SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICISM

There has been a great variety of critical approach to Shakespeare's work since his death. During the 17^th And 18th centuries, Shakespeare was both admired and condemned. Since then, much of the adverse criticism has not been considered relevant, although certain issues have continued to interest critics throughout the years. For instance, charges against his moral propriety were made by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century and by George Bernard Shaw in the 20th. Early criticism was directed primarily at questions of form. Shakespeare was criticized for mixing comedy and tragedy and failing to observe the unities of time and place prescribed by the rules of classical drama. Dryden and Johnson were among the critics claiming that he had corrupted the language with false wit, puns, and ambiguity. While some of his early plays might justly be charged with a frivolous use of such devices, 20thcentury criticism has tended to praise their use in later plays as adding depth and resonance of meaning. Generally critics of the 17th and 18th century accused Shakespeare of a want of artistic restraint while praising him for a fecund imagination. Samuel Johnson, while agreeing with many earlier criticisms, defended Shakespeare on the question of classical rules. On the issue of unity of time and place he argued that no one considers the stage play to be real life anyway. Johnson inaugurated the criticism of Shakespeare's characters that reached its culmination in the late 19th century with the work of A. C. Bradley. The German critics Gotthold Lessing and Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel saw Shakespeare as a romantic, different in type from the classical poets, but on equal footing. Schlegel first elucidated the structural unity of Shakespeare's plays, a concept of unity that is developed much more completely by the English poet and critic Samuel Coleridge. While Schlegel and Coleridge were establishing Shakespeare's plays as artistic, organic unities, such 19thcentury critics as the German Georg Gervinus and the Irishman Edward Dowden were trying to see positive moral tendencies in the plays. The 19th-century English critic William Hazlitt, who continued the development of character analysis begun by Johnson, considered each Shakespearean character to be unique, but found a unity through analogy and gradation of characterization. While A. C. Bradley marks the culmination of romantic 19th-century character study, he also suggested that the plays had unifying imagistic atmospheres, an idea that was further developed in the 20th century.

The tendency in 20th-century criticism has been to abandon both the study of character as independent personality and the assumption that moral considerations can be separated from their dramatic and aesthetic context. The plays have been increasingly viewed in terms of the unity of image, metaphor, and tone. Caroline Spurgeon began the careful classification of Shakespeare's imagery, and although her attempts were later felt to be somewhat naive and morally biased, her work is a landmark in Shakespearean criticism. Other important trends in 20th-century criticism include the Freudian approach, such as Ernest Jones's oedipal interpretation of Hamlet; the study of Shakespeare in terms of the Elizabethan world view and Elizabethan stage conventions; and the study of the plays in mythic terms. 

WORKS AND LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE

THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

In the early stages of their existence, the actors’ companies performed their plays in the open yards of some of the inns of the City Council, from where they were expelled in due course. The first theater was built by James Burbage in 1576. It was circular and open to the sky, the spectators stood in the pit, as they had done in the inn yards. The movable stage was rectangular and the audience could stand on three sides of it. A retiring house was curtained off behind the stage. After Burbage’s death, it was pulled down and its timber used in the construction of The Globe (one of the 2 theaters Shakespeare was intimately associated with, the other being the Blackfriars). Theaters that came after Burbage’s were also in the form of an amphitheatre where spectators stood in the pit. There were 2 or 3 galleries where seats were provided. There were also boxes for more privileged spectators. Aristocrats were seated on the stage itself. There they would carry on active and very audible criticism of the performance before the eyes of the whole house. The stage was rectangular, open on 3 sides to the public. There was no curtain and the close of an act or scene was indicated by the exit of all the performers. In the case of the dead, provision was always made for their removal. There was an upper stage or balcony and a rear stage that could be curtained off. Scenery, in the modern sense, did not exist and places and scenes were indicated either by suitable properties or possibly by a placard and more commonly by the words of actors. Costume, however, was elaborate and expensive. Since there was no artificial lighting plays could be performed only during the daytime. The Elizabethan audience was fun loving, yet enjoyed philosophizing on stage. They were very critical of drama and if they did not enjoy a play, it was immediately hissed off the stage. They wanted amusement and melodrama and plays of contemporary, social and historical interest. Hence Elizabethan drama was at times crude, farcical and indecent but on the whole full-blooded and imaginative with a remarkable human quality.

SHAKESPEARE'S WORLD

Most of Shakespeare's career unfolded during the monarchy of Elizabeth I, the Queen from whom the historical period of the Bard's life takes its name as the Elizabethan Age. Elizabeth came to the throne under turbulent circumstances in 1558 (before Shakespeare was born) and ruled until 1603. Under her reign, not only did England prosper as a rising commercial power at the expense of Catholic Spain, Shakespeare's homeland undertook an enormous expansion into the New World and laid the foundations of what would become the British Empire. This ascendance came in the wake of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the former regaining Greek and Roman classics and stimulating an outburst of creative endeavour throughout Europe, the latter transforming England into a Protestant/Anglican state, and generating continuing religious strife, especially during the civil wars of Elizabeth's Catholic sister, Queen Margaret or "Bloody Mary." The Elizabethan Age, then, was an Age of Discovery, of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the exploration of human nature itself. The basic assumptions underpinning feudalism/Scholasticism were openly challenged with the support of Elizabeth and, equally so, by her successor on the throne, James I. There was in all this an optimism about humanity and its future and an even greater optimism about the destiny of England in the world at large. Nevertheless, the Elizabethans also recognized that the course of history is problematic, that Fortune can undo even the greatest and most promising, as Shakespeare reveals in such plays as Antony & Cleopatra. More specifically, Shakespeare and his audiences were keenly aware of the prior century's prolonged bloodshed during the War of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. Many Elizabethans, particularly the prosperous, feared the prospect of civil insurrection and the destruction of the commonwealth, whether as a result of an uprising from below or of usurpation at the top. Thus, whether or not we consider Shakespeare to have been a political conservative, his histories, tragedies and even his romances and comedies are slanted toward the restoration or maintenance of civil harmony and the status quo of legitimate rule.

SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE

His father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous years his father was also involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had “small Latine, and less Greeke,” much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of travelling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus. In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man.

