizabethan plays were
histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare
particularly made his own, dramatizing the whole sweep of
English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two
four-play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with
triumphant success. The first sequence, comprising the three
Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a
patriotic celebration of English valour against the French.
But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the
devastating portrayal of Richard III—probably the first
“character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who
boasts in Henry VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous
Machevil to school.” Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes
the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but its
realistic depiction of the workings of state power
insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and the appeal of
Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling,
short-circuiting any easy moral judgments. The second
sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a
bad but legitimate king and follows its consequences through
two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult
questions of authority, obedience, and order that it raises.
(The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a performance of
Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against
Elizabeth in 1601.) In the Henry IV plays, which are
dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his
roguish exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes
among the rulers with scenes among those who are ruled, thus
creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life
at a particular historical moment. The tone of these plays,
though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with
hesitations and qualifications about the validity of the
myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story.
Through all these plays runs a concern for the individual
and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater
plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other history plays, King
John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar
questions through material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and
Monuments.
The early comedies
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms
used by the university wits but overlay them with elements
of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness
of comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive
comedies, giving access to a society vigorously and
imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of
Errors (c. 1589–94), The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94),
The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often
farcical, and placing a high premium on wit. The plays of a
second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94),
Love’s Labour’s Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—have as a
common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such
as a wood or a park, in which the restraints governing
everyday life are released and the characters are free to
remake themselves untrammeled by society’s forms,
sportiveness providing a space in which the fragmented
individual may recover wholeness. All the comedies share a
belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but
none is completely innocent of doubts about the limits that
encroach upon the comic space. In the four plays that
approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97),
Much Ado About Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well
(1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)—festivity is in
direct collision with the constraints of normality, with
time, business, law, human indifference, treachery, and
selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the
less-optimistic perspectives on society current in the
1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly acknowledged
to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation,
compromise, or the exclusion of one or more major
characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c.
1601–02) presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between
comedy and tragedy, between satire and savage farce.
Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism
against its parody in a way that voices fully the
fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
W.
Shakespeare "Hamlet" illustration from Eugene Delacroix
The tragedies
"Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"
"The Tragedy of King Lear"
"The Tragedy
of Macbeth"
"Othello, the
Moor of Venice"
"Romeo and
Juliet"
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age
find their highest expression in his tragedies. In these
extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and
forms are tested and found wanting, and all society’s latent
conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband against
wife, father against child, the individual against society;
he uncrowns kings, levels the nobleman with the beggar, and
interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental
tragedies Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular
violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96), with its comedy
and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken
away from the conventional Elizabethan understanding of
tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more complex
investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar
(1599) he begins to turn the political interests of the
history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men
fall victim to the unstoppable train of public events set in
motion by their private misjudgments. In the major tragedies
that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a
single general statement that covers all cases, for each
tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge tragedy in
Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in
Othello
(1603–04), social tragedy in King Lear (1605–06), political
tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony
and Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play
is exemplary and defines its type; the range and brilliance
of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of
Shakespeare’s heroes are collapsing around them, and their
desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their
sufferings and justify their existence. The ultimate insight
is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why
should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath
at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these great
and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all
versions of order stand revealed as adventitious. The
humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment
of its greatest single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile
invention returned to experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608)
he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state;
in the scene of the Roman food riot (not unsympathetically
depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire
enclosure riots of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an
unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last group
of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08),
Cymbeline (c. 1608–10), The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and
The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering. (A final work, The Two
Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], 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.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and
private belief became the overriding concern of the drama
until the closing of the theatres in 1642. The prevailing
manner of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic,
satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays focused
predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and
the court, with their typical activities, the pursuit of
wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter
Raleigh, “Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the
universal aims, and this situation was addressed by city
comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the
stages that the rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took
place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood,
Thomas
Dekker, John Day, Samuel Rowley, and others, the old
tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the
celebration of confidence in the dynamically expanding
commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have been involved
in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures
starring citizen heroes, spirited, patriotic, and inclined
to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece,
A
Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class
tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in his
Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen
brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like success; the play
nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work,
thrift, and the contempt of the great. On the other hand,
the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed
with civic pride became in the hands of
Ben Jonson,
George
Chapman,
John Marston, and
Thomas Middleton a sign of
self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the
sicknesses in society at large.
Thomas Heywood
born 1574?, Lincolnshire, Eng.
died Aug. 16, 1641, London
English actor-playwright whose career spans the
peak periods of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Heywood apparently attended the University of
Cambridge, though his attendance there remains
undocumented. After arriving in London sometime
before 1598, he joined Philip Henslowe’s
theatrical company, the Admiral’s Men, and was
subsequently active in London as a playwright
and actor for the rest of his life. He claimed
to have had “either an entire hand, or at least
a maine finger” in 220 plays. Of these, about 30
survive that are generally accepted as wholly or
partly his.
Most of Heywood’s plays are theatrical
mélanges employing two or more contrasted plots,
poorly unified and liberally laced with
clowning. They are sentimental in theme but
realistic in setting and reveal an affectionate
regard for all the daily sights, sounds, and
activities of London. He produced such romances
as The Captives and A Pleasant Comedy, Called a
Maidenhead Well Lost (both in 1634); such
adventure plays as The Fair Maid of the West
(1631); and seven lord mayor’s pageants,
completed between 1631 and 1639. He also wrote
masques, mythological cycles, and chronicle
plays. The most popular of his history plays, If
You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605–06), is
about Elizabeth I.
Heywood’s art found its finest expression in
the field of domestic sentiment. His
masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness
(1607), is one of the earliest middle-class
tragedies. His plays were so popular that they
were sometimes performed at two theatres
simultaneously. His charming masque Love’s
Mistress (1636) was seen by Charles I and his
queen three times in eight days.
Heywood also wrote many books and pamphlets
that are now of interest chiefly to students of
the period. His most important prose work was An
Apology for Actors (1612), an account of actors’
place and dignity and their role in society
since antiquity.
|
|
|
John Day
born 1574, Cawston, Norfolk, Eng.
died 1640?
Elizabethan dramatist whose verse allegory The
Parliament of Bees shows unusual ingenuity and
delicacy of imagination.
Day was expelled from the University of
Cambridge in 1593 for theft, and after 1598 he
became a playwright for the theatre proprietor
and manager Philip Henslowe. In this capacity
Day collaborated with Thomas Dekker, Henry
Chettle, and some lesser-known writers. His
first extant play is The Blind-Beggar of
Bednal-Green (written in 1600, with Chettle;
published 1659). Among his other plays are The
Isle of Gulls (1606) and Humour Out of Breath
(1608). Day’s reputation rests mainly on The
Parliament of Bees, published posthumously in
1641 and probably written near the end of his
life. This exquisite masque, which is actually a
series of pastoral eclogues, is about “the
doings, the births, the wars, the wooings” of
bees. The bees hold a parliament under Prorex,
the “Master Bee,” and grievances are presented
against the bumblebee, the wasp, the drone, and
other insects whom the author uses to represent
various human types. The satirical allegory ends
with a royal progress of the fairy king Oberon,
who dispenses justice among the bees.
|
|
|
Samuel Rowley
flourished 1597–c. 1633?
English dramatist apparently employed by the
theatrical manager Philip Henslowe. Sometimes he
is described as William Rowley’s brother, but
they seem not to have been related.
After 1601 Rowley acted with and wrote plays for
the Admiral’s Men and other companies. Several
plays on which he is thought to have
collaborated are lost. His When You See Me, You
Know Me, or The Famous Chronicle Historie of
King Henrie the Eight (probably performed 1604;
published 1605) resembles William Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII (which may have been influenced by
it) in owing something to popular tradition. His
only other extant play, The Noble Souldier. Or,
A Contract Broken, Justly Reveng’d, a tragedy
(1634), was probably written largely by Thomas
Dekker. Rowley has also been credited with the
prose scenes in some of Shakespeare’s plays, and
he is thought to have made some additions to
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
|
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by
Ben
Jonson,
Shakespeare’s friend and nearest rival, who stands
at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the dominant
modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every
Man in His Humour (1598) and Every Man Out of His Humour
(1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently
indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s; they introduced
to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of
“the time’s deformities,” the language, habits, and humours
of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-appointed social
legislator, socially conservative but intellectually
radical, outraged by a society given over to inordinate
appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth
learning to establish himself as the privileged artist, the
fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings; but he
was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to
prefer flattery to judicious advice. Consequently, the
greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual
accommodations with popular comedy and by their
unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments
explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the
villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters whom he
deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan
fashion and frivolity;
The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life
parading through the annual fair at Smithfield, a vast
panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays,
fools and rogues are indulged to the very height of their
daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own
conclusions while liberating Jonson’s wealth of exuberant
comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and
mastery of a language tumbling with detailed observation of
London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616 Jonson abandoned
the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly
disregarded, he made a hard-won return to the theatres. The
most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The New
Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean
romance, and A Tale of a Tub (1633), which resurrects the
Elizabethan country farce.
|
 |
Ben Jonson
PART I
"Volpone"
PART II
The Alchemist
English writer
byname of Benjamin Jonson
born June 11?, 1572, London, Eng.
died Aug. 6, 1637, London
Main
English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic. He is
generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after
William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I. Among his major plays
are the comedies Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1605),
Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and
Bartholomew Fair (1614).
Theatrical career
Jonson was born two months after his father died. His stepfather was a
bricklayer, but by good fortune the boy was able to attend Westminster
School. His formal education, however, ended early, and he at first
followed his stepfather’s trade, then fought with some success with the
English forces in the Netherlands. On returning to England, he became an
actor and playwright, experiencing the life of a strolling player. He
apparently played the leading role of Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy. By 1597 he was writing plays for Philip Henslowe, the
leading impresario for the public theatre. With one exception (The Case
Is Altered), these early plays are known, if at all, only by their
titles. Jonson apparently wrote tragedies as well as comedies in these
years, but his extant writings include only two tragedies, Sejanus
(1603) and Catiline (1611).
The year 1598 marked an abrupt change in Jonson’s status, when Every
Man in His Humour was successfully presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s
theatrical company (a legend has it that Shakespeare himself recommended
it to them), and his reputation was established. In this play Jonson
tried to bring the spirit and manner of Latin comedy to the English
popular stage by presenting the story of a young man with an eye for a
girl, who has difficulty with a phlegmatic father, is dependent on a
clever servant, and is ultimately successful—in fact, the standard plot
of the Latin dramatist Plautus. But at the same time Jonson sought to
embody in four of the main characters the four “humours” of medieval and
Renaissance medicine—choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood—which were
thought to determine human physical and mental makeup.
That same year Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel, and, though he
escaped capital punishment by pleading “benefit of clergy” (the ability
to read from the Latin Bible), he could not escape branding. During his
brief imprisonment over the affair he became a Roman Catholic.
Following the success of Every Man in His Humour, the same theatrical
company acted Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), which was
even more ambitious. It was the longest play ever written for the
Elizabethan public theatre, and it strove to provide an equivalent of
the Greek comedy of Aristophanes; “induction,” or “prelude,” and regular
between-act comment explicated the author’s views on what the drama
should be.
The play, however, proved a disaster, and Jonson had to look
elsewhere for a theatre to present his work. The obvious place was the
“private” theatres, in which only young boys acted (see children’s
company). The high price of admission they charged meant a select
audience, and they were willing to try strong satire and formal
experiment; for them Jonson wrote Cynthia’s Revels (c. 1600) and
Poetaster (1601). Even in these, however, there is the paradox of
contempt for human behaviour hand in hand with a longing for human
order.
From 1605 to 1634 he regularly contributed masques for the courts of
James I and Charles I, collaborating with the architect and designer
Inigo Jones. This marked his favour with the court and led to his post
as poet laureate.
His masques at court
It appears that Jonson won royal attention by his Entertainment at
Althorpe, given before James I’s queen as she journeyed down from
Scotland in 1603, and in 1605 The Masque of Blackness was presented at
court. The “masque” was a quasi-dramatic entertainment, primarily
providing a pretense for a group of strangers to dance and sing before
an audience of guests and attendants in a royal court or nobleman’s
house. This elementary pattern was much elaborated during the reign of
James I, when Jones provided increasingly magnificent costumes and
scenic effects for masques at court. The few spoken words that the
masque had demanded in Elizabethan days expanded into a “text” of a few
hundred lines and a number of set songs. Thus the author became
important as well as the designer: he was to provide not only the
necessary words but also a special “allegorical” meaning underlying the
whole entertainment. It was Jonson, in collaboration with Jones, who
gave the Jacobean masque its characteristic shape and style. He did this
primarily by introducing the suggestion of a “dramatic” action. It was
thus the poet who provided the informing idea and dictated the fashion
of the whole night’s assembly. Jonson’s early masques were clearly
successful, for during the following years he was repeatedly called upon
to function as poet at court. Among his masques were Hymenaei (1606),
Hue and Cry After Cupid (1608), The Masque of Beauty (1608), and The
Masque of Queens (1609). In his masques Jonson was fertile in inventing
new motives for the arrival of the strangers. But this was not enough:
he also invented the “antimasque,” which preceded the masque proper and
which featured grotesques or comics who were primarily actors rather
than dancers or musicians.
Important though Jonson was at the court in Whitehall, it was
undoubtedly Jones’s contributions that caused the most stir. That
tension should arise between the two men was inevitable, and eventually
friction led to a complete break: Jonson wrote the Twelfth Night masque
for the court in 1625 but then had to wait five years before the court
again asked for his services.
His prime and later life
In 1606 Jonson and his wife (whom he had married in 1594) were brought
before the consistory court in London to explain their lack of
participation in the Anglican church. He denied that his wife was guilty
but admitted that his own religious opinions held him aloof from
attendance. The matter was patched up through his agreement to confer
with learned men, who might persuade him if they could. Apparently it
took six years for him to decide to conform. For some time before this
he and his wife had lived apart, Jonson taking refuge in turn with his
patrons Sir Robert Townshend and Esmé Stuart, Lord Aubigny.
During this period, nevertheless, he made a mark second only to
Shakespeare’s in the public theatre. His comedies Volpone; or, the Foxe
(1606) and The Alchemist (1610) were among the most popular and esteemed
plays of the time. Each exhibited man’s folly in the pursuit of gold.
Set respectively in Italy and London, they demonstrate Jonson’s
enthusiasm both for the typical Renaissance setting and for his own town
on Europe’s fringe. Both plays are eloquent and compact, sharp-tongued
and controlled. The comedies Epicoene (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (1614)
were also successful.
Jonson embarked on a walking tour in 1618–19, which took him to
Scotland. During the visit the city of Edinburgh made him an honorary
burgess and guild brother. On his return to England he received an
honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford University, a most signal
honour in his time. Jonson’s life was a life of talk as well as of
writing. He engaged in “wit-combats” with Shakespeare and reigned
supreme. It was a young man’s ultimate honour to be regarded as a “son
of Ben.”
