English Literature
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Although for the purposes of this
article English literature is treated as being
confined to writings in English by natives or inhabitants of the British Isles
(including Ireland), it is to a certain extent the case that literature--and
this is particularly true of the literature written in English--knows no
frontiers. Thus, English literature can be regarded as a cultural whole of which
the mainstream literatures of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and
Canada and important elements in the literatures of other Commonwealth or
ex-Commonwealth countries are parts (see AMERICAN
LITERATURE ; AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND,
LITERATURES OF ; and CANADIAN LITERATURE ). |
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English literature has sometimes been
stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains
the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert's Madame
Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated
Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman French writings, eminently
foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed
themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic
instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by
William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in classical
learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all of
the arts; and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and
reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively
viewed, classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of
these impulses derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin.
The Decadents of the late 19th century and modernists of the early 20th looked
to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration. Nor was
attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by
the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly
French and German in origin, infused the very study of English literature itself
in a host of published critical studies and university departments. |
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Further, Britain's past imperial glories
around the globe, particularly those that were connected with the Indian
subcontinent, continued to inspire literature--in some cases wistful, in other
cases hostile. Finally, English literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion
abroad, not only in predominantly English-speaking countries but also in all
those others where English is the first choice of study as a second language. |
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English literature is therefore not so
much insular as detached from the continental European tradition across the
Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller's
list: in Shakespeare it has a dramatist of world renown; in poetry, a genre
notoriously resistant to adequate translation and therefore difficult to compare
with the poetry of other literatures, it is so peculiarly rich as to merit
inclusion in the front rank; English literature's humour has been found as hard
to convey to foreigners as poetry, if not more so--a fact at any rate permitting
bestowal of the label "idiosyncratic"; English literature's remarkable
body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of
insularity; in autobiography, biography, and historical writing English
literature compares with the best of any culture; and children's literature,
fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor genres, are all
fields of exceptional achievement as regards English literature. Even in
philosophical writings, popularly thought of as hard to combine with literary
value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill,
and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for lucidity and grace with the best of
the French philosophers and the masters of classical antiquity. |
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Some of English literature's most
distinguished practitioners in the 20th century--from Henry James and Joseph
Conrad at its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard more recently--were of
foreign origin. What is more, none of the aforementioned had as much in common
with his adoptive country as did, for instance, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter
(two other distinguished writer-immigrants to Britain) by virtue both of having
been born into a British family and of having been brought up on British
Commonwealth soil. |
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On the other hand, during the same
period in the 20th century, many notable practitioners of English literature
left Britain to live abroad: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley,
Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Anthony
Burgess, and Sir Angus Wilson. In one case, that of Samuel Beckett, this process
was carried to the extent of writing works first in French and then translating
them into English. |
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Even English literature considered
purely as a product of the British Isles is extraordinarily heterogeneous,
however. Literature actually written in those Celtic tongues once prevalent in
Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales--called the "Celtic Fringe"--is
treated separately (see CELTIC LITERATURE ). Yet
Irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English
literature even when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet
Robert Burns and the 20th-century Scots writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the
latter half of the 20th century interest began also to focus on writings in
English or English dialect by recent settlers in Britain, such as
Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa proper, the Indian subcontinent, and East
Asia. |
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Even within England, culturally and
historically the dominant partner in the union of territories comprising
Britain, literature has been as enriched by strongly provincial writers as by
metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than not for English letters
has been that between social milieus, however much observers of Britain in their
own writings may have deplored the survival of class distinctions. As far back
as medieval times a courtly tradition in literature cross-fertilized with an
earthier demotic one. Shakespeare's frequent juxtaposition of royalty in one
scene with plebeians in the next reflects a very British way of looking at
society. This awareness of differences between high life and low, a state of
affairs fertile in creative tensions, is observable throughout the history of
English literature. (see also social
structure) |
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The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who
invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with them the common
Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for panegyric,
magic, and short narrative, little or none survives. For nearly a century after
the conversion of King Aethelberht I of Kent to Christianity in 597, there is no
evidence that the English wrote poetry in their own language. But St.