I. COMEDIES

‘Comedy’ refers to drama that provokes laughter at human behaviour, usually involving romantic love and with a happy ending. In Shakespeare’s day, the conventional comedy enacted the struggle of young lovers to surmount some difficulty, usually presented by their elders, and the play ended happily in marriage or the prospect of marriage. Sometimes the struggle was to bring separated lovers or family members together, and their reunion was the happy culmination. Shakespeare generally observed these conventions, though his inventiveness within them yielded many variations. Eighteen plays are generally included among Shakespeare’s comedies. They are divided into – early comedies (The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew), middle comedies (Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night) tragi-comedies or problem plays (Troilus andCressida, Measure for Measure, All’s well That Ends Well), romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen)

All of Shakespeare’s comedies are driven by love. Love, in Shakespearean comedy, is stronger than the inertia of custom, the power of evil, or the fortunes of chance and time. In all these plays except one (Troilus) the obstacles presented to love are triumphantly overcome, as conflicts are resolved and errors forgiven in a general aura of reconciliation and marital bliss at the play’s close. Such intransigent characters as Shylock (Merchant of Venice), Malvolio (Twelfth Night) and Don John (Much Ado About Nothing), who choose not to act out of love, cannot be accommodated here, and are carefully isolated from the action before the climax. In their resolutions Shakespeare’s comedies resemble the medieval morality play, which centers on a sinful human being who receives God’s mercy. In Shakespeare’s secular comedies a human authority figure (for instance, Don Pedro in Much Ado or Duke Senior in As You Like It) is symbolically divine, the opponents of love are the representatives of sin, and all the characters partake of the love and forgiveness at the play’s closing. Moreover, the context of marriage – at least alluded to at the close of all comedies except Troilus and Cressida – is the cap-stone of the comedic situation, for these plays not only delight and entertain, they affirm, guaranteeing the future. Marriage, with its promise of offspring, reinvigorates society and transcends the purely personal element in sexual attraction and romantic love. Tragedy’s focus on the individual makes death the central fact of life, but comedy, with its insistence on the on going process of love and sex and birth, confirms our awareness that life transcends the individual.

II. TRAGEDIES

A tragedy is a drama dealing with a noble protagonist placed in a highly stressful situation that leads to a disastrous, usually fatal conclusion. The 10 plays generally included among Shakespeare’s tragedies are Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. A central group of 4 plays: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear offer Shakespeare’s fullest development of tragedy, and they are sometimes collectively labelled the great tragedies. These plays focus on a powerful central character whose most outstanding personal quality—tragic flaw, as it is called—is the source of his catastrophe. He is the victim of his own strength, which will not allow accommodation with his situation, and we are appalled at this paradox and at the inexorability of his fate. These works, sometimes with the addition of Antony and Cleopatra, are often thought to constitute Shakespeare’s greatest achievement as a playwright.

 Shakespeare’s tragedies developed out of earlier 16th century tragedies, which had antecedents in medieval poetry – verse accounts of disaster, suffering and death usually of mighty rulers. These medieval poems, however, did not lend themselves to the stage because they simply made a single point – that disaster comes even to the great, in the same fashion every time. Renaissance authors, imbued with a sense of the value of human experience, began to alter the pattern. A wider range of subjects was assembled and moral lessons incorporated into them. A good instance, and an important influence to Shakespeare, was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which the settings range from classical and biblical worlds to recent history. The typical subject of the biographies of this compilation is a villainous tyrant whose fall is amply deserved. Retribution becomes the theme rather than simple inevitability. The ancient plays of Seneca were similar in subject and tone and these works were exploited by 16th century playwrights. The immediate result was the revenge play, pioneered by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd. However, the emphasis on evil figures was gradually eroded by an awareness of the dramatic value of virtue. The medieval heritage of the Morality Play was an important influence on this development. Sometimes the good were simply victims as in Titus Andronicus; sometimes virtuous deeds resulted in death or disaster as in The Rape of Lucrece, and sometimes the two motifs combined, in virtuous victims whosedeaths are redemptive, spiritually cleansing the world of the play as in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, is a simple melodrama, frankly imitative of Seneca. With Romeo and Juliet, the young playwright advances considerably, developing human and credible protagonists. An essential tragic theme is established in Romeo: the superiority of the human spirit to its mortal destiny. It is in Julius Caesar that Shakespeare first achieves the distinctive element of the major tragedies, a protagonist. In Julius Caesar, the protagonist Brutus, who is undone precisely by his own virtues, as he pursues a flawed political ideal. A paradoxical sense of the interconnectedness of good and evil permeates the play, as the hero’s idealism leads to disaster for both him and his world. Only with Hamlet does the hero’s personal sense of that paradox become the play’s central concern. In Hamlet and its three great successors, Shakespeare composes four variations on the overarching theme that humanity’s weaknesses must be recognised as our inevitable human lot, for only by accepting our destiny can we transcend our morality. Hamlet, unable to alter the evil around him because of his fixation on the uncertainties of moral judgement, himself falls into evil in killing Polonius and rejecting Ophelia but finally recovers his humanity by recognizing his ties to others. He accepts his own fate, knowing that “readiness is all”. Lear, his world in ruins of his own making, can find salvation only through madness, but in his reconciliation with Cordelia, he too finds that destiny can be identified with, “as if we were God’s spies”. As Edgar puts it, sounding very like Hamlet, “Ripeness is all”. Othello, drawn into evil by an incapacity for trust, recognizes his failing and kills himself. The power of love—the importance of our bonds to others—is again upheld. In Macbeth, the same point is made negatively, as the protagonist’s rejection of love and loyalty leads to an extreme human isolation, where “Life’s but a walking shadow”. In each of the 4 major tragedies, a single protagonist grows in self-awareness and knowledge of human nature, though he cannot stop his disaster. In the later Roman tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus we find the same pattern. But these differ from their predecessors in that the central figures are placed in a complex social and political context, and the plays are strongly concerned with the relationship between the individual and the society, with less focus on the emotional development of the tragic hero. Timon of Athens is a flawed effort that Shakespeare left incomplete. Shakespeare’s tragedies are disturbing plays. We feel horror at the stories, and pity for the victims. That this pity extends to doers of evil as well – Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Coriolanus – attests to the dramatist’s power. We recognise the nobility of the human spirit, which may err catastrophically but which does so through an excess of strength, challenging its own limits. In a tragic universe, we are all flawed precisely because we are human, and Shakespeare’s tragic heroes embody this inexorable feature of life.

III. HISTORY PLAYS

Shakespeare’s 10 plays deal with events in English history.

(1) Minor Tetralogy - Henry VI 3 Parts, and Richard III

(2) King John

(3) Major Tetralogy - Richard II, Henry IV 2 Parts, and Henry V.

(4) Henry VIII.