In 1623 his personal library was destroyed by fire. By this time his
services were seldom called on for the entertainment of Charles I’s
court, and his last plays failed to please. In 1628 he suffered what was
apparently a stroke and, as a result, was confined to his room and
chair, ultimately to his bed. That same year he was made city
chronologer (thus theoretically responsible for the city’s pageants),
though in 1634 his salary for the post was made into a pension. Jonson
died in 1637 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The first folio edition of his works had appeared in 1616;
posthumously, in a second Jonson folio (1640), appeared Timber: or,
Discoveries, a series of observations on life and letters. Here Jonson
held forth on the nature of poetry and drama and paid his final tribute
to Shakespeare: in spite of acknowledging a belief that his great
contemporary was, on occasion, “full of wind”—sufflaminandus erat—he
declared that “I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side
idolatry, as much as any.”
His plays and achievement
Ben Jonson occupies by common consent the second place among English
dramatists of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. He was a man of
contraries. For “twelve years a papist,” he was also—in fact though not
in title—Protestant England’s first poet laureate. His major comedies
express a strong distaste for the world in which he lived and a delight
in exposing its follies and vices. A gifted lyric poet, he wrote two of
his most successful plays entirely in prose, an unusual mode of
composition in his time. Though often an angry and stubborn man, no one
had more disciples than he. He was easily the most learned dramatist of
his time, and he was also a master of theatrical plot, language, and
characterization. It is a measure of his reputation that his dramatic
works were the first to be published in folio (the term, in effect,
means the “collected works”) and that his plays held their place on the
stage until the period of the Restoration. Later they fell into neglect,
though The Alchemist was revived during the 18th century, and in the
mid-20th century several came back into favour: Volpone, The Alchemist,
and Bartholomew Fair especially have been staged with striking success.
Jonson’s chief plays are still very good theatre. His insistence on
putting classical theory into practice in them has reinforced rather
than weakened the effect of his gift of lively dialogue, robust
characterization, and intricate, controlled plotting. In each of them he
maneuvers a large cast of vital personages, all consistently
differentiated from one another. Jonson’s plots are skillfully put
together; incident develops out of incident in a consistent chain of
cause and effect, taking into account the respective natures of the
personages involved and proceeding confidently through a twisting,
turning action that is full of surprises without relying on coincidence
or chance. Sometimes Jonson’s comedy derives from the dialogue,
especially when it is based on his observation of contemporary tricks of
speech. But there are also superbly ludicrous situations, often hardly
removed from practical joke.
Jonson is renowned for his method of concentrating on a selected
side, or on selected sides, of a character, showing how they dominate
the personality. This is to some extent a natural outcome of his
classical conception of art, but it also stems from his clear, shrewd
observation of people. In Jonson’s plays both eccentricity and normal
behaviour are derived from a dominating characteristic, so that the
result is a live, truthfully conceived personage in whom the ruling
passion traces itself plainly. The later plays, for example, have
characters whose behaviour is dominated by one psychological
idiosyncrasy. But Jonson did not deal exclusively in “humours.” In some
of his plays (notably Every Man in His Humour), the stock types of Latin
comedy contributed as much as the humours theory did. What the theory
provided for him and for his contemporaries was a convenient mode of
distinguishing among human beings. The distinctions so made could be
based on the “humours,” on Latin comic types, or, as in Volpone, in the
assimilation of humans to different members of the animal kingdom. The
characters Volpone, Mosca, Sir Epicure Mammon, Face, Subtle, Dol Common,
Overdo, and Ursula are not simply “humours”; they are glorious type
figures, so vitally rendered as to take on a being that transcends the
type. This method was one of simplification, of typification, and yet
also of vitalization.
The Restoration dramatists’ use of type names for their characters
(Cockwood, Witwoud, Petulant, Pinchwife, and so on) was a harking back
to Jonson, and similarly in the 18th century, with such characters as
Peachum, Lumpkin, Candour, and Languish. And though, as the 18th century
proceeded, comic dramatists increasingly used names quite arbitrarily,
the idea of the Jonsonian “type” or “humour” was always at the root of
their imagining. Jonson thus exerted a great influence on the
playwrights who immediately followed him. In the late Jacobean and
Caroline years, it was he, Shakespeare, and Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher who provided all the models. But it was he, and he alone, who
gave the essential impulse to dramatic characterization in comedy of the
Restoration and also in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Clifford Leech
|
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy,
Francis Beaumont, in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), amusingly insults
the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays.
John Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic
plays frequently border on tragedy. All values are mocked by
Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy
The Dutch Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the
pleasures and perils of libertinism. His tragicomedy The
Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and
sexual and political disgust; Marston cuts the audience
adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay
of parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of
Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral concern with greed and
self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit
of money as the sole human absolute and buying and selling,
usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as the dominant
modes of social interaction. His unprejudiced satire touches
the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool
and knave, and the sympathies of the audience are typically
engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal
and dexterous whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old One
(1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray
his society dynamically, as a mechanism in which each sex
and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus
concerned less with characterizing individuals in depth than
with examining the inequalities and injustices of the world
that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl
(c. 1608) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only
Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to
Jonson’s; the misbehaviour that Jonson condemned morally as
“humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the
product of circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the
fore in his great tragedies, Women Beware Women (c. 1621)
and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of
men of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they
themselves have casually set in train, proving the
answerability of all men for their actions despite the
exemptions claimed for privilege and status. The hand of
heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of
the aristocratic libertine D’Amville in
Cyril Tourneur’s
The
Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown of old
codes of deference before a progressive middle-class
morality is strongly in evidence. In The Revenger’s Tragedy
(1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing
attack on courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints
about inflation and penury in the countryside at large. For
more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in
the corrupt and sprawling bureaucracy of the modern court
and in the political eclipse of the nobility before
incipient royal absolutism. In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603)
Machiavellian statesmen abound, while
George Chapman’s
Bussy
d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron
(1608) drew on recent French history to chart the collision
of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style
aristocrat, whose code of honour had outlived its social
function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman
doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The
classic tragedies of state are John Webster’s, with their
dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies,
malcontents, and informers. His The White Devil (1612), a
divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply
corrupt society, and the heroine in The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her
world, yet her noble death cannot avert the fearfully futile
and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of
power was mounted through the experience of its women.
Thomas Middleton
born , April? 1580, London, Eng.
died July 4, 1627, Newington Butts, Surrey
late-Elizabethan dramatist who drew people as he
saw them, with comic gusto or searching irony.
By 1600 Middleton had spent two years at
Oxford and had published three books of verse.
He learned to write plays by collaborating with
Thomas Dekker, John Webster, and others for the
producer Philip Henslowe.
A popular playwright, he was often
commissioned to write and produce lord mayor’s
pageants and other civic entertainments, and in
1620 he was appointed city chronologer. His
chief stage success was A Game at Chess (1625),
in which the Black King and his men,
representing Spain and the Jesuits, are
checkmated by the White Knight, Prince Charles.
This political satire drew crowds to the Globe
Theatre until the Spanish ambassador protested
and James I suppressed the play.
Middleton’s masterpieces are two tragedies,
Women Beware Women (1621?, published 1657) and
The Changeling (1622, with William Rowley;
published 1653). His comedies picture a society
dazzled by money in which most people grasp for
all they can get, by any means. Michaelmas Term
(1605?, published 1607) is one of the richest in
irony. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (1606?,
published 1608) two rival usurers are so eager
to score over each other that both are taken in
by a clever nephew. A Trick was entered for
licensing with an unattributed play entitled The
Revenger’s Tragedy (1607). Modern scholarship
attributes the latter to Middleton, although
Cyril Tourneur is sometimes given as the author.
In A Mad World, My Masters (1604?, published
1608) an old country gentleman prides himself on
his generosity to all except his grandson and
heir.
The Roaring Girl (1604–10?, with Dekker;
published 1611) depicts events in the life of
the notorious criminal Moll Frith (Moll
Cutpurse), who dressed as a man and preferred
her freedom to marriage. A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside (1613?, published 1630) is an
exuberant comedy that makes fun of naive or
complacent London citizens.
Middleton’s tragicomedies are farfetched in
plot but strong in dramatic situations. A Fair
Quarrel (1616?, with Rowley, published 1617)
contains one of Middleton’s few heroes, Captain
Ager, with his conflicts of conscience. Most of
Middleton’s other plays are comedies. He
collaborated with Dekker in The Honest Whore
(1604), and with Rowley and Philip Massinger in
The Old Law (1618?, published 1656). In 2007 all
the works attributed to Middleton were published
together, for the first time, as Thomas
Middleton: The Collected Works (eds. Gary Taylor
and John Lavagnino).
|
|
|
John Webster
born c. 1580, London, Eng.
died c. 1632
English dramatist whose The White Devil (c.
1609–c. 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c.
1612/13, published 1623) are generally regarded
as the paramount 17th-century English tragedies
apart from those of Shakespeare.
Little is known of Webster’s life. His
preface to Monuments of Honor, his Lord Mayor’s
Show for 1624, says he was born a freeman of the
Merchant Taylors’ Company. He was probably a
coachmaker, and possibly he was an actor. Apart
from his two major plays and The Devils Law-Case
(c. 1620; published 1623), his dramatic work
consists of collaborations (not all extant) with
leading writers. With Thomas Dekker, his main
collaborator, he wrote Westward Ho (1604) and
Northward Ho (1605), both of which were
published in 1607. He is also believed to have
worked to varying degrees with William Rowley,
Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, John Ford, and
perhaps Philip Massinger. Eight extant plays and
some nondramatic verse and prose are wholly or
partly his; the most standard edition is The
Complete Works of John Webster, ed. by F.L.
Lucas, 4 vol. (1927).
|
The last Renaissance dramatists
Already in the Jacobean period, signs of a politer drama
such as would prevail after 1660 were beginning to appear.
Simply in terms of productivity and longevity, the most
successful Jacobean playwright was John Fletcher, whose
ingenious tragicomedies and sometimes bawdy comedies were
calculated to attract the applause of the emerging Stuart
leisured classes. With plays such as The Faithful
Shepherdess (1609 or 1610), Fletcher caught up with the
latest in avant-garde Italianate drama, while his most
dazzling comedy, The Wild Goose Chase (produced 1621,
printed 1652), is a battle of the sexes set among Parisian
gallants and their ladies; it anticipates the Restoration
comedy of manners. Fletcher’s successor in the reign of
Charles I was James Shirley, who showed even greater
facility with romantic comedy and the mirroring of fashions
and foibles. In The Lady of Pleasure (1635) and Hyde Park
(1637), Shirley presented the fashionable world to itself in
its favourite haunts and situations.
John Fletcher
baptized December 20, 1579, Rye,
Sussex, England
died August 29, 1625, London
English Jacobean dramatist who collaborated
with Francis Beaumont and other dramatists on
comedies and tragedies between about 1606 and
1625.
His father, Richard Fletcher, was minister of
the parish in which John was born and became
afterward queen’s chaplain, dean of
Peterborough, and bishop successively of
Bristol, Worcester, and London, gaining a
measure of fame as an accuser in the trial of
Mary, Queen of Scots, and as the chaplain
sternly officiating at her execution. When not
quite 12, John was apparently admitted pensioner
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and two
years later became a Bible clerk. From the time
of his father’s death (1596) until 1607 nothing
is known of him. His name is first linked with
Beaumont’s in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607), to
which both men contributed encomiums.
Fletcher began to work with Beaumont probably
about 1607, at first for the Children of the
Queen’s Revels and its successor and then (from
c. 1609 until Beaumont’s retirement in 1613)
mainly for the King’s Men at the Globe and
Blackfriars theatres. After 1613 he often
collaborated with or had his plays revised by
Philip Massinger, who actually succeeded him in
1625 as chief playwright of the King’s Men;
other collaborators included Nathan Field and
William Rowley. Throughout his career he also
wrote plays unaided. He died in the London
plague of 1625 that killed some 40,000 others;
the antiquarian John Aubrey claimed that he had
lingered in the city to be measured for a suit
of clothes instead of making his escape to the
country.
The canon of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays
is approximately represented by the 52 plays in
the folio Fifty Comedies and Tragedies… (1679);
but any consideration of the canon must omit one
play from the 1679 folio (James Shirley’s
Coronation) and add three not to be found in it
(Henry VIII, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, A
Very Woman). Of these 54 plays not more than 12
are by Beaumont or by Beaumont and Fletcher in
collaboration. Another 3 were probably
collaborations with Beaumont and Massinger. The
others represent Fletcher either unaided or in
collaboration with dramatists other than
Beaumont, principally Massinger.
The masterpieces of the Beaumont and Fletcher
collaboration—Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and
A King and No King—show, most clearly in the
last, the emergence of most of the features that
distinguish the Fletcherian mode from that of
Shakespeare, George Chapman, or John Webster:
the remote, often pseudohistorical, fairy-tale
setting; the clear, smooth speech rising to
great emotional arias of declamatory rhetoric;
the basically sensational or bizarre plot that
faces the characters with wild “either–or”
choices between extremes and that can be
manipulated toward a sad or a happy ending as
the playwrights choose; the sacrifice of
consistency and plausibility in characterization
so that patterns can be made out of constantly
shifting emotional states and piquant situations
can be prolonged.
Of Fletcher’s unaided plays, The Faithfull
Shepheardesse, The Mad Lover, The Loyall
Subject, The Humorous Lieutenant, Women Pleas’d,
The Island Princesse, and A Wife for a Moneth
(all between c. 1608 and c. 1624) are perhaps
the best. Each of these is a series of
extraordinary situations and extreme attitudes,
displayed through intense declamations. The best
of these are perhaps The Loyall Subject and A
Wife for a Moneth, the latter a florid and
loquacious play, in which a bizarre sexual
situation is handled with cunning piquancy, and
the personages illustrate clearly Fletcher’s
tendency to make his men and women
personifications of vices and virtues rather
than individuals. The best of Fletcher’s
comedies, for urbanity and consistency of tone,
is probably The Wild-Goose Chase, a play of
episodes rather than of intricate intrigue, but
alive with irony and easy wit.
Lastly, there are the Fletcherian plays in
which others besides Beaumont had a hand. Wit at
Several Weapons is a comedy that might have been
written wholly by Thomas Middleton; and The
Captaine (to which Beaumont may, however, have
contributed) is a lively, complex play of sexual
intrigue, with tragic dilemmas too. Notable
among the numerous plays in this group are The
False One and The Beggars Bush. The former is an
original, incisive, and moderately subtle
treatment of the story of Caesar and Cleopatra,
which may well have aided John Dryden to compose
All for Love and for which the greater credit
goes to Massinger. The latter is worth reading
for its “version of pastoral,” which genially
persuades the audience that it is better to be a
country beggar than a tyrannical king.
|
However, the underlying tensions of the time continued to
preoccupy the drama of the other major Caroline playwrights:
John Ford, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome. The plays of
Ford, the last major tragic dramatist of the Renaissance,
focus on profoundly conservative societies whose values are
in crisis. In ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633?), a seemingly
typical middle-class family is destroyed by the discovery of
incest. In The Broken Heart (1633?), a courtly society
collapses under the pressure of hidden political maladies.