The Tetralogies are Shakespeare’s major achievement in the histories and deal with English history from 1398 to 1485. The central theme of the history plays is political – they deal with the gain and loss of power – ut Shakespeare transcended this subject. As he wrote his histories, the playwright increasingly pursued the definition of the perfect king. After presenting two distinctly bad rulers, the ineffectual Henry VI and the villainous Richard III, he turned to a consideration of kingly virtues. He began to explore the psychology of political leaders, and these plays are at their best as much psychological as historical. Not content to deal with the nature of kingship solely from the point of view of the rulers, Shakespeare also focuses on the lives of the common people of England, especially in the major tetralogy. Sometimes fictitious minor figures, such as the Gardener in Richard III, fulfill an important function simply by offering their own interpretation of political events and historical personalities and thus influencing the reader’s responses. But many common people are developed as characters in their own right. Indeed, in the Henry IV plays, often considered the greatest of his histories, Falstaff and a number of fully sketched minor characters offer a sort of national group portrait that is contrasted with political history. The juxtaposition generates a richly stimulating set of relationships. Those secular accounts of the past, neither legendary nor religious, that were presented on the stage— and were highly popular—reflect the Elizabethan era’s intense interest in history. In the late 16th century, when these plays were written, England was undergoing a great crisis. As a leading Protestant state, it found itself at odds, with the great Catholic powers of counter-Reformation Europe, including its traditional enemy, France, and a new foe, Spain. The latter, at the height of its power, was a very dangerous adversary, and England felt seriously imperiled until the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. This situation sparked a tremendous patriotism among all classes of English society, and with that came an increasing interest in the nation’s history, an interest that the theatre was of course delighted to serve. Written not long after the peak of nationalistic fervour in 1588, the history plays, which were extremely popular, deal with political events of England, like the Wars of the Roses, the significance of which the Elizabethans were very much aware. Moreover, even though in hindsight the reign of Elizabeth seems very different from those of the troubled 15th century, this was not so clear at the time. A number of threats to the government arose and the people felt a strong fear of civil war and anarchy; for both moral and practical reasons they valued an orderly society ruled by a strong monarch. The history plays addressed this attitude by presenting a lesson in the evils of national disunity. This view of English history was held not only by both the playwright and most of his audience, but also by the historians whose works Shakespeare consulted. When the Tudor dynasty came to power, among the policies adopted by King Henry VII was the use of scholarly propaganda to justify his seizure of the throne. He encouraged and commissioned various works of history and biography to emphasize the faults of earlier rulers and present his own accession as the nation’s salvation. Among them was an official history of England by the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil, which was to have a strong influence on subsequent historians including Holinshed and Hall, whose chronicles were Shakespeare’s chief sources. Thus Shakespeare saw, and passed on, a story of inevitable progress towards the benevolent reign of the Tudors. The sources available to Shakespeare were highly unreliable by modern historical standards. In any case, Shakespeare was not writing history; he was concerned with dramatic values more than with historical accuracy. Other Elizabethan playwrights also wrote histories but only Shakespeare’s work has survived. In writing history plays Shakespeare always pursued his own concerns, exploring political values and social relations. Throughout his career he was preoccupied with the value of order in society. Shakespeare believed, as is evident in Henry V, in the need for authority, but he also showed a distrust of those who held authority. Thus the history plays point to an underlying characteristic of human societies—the fact that political power inspires disturbing fears as well as profound ideals.

IV. PROBLEM PLAYS

Three of Shakespeare’s comedies—All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida are called problem plays. They are potent satires characterised by disturbingly ambiguous points of view and seemingly cynical attitudes towards sexual and social relations. These plays – written around 1602- 1604 – are concerned with basic elements of life, sex and death, and the psychological and social complications they give rise to. These issues are problematic, and the plays further stress this by pointedly offering no clear-cut resolutions, leaving audiences with a painful awareness of life’s difficulties. The phrase ‘problem play’ was first applied to these plays – as well as to Hamlet – by Frederick Boas in his book Shakespeare and his Predecessors. In Boas’s time the phrase was used to refer to the works of playwrights like Ibsen and Shaw whose plays dealt frankly and purposefully with social problems. Shakespeare’s problem plays too are indeed concerned with society and its discontents.

V. ROMAN PLAYS

Three plays of Shakespeare are set in ancient Rome – Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. The much earlier Titus Andronicus, though Roman in setting, is generally excluded from this classification because it is a timeless tale that does not involve any real, historical world. Each of the Roman plays is a tragedy, but they are unlike the other tragedies, which are placed in virtually imaginary historical situations. These works are complicated by the history of ancient Rome, which is reasonably accurately presented, and they are thus similar to the history plays. When he wrote plays about ancient Rome, Shakespeare dealt with material that was highly meaningful to his age. Due to the Renaissance rediscovery of classical literature and art, the Roman era in the Mediterranean world was seen as the high-watermark of Western culture, and the general outlines of its history were familiar to all educated people. Thus the politics of that world, and the lives of its illustrious personages were viewed with great interest. The moral questions found in the careers of Coriolanus, Brutus and Antony had particular importance as they were examples taken from the most important epoch in the development of western polities. Rome’s history also had importance to Christianity because it was thought of as the period of Christianity’s birth. In particular, the establishment of the empire was often perceived as evidence of God’s intervention in human affairs. In fact, it is important to the Roman plays that the Roman Republic was pre-Christian. Shakespeare’s repeated allusions to suicide as an honourable alternative to defeat marks a striking difference in pre-Christian morality. The suicides indeed point to the most important distinction of the Roman tragedies: they lack Christianity’s belief in divine providence as a final arbiter of human affairs. Without God’s promised redemption, the moral questions of the classical world had to be resolved within an earth–bound universe of references. The protagonists of Roman plays cannot recognize an error and gain divine forgiveness, nor can they be confident that he is right in the face of worldly defeat. Hence there is a paradox in their characters. The consequence is that Rome’s conflicts are never clearly organized on lines of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – each side contains elements of both.

VI. ROMANCES

Shakespeare’s late comedies are called romances: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and (sometimes) The Two Noble Kinsmen. They are tragicomedies in the broadest sense of the term. All of the romances share a number of themes. The theme of separation and reunion of family members is highly important. The related idea of exile also features in the romances, with the banished characters—usually rulers or rulers–to be—restored to their rightful homes at the play’s end. Another theme, jealousy, is prominent in The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen; it has minor importance in Pericles and The Tempest. Most significant, the romances all speak to the need for patience in adversity and the importance of providence in human affairs. This visionary conception outweighs any given individual’s fate or even the development of individual personalities. Compared with earlier plays, realistic characterization in the romances is weak, instead, the characters’ symbolic meaning in pronounced. The plots of these plays offer improbable events in exotic locales. Their characters are frequently subject to long journeys, often involving shipwrecks. Seemingly magical developments arise—with real sorcery in The Tempest—and supernatural beings appear. These developments are elaborately represented, and all of the romances rely heavily on spectacular scenic effects. In all these respects, the romances are based on a tradition of romantic literature going back at least to Hellenistic Greece, in which love serves as the trigger for extraordinary adventures. In this tradition love is subjected to abnormal strains – often involving jealous intrigues and conflicts between male friendship and romantic love - and there are fantastic journeys to exotic lands, encounters with chivalrous knights and allegorical appearances of supernatural beings. Absurdly improbable coincidences and mistaken identities complicate the plot, though everything is resolved in a conventional happy ending. The protagonists are also conventional, their chief distinction being their noble or royal blood. In the romances Shakespeare returned to an idea that had been prominent in his earlier comedies— young lovers are united after various tribulations. Now, however, the focus is not only on the young lovers, but also encompasses the older generation, once the opponents of love. At the end of these plays, the emphasis is not on reward and punishment but rather on the reunion of parents and children and the hopeful prospect of new generations to come. The romances concern themselves with the lovers not for their own sake but for their effect on the whole continuum of life. This broad canvas is enlarged even further to cosmic dimensions with the many images of the supernatural. The romances conclude in a spirit of hope, as the main characters are reunited in an aura of reconciliation—a favourite motif throughout Shakespeare’s career. The natural good in humanity is put under pressure but preserved through the action of providence. An emphasis on the cycle of regeneration—both in the traditional comedic emphasis on marriage and in the theme of reunited families—offers a guarantee that the preservation will be lasting.