Massinger, too, wrote some fine tragedies (The Roman Actor,
1626), but his best plays are comedies and tragicomedies
preoccupied with political themes, such as The Bondman
(1623), which deals with issues of liberty and obedience,
and A New Way to Pay Old Debts (performed 1625, printed
1633), which satirizes the behaviour and outlook of the
provincial gentry. The tradition of subversive domestic
satire was carried down to the English Civil Wars in the
plays of Brome, whose anarchic and popular comedies, such as
The Antipodes (1640) and A Jovial Crew (produced 1641,
printed 1652), poke fun at all levels of society and include
caustic and occasionally libelous humour. The outbreak of
fighting in 1642 forced the playhouses to close, but this
was not because the theatre had become identified with the
court. Rather, a theatre of complex political sympathies was
still being produced. The crisis in which the playhouses had
become embroiled had been the drama’s preoccupation for
three generations.
John Ford
baptized April 17, 1586, Ilsington, Devon, Eng.
died 1639?
English dramatist of the Caroline period, whose
revenge tragedies are characterized by certain
scenes of austere beauty, insight into human
passions, and poetic diction of a high order.
In 1602 Ford was admitted to the Middle Temple
(a training college for lawyers), and he
remained there, except for a period of
suspension (1606–08), until at least 1617 and
possibly much later still. He published an elegy
on the Earl of Devonshire and a prose pamphlet
in 1606, and a few other minor nondramatic works
have been attributed to him during this period.
It is not certain that he wrote for the stage
until his collaboration with Thomas Dekker and
William Rowley on the play The Witch of Edmonton
in 1621. He also collaborated with Dekker in The
Sun’s Darling (1624), perhaps also in The Welsh
Ambassador (1623), and in three other plays, now
lost, of about the same date. His hand has been
seen in Thomas Middleton’s and William Rowley’s
Spanish Gypsy (1623), John Fletcher’s Fair Maid
of the Inn (1626), and other plays of Francis
Beaumont and Fletcher.
From about 1627 to 1638 Ford wrote plays by
himself, mostly for private theatres, but the
sequence of his eight extant plays cannot be
precisely determined, and only two of them can
be dated. His plays are: The Broken Heart; The
Lover’s Melancholy (1628); ’Tis Pity She’s a
Whore; Perkin Warbeck; The Queen; The Fancies,
Chaste and Noble; Love’s Sacrifice; and The
Lady’s Trial (1638). There are a few
contemporary references to Ford, but nothing is
known of his personal life, and there is no
certain record of him after 1639.
Ford’s reputation, which has never been
beyond controversy, rests mainly on the first
four plays he wrote alone; of these, ’Tis Pity
She’s a Whore is probably the best known. The
story concerns the incestuous love of Giovanni
and his sister Annabella. When she is found to
be pregnant, she agrees to marry her suitor
Soranzo; the lovers’ secret is finally
discovered, but Soranzo’s plan for revenge is
outpaced by Giovanni’s murder of Annabella and
then Soranzo, at the hands of whose hired
killers Giovanni himself finally dies. There is
no sense in ’Tis Pity that Ford is arguing a
case for the brother and sister’s unnatural
union, but he does exhibit an eloquent sympathy
for the lovers, who are set apart from others by
their unlawful relationship, their consciousness
of their sin, and their sensual and at times
even arrogant acceptance of it.
The Broken Heart is characteristic of Ford’s
work in its depiction of a noble and virtuous
heroine who is torn between her true love and an
unhappy forced marriage, again with tragic
consequences for all concerned. Perkin Warbeck
is a historical play centring on the tragic fate
of the deluded impostor of that name who claimed
to be the Duke of York. The Lover’s Melancholy
is the best of Ford’s other plays, all of which
are tragicomedies.
Ford’s austerely powerful themes are blurred
by subplots featuring minor characters and bad
comedy, but he is still considered the most
important tragedian of the reign of King Charles
I (1625–49). Ford’s work is distinguished by the
highly wrought power of its blank verse and by
its tragically frustrated characters whose
intense desires are blocked by the dictates of
circumstance.
|
|
|
Philip Massinger
born 1583, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, Eng.
died March 1639/40, London
English Jacobean and Caroline playwright noted
for his gifts of comedy, plot construction,
social realism, and satirical power.
Besides the documentation of his baptism at St.
Thomas’s Church, Salisbury, it is known that
Massinger attended St. Alban Hall, Oxford, in
1602, but nothing certain is known about his
life from then until 1613, when he was in prison
for debt. Bailed out by the theatrical
impresario Philip Henslowe, he spent a period
working as the junior partner in coauthored
plays, collaborating with established dramatists
such as Thomas Dekker and John Fletcher, and
eventually graduated to his own independent
productions. In 1625 he succeeded Fletcher, some
of whose plays he revised, as the chief
playwright of the King’s Men (formerly Lord
Chamberlain’s Men). Though apparently not as
successful as Fletcher, he remained with the
King’s Men until his death, producing plays
marked by a high moral tone and elevated
philosophic character.
Among the plays Massinger collaborated on
with Fletcher is The False One (c. 1620), a
treatment of the story of Caesar and Cleopatra.
Two other important plays written in
collaboration are The Fatal Dowry (1616–19, with
Nathan Field), a domestic tragedy in a French
setting, and The Virgin Martyr (1620?, with
Thomas Dekker), a historical play about the
persecution of Christians under the Roman
emperor Diocletian. Fifteen plays written solely
by Massinger have survived, but many of their
dates can only be conjectured. The four
tragedies are The Duke of Milan (1621–22) and
The Unnatural Combat (1624?)—both skillfully
told mystery stories of a melodramatic type—and
The Roman Actor (1626) and Believe As You List
(1631)—each a historical tragedy in a classical
setting. The Roman Actor is considered his best
serious play.
The Bondman (1623), about a slave revolt in
the Greek city of Syracuse, is one of
Massinger’s seven tragicomedies and shows his
concern for state affairs. The Renegado (1624),
a tragicomedy with a heroic Jesuit character,
gave rise to the still-disputed theory that he
became a Roman Catholic. Another tragicomedy,
The Maid of Honour (1621?), combines political
realism with the courtly refinement of later
Caroline drama. The tendency of his serious
plays to conform to Caroline fashion, however,
is contradicted by the mordant realism and
satirical force of his two great comedies—A New
Way to Pay Old Debts, his most popular and
influential play, in which he expresses genuine
indignation at economic oppression and social
disorder, and The City Madam (1632?), dealing
with similar evils but within a more starkly
contrived plot that curiously combines
naturalistic and symbolic modes. One of his last
plays, The King and the Subject (1638), had
politically objectionable lines cut from it by
King Charles himself.
|
|
|
Richard Brome
born c. 1590
died Sept. 24, 1652, London, Eng.
English dramatist generally deemed the most
considerable of the minor Jacobean playwrights.
Nothing is known of Brome’s origins. As early as
1614, he is known to have been in Ben Jonson’s
service, probably acting as Jonson’s secretary
and domestic. The relationship developed into
friendship, and knowledge of Brome’s personal
character is chiefly drawn from Jonson’s sonnet
to “my old faithful servant and by his continued
virtue my loving friend . . . Mr. Richard
Brome,” prefixed to Brome’s Northern Lasse
(produced 1629?; published 1632).
Brome was a prolific and inventive writer,
continuing the Elizabethan dramatic tradition
until the theatres were closed by order of
Parliament in 1642. Filled with pictures of
contemporary London and its life, his comedies
present a lively and sometimes challenging
criticism of their own times.
The Northern Lasse made Brome’s reputation as
a dramatist and was the most popular of his
plays, although A Joviall Crew (produced 1641,
published 1652) is considered to be his best
work. There are 15 of his comedies extant,
including The City Wit; or The Woman Wears the
Breeches (produced 1629; published 1653), The
Sparagus Garden (produced 1635; published 1640),
The Antipodes (produced 1638; published 1640),
and A Mad Couple Well Match’d (produced 1639;
published 1653). He was ruined by the closing of
the theatres and died in the Charterhouse, a
charity institution. Two volumes of his plays
were edited by Alexander Brome (no relation) in
1653 and 1659.
|
Early Stuart poetry and prose
In the early Stuart period
the failure of consensus was dramatically demonstrated in
the political collapse of the 1640s and in the growing
sociocultural divergences of the immediately preceding
years. While it was still possible for the theatres to
address the nation very much as a single audience, the
court—with the Baroque style, derived from the Continent,
that it encouraged in painting, masque, and panegyric—was
becoming more remote from the country at large and was
regarded with increasing distrust. In fact, a growing
separation between polite and vulgar literature was to
dispel many of the characteristic strengths of Elizabethan
writing. Simultaneously, long-term intellectual changes were
beginning to impinge on the status of poetry and prose.
Sidney’s defense of poetry, which maintained that poetry
depicted what was ideally rather than actually true, was
rendered redundant by the loss of agreement over
transcendent absolutes; the scientist, the Puritan with his
inner light, and the skeptic differed equally over the
criteria by which truth was to be established. From the
circle of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at Great Tew in
Oxfordshire—which included poets such as Edmund Waller,
Thomas Carew, and Sidney Godolphin—William Chillingworth
argued that it was unreasonable for any individual to force
his opinions onto any other, while
Thomas Hobbes reached the
opposite conclusion (in his
Leviathan, 1651) that all must
be as the state pleases. In this context, the old idea of
poetry as a persuader to virtue fell obsolete, and the
century as a whole witnessed a massive transfer of energy
into new literary forms, particularly into the rationally
balanced couplet, the autobiography, and the embryonic
novel. At the same time, these influences were neither
uniform nor consistent; Hobbes might repudiate the use of
metaphor as senseless and ambiguous, yet his own prose was
frequently enlivened by half-submerged metaphors.
Lucius Cary
born c. 1610, Burford Priory, Oxfordshire, England
died September 20, 1643, Newbury, Berkshire
English royalist who attempted to exercise a moderating
influence in the struggles that preceded the English Civil
Wars (1642–51) between the royalists and the
Parliamentarians. He is remembered chiefly as a prominent
figure in the History of the Rebellion by his close friend
Edward Hyde (afterward Earl of Clarendon).
The son of Sir Henry Cary, lord deputy of Ireland from 1622
to 1629, Cary succeeded his father as Viscount Falkland in
1633. At his manor at Great Tew, near Burford Priory,
Falkland surrounded himself with some of the most learned
men of his age.
As a member of the Long Parliament, which convened in
November 1640, Falkland at first took an active part in the
opposition to the policies of King Charles I, going so far
as to support the impeachment of the king’s chief minister,
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. At the same time, he
sought a compromise between the Anglican, or royalist, and
the Puritan factions in Parliament. When the Puritans
obtained control of the House of Commons, he broke with
Parliament and on Jan. 1, 1642, became Charles I’s secretary
of state. He saw limited action in the Civil Wars but fell
into despair when it became evident the conflict would not
end quickly. According to Hyde, Falkland then welcomed death
on the battlefield. He was killed in the Battle of Newbury
in September 1643.
|
|
|
Edmund Waller
born March 3, 1606, Coleshill, Hertfordshire, Eng.
died Oct. 21, 1687, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire
English poet whose adoption of smooth, regular versification
prepared the way for the heroic couplet’s emergence by the
end of the century as the dominant form of poetic
expression. His importance was fully recognized by his age.
“Mr. Waller reformed our numbers,” said John Dryden, who,
with Alexander Pope, followed him and raised the couplet to
its most concentrated form.
Waller was educated at Eton College and the University of
Cambridge and entered Parliament while still a young man. In
1631 he married the heiress of a wealthy London merchant,
but she died three years later. He then paid unsuccessful
court to Lady Dorothy Sidney (whom he addressed in poetry as
Sacharissa) and in 1644 married Mary Bracey.
During the political turmoil of the 1640s, with
Parliament arrayed against the King, Waller was at first a
champion of religious toleration and an opponent of the
bishops. He then drifted to the King’s cause, and in 1643 he
was deeply involved in a conspiracy (sometimes known as
Waller’s plot) to establish London as a stronghold of the
King, leading to the poet’s arrest in May. By wholesale
betrayal of his colleagues, and by lavish bribes, he managed
to avoid the death sentence, but he was banished and heavily
fined. He then lived abroad until 1651, when he made his
peace with his distant cousin Oliver Cromwell, later lord
protector of the Commonwealth.
Several of Waller’s poems, including “Go, lovely
Rose!”—one of the most famous lyric poems in English
literature—had circulated for some 20 years before the
appearance of his Poems in 1645. The first edition claiming
full authorization, however, was that of 1664. In 1655
appeared his “Panegyrick to my Lord Protector” (i.e.,
Cromwell), but in 1660 he also celebrated “To the King, upon
his Majesties happy return.” He became a member of the Royal
Society and was returned to Parliament in 1661, where he
held moderate opinions and advocated religious toleration.
His later works include Divine Poems (1685). The Second Part
of Mr. Waller’s Poems was published in 1690.
Waller’s poetry was held in high esteem throughout the
18th century, but his reputation waned in the 19th century
along with that of Augustan poetry in general. His technical
achievement in leading away from the dense verse of the
Metaphysical poets lies in his incorporation of wit more
related to rational judgment and in his replacement of
Metaphysical poetry’s dramatic immediacy, argumentative
structure, and ethical seriousness with generalizing
statement, easy associative development, and urbane social
comment. His pursuit of definitive phrasing through
inversion and balance led to the tight, symmetrical
patterning of the Augustan heroic couplet. Waller helped to
transmit to the Augustans a synthesis of the regular iambic
norm with native English four-stress alliterative metre and
showed its use for expressive emphasis, as in the line
“Invíte affećtion, and restráin our ráge.” Waller is also
remembered for the distinction of his poems on public themes
and for his elegance, lyrical grace, and formal polish.
|
|
|
Thomas Carew
born 1594/95, West Wickham, Kent, Eng.
died March 22, 1639/40, London
English poet and first of the Cavalier song writers.
Educated at the University of Oxford and at the Middle
Temple, London, Carew served as secretary at embassies in
Venice, The Hague, and Paris. In 1630 Carew received a court
appointment and became server at table to the king. The Earl
of Clarendon considered him as “a person of pleasant and
facetious wit” among a brilliant circle of friends that
included the playwright Ben Jonson.
Carew’s only masque, Coelum Britannicum, was performed by
the king and his gentlemen in 1634 and published the same
year. Music for it was composed by Henry Lawes, who, among
others, set some of Carew’s songs to music.
Carew’s poems, circulated in manuscript, were amatory
lyrics or occasional poems addressed to members of the court
circle, notable for their ease of language and skillful
control of mood and imagery. His longest poem was the
sensuous Rapture, but his lyrics are among the most complex
and thoughtful of any produced by the Cavalier poets. He was
a meticulous workman, and his own verses addressed to Ben
Jonson show that he was proud to share Jonson’s creed of
painstaking perfection. He greatly admired the poems of John
Donne, whom he called king of “the universal monarchy of
wit” in his elegy on Donne (deemed the outstanding piece of
poetic criticism of the age). Carew was also indebted to
Italian poets, particularly Giambattista Marino, whose
libertine spirit, brilliant wit, and technical facility were
much akin to his own, and on whose work he based several of
his lyrics. He translated a number of the Psalms and is said
to have died with expressions of remorse for a life of
libertinism. His poems were published a few weeks after his
death. The definitive edition is The Poems of Thomas Carew,
with His Masque “Coelum Britannicum,” edited by Rhodes
Dunlap (1949).
|
|
|
Sidney Godolphin
baptized Jan. 15, 1610
died Feb. 9, 1643, Chagford, Devon, Eng.
English poet and Royalist during the reign of Charles I.
Educated at Exeter College, Oxford (1624–27), and at one of
the Inns of Court, Godolphin traveled abroad and also became
friends with Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and other men of
letters. He was elected a member of the House of Commons
(from Helston, Cornwall) in 1628 and was again elected to
the Short Parliament in March 1640 and to the Long
Parliament in October 1640. A staunch Royalist, he was a
supporter of the doomed Earl of Strafford and was one of the
last to leave the House of Commons when Charles I ordered
his supporters to withdraw. During the first Civil War, he
joined the Royalist forces of Sir Ralph Hopton and, at age
33, was killed in action while advancing into Devon.
The Earl of Clarendon paid a notable tribute to Godolphin
in his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England,
and Hobbes eulogized him in Leviathan. A few of Godolphin’s
poems were published in the 17th century; of these, the
chief is The Passion of Dido for Aeneas, a translation from
Virgil’s fourth book of the Aeneid, apparently unfinished at
his death and completed and published by the poet Edmund
Waller (1658). Other poems survived in manuscript
collections. The first complete collection was edited by
George Saintsbury, in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period,
vol. 2 (1906).
|
|
|
Thomas Hobbes
"Leviathan"
English philosopher
born April 5, 1588, Westport, Wiltshire, Eng.
died Dec. 4, 1679, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
Main
English philosopher, scientist, and historian, best known
for his political philosophy, especially as articulated in
his masterpiece Leviathan (1651). Hobbes viewed government
primarily as a device for ensuring collective security.
Political authority is justified by a hypothetical social
contract among the many that vests in a sovereign person or
entity the responsibility for the safety and well-being of
all. In metaphysics, Hobbes defended materialism, the view
that only material things are real. His scientific writings
present all observed phenomena as the effects of matter in
motion. Hobbes was not only a scientist in his own right but
a great systematizer of the scientific findings of his
contemporaries, including Galileo and Johannes Kepler. His
enduring contribution is as a political philosopher who
justified wide-ranging government powers on the basis of the
self-interested consent of citizens.
Early life
Hobbes’s father was a quick-tempered vicar of a small
Wiltshire parish church. Disgraced after engaging in a brawl
at his own church door, he disappeared and abandoned his
three children to the care of his brother, a well-to-do
glover in Malmesbury. When he was four years old, Hobbes was
sent to school at Westport, then to a private school, and
finally, at 15, to Magdalen Hall in the University of
Oxford, where he took a traditional arts degree and in his
spare time developed an interest in maps.
For nearly the whole of his adult life, Hobbes worked for
different branches of the wealthy and aristocratic Cavendish
family. Upon taking his degree at Oxford in 1608, he was
employed as page and tutor to the young William Cavendish,
afterward the second earl of Devonshire. Over the course of
many decades Hobbes served the family and their associates
as translator, traveling companion, keeper of accounts,
business representative, political adviser, and scientific
collaborator. Through his employment by William Cavendish,
the first earl of Devonshire, and his heirs, Hobbes became
connected with the royalist side in disputes between the
king and Parliament that continued until the 1640s and that
culminated in the English Civil Wars (1642–51). Hobbes also
worked for the marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a cousin of
William Cavendish, and Newcastle’s brother, Sir Charles
Cavendish. The latter was the centre of the “Wellbeck
Academy,” an informal network of scientists named for one of
the family houses at Wellbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.
Intellectual development
The two branches of the Cavendish family nourished Hobbes’s
enduring intellectual interests in politics and natural
science, respectively. Hobbes served the earls of Devonshire
intermittently until 1628; Newcastle and his brother
employed him in the following decade. He returned to the
Devonshires after the 1640s. Through both branches of the
Cavendish family, and through contacts he made in his own
right on the Continent as traveling companion to various
successors to the Devonshire title, Hobbes became a member
of several networks of intellectuals in England. Farther
afield, in Paris, he became acquainted with the circle of
scientists, theologians, and philosophers presided over by
the theologian Marin Mersenne. This circle included René
Descartes.
Hobbes was exposed to practical politics before he became
a student of political philosophy. The young William
Cavendish was a member of the 1614 and 1621 Parliaments, and
Hobbes would have followed his contributions to
parliamentary debates. Further exposure to politics came
through the commercial interests of the earls of Devonshire.
Hobbes attended many meetings of the governing body of the
Virginia Company, a trading company established by James I
to colonize parts of the eastern coast of North America, and
came into contact with powerful men there. (Hobbes himself
was given a small share in the company by his employer.) He
also confronted political issues through his connection with
figures who met at Great Tew; with them he debated not only
theological questions but also the issues of how the
Anglican church should be led and organized and how its
authority should be related to that of any English civil
government.
In the late 1630s Parliament and the king were in
conflict over how far normal kingly powers could be exceeded
in exceptional circumstances, especially in regard to
raising money for armies. In 1640 Hobbes wrote a treatise
defending King Charles I’s own wide interpretation of his
prerogatives. Royalist members of Parliament used arguments
from Hobbes’s treatise in debates, and the treatise itself
circulated in manuscript form. The Elements of Law, Natural
and Politic (written in 1640, published in a misedited
unauthorized version in 1650) was Hobbes’s first work of
political philosophy, though he did not intend it for
publication as a book.
The development of Hobbes the scientist began in his
middle age. He was not trained in mathematics or the
sciences at Oxford, and his Wiltshire schooling was
strongest in classical languages. His interest in motion and
its effects was stimulated mainly through his conversation
and reading on the Continent, as well as through his
association with the scientifically and mathematically
minded Wellbeck Cavendishes. In 1629 or 1630 Hobbes was
supposedly charmed by Euclid’s method of demonstrating
theorems in the Elements. According to a contemporary
biographer, he came upon a volume of Euclid in a gentleman’s
study and fell in love with geometry. Later, perhaps in the
mid-1630s, he had gained enough sophistication to pursue
independent research in optics, a subject he later claimed
to have pioneered. Within the Wellbeck Academy, he exchanged
views with other people interested in the subject. And as a
member of Mersenne’s circle in Paris after 1640, he was
taken seriously as a theorist not only of ethics and
politics but of optics and ballistics. Indeed, he was even
credited with competence in mathematics by some very able
French mathematicians, including Gilles Personne de
Roberval.
Self-taught in the sciences and an innovator at least in
optics, Hobbes also regarded himself as a teacher or
transmitter of sciences developed by others. In this
connection he had in mind sciences that, like his own
optics, traced observed phenomena to principles about the
sizes, shapes, positions, speeds, and paths of parts of
matter. His great trilogy—De Corpore (1655; “Concerning
Body”), De Homine (1658; “Concerning Man”), and De Cive
(1642; “Concerning the Citizen”)—was his attempt to arrange
the various pieces of natural science, as well as psychology
and politics, into a hierarchy, ranging from the most
general and fundamental to the most specific. Although
logically constituting the last part of his system, De Cive
was published first, because political turmoil in England
made its message particularly timely and because its
doctrine was intelligible both with and without
natural-scientific preliminaries. De Corpore and De Homine
incorporated the findings of, among others, Galileo on the
motions of terrestrial bodies, Kepler on astronomy, William
Harvey on the circulation of the blood, and Hobbes himself
on optics. The science of politics contained in De Cive was
substantially anticipated in Part II of The Elements of Law
and further developed in Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form,
and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil
(1651), the last—and in the English-speaking world the most
famous—formulation of Hobbes’s political philosophy (see
below Hobbes’s system).
Exile in Paris
When strife became acute in 1640, Hobbes feared for his
safety. Shortly after completing The Elements of Law, he
fled to Paris, where he rejoined Mersenne’s circle and made
contact with other exiles from England. He would remain in
Paris for more than a decade, working on optics and on De
Cive, De Corpore, and Leviathan. In 1646 the young prince of
Wales, later to become Charles II, sought refuge in Paris,
and Hobbes accepted an invitation to instruct him in
mathematics.
Political philosophy
Hobbes presented his political philosophy in different forms
for different audiences. De Cive states his theory in what
he regarded as its most scientific form. Unlike The Elements
of Law, which was composed in English for English
parliamentarians—and which was written with local political
challenges to Charles I in mind—De Cive was a Latin work for
an audience of Continental savants who were interested in
the “new” science—that is, the sort of science that did not
appeal to the authority of the ancients but approached
various problems with fresh principles of explanation.
De Cive’s break from the ancient authority par
excellence—Aristotle—could not have been more loudly
advertised. After only a few paragraphs, Hobbes rejects one
of the most famous theses of Aristotle’s politics, namely
that human beings are naturally suited to life in a polis
and do not fully realize their natures until they exercise
the role of citizen. Hobbes turns Aristotle’s claim on its
head: human beings, he insists, are by nature unsuited to
political life. They naturally denigrate and compete with
each other, are very easily swayed by the rhetoric of
ambitious men, and think much more highly of themselves than
of other people. In short, their passions magnify the value
they place on their own interests, especially their
near-term interests. At the same time, most people, in
pursuing their own interests, do not have the ability to
prevail over competitors. Nor can they appeal to some
natural common standard of behaviour that everyone will feel
obliged to abide by. There is no natural self-restraint,
even when human beings are moderate in their appetites, for
a ruthless and bloodthirsty few can make even the moderate
feel forced to take violent preemptive action in order to
avoid losing everything. The self-restraint even of the
moderate, then, easily turns into aggression. In other
words, no human being is above aggression and the anarchy
that goes with it.
War comes more naturally to human beings than political
order. Indeed, political order is possible only when human
beings abandon their natural condition of judging and
pursuing what seems best to each and delegate this judgment
to someone else. This delegation is effected when the many
contract together to submit to a sovereign in return for
physical safety and a modicum of well-being. Each of the
many in effect says to the other: “I transfer my right of
governing myself to X (the sovereign) if you do too.” And
the transfer is collectively entered into only on the
understanding that it makes one less of a target of attack
or dispossession than one would be in one’s natural state.
Although Hobbes did not assume that there was ever a real
historical event in which a mutual promise was made to
delegate self-government to a sovereign, he claimed that the
best way to understand the state was to conceive of it as
having resulted from such an agreement.
In Hobbes’s social contract, the many trade liberty for
safety. Liberty, with its standing invitation to local
conflict and finally all-out war—a “war of every man against
every man”—is overvalued in traditional political philosophy
and popular opinion, according to Hobbes; it is better for
people to transfer the right of governing themselves to the
sovereign. Once transferred, however, this right of
government is absolute, unless the many feel that their
lives are threatened by submission. The sovereign determines
who owns what, who will hold which public offices, how the
economy will be regulated, what acts will be crimes, and
what punishments criminals should receive. The sovereign is
the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of
law, and supreme interpreter of scripture, with authority
over any national church. It is unjust—a case of reneging on
what one has agreed—for any subject to take issue with these
arrangements, for, in the act of creating the state or by
receiving its protection, one agrees to leave judgments
about the means of collective well-being and security to the
sovereign. The sovereign’s laws and decrees and appointments
to public office may be unpopular; they may even be wrong.
But unless the sovereign fails so utterly that subjects feel
that their condition would be no worse in the free-for-all
outside the state, it is better for the subjects to endure
the sovereign’s rule.
It is better both prudentially and morally. Because no
one can prudently welcome a greater risk of death, no one
can prudently prefer total liberty to submission. Total
liberty invites war, and submission is the best insurance
against war. Morality too supports this conclusion, for,
according to Hobbes, all the moral precepts enjoining
virtuous behaviour can be understood as derivable from the
fundamental moral precept that one should seek peace—that is
to say, freedom from war—if it is safe to do so. Without
peace, he observed, man lives in “continual fear, and danger
of violent death,” and what life he has is “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.” What Hobbes calls the “laws of
nature,” the system of moral rules by which everyone is
bound, cannot be safely complied with outside the state, for
the total liberty that people have outside the state
includes the liberty to flout the moral requirements if
one’s survival seems to depend on it.
The sovereign is not a party to the social contract; he
receives the obedience of the many as a free gift in their
hope that he will see to their safety. The sovereign makes
no promises to the many in order to win their submission.
Indeed, because he does not transfer his right of
self-government to anyone, he retains the total liberty that
his subjects trade for safety. He is not bound by law,
including his own laws. Nor does he do anything unjustly if
he makes decisions about his subjects’s safety and
well-being that they do not like.
Although the sovereign is in a position to judge the
means of survival and well-being for the many more
dispassionately than they are able to do themselves, he is
not immune to self-interested passions. Hobbes realizes that
the sovereign may behave iniquitously. He insists that it is
very imprudent for a sovereign to act so iniquitously that
he disappoints his subjects’s expectation of safety and
makes them feel insecure. Subjects who are in fear of their
lives lose their obligations to obey and, with that, deprive
the sovereign of his power. Reduced to the status of one
among many by the defection of his subjects, the unseated
sovereign is likely to feel the wrath of those who submitted
to him in vain.
Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), does not
significantly depart from the view of De Cive concerning the
relation between protection and obedience, but it devotes
much more attention to the civil obligations of Christian
believers and the proper and improper roles of a church
within a state. Hobbes argues that believers do not endanger
their prospects of salvation by obeying a sovereign’s
decrees to the letter, and he maintains that churches do not
have any authority that is not granted by the civil
sovereign.
Hobbes’s political views exerted a discernible influence
on his work in other fields, including historiography and
legal theory. His political philosophy is chiefly concerned
with the way in which government must be organized in order
to avoid civil war. It therefore encompasses a view of the
typical causes of civil war, all of which are represented in
Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament (1679), his history of the
English Civil Wars. Hobbes produced the first English
translation of Thucydides’ History of the Pelopponesian War,
which he thought contained important lessons for his
contemporaries regarding the excesses of democracy, the
worst kind of dilution of sovereign authority, in his view.
Hobbes’s works on church history and the history of
philosophy also strongly reflect his politics. He was firmly
against the separation of government powers, either between
branches of government or between church and state. His
ecclesiastical history emphasizes the way in which
power-hungry priests and popes threatened legitimate civil
authority. His history of philosophy is mostly concerned
with how metaphysics was used as a means of keeping people
under the sway of Roman Catholicism at the expense of
obedience to a civil authority. His theory of law develops a
similar theme regarding the threats to a supreme civil power
posed by common law and the multiplication of authoritative
legal interpreters.
Return to England
There are signs that Hobbes intended Leviathan to be read by
a monarch, who would be able to take the rules of statecraft
from it. A specially bound copy was given to Prince Charles
while he was in exile in Paris. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s
suggestion in Leviathan that a subject had the right to
abandon a ruler who could no longer protect him gave serious
offense to the prince’s advisers. Barred from the exiled
court and under suspicion by the French authorities for his
attack on the papacy (see below), Hobbes found his position
in Paris becoming daily more intolerable. At the end of
1651, at about the time that Leviathan was published, he
returned to England and made his peace with the new regime
of Oliver Cromwell. Hobbes submitted to that authority for a
long time before the monarchy was restored in 1660.