VII. POETRY

Shakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare. However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labours Lost. A love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. In the 1980s and 90s many Elizabethan scholars concluded that a poem published in 1612 entitled A Funeral Elegy and signed “W.S.” exhibits many Shakespearean characteristics; it has not yet been definitely included in the canon. Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important non-dramatic poetry. They were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the poems and the degree of autobiographical content. The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; or they are possibly the initials of William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, whose connection with Shakespeare is more tenuous. The identity of the dark lady addressed in sonnets 127-152 has also been the object of much conjecture but no proof. The sonnets are marked by the recurring themes of beauty, youthful beauty ravaged by time, and the ability of love and art to transcend time and even death.

UNIVERSITY WITS

About twenty years after Gorboduc, in about 1580, the first of the University Wits appeared on the English stage. The Wits were a group of seven young writers, bred in the traditions of the classical drama and educated at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

(1) John Lyly, the first of the seven to enter the field, stands apart from the others in that he wrote entirelyfor the court rather than for the popular stage. Lyly’s eight plays, to which Shakespeare owed a considerable debt, were court allegories. Their the mes were derived from classical mythology, and nearly all were in prose, steeped in the euphuistic style. Two of his best plays are Endymion and Campaspe.

(2) George Peele, another of this group, is remembered chiefly for his Arraignment of Paris, David and Bethsabe, The Old Wives’ Tale and The Battle of Alcazar. Peele’s work is dominated by courtly and patriotic themes.

(3) Thomas Kyd, in The Spanish Tragedy, established “the tragedy of blood”, to which Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus belongs. Hamlet itself is said to be based upon a horror-play of the same genre—ur–Hamlet— believed to be written by Kyd.

(4) Thomas Lodge wrote classical plays like The Wounds of Civil War, and A Looking Glass for London and England in collaboration with Greene. [Lodge wrote a Defence of Poetry in response to Gosson’s School of Abuse]

(5) Robert Greene was a man of greater genius but he squandered it in drink and much second-rate writing. Gabriel Harvey, in Four Letters, attacked Greene’s waywardness and Nashe defended him in Strange News. The best-known of his plays are Orlando Furioso, Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay and James the Fourth. Most of his plays are dramatized pastoral romances, like As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale. Greene is also remembered today for his attack on Shakespeare as an “upstart Crow beautified with our feathers” in the Groats-Worth of Wit. His Pandosto was the source of The Winter’s Tale.

(6) One of Greene’s collaborators was Thomas Nash whose extant dramatic work is slight. [He is remembered for his prose work The Unfortunate Traveller or The Life of Jack Wilton]

The greatest of all University Wits was Christopher Marlowe. The youngest of the group and born in the same year as Shakespeare, Marlowe, before his untimely death at the age of 29, had founded English romantic tragedy and converted the stiff, mechanical blank verse of Gorboduc into that vital verse form which Shakespeare would later use in his plays. His plays show only moderate power of characterization but they carry the reader away by the sheer force and beauty of language and their imaginative power. In his four great plays the protagonists are driven by vaulting ambition, inordinate pride, a lust for power and inhumane cruelty. The tragedy invariably takes the same course—triumph followed by a mighty fall. Each protagonist is Marlovian in his masculine prowess which often conceals a sensuous, sensitive heart. Tamburlaine the Great is his earliest and crudest creation where a shepherd-robber rises to imperial power through ruthlessly cruel actions and once appears on stage driving a team of kings before his chariot. His ferocity is softened only by his love for his captive Zenocrate. In The Jew of Malta, Barabas, a Jew, is harassed by the governor of Malta for not paying the tribute; and Barabas, in revenge rises to be the governor by treachery and the power of gold. But he is punished and killed by the Turkish commander against whom he plots. The Prologue to the play is spoken by ‘Machevil’ and Barabas is one of the prototypes for unscrupulous Machiavellian villains in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His praise of gold and precious stones as “Infinite riches in a little room” is often quoted. Doctor Faustus is perhaps the first dramatization of the medieval legend of a man who sold his soul to the Devil and who became identified with a Dr. Faustus, necromancer of the 16th century. Marlowe’s Faustus, unlike the legendary figure who was merely a magician, is an embodiment of a spiritual thirst for infinite power, an ambition to rule over the universe. Again, unlike the legend, at the end of the play, as the hour for the surrender of his soul draws near, Faustus is depicted as reeling in intense mental anguish. Marlowe’s best work, from the technical point of view, is Edward II, but it cannot compare in psychological interest or poetic grandeur with Doctor Faustus. Like his great hero Faustus, Marlowe also tasted the forbidden fruit and came to a miserable and sordid end, not indeed torn by devils, but stabbed in a tavern over a slight dispute. 

EARLY ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

England at the accession of Elizabeth (1558)

He first half of the 16th century was beset with political confusion, economic uncertainties and religious troubles. Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558 when the conditions were most unfavourable. With diplomacy, remarkable political insight and the cunning of a born statesman, Elizabeth changed the face of the country. Under her, Britain raised as an international power – proud and successful – a naval power to be reckoned with, that reached the heights of its glory by its defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Britain was again a nation tuned for great literature to give immortal expression to the new national self-consciousness. This was a time when naval commerce and trade flourished; wealth accumulated adding to the comfort of all classes. They had leisure, and as a consequence, a wider public was created for the abundant outpouring of literary works at this time. The drama, in spite of Puritan opposition, thrived and grew more respectable.