From the time of the Restoration in 1660, Hobbes enjoyed
a new prominence. Charles II received Hobbes again into
favour. Although Hobbes’s presence at court scandalized the
bishops and the chancellor, the king relished his wit. He
even granted Hobbes a pension of £100 a year and had his
portrait hung in the royal closet. It was not until 1666,
when the House of Commons prepared a bill against atheism
and profaneness, that Hobbes felt seriously endangered, for
the committee to which the bill was referred was instructed
to investigate Leviathan. Hobbes, then verging upon 80,
burned such of his papers as he thought might compromise
him.
Optics
Hobbes’s most significant contributions to natural science
were in the field of optics. An optical theory in his day
was expected to pronounce on the nature of light, on the
transmission of light from the Sun to the Earth, on
reflection and refraction, and on the workings of optical
instruments such as mirrors and lenses. Hobbes took up these
topics in several relatively short treatises and in
correspondence, including with Descartes on the latter’s
Dioptrics (1637). The most polished of Hobbes’s optical
works was A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (1646).
In its mature form, Hobbes’s optical theory held that the
dilations and contractions of an original light source, such
as the Sun, are transmitted by contact with a uniform,
pervading ethereal medium, which in turn stimulates the eye
and the nerves connected to it, eventually resulting in a
“phantasm,” or sense-image, in the brain. In Hobbes’s
theory, the qualities of a sense-image do not need to be
explained in terms of the qualities of a perceived object.
Instead, motion and matter—the motion of a light source, the
disturbance of a physical nervous system, and sensory
membranes—are all that have to be invoked. In contrast,
traditional optics—optics as developed within Aristotle’s
framework—had held that seeing the colour of something—the
redness of a strawberry, for example—was a matter of
reproducing the “form” of the colour in the sense organs;
the form is then abstracted from the sense organs by the
mind. “Sensible forms,” the characteristic properties
transmitted by objects to the senses in the act of
perception, were entirely dispensed with in Hobbes’s optics.
Hobbes’s system
Theories that trace all observed effects to matter and
motion are called mechanical. Hobbes was thus a mechanical
materialist: He held that nothing but material things are
real, and he thought that the subject matter of all the
natural sciences consists of the motions of material things
at different levels of generality. Geometry considers the
effects of the motions of points, lines, and solids; pure
mechanics deals with the motions of three-dimensional bodies
in a full space, or plenum; physics deals with the motions
of the parts of inanimate bodies insofar as they contribute
to observed phenomena; and psychology deals with the effects
of the internal motions of animate bodies on behaviour. The
system of the natural sciences described in Hobbes’s trilogy
represents his understanding of the materialist principles
on which all science is based.
The fact that Hobbes included politics as well as
psychology within his system, however, has tended to
overshadow his insistence on the autonomy of political
understanding from natural-scientific understanding.
According to Hobbes, politics does not need to be understood
in terms of the motions of material things (although,
ultimately, it can be); a certain kind of widely available
self-knowledge is evidence enough of the human propensity to
war. Although Hobbes is routinely read as having discerned
the “laws of motion” for both human beings and human
societies, the most that can plausibly be claimed is that he
based his political philosophy on psychological principles
that he thought could be illuminated by general laws of
motion.
Last years and influence
Although he was impugned by enemies at home, no Englishman
of the day stood in such high repute abroad as Hobbes, and
distinguished foreigners who visited England were always
eager to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and
freshness of intellect remained unquenched. In his last
years Hobbes amused himself by returning to the classical
studies of his youth. The autobiography in Latin verse with
its playful humour, occasional pathos, and sublime
self-complacency was brought forth at the age of 84. In 1675
he produced a translation of the Odyssey in rugged English
rhymes, with a lively preface, “Concerning the Virtues of an
Heroic Poem.” A translation of the Iliad appeared in the
following year. As late as four months before his death, he
was promising his publisher “somewhat to print in English.”
Hobbes’s importance lies not only in his political
philosophy but also in his contribution to the development
of an anti-Aristotelian and thoroughly materialist
conception of natural science. His political philosophy
influenced not only successors who adopted the
social-contract framework—John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
and Immanuel Kant, for example—but also less directly those
theorists who connected moral and political decision making
in rational human beings to considerations of self-interest
broadly understood. The materialist bent of Hobbes’s
metaphysics is also much in keeping with contemporary
Anglo-American, or analytic, metaphysics, which tends to
recognize as real only those entities that physics in
particular or natural science in general presupposes.
Tom Sorell
|
The Metaphysical poets
Writers responded to these conditions in different ways, and
in poetry three main traditions may broadly be
distinguished, which have been coupled with the names of
Spenser, Jonson, and John Donne. Donne heads the tradition
that 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson labeled for all time
as the Metaphysicals; what unites these poets as a group is
less the violent yoking of unlike ideas to which Johnson
objected than that they were all poets of personal and
individual feeling, responding to their time’s pressures
privately or introspectively. This privateness, of course,
was not new, but the period in general experienced a huge
upsurge of contemplative or devotional verse.
Donne
Donne has been taken to be the apex of the 16th-century
tradition of plain poetry, and certainly the love lyrics of
his that parade their cynicism, indifference, and
libertinism pointedly invert and parody the conventions of Petrarchan lyric, though he courts admiration for his poetic
virtuosity no less than the Petrarchans. A “great haunter of
plays” in his youth, he is always dramatic; his verse
cultivates “strong lines,” dissonance, and colloquiality.
Carew praised him for avoiding poetic myths and excluding
from his verse the “train of gods and goddesses”; what fills
it instead is a dazzling battery of language and argument
drawn from science, law and trade, court and city. Donne is
the first London poet: his early satires and elegies are
packed with the busy metropolitan milieu, and his songs and
sonnets, which include his best writing, with their
kaleidoscope of contradictory attitudes, ironies, and
contingencies, explore the alienation and ennui of urban
living. Donne treats experience as relative, a matter of
individual point of view; the personality is multiple,
quizzical, and inconsistent, eluding definition. His love
poetry is that of the frustrated careerist. By inverting
normal perspectives and making the mistress the centre of
his being—he boasts that she is “all states, and all
princes, I, nothing else is”—he belittles the public world,
defiantly asserting the superior validity of his private
experience, and frequently he erodes the traditional
dichotomy of body and soul, outrageously praising the
mistress in language reserved for platonic or religious
contexts. The defiance is complicated, however, by a
recurrent conviction of personal unworthiness that
culminates in the Anniversaries (1611–12), two long
commemorative poems written on the death of a patron’s
daughter. These expand into the classic statement of
Jacobean melancholy, an intense meditation on the vanity of
the world and the collapse of traditional certainties. Donne
would, reluctantly, find respectability in a church career,
but even his religious poems are torn between the same tense
self-assertion and self-abasement that mark his secular
poetry.
John Donne
"Songs and
Sonnets",
"Elegies"
English poet
born , sometime between Jan. 24 and June 19, 1572, London, Eng.
died March 31, 1631, London
Main
leading English poet of the Metaphysical school and dean of St. Paul’s
Cathedral, London (1621–31). Donne is often considered the greatest love
poet in the English language. He is also noted for his religious verse
and treatises and for his sermons, which rank among the best of the 17th
century.
Life and career
Donne was born of Roman Catholic parents. His mother, a direct
descendant of Sir Thomas More’s sister, was the youngest daughter of
John Heywood, epigrammatist and playwright. His father, who, according
to Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton, was “descended from a very
ancient family in Wales,” was a prosperous London merchant. Donne was
four when his father died, and shortly thereafter his mother married Dr.
John Syminges, who raised the Donne children. At age 12 Donne
matriculated at the University of Oxford, where he studied for three
years, and he then most likely continued his education at the University
of Cambridge, though he took no degree from either university because as
a Roman Catholic he could not swear the required oath of allegiance to
the Protestant queen, Elizabeth. Following his studies Donne probably
traveled in Spain and Italy and then returned to London to read law,
first at Thavies Inn (1591) and then at Lincoln’s Inn (1592–94). There
he turned to a comparative examination of Roman Catholic and Protestant
theology and perhaps even toyed with religious skepticism. In 1596 he
enlisted as a gentleman with the Earl of Essex’s successful privateering
expedition against Cádiz, and the following year he sailed with Sir
Walter Raleigh and Essex in the near-disastrous Islands expedition,
hunting for Spanish treasure ships in the Azores.
After his return to London in 1597, Donne became secretary to Sir
Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal, in whose employ Donne
remained for almost five years. The appointment itself makes it probable
that Donne had become an Anglican by this time. During his tenure with
the lord keeper, Donne lived, according to Walton, more as a friend than
as a servant in the Egerton household, where Sir Thomas appointed him “a
place at his own table, to which he esteemed [Donne’s] company and
discourse to be a great ornament.” Donne’s contemporary, Richard Baker,
wrote of him at this time as “not dissolute [i.e., careless], but very
neat; a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great
writer of conceited Verses.”
While in Egerton’s service, Donne met and fell in love with Anne
More, niece of Egerton’s second wife and the daughter of Sir George
More, who was chancellor of the garter. Knowing there was no chance of
obtaining Sir George’s blessing on their union, the two married
secretly, probably in December 1601. For this offense Sir George had
Donne briefly imprisoned and dismissed from his post with Egerton as
well. He also denied Anne’s dowry to Donne. Because of the marriage,
moreover, all possibilities of a career in public service were dashed,
and Donne found himself at age 30 with neither prospects for employment
nor adequate funds with which to support his household.
During the next 10 years Donne lived in poverty and humiliating
dependence, first on the charity of Anne’s cousin at Pyrford, Surrey,
then at a house in Mitcham, about 7 miles (11 km) from London, and
sometimes in a London apartment, where he relied on the support of noble
patrons. All the while he repeatedly tried (and failed) to secure
employment, and in the meantime his family was growing; Anne ultimately
bore 12 children, 5 of whom died before they reached maturity. Donne’s
letters show his love and concern for his wife during these years:
“Because I have transplanted [her] into a wretched fortune, I must
labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices, as giving
her my company, and discourse.” About himself, however, Donne recorded
only despair: “To be part of no body is as nothing; and so I am. . . . I
am rather a sickness or a disease of the world than any part of it and
therefore neither love it nor life.”
In spite of his misery during these years, Donne wrote and studied
assiduously, producing prose works on theology, canon law, and
anti-Catholic polemics and composing love lyrics, religious poetry, and
complimentary and funerary verse for his patrons. As early as 1607
friends had begun urging him to take holy orders in the Church of
England, but he felt unworthy and continued to seek secular employment.
In 1611–12 he traveled through France and the Low Countries with his
newfound patron, Sir Robert Drury, leaving his wife at Mitcham. Upon
their return from the European continent, the Drurys provided the Donnes
with a house on the Drury estate in London, where they lived until 1621.
In 1614 King James I refused Donne’s final attempt to secure a post
at court and said that he would appoint him to nothing outside the
church. By this time Donne himself had come to believe he had a
religious vocation, and he finally agreed to take holy orders. He was
ordained deacon and priest on Jan. 23, 1615, and preferment soon
followed. He was made a royal chaplain and received, at the king’s
command, the degree of doctor of divinity from Cambridge. On Nov. 22,
1621, Donne was installed as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at which he
carried out his duties with efficiency and integrity. But this turnabout
in Donne’s professional life was accompanied by searing personal grief.
Two years after his ordination, in 1617, Anne Donne died at the age of
33 after giving birth to a stillborn child. Grief-stricken at having
lost his emotional anchor, Donne vowed never to marry again, even though
he was left with the task of raising his children in modest financial
circumstances at the time. Instead, his bereavement turned him fully to
his vocation as an Anglican divine. The power and eloquence of Donne’s
sermons soon secured for him a reputation as the foremost preacher in
the England of his day, and he became a favourite of both Kings James I
and Charles I.
In 1623 Donne fell seriously ill with either typhus or relapsing
fever, and during his sickness he reflected on the parallels between his
physical and spiritual illnesses—reflections that culminated during his
recovery in the prose Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published in
1624. On Feb. 25, 1631, Donne, who was fatally ill with stomach cancer,
left his sickbed to preach a final sermon at court; this was published
posthumously as “Death’s Duell” and is sometimes considered to be his
own funeral sermon. He returned to his sickbed and, according to Walton,
had a drawing made of himself in his shroud, perhaps as an aid to
meditating on his own dissolution. From this drawing Nicholas Stone
constructed a marble effigy of Donne that survived the Great Fire of
1666 and still stands today in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Poetry
Because almost none of Donne’s poetry was published during his lifetime,
it is difficult to date it accurately. Most of his poems were preserved
in manuscript copies made by and passed among a relatively small but
admiring coterie of poetry lovers. Most current scholars agree, however,
that the elegies (which in Donne’s case are poems of love, not of
mourning), epigrams, verse letters, and satires were written in the
1590s, the Songs and Sonnets from the 1590s until 1617, and the “Holy
Sonnets” and other religious lyrics from the time of Donne’s marriage
until his ordination in 1615. He composed the hymns late in his life, in
the 1620s. Donne’s Anniversaries were published in 1611–12 and were the
only important poetic works by him published in his lifetime.
Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the
conventions of 16th-century English verse, particularly that of Sir
Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Even his early satires and elegies,
which derive from classical Latin models, contain versions of his
experiments with genre, form, and imagery. His poems contain few
descriptive passages like those in Spenser, nor do his lines follow the
smooth metrics and euphonious sounds of his predecessors. Donne replaced
their mellifluous lines with a speaking voice whose vocabulary and
syntax reflect the emotional intensity of a confrontation and whose
metrics and verbal music conform to the needs of a particular dramatic
situation. One consequence of this is a directness of language that
electrifies his mature poetry. “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me
love,” begins his love poem “The Canonization,” plunging the reader into
the midst of an encounter between the speaker and an unidentified
listener. Holy Sonnet XI opens with an imaginative confrontation wherein
Donne, not Jesus, suffers indignities on the cross: “Spit in my face yee
Jewes, and pierce my side. . .”
From these explosive beginnings, the poems develop as closely
reasoned arguments or propositions that rely heavily on the use of the
conceit—i.e., an extended metaphor that draws an ingenious parallel
between apparently dissimilar situations or objects. Donne, however,
transformed the conceit into a vehicle for transmitting multiple,
sometimes even contradictory, feelings and ideas. And, changing again
the practice of earlier poets, he drew his imagery from such diverse
fields as alchemy, astronomy, medicine, politics, global exploration,
and philosophical disputation. Donne’s famous analogy of parting lovers
to a drawing compass affords a prime example. The immediate shock of
some of his conceits aroused Samuel Johnson to call them “heterogeneous
ideas . . . yoked by violence together.” Upon reflection, however, these
conceits offer brilliant and multiple insights into the subject of the
metaphor and help give rise to the much-praised ambiguity of Donne’s
lyrics.