Material prosperity in the Elizabethan age was coupled with a cultural progress that was the effect of Renaissance. Education spread, so did the knowledge in Latin and Greek. The Latin of the Renaissance was very different from the Latin of the Middles Ages. Virgil, Cicero, and particularly Ovid were studied in their best works. Greek was not so familiar, but its influence was immense. From the Greeks the Elizabethans acquired a humane nature which overwhelmed the pedantries of Latin culture. The Elizabethan era witnessed several major translations—Golding’s Ovid (Metamorphosis), North’s Plutarch (Lives), and Chapman’s Homer placed the classical masterpieces in the hands of those who had “small Latin and less Greek”. During this period, the influence of Italy is seen in scholarship, in poetry, romance and pastoral. The Elizabethans turned to Italy for pioneers in literary criticism, to Petrarch for the sonnet, to Ariosto for the romantic epic, to Sannozaro for an Arcadia, to Bandello and Cinthio for many ‘novels’ and dramatic plots. They learnt cultural poetry from France and Montaigne led the way for Bacon. Elizabethan England also felt the impulse towards scientific learning as is reflected in some works. The many-sided intellectual innovation was reflected in Elizabethan literature. There were books like Euphues which were honeycombed with classical allusions. Along with these there were the bold philosophizing of Marlowe, as well as frank animalism of later dramatists to whom liberty meant licence. This later licentiousness was checked by the growing puritan power which killed drama for a time. The most typically Elizabethan writers – Spenser, Sidney and Lyly – had in them the moral seriousness of a Puritan. But in the hands of later dramatists like Fletcher, Middleton, Webster and Ford, drama declined to Melodrama, indecency and unnatural plots. James I, who succeeded Elizabeth, was pedantic and narrow-minded in his literary interests. Great poetry ceased to come forth and drama reflected the corrupt morals of an uncritical court. Instead of unity there was now division in the nation. Puritan fervour now drifted into a Catholic point of view. Thus Elizabethan literature slowly faded into the shadow of a great national conflict.

EARLY ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

At the time of Henry VIII the morality play still held the field of drama, and it lingered on till the time of Shakespeare. But the Renaissance spirit at the Tudor Court demanded plays that would amuse rather than instruct; and the result was the interlude. Interludes were of a comical nature, generally dealing with a single incident. They did not have much literary merit but they were intimately associated with the rise of the professional actor in England. The printing-press had deprived the minstrel of his occupation. The minstrels or players now turned to the theatre and they were embraced by the actors’ companies that now rose in England under the patronage of noblemen. It was during the time of Elizabeth’s reign – around 1580 – that permanent play houses were established, drama got its division into acts and scenes, and there came about a distinction between tragedy and comedy. By the middle of the 15th century, Terence, Plautus (both influenced Elizabethan comedy) and Seneca (influenced Elizabethan tragedy) began to be enacted in schools and universities, giving rise to an outburst of scholastic drama. There was a large body of Latin drama written at the universities during the Tudor period. These exerted a powerful influence upon the development of vernacular drama as well. An English comedy, probably the first, was produced about 1550 at Eton or Winchester in imitation of Plautus. This was called Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall. At about the same time another comedy was produced at Christ’s College – Gammer Gurton’s Needle by one W.S (probably William Stevenson or John Still). The earliest extant English tragedy was likewise the work of scholars—Norton and Sackville. The play was modelled on Seneca and was called Gorboduc (alternate title “Ferrex and Porrex”). Gorboduc, which followed the classical model, was also the first play written to be written in blank verse, the native tongue of Elizabethan theatre.

EARLY TUDOR POETRY

The reign of Henry VIII was rocked by momentous events in the political, religious and domestic spheres. Partly owing to the national preoccupation with the national affairs, partly due to the reluctance of noble men to come forward as professed authors, most courtly verse written during Henry VIII’s time was published only after his death. In 1557 Richard Tottel published Songs and Sonnets, written by the right honourable Lord Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and others. Surrey, who was then no more, was singled out for mention because of his exalted rank. The other important contributors of the Tottel’s Miscellany were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, and Lord Thomas Vaux. Sir Thomas Wyatt, English nobleman and diplomat, was an important literary figure of 16th century England. He is believed to have come under the spell of Anne Boleyn for a time, for which he won the displeasure of the king later, though temporarily. Though, like Surrey, Wyatt had been considerably influenced by foreign masters, he was an enthusiastic reader of Chaucer and borrowed many stylistic and formal features from him. As was fashionable in Henry VIII’s Court, Wyatt wrote lyrics that could be set to music. One such song beginning “A Robyn / Joly Robyn” was immortalized by the fool in Twelfth Night. Some of Wyatt’s lyrics show French influence, especially his rondeaux, but it cannot be clearly distinguished from his Italian influence. It was as a student of Petrarch, Serafino, Alamanni and Aretino that Wyatt opened a new era in English poetry and introduced the sonnet, the epigram and the terza rima to his fellow poets. Though out of a total 31, 20 of his sonnets have been traced to Italian originals (mainly Petrarch), Wyatt was no slavish follower of his master. In the sestet he deviates from the Petrarchan rhyme scheme and rhymes cdd cee. Thus he introduces a final couplet to which the Elizabethan sonnet has clung in all its variations. Wyatt’s sonnets exhibited a robust and defiant spirit and adapted Petrarchan lines to his own English circumstances. Wyatt showed greater mastery over a simpler verse form, ottawa rima, in which most of his epigrams are written, in which he borrows chiefly from Serafino. Wyatt also wrote 3 satires, one of which he dedicated to Sir Francis Brian and the other two to John Poynz. These are written in terza rima, the metre used by Alamanni in his Satires. The moral fervour of the Satires turns to the pleading of a penitent heart in the Penitential Psalms, of which Aretino’s Psalms are the source. In his verse Wyatt is present throughout as a man of affairs and a moralist. His interests were not insular but European and he brought English poetry into the great tradition of Greece and Rome, of Italy, France and Spain.

Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey mourned Wyatt’s death in a fine elegy. Like Wyatt he seems to have had a mistress—“Geraldine”. In career and fortune both poets were akin to each other. As a lyricist Surrey surpasses Wyatt in his sensitivity to natural beauty and his instinct for melodious rhythm. Though his direct borrowings from Italian are fewer than Wyatt’s, he was more deeply affected by the tearful sentimentality of the Petrarchan school. But in technique Surrey broke away from the Italian models. He introduced the Elizabethan model with 3 quatrains and a couplet, thus forsaking the structural balance and intricate rhyme-scheme of the original. Though Surrey’s sonnets had a stateliness of their own, it was only in Shakespeare’s hands that the English sonnet achieved full grace and charm. Another of Surrey’s favourite metres was an Alexandrine (12 syllabled line) followed by a “fourteener”, called a ‘Poulter’s measure’. This was quite popular in Surrey’s time but died out in later ages.

In his translation of Aeneid, Surrey abandoned rhyme altogether and stumbled inadvertently upon a revolutionary metre – the blank verse. This translation was first published by John Day. Though in his translation Surrey borrowed freely from Gawain Douglas’s earlier rhymed version, his translation had an individual stamp and a remarkable quality. Surrey’s innate sense of rhythm and sensibility to suffering equipped him to interpret Virgil. It is interesting to note that in Tottel’s Miscellany itself there are 2 short blank-verse translations by another hand – Nicholas Grimald. But Grimald’s blank verse lacks the sweetness of Surrey’s and the constant alliteration is monotonous, but there is skilful use of run on lines.