The presence of a listener is another of Donne’s modifications of the
Renaissance love lyric, in which the lovers lament, hope, and dissect
their feelings without facing their ladies. Donne, by contrast, speaks
directly to the lady or some other listener. The latter may even
determine the course of the poem, as in “The Flea,” in which the speaker
changes his tack once the woman crushes the insect on which he has built
his argument about the innocence of lovemaking. But for all their
dramatic intensity, Donne’s poems still maintain the verbal music and
introspective approach that define lyric poetry. His speakers may
fashion an imaginary figure to whom they utter their lyric outburst, or,
conversely, they may lapse into reflection in the midst of an address to
a listener. “But O, selfe traytor,” the forlorn lover cries in “Twickham
Garden” as he transforms part of his own psyche into a listener. Donne
also departs from earlier lyrics by adapting the syntax and rhythms of
living speech to his poetry, as in “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and
I/Did, till we lov’d?”. Taken together, these features of his poetry
provided an impetus for the works of such later poets as Robert
Browning, William Butler Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.
Donne also radically adapted some of the standard materials of love
lyrics. For example, even though he continued to use such Petrarchan
conceits as “parting from one’s beloved is death,” a staple of
Renaissance love poetry, he either turned the comparisons into comedy,
as when the man in “The Apparition” envisions himself as a ghost
haunting his unfaithful lady, or he subsumed them into the texture of
his poem, as the title “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” exemplifies.
Donne’s love lyrics provide keen psychological insights about a broad
range of lovers and a wide spectrum of amorous feelings. His speakers
range from lustful men so sated by their numerous affairs that they
denounce love as a fiction and women as objects—food, birds of prey,
mummies—to platonic lovers who celebrate both the magnificence of their
ladies and their own miraculous abstention from consummating their love.
Men whose love is unrequited feel victimized and seek revenge on their
ladies, only to realize the ineffectuality of their retaliation. In the
poems of mutual love, however, Donne’s lovers rejoice in the
compatibility of their sexual and spiritual love and seek immortality
for an emotion that they elevate to an almost religious plane.
Donne’s devotional lyrics, especially the “Holy Sonnets,” “Good
Friday 1613, Riding Westward,” and the hymns, passionately explore his
love for God, sometimes through sexual metaphors, and depict his doubts,
fears, and sense of spiritual unworthiness. None of them shows him
spiritually at peace.
The most sustained of Donne’s poems, the Anniversaries, were written
to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of
his patron, Sir Robert Drury. These poems subsume their ostensible
subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world.
Elizabeth Drury becomes, as Donne noted, “the Idea of a woman,” and a
lost pattern of virtue. Through this idealized feminine figure, Donne in
The First Anniversarie: An Anatomie of the World laments humanity’s
spiritual death, beginning with the loss of Eden and continuing in the
decay of the contemporary world, in which men have lost the wisdom that
connects them to God. In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the
Soule, Donne, partly through a eulogy on Elizabeth Drury, ultimately
regains the wisdom that directs him toward eternal life.
Prose
Donne’s earliest prose works, Paradoxes and Problems, probably were
begun during his days as a student at Lincoln’s Inn. These witty and
insouciant paradoxes defend such topics as women’s inconstancy and
pursue such questions as “Why do women delight much in feathers?” and
“Why are Courtiers sooner Atheists than men of other conditions?” While
living in despair at Mitcham in 1608, Donne wrote a casuistic defense of
suicide entitled Biathanatos. His own contemplation of suicide, he
states, prompted in him “a charitable interpretation of theyr Action,
who dye so.” Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, attacks the
recusants’ unwillingness to swear the oath of allegiance to the king,
which Roman Catholics were required to do after the Gunpowder Plot
(1605). The treatise so pleased James I that he had Oxford confer an
honorary master of arts degree on Donne. In 1610 Donne also wrote a
prose satire on the Jesuits entitled Ignatius His Conclave, in both
Latin and English.
In 1611 Donne completed his Essays in Divinity, the first of his
theological works. Upon recovering from a life-threatening illness,
Donne in 1623 wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the most enduring
of his prose works. Each of its 23 devotions consists of a meditation,
an expostulation, and a prayer, all occasioned by some event in Donne’s
illness, such as the arrival of the king’s personal physician or the
application of pigeons to draw vapours from Donne’s head. The Devotions
correlate Donne’s physical decline with spiritual sickness, until both
reach a climax when Donne hears the tolling of a passing bell (16, 17,
18) and questions whether the bell is ringing for him. Like Donne’s
poetry, the Devotions are notable for their dramatic immediacy and their
numerous Metaphysical conceits, such as the well-known “No man is an
Iland,” by which Donne illustrates the unity of all Christians in the
mystical body of Christ.
It is Donne’s sermons, however, that most powerfully illustrate his
mastery of prose. One-hundred and fifty-six of them were published by
his son in three great folio editions (1640, 1649, and 1661). Though
composed during a time of religious controversy, Donne’s
sermons—intellectual, witty, and deeply moving—explore the basic tenets
of Christianity rather than engage in theological disputes. Donne
brilliantly analyzed Biblical texts and applied them to contemporary
events, such as the outbreak of plague that devastated London in 1625.
The power of his sermons derives from their dramatic intensity, candid
personal revelations, poetic rhythms, and striking conceits.
Reputation and influence
The first two editions of Donne’s Poems were published posthumously, in
1633 and 1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. The
Poems were sufficiently popular to be published eight times within 90
years of Donne’s death, but his work was not to the general taste of the
18th century, when he was regarded as a great but eccentric “wit.” The
notable exception to that appraisal was Alexander Pope, who admired
Donne’s intellectual virtuosity and echoed some of Donne’s lines in his
own poetry. From the early 19th century, however, perceptive readers
began to recognize Donne’s poetic genius. Robert Browning credited Donne
with providing the germ for his own dramatic monologues. By the 20th
century, mainly because of the pioneering work of the literary scholar
H.J.C. Grierson and the interest of T.S. Eliot, Donne’s poetry
experienced a remarkable revival.
The impression in his poetry that thought and argument are arising
immediately out of passionate feeling made Donne the master of both the
mature Yeats and Eliot, who were reacting against the meditative
lyricism of a Romantic tradition in decline. Indeed, the play of
intellect in Donne’s poetry, his scorn of conventionally poetic images,
and the dramatic realism of his style made him the idol of
English-speaking poets and critics in the first half of the 20th
century. Readers continue to find stimulus in Donne’s fusion of witty
argument with passion, his dramatic rendering of complex states of mind,
his daring and unhackneyed images, and his ability (little if at all
inferior to William Shakespeare’s) to make common words yield up rich
poetic meaning without distorting the essential quality of English
idiom.
Patricia Garland Pinka
|
Donne’s influence
Donne’s influence was vast; the taste for wit and conceits
reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them courtiers
such as Aurelian Townshend and William Habington, academics
such as
William Cartwright, and religious poets such as
Francis Quarles and Henry King. The only true Metaphysical,
in the sense of a poet with genuinely philosophical
pretensions, was Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury),
important as an early proponent of religion formulated by
the light of reason. Donne’s most enduring followers were
the three major religious poets George Herbert, Richard
Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. Herbert, a Cambridge academic
who buried his courtly ambitions in the quiet life of a
country parsonage, wrote some of the most resonant and
attractive religious verse in the language. Though not
devoid of tension, his poems substitute for Donne’s tortured
selfhood a humane, meditative assurance. They evoke a
practical piety and a richly domestic world, but they
dignify it with a musicality and a feeling for the beauty of
holiness that bespeak Herbert’s identification with the
nascent Anglican church of Archbishop William Laud. By
contrast, the poems of Crashaw (a Roman Catholic) and the
Welsh recluse Vaughan move in alternative traditions: the
former toward the sensuous ecstasies and effusions of the
Continental Baroque, the latter toward hermetic naturalism
and mystical raptures.
However, in the context of the Civil Wars, Vaughan’s and
Crashaw’s introspection began to look like retreat, and,
when the satires of John Cleveland and the lyrics of
Abraham
Cowley took the
Donne manner to extremes of paradox and
vehemence, it was symptomatic of a loss of control in the
face of political and social traumas. The one poet for whom
metaphysical wit became a strategy for holding together
conflicting allegiances was Donne’s outstanding heir,
Andrew
Marvell. Marvell’s writing is taut, extraordinarily dense
and precise, uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with
Puritanical economy of statement. His finest work seems to
have been done at the time of greatest strain, in about
1650–53, and under the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax,
parliamentarian general but opponent of King Charles I’s
execution, to whose retirement from politics to his country
estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in Upon Appleton
House. His lyrics are poems of the divided mind, sensitive
to all the major conflicts of their society—body against
soul, action against retirement, experience against
innocence, Oliver Cromwell against the king—but Marvell
sustains the conflict of irreconcilables through paradox and
wit rather than attempting to decide or transcend it. In
this situation, irresolution has become a strength; in a
poem like An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from
Ireland, which weighs the claims of King Charles and
Cromwell, the poet’s reserve was the only effective way of
confronting the unprecedented demise of traditional
structures of politics and morality.
William Cartwright
born December 1611, Ashchurch,
Tewkesbury, Eng.
died Nov. 29, 1643, Oxford, Oxfordshire
British writer greatly admired in his day as a
poet, scholar, wit, and author of plays in the
comic tradition of Ben Jonson.
Educated at Westminster School and the
University of Oxford, Cartwright became a
preacher, noted for his florid style, and a
reader in metaphysics. On the outbreak of the
English Civil Wars in 1642, he joined the
university war council, and in 1643 he was
university junior proctor. Charles I wore black
on the day of Cartwright’s funeral. Cartwright’s
plays were written before he took orders; The
Ordinary (produced 1635?) mocked Puritans, and
The Royal Slave (1636) was staged at court. His
plays, fantastic in plot and stilted and
artificial in treatment, have not withstood the
test of time.
|
|
|
Francis Quarles
baptized May 8, 1592, Romford, Essex, Eng.
died Sept. 8, 1644, London
religious poet remembered for his Emblemes, the
most notable emblem book in English.
The son of a minor court official, Quarles was
educated at the University of Cambridge and at
Lincoln’s Inn, London. The wealth of Quarles’s
family at first allowed him to live a leisured
and studious life, but in the late 1620s he
served as secretary to Archbishop James Ussher
in Ireland. In 1640 Quarles became chronologer
to London, virtually abandoning poetry to employ
his pen more lucratively. He died in relative
poverty.
With Emblemes (1635) Quarles produced a new
type of emblem book (traditionally a collection
of symbolic pictures, usually accompanied by
mottoes and expositions in verse and by a prose
commentary). Each emblem consisted of a
grotesque engraving and a paraphrase of
Scripture in ornate and metaphysical language
and concluded with an epigrammatic verse.
Emblemes was so successful that Quarles produced
another emblem book, Hieroglyphikes of the Life
of Man (1638). The two were printed together in
1639, and this work became possibly the most
popular book of verse of the 17th century.
His first prose work, Enchiridion (1640), was
a highly popular book of aphorisms. In the
English Civil Wars he is said to have suffered
for his allegiance and for writing The Loyall
Convert (1644), a pamphlet defending Charles I’s
position.
|
|
|
Henry King
baptized Jan. 16, 1592, Worminghall,
Buckinghamshire, Eng.
died Sept. 30, 1669, Chichester, Sussex
English poet and Anglican bishop whose elegy for
his wife is considered one of the best in the
English language.
Educated at Oxford, King received numerous and
remunerative preferments. A friend and an
executor of the estate of John Donne, his poetry
was as much influenced by Ben Jonson as by
Donne. King became bishop of Chichester in 1642,
but his estate was sequestered during the
interregnum and he spent the time until the
Restoration (1660) in restless retirement with
friends and relations. The collection Poems,
Elegies, Paradoxes, and Sonets (1657), bearing
his name, was not prepared by him and included
poems of others. The standard modern edition is
that of Margaret Crum (1965).
|
|
|
Edward Herbert
born March 3, 1583, Eyton-on-Severn,
Shropshire, Eng.
died Aug. 5, 1648, London
Baron Herbert Of Castle Island
English courtier, soldier, diplomat, historian,
metaphysical poet, and philosopher (“the father
of English Deism”), also remembered for his
revealing Autobiography.
Brother of the devotional poet George
Herbert, he was educated at Oxford. From 1608 to
1617 he campaigned in Holland and travelled in
France and Italy. He was ambassador at Paris for
five years and received Irish and English
peerages (1624, 1629) for his political
services.
De Veritate (“On Truth”) was published in
Paris in 1624. Thereafter he devoted himself to
philosophy, history, and literature. When the
Civil War broke out he lacked enthusiasm for
either cause; however, he opened Montgomery
Castle to the Parliamentary forces in 1644 and
met with severe criticism.
De Veritate was designed to establish
instructed reason as the safest guide in a
search for truth. Herbert examines freshly the
nature of truth and concludes that there are
five religious ideas that are God-given, innate
in the mind of man. They are the belief in a
Supreme Being, in the need to worship him, in
the pursuit of a pious and virtuous life as the
best form of worship, in repentance, and in
rewards and punishments in the next world.
Supplementary intuitions may be valid, but
Herbert virtually rejected revelation.
De Veritate was further elaborated in his De
Causis Errorum (“On the Causes of Errors”) and
De Religione Laici (“On the Religion of the
Laity”), published together in 1645; De
Religione Gentilium (1663; “On the Religion of
the Gentiles”); and A Dialogue Between a Tutor
and His Pupil (c. 1645; published 1768;
authorship disputed).
His works reflect the active and versatile
mind of a competent writer. The Autobiography,
ending at 1624, (published 1764), brings his
human qualities into focus: his social gifts,
adventurous spirit, studious bent, and worldly
wisdom. Proud of his military experience and
diplomatic skill, he nourished a crotchety
regard for his personal honour, resulting in
af-frays which he recalls with evident
satisfaction.
Herbert also wrote historical works,
including The Expedition to the Isle of Rhé
(Latin 1656; Eng. trans., 1860) and The Life and
Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1649).
Occasional Verses (1665) shows him to have been
a talented and original poet as well.
|
|
|
George Herbert
born April 3, 1593, Montgomery Castle, Wales
died March 1, 1633, Bemerton, Wiltshire, Eng.
English religious poet, a major metaphysical
poet, notable for the purity and effectiveness
of his choice of words.
A younger brother of Edward Herbert, 1st Baron
Herbert of Cherbury, a notable secular
metaphysical poet, George in 1610 sent his
mother for New Year’s two sonnets on the theme
that the love of God is a fitter subject for
verse than the love of woman, a foreshadowing of
his poetic and vocational bent.
Educated at home, at Westminster School, and
at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was in 1620
elected orator of the university, a position
that he described as “the finest place in the
university.” His two immediate predecessors in
the office had risen to high positions in the
state, and Herbert was much involved with the
court. During Herbert’s academic career, his
only published verse was that written for
special occasions in Greek and Latin. By 1625
Herbert’s sponsors at court were dead or out of
favour, and he turned to the church, being
ordained deacon. He resigned as orator in 1627
and in 1630 was ordained priest and became
rector at Bemerton. He became friends with
Nicholas Ferrar, who had founded a religious
community at nearby Little Gidding, and devoted
himself to his rural parish and the
reconstruction of his church. Throughout his
life he wrote poems, and from his deathbed he
sent a manuscript volume to Ferrar, asking him
to decide whether to publish or destroy them.
Ferrar published them with the title The Temple:
Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations in 1633.
Herbert described his poems as “a picture of
the many spiritual conflicts that have passed
between God and my soul, before I could subject
mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose
service I have now found perfect freedom.”