A Mirror for Magistrates is one of the important books of the early Tudor period. It was a work planned by George Ferrers and William Baldwin. In it various men and women, most of them drawn from English history, recount their down fall in verse. It was begun as a continuation of Lydgate’s The Falls of Princes. Apart from Ferrers and Baldwin, Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Sackville were also associated with the writing of this work. Sackville wrote in rhyme–royal the Induction to this work and contributed 2 poems including ‘The Complaint of Buckingham’. As a poet Sackville had vision, instinct and a true mastery over his craft; and in essence, he belonged to the Renaissance. In the field of drama he collaborated with Norton in writing Gorboduc. Thereafter he retired from literary activity and Spenser lamented the silence of his learned Muse”.

Edmund Spenser was the greatest literary influence of this period. His major works are TheShepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, Dapnaida, an Elegy, Astrophel, a Pastoral Elegy, Amoretti, Epithalamion, Four Hymns and Prothalamion. In The Shepheardes Calender, the author, veiling himself under the modest title of ‘Immerito,’ steps aside for ‘E.K.’ (believed to be Edward Kirke) who introduces the poem to Gabriel Harvey. The work is dedicated to Sidney and it consists of 12 eclogues, one for every month of the year. They take the form of dialogues among shepherds, except the first and last, which are complaints by Colin Clout, who is Spenser himself. The eclogues are modelled on those by Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuan and Marot. In a shorter poem, Mother Hubbard’s Tale, Spenser’s discipleship to Chaucer is evident. Here he turns a beast-fable to political and social satire. The bare, forthright diction and the strong, rapid swing of the decasyllabic couplet have the Chaucerian stamp. Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is an allegorical pastoral dedicated to Walter Ralegh. The poem ends with a tribute to Colin’s mistress Rosalind. The greatest work of Spenser is The Faerie Queene, the 1st 3 books of which were published in 1590 and the next 3 in 1596. The general scheme of the work is elaborated on in the author’s introductory letter to Walter Ralegh. By The Faerie Queene the poet signifies glory in the abstract and Elizabeth I in particular, who also figures under the names Britomart, Belphoebe, Mercilla and Gloriana. Twelve of her knights – examples of twelve virtues – each undertake an adventure. Prince Arthur, symbolising ‘magnificence’ has a vision of the Faerie Queene, and determined to seek her out, is brought into the adventures of the Knights. The book however does not present Arthur but starts at once with the adventures of the knights.

They are:

I. The adventures of the Redcrosse Knight of Holiness (The Anglican Church);

II. The adventures of Sir Guyon, the Knight of temperance;

III. The legend of chastity, exemplified by Britomart and Beplhoebe;

IV. The legend of Triamond and Campbell exemplifying Friendship;

V. The adventures of Artegall, the Knight of Justice;

VI. The adventures of Sir Calidore, exemplifying Courtesy.

There is also a fragment on Mutabilitie, which was to have formed the 7th book. The book is modelled to some extent on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The work is written in the Spenserian stanza. The Faerie Queene is an allegory on multiple levels. It is the moral allegory of Glory, the political one of Queen Elizabeth and the religious allegory of the Anglican Church. There is also a historical level and at times Arthur is to be identified with Leicester, Artegall with Lord Grey of Wilton and Duessa with Mary, Queen of Scots. In fact Spenser’s genius and imagination were too fertile to move at ease within the limits of allegory. He had a vast framework to fill, and he crowded into it the most diverse materials. But, even though there is no structural unity, there is an inner spiritual one. It is the epic of the militant spiritual life, ever battling with evil in its many forms, unwearied in the quest for Honour. However, in spite of his strict moral sense, Spenser had a keen sensibility for Beauty which is very much part of his work. Perfectly matching the rich complexity of The Faerie Queene is the nine – lined Spenserian stanza ending with the Alexandrine and rhyming ababbcbcc. The Faerie Queene does indeed foretell a golden age of English literature, being a poetic masterpiece worthy to be set beside the plays of Shakespeare, the prose of the Authorized Version and the prophetic vision of the Baconian philosophy.

THE RENAISSANCE 1485 - 1660

The Wars of the Roses, with which the Middle Ages came to an end in England, destroyed the peace and Security of English life and resulted in a dearth of literature in the 15th century. It was during the Tudor period that England rose with a renewed nationalistic spirit, and peace returned after a long period of strife. England was swept along the strong tide of Renaissance. The re-discovery of the classics had profoundly influenced the educational system and the “New Learning” or Humanism reached its hey-day at the time of Henry VIII, under its exponents like Erasmus, More, Colet and Fisher. Humanism affected English literature chiefly in the domain of prose. Since the models it took up were from Latin it sometimes led to affectation as in the euphuistic prose of Lyly. However these Latin models brought order and precision into the chaos of English prose writings, and played an important role in the development of modern prose. Humanism was a great influence in the advancement of English drama as well. The classical revival of the continent gave rise to a neo-Latin drama mostly written for schools and universities, of which The Christian Terence was a notable example. The Latin university drama also influenced English drama, especially the works of the “university wits”. Renaissance humanism was the parent of another movement – Reformation – which left a deeper imprint upon England’s national character, but which was later to run counter to the Renaissance spirit. The two movements at first went hand in hand under the patronage of Henry VIII. Reformation gave rise to the Protestant religion which later became Puritanism, the religion of the middle classes who were growing rapidly in wealth and power. The austerity of Puritanism, its intense preoccupation with the spiritual needs of the individual and the ideal of economy it set before its eyes were all oppositional to the delight in life and love of extravagance that was the hallmark of Renaissance spirit and literature. Puritan criticism was directed particularly against the players: and English drama, however much it may owe to Renaissance, remained firmly rooted in Christian faith. In the field of poetry the continental models were Petrarch and, especially to Spenser, Ariosto. The Sonnet and the Pastoral were, in this period, adapted to refined passion or delicate flattery.

PROSE WRITERS OF THE RENAISSANCE (16th Century)

In Medieval England as well as in the 14th and 15th centuries there was a preponderance of poetry in English literature. The few writers who wrote in prose chose Latin and sometimes French as their medium. It is often said that printing stimulated the writing of prose. When more and more books were printed, it resulted in an increase in the number of readers, mostly common men. This meant a demand for books in prose. The bulk of Caxton’s publications were in prose, so were those of the several publishing houses established in the 15th–16th century in England. The publishers mainly employed translators for rendering the romances into English, thereby producing a large number of prose works which were, however, of little literary merit. Lord Berners was different from these professional translators. He was a statesman and a soldier. His translation of Froissart’s Chronicles is a splendid example of epic prose. He went further than Malory in deliberately cultivating a sensuous vocabulary and a simple, direct style. He developed his rhetorical tendencies further in his translation of Guevara’s Libro Aureo (The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius). He also translated several romances. Berners began in English the extravagant cult of antithesis, metaphor, and ornate phraseology, which was later employed by Lyly.

The protagonist of Classical Renaissance in England was the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus who came to England and joined a group of four scholars – Linacre, Colet, Grocyn and More. All of them were well-grounded in Greek erudition and theology, and hoped for a reformation of the Church. Erasmus brought out an edition of the Greek Testament with a Latin translation. His genial nature, sharp observation, and humour are revealed in his The Praise of Folly. John Colet was a principal Christian humanist, a scholar, theologian and educationist and the founder of St.Paul’s School. His careful provisions for discipline and teaching are a permanent legacy to posterity. Among the humanists, it was Thomas More who came closest to Erasmus in charm of disposition and humour. His diplomatic work in negotiating a commercial treaty with the Netherlands made More a part of English history. When More, like Bishop Fisher, refused to support Henry VIII in his divorce and re-marriage, he was executed. This act of tyranny was condemned throughout Europe. More’s Utopia was written in Latin and was first translated into English by Ralph Robinson.

Sir Thomas Elyot, author of The Book of the Governor was another major writer of this period. This book deals with the various branches of the education of a gentleman intended to take his due share in the government. Its discussions on the relative merits of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in which the author favours the first, is an example of the freedom from pedantry and the worldly wisdom of the author. Another important writer on education was Roger Ascham who is remembered perhaps for his puritanical denunciation of Malory’s Morte d’ Arthur. But Puritanism does not seem to agree with his interest in cock-fighting and sports as well as his elaborate work on archery—Toxophilus. His other major work was The Schoolmaster. Ascham urged that English matters should be written in the English language for Englishmen. The two chief literary products of the Reformation were the translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, both of which were composite works. Parts of the Bible were translated by Wycliff and the Tudor translators probably were influenced by the simple English of the Wycliffite versions. The Authorized Version of 1611 was prepared by many hands at the command of James I of Scotland. In the evolution of the Prayer Book, Cranmer, who was employed by Henry VIII, had the leading part. Apart from Cranmer, the literary merits of the English Bible in its present form are due to two other men as well—Tyndale and Coverdale.

Tyndale imbibed the Renaissance spirit and was enthusiastic about the reformed doctrines then being preached in Germany. Tyndale had difficulty getting his translation of the Bible printed in England and Europe. Finally when he did succeed in printing it, the book was condemned by the English bishops and copies of it seized and destroyed. Later he won the approval of Henry VIII but lost it by his denunciation of the divorce and was executed. Tyndale’s prose style was rhythmic and forcible but rarely has a consistent beauty of expression. Thomas Cranmer was a favourite of Henry VIII by his convenient support of the King’s divorce. He wrote well in Latin and English, and his own prayers, exhortations and homilies stand apart from those prepared by others under his authority. Miles Coverdale published a translation of the Bible principally based on the Zurich Bible and Tyndale’s version. One of its editions, known as Cranmer’s Bible (for it contained a preface by Cranmer), was one of the main sources of the Authorised Version. In the period after Berners, though English prose underwent much development, there did not evolve a really distinctive form of prose until the beginning of the Elizabethan era. Euphuism was the prose style of a generation though it owes its name to Lyly’s book. Two years before the publication of Euphues, George Pettie in his Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, displayed a euphuistic style. However Euphues was the most extravagant illustration of this prose style.

John Lyly’s Euphues or The Anatomy of Wit with its sequel Euphues and his England was a brilliant experiment of a new prose. Its serious didactic tone, its philosophic attitude to contemporary life, its grave studies of character and personal relations and of the subtleties of emotion offer a sharp contrast with the old romances and herald the novel of manners. However, Euphues is not a novel but a series of meditative debates with a thread of love-story serving to illustrate the author’s criticism of society. The characters are vague idealisms in the manner of a morality. Lylian euphuism aimed at richness, a variety of ornament and an artificiality of structure. The structure was based on antithesis and employed balanced clauses and alliteration. The diction was enriched by figures of speech.

Sir Philip Sidney was an embodiment of the idealism, valour, keen intelligence and practical accomplishment of his age, and was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. He had been in love with Penelope Devereaux, the ‘Stella’ of his sonnets. None of Sidney’s works were printed in his life time. First to be published were his love sonnets under the title ‘Astrophel and Stella’. (His poetry which belongs in spirit to a later tradition than the prose, shall be dealt with later). His major prose works are The Apologie for Poetrie (written in defence of poetry and as a reply to Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse) and the romance–pastoral Arcadia. The Apologie for Poetrie has much of the ardour and imagination of a youthful poet as well as many of its shortcomings. Though he was misled by his classical training into denouncing the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and upholding the strictest observance of the unities, he gives us an extra-ordinary insight into the creative force and exuberance characteristic of Elizabethan poetry. In this critical treatise he expounds the view that all literature of an imaginative, idealistic nature is poetry. Sidney followed the Lylian theory of artistic prose to a certain, extent, though he condemned it in Apologie. Sidney’s style is often as rich as that of Euphues though much more conservative and classical. Euphues was in its analytical tendencies and its criticism of life an anticipation of the modern novel, Sidney’s Arcadia belongs in essence to the stock of chivalric romance blended with the pastoral. But both works have an original plot. In Euphues the plot is a framework for the author’s theorizing about life but in Arcadia the story is everything. Sidney wrote it for his sister, the countess of Pembroke. The scene is set in a remote Utopian land and breathes the ideals of chivalrous virtue, heroic energy, passionate love, and express his longing for a simpler and purer life in contrast to the pomps and frivolities of Elizabethan court. The style of Euphues and Arcadia was imitated by other prose writers of the Elizabethan era. 

CANONIZATION BY JOHN DONNE

Summary

The speaker asks his addressee to be quiet, and let him love. If the addressee cannot hold his tongue, the speaker tells him to criticize him for other shortcomings (other than his tendency to love): his palsy, his gout, his "five grey hairs," or his ruined "fortune. He admonishes the addressee to look to his own mind and his own wealth and to think of his position and copy the other nobles ("Observe his Honour, or his Grace, "Or the King's real, or his stamped face" Contemplate.") The speaker; does not care what the addressee says or does, as long as he lets him love.

The speaker asks rhetorically, "Who's injured by my love?" He says that his sighs have not drowned? ships, his tears have not flooded land, his colds have not chilled spring, and the heat of his veins has not| added to the list of those killed by the plague. Soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find litigious men, regardless of the emotions of the speaker and his loyer.