Herbert shares his conflicts with John Donne,
the archetypal metaphysical poet and a family
friend. As well as personal poems, The Temple
includes doctrinal poems, notably “The Church
Porch,” the first in the volume, and the last,
“The Church Militant.” Other poems are concerned
with church ritual.
The main resemblance of Herbert’s poems to
Donne’s is in the use of common language in the
rhythms of speech. Some of his poems, such as
“The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” are “pattern”
poems, the lines forming the shape of the
subject, a practice Joseph Addison in the 18th
century called “false wit.” Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in the 19th century wrote of Herbert’s
diction, “Nothing can be more pure, manly, and
unaffected.” Herbert was a versatile master of
metrical form and all aspects of the craft of
verse. Though he shared the critical disapproval
given the metaphysical poets until the 20th
century, he was still popular with readers.
Herbert also wrote at Bemerton A Priest to the
Temple: Or The Country Parson, his Character and
Rule of Life (1652). Herbert’s Works (1941;
corrected, 1945), edited by F. Hutchinson, is
the standard text.
|
|
|
Richard
Crashaw
born c. 1613, London, Eng.
died Aug. 21, 1649, Loreto, Papal States [Italy]
English poet known for religious verse of
vibrant stylistic ornamentation and ardent
faith.
The son of a zealous, learned Puritan minister,
Crashaw was educated at the University of
Cambridge. In 1634, the year of his graduation,
he published Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (“A
Book of Sacred Epigrams”), a collection of Latin
verse on scriptural subjects. He held a
fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a centre of
High Church thought, where he was ordained.
During the English Civil Wars (1642–51), his
position at Peterhouse became untenable because
of his growing inclination toward Roman
Catholicism, and he resigned his post before the
Puritans could evict him. He prepared the first
edition of his Steps to the Temple: Sacred
Poems, with other Delights of the Muses for
publication in 1646. It included religious and
secular poems in Latin and English.
He went to France in 1644 and became a Roman
Catholic. When Queen Henrietta Maria of England,
consort of Charles I, moved to Paris with her
entourage two years later, Crashaw was found, by
his friend and fellow poet Abraham Cowley,
living in poverty. The queen sent him to Rome
with a strong recommendation to the pope, but it
was not until a few months before his death that
he received the position of canon of the
Cathedral of Santa Casa (“Holy House”) at
Loreto.
Crashaw’s English religious poems were
republished in Paris in 1652 under the title
Carmen Deo Nostro (“Hymn to Our Lord”). Some of
his finest lines are those appended to “The
Flaming Heart” a poem on St. Teresa of Avila.
Having read the Italian and Spanish mystics,
Crashaw reflected little of the contemporary
English metaphysical poets, adhering, rather, to
the flamboyant imagery of the continental
Baroque poets. He used conceits (elaborate
metaphors) to draw analogies between the
physical beauties of nature and the spiritual
significance of existence. Crashaw’s verse is
marked by loose trains of association, sensuous
imagery, and eager religious emotion. The
standard text of his poems was edited by L.C.
Martin (1927; rev. ed., 1957).
|
|
|
Henry Vaughan
born April 17, 1622, Llansantffraed,
Breconshire, Wales
died April 23, 1695, Llansantffraed
Anglo-Welsh poet and mystic remarkable for the
range and intensity of his spiritual intuitions.
Educated at Oxford and studying law in London,
Vaughan was recalled home in 1642 when the first
Civil War broke out, and he remained there the
rest of his life.
In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of
Juvenal Englished was published, followed by a
second volume in 1647. Meanwhile he had been
“converted” by reading the religious poet George
Herbert and gave up “idle verse.” His Silex
Scintillans (1650; “The Glittering Flint,”
enlarged 1655) and the prose Mount of Olives:
or, Solitary Devotions (1652) show the depth of
his religious convictions and the authenticity
of his poetic genius. Two more volumes of
secular verse were published, ostensibly without
his sanction; but it is his religious verse that
has lived. He also translated short moral and
religious works and two medical works in prose.
At some time in the 1650s he began to practice
medicine and continued to do so throughout his
life.
Though Vaughan borrowed phrases from Herbert
and other writers and wrote poems with the same
titles as Herbert’s, he was one of the most
original poets of his day. Chiefly he had a gift
of spiritual vision or imagination that enabled
him to write freshly and convincingly, as is
illustrated in the opening of “The World”:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a Great Ring of pure and endless light
He was equally gifted in writing about
nature, holding the old view that every flower
enjoys the air it breathes and that even sticks
and stones share man’s expectation of
resurrection. The Romantic poet William
Wordsworth may have been influenced by Vaughan.
Vaughan’s poetry was largely disregarded in
his own day and for a century after his death.
He shared in the revival of interest in
17th-century metaphysical poets in the 20th
century. The standard edition is Works (1914;
2nd ed., 1957), edited by L.C. Martin.
|
|
|
John Cleveland
born June 16, 1613, Loughborough,
Leicestershire, Eng.
died April 29, 1658, London
English poet, the most popular of his time,
and then and in later times the most commonly
abused Metaphysical poet.
Educated at Cambridge, Cleveland became a
fellow there before joining the Royalist army at
Oxford in 1643. In 1645–46 he was judge advocate
with the garrison at Newark until it surrendered
to the Parliamentary forces, after which he
lived with friends. When Charles I put himself
in the hands of the Scots’ army and they turned
him over to the Parliamentary forces, Cleveland
excoriated his enemies in a famous satire, The
Rebel Scot. Imprisoned for “delinquency” in
1655, Cleveland was released on appeal to Oliver
Cromwell, but he did not repudiate his royalist
convictions.
Cleveland’s poems first appeared in The
Character of a London Diurnal (1647) and
thereafter in some 20 collections in the next
quarter century; this large number of editions
attests to his great popularity in the mid-17th
century. Cleveland carried Metaphysical
obscurity and conceit to their limits, and many
of his poems are merely intellectual gymnastics.
From the time of John Dryden’s deprecatory
criticism of the Metaphysical poets, Cleveland
has been a whipping boy for them, largely
because his conceits are profuse and cosmetic
rather than integral to his thought. Cleveland’s
real achievement lay in his political poems,
which were mostly written in heroic couplets and
satirized contemporary persons and issues.
Cleveland’s political satires influenced his
friend Samuel Butler (in Hudibras), and his use
of heroic couplets foreshadowed that of Dryden.
|
|
|
Abraham
Cowley
born 1618, London
died July 28, 1667, Chertsey, Eng.
poet and essayist who wrote poetry of a
fanciful, decorous nature. He also adapted the
Pindaric ode to English verse.
Educated at Westminster school and the
University of Cambridge, where he became a
fellow, he was ejected in 1643 by the Parliament
during the Civil War and joined the royal court
at Oxford. He went abroad with the queen’s court
in 1645 as her cipher secretary and performed
various Royalist missions until his return to
England in 1656. Seemingly reconciled to the
Commonwealth, he did not receive much reward
after Charles II was restored in 1660 and
retired to Chertsey, where he engaged in
horticulture and wrote on the virtues of the
contemplative life.
Cowley tended to use grossly elaborate,
self-consciously poetic language that decorated,
rather than expressed, his feelings. In his
adolescence he wrote verse (Poeticall Blossomes,
1633, 1636, 1637) imitating the intricate rhyme
schemes of Edmund Spenser. In The Mistress
(1647, 1656) he exaggerated John Donne’s
“metaphysical wit”—jarring the reader’s
sensibilities by unexpectedly comparing quite
different things—into what later tastes felt was
fanciful poetic nonsense. His Pindarique Odes
(1656) try to reproduce the Latin poet’s
enthusiastic manner through lines of uneven
length and even more extravagant poetic
conceits.
Cowley also wrote an unfinished epic,
Davideis (1656). His stage comedy The Guardian
(1641, revised 1661) introduced the fop Puny,
who became a staple of Restoration comedy. As an
amateur man of science he promoted the Royal
Society, publishing A Proposition for the
Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661).
In his retirement he wrote sober, reflective
essays reminiscent of Montaigne.
Cowley is often considered a transitional
figure from the metaphysical poets to the
Augustan poets of the 18th century. He was
universally admired in his own day, but by 1737
Alexander Pope could write, justly: “Who now
reads Cowley?” Perhaps his most effective poem
is the elegy on the death of his friend and
fellow poet Richard Crashaw.
|
|
|
Andrew
Marvell
born March 31, 1621, Winestead, Yorkshire,
Eng.
died Aug. 18, 1678, London
English poet whose political reputation
overshadowed that of his poetry until the 20th
century. He is now considered to be one of the
best Metaphysical poets.
Marvell was educated at Hull grammar school and
Trinity College, Cambridge, taking a B.A. in
1639. His father’s death in 1641 may have ended
Marvell’s promising academic career. He was
abroad for at least five years (1642–46),
presumably as a tutor. In 1651–52 he was tutor
to Mary, daughter of Lord Fairfax, the
Parliamentary general, at Nun Appleton,
Yorkshire, during which time he probably wrote
his notable poems “Upon Appleton House” and “The
Garden” as well as his series of Mower poems.
Although earlier opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s
Commonwealth government, he wrote “An Horatian
Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650),
and from 1653 to 1657 he was a tutor to
Cromwell’s ward William Dutton. In 1657 he
became assistant to John Milton as Latin
secretary in the foreign office. “The First
Anniversary” (1655) and “On the Death of O.C.”
(1659) showed his continued and growing
admiration for Cromwell. In 1659 he was elected
member of Parliament for Hull, an office he held
until his death, serving skillfully and
effectively.
After the restoration of Charles II in 1660,
Marvell turned to political verse satires—the
most notable was Last Instructions to a Painter,
against Lord Clarendon, Charles’s lord
chancellor—and prose political satire, notably
The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73). Marvell is
also said to have interceded on behalf of Milton
to have him freed from prison in 1660. He wrote
a commendatory poem for the second edition of
Milton’s Paradise Lost. His political writings
favoured the toleration of religious dissent and
attacked the abuse of monarchical power.
At Marvell’s death, his housekeeper-servant
Mary Palmer claimed to be his widow, although
this was undoubtedly a legal fiction. The first
publication of his poems in 1681 resulted from a
manuscript volume she found among his effects.
While Marvell’s political reputation has
faded and his reputation as a satirist is on a
par with others of his time, his small body of
lyric poems, first recommended in the 19th
century by Charles Lamb, has since appealed to
many readers, and in the 20th century he came to
be considered one of the most notable poets of
his century. Marvell was eclectic: his “To His
Coy Mistress” is a classic of Metaphysical
poetry; the Cromwell odes are the work of a
classicist; his attitudes are sometimes those of
the elegant Cavalier poets; and his nature poems
resemble those of the Puritan Platonists. In “To
His Coy Mistress,” which is one of the most
famous poems in the English language, the
impatient poet urges his mistress to abandon her
false modesty and submit to his embraces before
time and death rob them of the opportunity to
love:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime. . . .
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity . . .
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace. . . .
|
Jonson and the Cavalier poets
By contrast, the Jonsonian tradition was, broadly, that of
social verse, written with a Classical clarity and weight
and deeply informed by ideals of civilized reasonableness,
ceremonious respect, and inner self-sufficiency derived from
Seneca; it is a poetry of publicly shared values and norms.
Jonson’s own verse was occasional; it addresses other
individuals, distributes praise and blame, and promulgates
sober and judicious ethical attitudes. His favoured forms
were the ode, elegy, satire, epistle, and epigram, and they
are always beautifully crafted objects, achieving a
Classical symmetry and monumentality. For Jonson, the
unornamented style meant not colloquiality but labour,
restraint, and control; a good poet had first to be a good
man, and his verses lead his society toward an ethic of
gracious but responsible living.
With the Cavalier poets who succeeded Jonson, the element
of urbanity and conviviality tended to loom larger. Robert
Herrick was perhaps England’s first poet to express
impatience with the tediousness of country life. However,
Herrick’s The Country Life and The Hock Cart rival
Jonson’s
To Penshurst as panegyrics to the Horatian ideal of the
“good life,” calm and retired, but Herrick’s poems gain
retrospective poignancy by their implied contrast with the
disruptions of the Civil Wars. The courtiers Carew, Sir John
Suckling, and Richard Lovelace developed a manner of ease
and naturalness suitable to the world of gentlemanly
pleasure in which they moved; Suckling’s A Session of the
Poets (1637; published 1646) lists more than 20 wits then in
town. The Cavalier poets were writing England’s first vers
de société, lyrics of compliments and casual liaisons, often
cynical, occasionally obscene; this was a line to be picked
up again after 1660, as were the heroic verse and
attitudinizing drama of Jonson’s successor as poet laureate,
Sir William Davenant. A different contribution was the
elegance and smoothness that came to be associated with Sir
John Denham and Edmund Waller, whom the poet
John Dryden
named as the first exponents of “good writing.” Waller’s
inoffensive lyrics are the epitome of polite taste, and
Denham’s topographical poem Cooper’s Hill (1641), a
significant work in its own right, is an important precursor
of the balanced Augustan couplet (as is the otherwise slight
oeuvre of Viscount Falkland). The growth of Augustan
gentility was further encouraged by work done on
translations in mid-century, particularly by Sir Richard
Fanshawe and Thomas Stanley.
Robert
Herrick
baptized Aug. 24, 1591, London, Eng.
died October 1674, Dean Prior, Devonshire
English cleric and poet, the most original of
the “sons of Ben [Jonson],” who revived the
spirit of the ancient classic lyric. He is best
remembered for the line “Gather ye rosebuds
while ye may.”
As a boy, Herrick was apprenticed to his
uncle, Sir William Herrick, a prosperous and
influential goldsmith. In 1613 he went to the
University of Cambridge, graduating in 1617. He
took his M.A. in 1620 and was ordained in 1623.
He then lived for a time in London, cultivating
the society of the city’s wits, enlarging his
acquaintance with writers (Ben Jonson being the
most prominent) and musicians, and enjoying the
round of court society. In 1627 he went as a
chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham on the
military expedition to the Île de Ré to relieve
La Rochelle from the French Protestants. He was
presented with the living of Dean Prior (1629),
where he remained for the rest of his life,
except when, because of his Royalist sympathies,
he was deprived of his post from 1646 until
after the Restoration (1660).
Herrick became well known as a poet about
1620–30; many manuscript commonplace books from
that time contain his poems. The only book that
Herrick published was Hesperides (1648), which
included His Noble Numbers, a collection of
poems on religious subjects with its own title
page dated 1647 but not previously printed.
Hesperides contained about 1,400 poems, mostly
very short, many of them being brief epigrams.
His work appeared after that in miscellanies and
songbooks; the 17th-century English composer
Henry Lawes and others set some of his songs.
Herrick wrote elegies, satires, epigrams,
love songs to imaginary mistresses, marriage
songs, complimentary verse to friends and
patrons, and celebrations of rustic and
ecclesiastical festivals. The appeal of his
poetry lies in its truth to human sentiments and
its perfection of form and style. Frequently
light, worldly, and hedonistic, and making few
pretensions to intellectual profundity, it yet
covers a wide range of subjects and emotions,
ranging from lyrics inspired by rural life to
wistful evocations of life and love’s
evanescence and fleeting beauty. Herrick’s
lyrics are notable for their technical mastery
and the interplay of thought, rhythm, and
imagery that they display. As a poet Herrick was
steeped in the classical tradition; he was also
influenced by English folklore and lyrics, by
Italian madrigals, by the Bible and patristic
literature, and by contemporary English writers,
notably Jonson and Robert Burton.
|
|
|
Sir John
Suckling
born February 1609, Whitton, Middlesex,
England
died 1642, Paris, France
English Cavalier poet, dramatist, and courtier,
best known for his lyrics.