The speaker tells his addressee to "Call us what you will," for it is love that makes them so. He? Says that the addressee can "Call her one, me another fly," and that they are also like candles ("tapers"), which burn by feeding upon their own selves ("and at our own cost die"). In each other, the lovers find the eagle and the dove, and together ("we two being one") they illuminate the riddle of the phoenix, for they "die and raise the same," just as the phoenix does-though unlike the phoenix, it is love that slays and resurrects them. •_.¦'"

He says that they can die by love if they are not able to live by it, and if their legend is not fit "for tombs and hearse," it ‘will be fit for poetry and "We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms." A well-wrought urn does as much justice to a dead man's ashes as does a gigantic tomb; and by the same token, the poems about the speaker and his lover will cause them to be "canonized," admitted to the sainthood of love. All those who hear their story will invoke the lovers, saying that countries, towns, and courts "beg from above / A pattern of your love!"

Commentary

This complicated poem, spoken ostensibly to someone who disapproves of the speaker's love' affair, is written in the voice of a world-wise, sardonic courtier who is nevertheless utterly caught up in his love. The poem simultaneously parodies old notions of love and coins elaborate new ones, eventually concluding that even if the love affair is impossible in the real world, it can become legendary through poetry, and the speaker and his lover will be like saints to later generations of lovers. (Hence the title: "The Canonization" refers to the process by which people are inducted into the canon of saints).

In the first stanza, the speaker obliquely details his relationship to the world of politics, wealth, and nobility; by assuming that these are the concerns of his addressee, he indicates his own background amid such concerns, and he also indicates the extent to which he has moved beyond that background. He hopes that the listener will leave him alone and pursue a career in the court, toadying to aristocrats, preoccupied with favor (the King's real face) and money (the King's stamped face, as on a coin). In the second stanza, he parodies contemporary Petrarchan notions of love and continues to mock his addressee, making the point that his sighs have not drowned ships and his tears have not caused floods. (Petrarchan love-poems were full of claims like "My tears are rain, and my sighs storms.") He also mocks the operations of the everyday world, saying that his love will not keep soldiers from fighting wars or lawyers from finding court cases--as though war and legal wrangling were the sole concerns of world outside the confines of his love affair.

In the third stanza, the speaker begins spinning off metaphors that will help explain the intensity and uniqueness of his love. First, he says that he and his lover are like moths drawn to a candle ("her one, me another fly"), then that they are like the candle itself. They embody the elements of the eagle (strong and masculine) and the dove (peaceful and feminine) bound up in the image of the phoenix, dying and rising by love. In the fourth stanza, the speaker explores the possibility of canonization in verse, and in the final stanza, he explores his and his lover's roles as the saints of love, to whom generations of future lovers will appeal for help. Throughout, the tone of the poem is balanced between a kind of arch, sophisticated sensibility ("half-acre tombs") and passionate amorous abandon ("We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love").

"The Canonization" is one of Donne's most famous and most written-about poems. Its criticism at the hands of Cleanth Brooks and others has made it a central topic in the argument between formalist critics and historicist critics; the former argue that the poem is what it seems to be, an anti-political love poem, while the latter argue, based on events in Donne's life at the time of the poem's composition, that it is actually a kind of coded, ironic rumination on the "ruined fortune" and dashed political hopes of the first stanza. The choice of which argument to follow is largely a matter of personal temperament. But unless one seeks a purely biographical understanding of Donne, it is probably best to understand the poem as the sort of droll, passionate speech-act it is, a highly sophisticated defense of love against the corrupting values of politics and privilege.

ORIGINS OF ENGLISH DRAMA - MIRACLE, MYSTERY AND MORALITY PLAYS

Like the great drama of the Greeks, the English drama owed its origin to religious ritual. It began in a simple attempt to render clearly the central doctrine of the Church. These plays were usually performed in the church by clergymen during Easter time. Gradually these included stories from the Old and New Testaments and the lives of saints; as they became more elaborate and dramatic, the plays moved from the interior of the church to the porch, to the churchyard, and later to meadows, streets and other public places. Plays, by then, had of course become secular, and the clergy began to view them with suspicion. But the revival of the Corpus Christ festival in 1311 provided a public holiday dedicated to dramatic representations of Biblical history. The growing importance of fairs, and the increase in wealth of the trading classes made miracle plays a regular feature of the 15th century, retaining their religious basis but developing dramatically at the same time. The miracle play proper, dealing with the lives of the saints, has been traced back to early 12^th century, when a play of St. Katherine was performed at Dunstable. A Norman clerk called Hilarius composed several miracles of which St. Nicholas and Raising of Lazarus are extant. The oldest English fragment, Harrowing of Hell, dates back to the 13th century. The mystery plays dealing with the Scripture history were developed from the Easter and Christmas plays and were especially associated with the Corpus Christi festival. They were performed in a cycle of pageants, each representing a single episode. These plays were enacted by several guilds at especially the towns of York, Wakefield, Chester, Norwich and Coventry. The stage was a crude contrivance of two stories – the lower representing hell and the upper signifying heaven. The mystery plays had little literary merit. Though the dialogue was sometimes lively and witty, the verse was crude and limping. These plays had no freedom of plot and the least suspicion of heresy could be fatal. Several complete cycles of mysteries have been preserved. The York cycle consists of 48 plays. The Towneley Mysteries, consisting of 30 plays, were performed at Wakefield. They treat their themes in a freer, less religious spirit, and hence, are more dramatic. They are less didactic and the human interest is heightened. The Chester group of 24 plays is more uneven and those of Coventry, 42 in number, have a serious, moralizing allegorical tone. Nothing is known of the authors of any of these plays. In the group of 4 plays known as the Digby Mysteries (c. 1500), an unmistakable advance in the direction or regular drama is made, especially in Mary Magdalene. But this realistic line of growth was interrupted by the morality play. The morality play retained the crude versification of the mystery, making use of alliteration as well as rhyme. It was, like the mystery, serious in intention and dealt with the basic problem of good and evil. They were written in the then fashionable allegorical manner – the characters were abstractions of virtues and vices. For the first time they employed a definite plot which was a great advance in dramatic development. The earliest mention of a morality is that of the Play of the Paternoster (not extant) and the oldest extant play is The Castle of Perseverance. Even more abstract are such plays like Mind, Wit and Understanding, The Four Elements, and Wit and Science. The best of the older moralities is the impressive Everyman, in which the powerful allegory is reinforced by considerable knowledge of human nature and well-handled dialogue. Under Henry VIII, a patron of the drama, the morality grew into the interlude, a short dramatic piece filling the intervals of long spectacular ones. The interlude lost its didactic purpose and employed humour freely, as in the interludes of John Heywood like the Four PP (Four Ps). The interludes were the harbingers of regular drama.