He was educated at Cambridge and inherited his
father’s considerable estates at the age of 18.
He entered Gray’s Inn in 1627 and was knighted
in 1630. He became a prominent figure at court
with a reputation for being “the greatest
gallant of his time, and the greatest gamester
both for bowling and cards”; and he is credited
with having invented cribbage. He was a
gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I and
a friend of the poets Thomas Carew, Richard
Lovelace, and Sir William Davenant. When the war
with the Scots broke out in 1639, Suckling
raised a troop of soldiers, supplying them with
horses at his own expense, and accompanied
Charles I on his ill-fated expedition. The
costumes of Suckling’s gaudy warriors and the
troop’s poor performance in the field were the
subjects of much ridicule.
In 1641 Suckling took an active part in the
plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford from the
Tower. When the plot was discovered, Suckling
fled to France and is believed to have committed
suicide.
Suckling was the author of four plays, the
most ambitious of which is the tragedy Aglaura,
magnificently staged in 1637 and handsomely
printed at the author’s expense (1638); the best
is the lively comedy The Goblins (1638). They
all contain echoes of Shakespeare and Beaumont
and Fletcher.
His reputation as a poet rests on his lyrics,
the best of which justifies the description of
him as “natural, easy Suckling.” He inherited
from Donne the tradition of the “anti-platonic”
deflation of high-flown love sentiment and uses
it with insouciance.
Out upon it I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.
He can even be cynically chiding in such
songs as this:
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee, why so pale?
A Session of the Poets (1637; published 1646)
is an amusing skit for which he probably took a
hint from an Italian work by Traiano Boccalini;
it is the prototype of a long line of similar
works in the 17th and 18th centuries. His
masterpiece is undoubtedly “A Ballad Upon a
Wedding,” in the style and metre of the
contemporary street ballad. Suckling’s extant
letters are in lively, colloquial prose that
anticipates that of the Restoration wits.
|
|
|
Richard Lovelace
born 1618
died 1657, London
English poet, soldier, and Royalist whose
graceful lyrics and dashing career made him the
prototype of the perfect Cavalier.
Lovelace was probably born in the Netherlands,
where his father was in military service. He was
educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, and at age
16 or possibly a little later he wrote The
Scholars, a comedy acted at Whitefriars, of
which the prologue and epilogue survive. He took
part in the expeditions to Scotland (1639–40) at
the time of the rebellions against Charles I.
During this period he is said to have written a
tragedy, The Soldier, but there is no certain
evidence of this.
Returning to his estates in Kent, Lovelace
was chosen to present (1642) a Royalist petition
to a hostile House of Commons. For this he was
imprisoned in the Gatehouse, London, where he
wrote “To Althea, from Prison,” which contains
the well-known lines: “Stone walls do not a
prison make/Nor iron bars a cage.” He passed
much of the next four years abroad and was
wounded fighting for the French against the
Spaniards at Dunkerque in 1646. In 1648 he was
again imprisoned. During his imprisonment,
Lovelace prepared Lucasta (1649) for the press.
The antiquarian and historian Anthony à Wood
says he died in misery and poverty in 1658, but
an elegy on him was printed in 1657. He had
certainly sold much of his estates, but none of
the elegies supports the story of his unhappy
death.
The only other publication of his work was
Lucasta; Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace,
Esq. (1659), edited by his brother Dudley,
including Elegies, and dated 1660.
|
|
|
Sir William Davenant
born February 1606, Oxford, Eng.
died April 7, 1668, London
English poet, playwright, and theatre manager
who was made poet laureate on the strength of
such successes as The Witts (licensed 1634), a
comedy; the masques The Temple of Love,
Britannia Triumphans, and Luminalia; and a
volume of poems, Madagascar (published 1638).
Shakespeare was apparently Davenant’s godfather,
and gossip held that the famous playwright may
even have been his father. Davenant became a
page in London in 1622 and later served a famous
literary courtier, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke.
Meanwhile he was writing his early revenge
tragedies, such as Albovine (produced c. 1629),
and tragicomedies, such as The Colonel. After he
had served in continental wars, his engaging,
reckless personality and his plays and
occasional verses attracted the patronage of
Queen Henrietta Maria. Davenant was appointed to
the poet laureateship in 1638, after the death
of Ben Jonson the previous year, and composed
several court masques.
In 1641 Davenant risked his life in a bungled
army plot, and the outbreak of the Civil War in
1642 nullified a royal patent he had secured to
build a theatre. A supporter of King Charles I
during the Civil War, he was knighted by the
king in 1643 for running supplies across the
English Channel. Later, having joined the
defeated and exiled Stuart court in Paris, he
began his uncompleted verse epic Gondibert
(1651), a tale of chivalry in 1,700 quatrains.
After the execution of Charles I, his queen sent
Davenant to aid the Royalist cause in America as
lieutenant governor of Maryland. Davenant’s ship
was captured in the English Channel, however,
and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London
until 1654.
In 1656 Davenant made the first attempt to
revive English drama, which had been banned
under Cromwell, with The first day’s
Entertainment (produced 1656), a work disguised
under the title Declamations and Musick. This
work led to his creating the first public opera
in England, The Siege of Rhodes Made a
Representation by the Art of Prospective in
Scenes, And the Story sung in Recitative Musick
(produced 1656). In The Siege he introduced
three innovations to the English public stage:
an opera, painted stage sets, and a female
actress-singer.
In 1660, after the Restoration, he was
granted one of two new royal patents to
establish new acting companies and founded the
new Duke of York’s Playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. As manager, director, and playwright, he
continued to produce, write, and adapt plays.
The charter was later transferred to Covent
Garden. Together with the poet John Dryden, he
adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1667.
|
|
|
Sir
John Denham
born 1615, Dublin, Ire.
died March 10, 1669, London, Eng.
poet who established as a new English genre the
leisurely meditative poem describing a
particular landscape.
Educated at the University of Oxford, Denham was
admitted to the bar, but he was already actively
writing. He had translated six books of the
Aeneid, parts of which were later printed; but
he made his reputation with The Sophy, a
blank-verse historical tragedy acted in 1641,
and with Cooper’s Hill, a poem published in
1642. During the English Civil Wars, he was
engaged at home and abroad in the cause of
Charles II. Made a knight of the Bath and
elected to the Royal Society after the
Restoration in 1660, he also served as a member
of Parliament. He was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Denham’s poetry is essentially didactic. Its
strength lies in its gravely reflective ethical
solidity, and it achieves an expression of
balance and unity that is developed out of a
theory of the harmony of opposites. He helped
develop the closed heroic couplet (a couplet
rhyming aa and containing a complete idea, not
dependent upon the preceding or following
couplet). Denham greatly increased the
popularity of that form with Cooper’s Hill, a
new type of descriptive landscape verse that was
imitated by English poets for the next 100
years.
|
|
|
Sir Richard
Fanshawe
born June 1608, Ware Park,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
died , June, 16, 1666, Madrid
English poet, translator, and diplomat whose
version of Camões’ Os Lusíadas is a major
achievement of English verse translation.
Educated at Cambridge, he was appointed
secretary to the English embassy at Madrid in
1635. At the outbreak of the Civil War he joined
the King. In 1648 he became treasurer to the
navy, and in 1650 he was dispatched by Charles
II to obtain help from Spain. Although this was
refused, Fanshawe was created a baronet; he
rejoined Charles in Scotland and was taken
prisoner at the Battle of Worcester. On
Cromwell’s death he reentered the King’s service
in Paris and after the Restoration was appointed
ambassador to Portugal and later to Spain.
Fanshawe’s Il Pastor Fido, The faithful
Shepherd, a translation of Battista Guarini’s Il
Pastor Fido, was published in 1647. A second
edition “with divers other poems” (1648)
included his version of the fourth book of
Virgil’s Aeneid, in Spenserian stanza. His
Selected Parts of Horace appeared in 1652. The
great work of his retirement during the
Protectorate was his translation in the original
metre of the Os Lusíadas of Camões (1655).
|
|
|
Thomas Stanley
born 1625, Cumberlow, Hertfordshire,
Eng.
died April 12, 1678, London
English poet, translator, and the first English
historian of philosophy.
Stanley was the son of Sir Thomas Stanley,
himself the grandson of Thomas Stanley, a
natural son of Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of
Derby. The younger Stanley was educated by
William Fairfax, son of the translator of
Torquato Tasso. He became a good classical
scholar and an enthusiastic student of French,
Italian, and Spanish poetry. Stanley entered
Pembroke Hall (later College), Cambridge, in
1639 and studied there and at the University of
Oxford, graduating with an M.A. in 1641.
Stanley was the friend of many poets and
himself a prolific translator and writer of
verse. He traveled on the European continent
during the English Civil Wars and on his return
lived in the Middle Temple, London, where he
devoted himself to literary work. His first
volume of poems appeared in 1647. Subsequent
volumes included translations from Anacreon,
Bion, Decimus Magnus Ausonius, Battista Guarini,
Giambattista Marino, Petrarch, Pierre de
Ronsard, and others. His classic renderings of
the Anacreontic poems were published in 1651,
and the same collection contains his version of
Pico della Mirandola’s A Platonick Discourse
upon Love. Stanley’s The History of Philosophy,
which long remained a standard work, was
published in 1655–62, and his edition of
Aeschylus with Latin translation and commentary
in 1663. He had a graceful if tenuous gift as a
lyrical poet and was a versatile and
accomplished translator.
|
Continued influence of
Spenser
Donne had shattered
Spenser’s leisurely ornamentation, and
Jonson censured his archaic language, but the continuing
regard for Spenser at this time was significant. Variants of
the Spenserian stanza were used by the brothers Giles
Fletcher and Phineas Fletcher, the former in his long
religious poem Christ’s Victory (1610), which is also
indebted to Josuah Sylvester’s highly popular translations
from the French Calvinist poet Guillaume du Bartas, the
Divine Weeks and Works (1605). Similarly, Spenserian
pastorals still flowed from the pens of William Browne
(Britannia’s Pastorals, 1613–16), George Wither (The
Shepherd’s Hunting, 1614), and
Michael Drayton, who at the
end of his life returned nostalgically to portraying an
idealized Elizabethan golden age (The Muses Elizium, 1630).
Nostalgia was a dangerous quality under the progressive and
absolutist Stuarts; the taste for Spenser involved a respect
for values—traditional, patriotic, and Protestant—that were
popularly, if erroneously, linked with the Elizabethan past
but thought to be disregarded by the new regime. These poets
believed they had a spokesman at court in the heroic and
promising Prince Henry, but his death in 1612 disappointed
many expectations, intellectual, political, and religious,
and this group in particular was forced further toward the
Puritan position. Increasingly, their pastorals and
fervently Protestant poetry made them seem out of step with
a court whose sympathies in foreign affairs were pro-Spanish
and pro-Catholic; so sharp became Wither’s satires that he
earned imprisonment and was lampooned by Jonson in a court
masque. The failure of the Stuarts to conciliate attitudes
such as these was to be crucial to their inability to
prevent the collapse of the Elizabethan compromise in the
next generation. The nearest affinities, both in style and
substance, of
John Milton’s early poetry would be with the
Spenserians; in Areopagitica (1644) Milton praised “our sage
and serious poet Spenser” as “a better teacher than [the
philosophers] Scotus or Aquinas.”
Giles
Fletcher the Younger
born c. 1585, London
died 1623, Alderton, Suffolk, Eng.
English poet principally known for his great
Baroque devotional poem Christs Victorie.
He was the younger son of Giles Fletcher the
Elder. He was educated at Westminster School and
at Trinity College, Cambridge. After his
ordination, he held a college position, and
became known for his sermons at the Church of
St. Mary the Great. He left Cambridge about 1618
and soon after received the rectory of Alderton,
Suffolk.
The theme of Fletcher’s masterpiece, Christs
Victorie, and Triumph in Heaven, and Earth,
over, and after death (1610), bears some
resemblance to that of the religious epic
Semaine (1578; Eng. trans., Devine Weekes and
Workes, 1605) of the French Protestant poet Du
Bartas; but the devotion, the passionate
lyricism, and the exquisite vision of paradise
that critics have praised are Fletcher’s own.
The poem is written in eight-line stanzas
somewhat derivative of Edmund Spenser, of whom,
like his brother Phineas, Giles was a disciple.
|
|
|
Phineas Fletcher
baptized April 8, 1582, Cranbrook,
Kent, England
died 1650, Hilgay, Norfolk
English poet best known for his religious and
scientific poem The Purple Island.
He was the elder son of Giles Fletcher the Elder
and brother of Giles Fletcher the Younger. He
was educated at Eton and at King’s College,
Cambridge. Fletcher became chaplain to Sir Henry
Willoughby, who presented him in 1621 to the
rectory of Hilgay, Norfolk, where he spent the
rest of his life.
His greatest work, The Purple Island, was
published in 1633. It included the Piscatorie
Eclogs and other Poetical Miscellanies. The
Purple Island: or the Isle of Man, is a poem in
12 cantos describing allegorically the human
physiology and soul. The manner of Edmund
Spenser is employed throughout, and the chief
charm of the poem is considered by critics to be
its descriptions of rural scenery. The
Piscatorie Eclogs are pastorals, the characters
of which are represented as fisherboys on the
banks of the Cam, and are interesting for the
light they cast on the biography of the poet
himself (Thyrsil) and his father (Thelgon), and
on Phineas’ friendship with Cambridge men.
Fletcher’s poetry has not the sublimity
sometimes reached by his brother Giles.
|
|
|
Josuah Sylvester
born 1563, Kent, Eng.
died Sept. 28, 1618, Middelburg, Neth.
English poet-translator, best known as the
translator of a popular biblical epic, the
Divine Weekes and Workes. Translated from a
French Protestant poet, Guillaume du Bartas,
(1544–90), it appeared in sections in 1592 and
complete in 1608. This epic on the creation, the
fall of man, and other early parts of Genesis
was extremely popular in England through the
first half of the 17th century. Sylvester had
some small influence on Dryden, Milton, and
other poets.
|
|
|
William Browne
born 1591?, Tavistock, Devonshire,
Eng.
died 1645?
English poet, author of Britannia’s Pastorals
(1613–16) and other pastoral and miscellaneous
verse.
Browne studied at the University of Oxford and
entered the Inner Temple in 1611. Between 1616
and 1621 he lived in France. In 1623 he became
tutor to Robert Dormer, the future Earl of
Carnarvon, accompanying him to Eton and Oxford.
His later life appears to have been spent near
Dorking, Surrey.
Britannia’s Pastorals, modeled on the work of
the poet Edmund Spenser, is a long, discursive
pastoral narrative interspersed with songs.
Devoted to his country, and especially to
Devonshire, he attempted to glorify them in
pastoral verse of epic dignity.
|
|