Bede the Venerable, in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical
History of the English People"), wrote that in the late 7th century Caedmon,
an illiterate Northumbrian cowherd, was inspired in a dream to compose a short
hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later composed verses based on
Scripture, which was expounded for him by monks at Streaneshalch (Whitby), but
only the "Hymn of Creation" survives. Caedmon legitimized the native
verse form by adapting it to Christian themes. Others, following his example,
gave England a body of vernacular poetry unparalleled in Europe before the end
of the 1st millennium. |
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Virtually all Old English poetry is
written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a syntactical break, or
caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration linking
the two halves of the line; this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress
lines. The poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of stock phrases and
phrase patterns, applying standard epithets to various classes of characters,
and depicting scenery with such recurring images as the eagle and wolf, which
wait during battles to feast on carrion, and the ice and snow, which appear in
the landscape to signal sorrow. In the best poems such formulas, far from being
tedious, give a strong impression of the richness of the cultural fund from
which poets could draw. Other standard devices of this poetry are the kenning,
a metaphorical name for a thing, usually expressed in a compound noun (e.g.,
"swan-road" used to name the sea); and variation, the repeating of a
single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new level of
meaning. That these verse techniques changed little during 400 years of literary
production suggests the extreme conservatism of Anglo-Saxon culture. |
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Most Old English poetry is preserved in
four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th centuries. The Beowulf
manuscript (British Library) contains Beowulf,
Judith, and three prose tracts; the Exeter Book
(Exeter cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of lyrics, riddles, didactic
poems, and religious narratives; the Junius manuscript
(Bodleian Library, Oxford) contains biblical paraphrases; and the Vercelli
Book (cathedral library, Vercelli, Italy) contains saints' lives, several
short religious poems, and prose homilies. In addition to the poems in these
books are historical poems in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle; poetic renderings of Psalms 51-150; the 31 "Metres"
included in King Alfred the Great's translation of Boethius' Consolation
of Philosophy; magical, didactic, elegiac, and heroic poems; and others,
miscellaneously interspersed with prose, jotted in margins and even worked in
stone or metal. |
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Few poems can be dated as closely as
Caedmon's "Hymn." King Alfred's compositions fall into the late 9th
century, and Bede composed his "Death Song" within 50 days of his
death on May 25, 735. Historical poems like "The Battle of Brunanburh"
(after 937) and "The Battle of Maldon" (after 991) are fixed by the
dates of the events they commemorate. A translation of one of Aldhelm's riddles
is found not only in the Exeter Book but also in an early 9th-century manuscript
at Leiden; it can be no later than the Leiden manuscript. And at least a part of
"The Dream of the Rood" can be dated by an excerpt carved on the
8th-century Ruthwell Cross (in Dumfriesshire, Scotland). But in the absence of
such indications, Old English poems are hard to date, and the scholarly
consensus that most were composed in the Midlands and the North in the 8th and
9th centuries has crumbled in recent years. Many now hold that "The
Wanderer," Beowulf, and other
poems once assumed to be early are of the 9th or 10th century. For most poems,
little more than that they were written between the 8th and the 11th centuries
can be said with certainty. |
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If few poems can be dated accurately,
still fewer can be attributed to particular poets. The most important author
from whom a considerable body of work survives is Cynewulf,
who wove his runic signature into the epilogues of four poems. Aside from his
name, little is known of him; he probably lived in the 9th century in Mercia.
His works include The Fates of the
Apostles, a short martyrology; The
Ascension (also called Christ II),
a homily and biblical narrative; Juliana,
a saint's passion set in the reign of Maximian (late 3rd century AD); and Elene,
perhaps the best of his poems, which describes the mission of St. Helena, mother
of the emperor Constantine, to recover Christ's cross. Cynewulf's work is lucid
and technically elegant; his theme is the continuing evangelical mission from
the time of Christ to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. Several
poems not by Cynewulf are associated with him because of their subject matter.
These include two lives of St. Guthlac and Andreas, the story of St. Andrew among the Mermedonians, which has
stylistic affinities with Beowulf.
Also in the "Cynewulf group" are several poems with Christ as their
subject, of which the most important is "The Dream
of the Rood," in which the cross speaks of itself as Christ's loyal
thane and yet the instrument of his death. This tragic paradox echoes a
recurring theme of secular poetry and at the same time movingly expresses the
religious paradoxes of Christ's triumph in death and mankind's redemption from
sin. |
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The Old Testament narratives (Genesis,
Exodus, and Daniel) of the Junius
manuscript were once attributed to Caedmon but now are thought to be of
anonymous authorship. Of these Exodus
is remarkable for its intricate diction and bold imagery. The fragmentary Judith
of the Beowulf manuscript stirringly embellishes the story from the apocrypha of
the heroine who led the Jews to victory over the Assyrians. |
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The term elegy
is used of Old English poems that lament the loss of worldly goods, glory, or
human companionship. "The Wanderer" is narrated by a man, deprived of
lord and kinsmen, whose journeys lead him to the realization that there is
stability only in heaven. "The Seafarer" is similar, but its journey
motif more explicitly symbolizes the speaker's spiritual yearnings. Several
others have similar themes, and three elegies, "The Husband's
Message," "The Wife's Lament," and "Wulf and Eadwacer,"
describe what appears to be a conventional situation: the separation of husband
and wife by the husband's exile. |
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"Deor"
bridges the gap between the elegy and the heroic poem, for in it a poet laments
the loss of his position at court by alluding to sorrowful stories from Germanic
legend. Beowulf
itself narrates the battles of Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a tribe in what
is now southern Sweden), against the monstrous Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a
fire-breathing dragon. The account contains some of the best elegiac verse in
the language; and by setting marvelous tales against a historical background in
which victory is always temporary and strife is always renewed, the poet gives
the whole an elegiac cast. Beowulf also
is one of the best religious poems, not only because of its explicitly Christian
passages but also because Beowulf's monstrous foes are depicted as God's enemies
and Beowulf himself as God's champion. Other heroic narratives are fragmentary.
Of "The Battle of Finnsburh" and "Waldere" only enough
remains to indicate that when whole they must have been fast paced and stirring. |
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Of several poems dealing with English
history and preserved in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, the most notable is "The
Battle of Brunanburh," a panegyric on the occasion of King
Athelstan's victory over a coalition of Norsemen and Scots in the year 937. But
the best historical poem is not from the Chronicle.
"The Battle of Maldon," which
describes the defeat of Aldorman Byrhtnoth at the hands of Viking invaders in
991, states eloquently the heroic ideal, contrasting the determination of some
of Byrhtnoth's thanes to avenge his death or die in the attempt with the
cowardice of others who left the field. Minor poetic genres include catalogs
(two sets of "Maxims" and "Widsith," a list of rulers,
tribes, and notables in the heroic age), dialogues, metrical prefaces and
epilogues to prose works of the Alfredian period, and liturgical poems
associated with the Benedictine Office. |
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The earliest English prose work, the law
code of King Aethelberht I of Kent, was written within a few years of St.
Augustine of Canterbury's arrival in England (597). Other 7th- and 8th-century
prose, similarly practical in character, includes more laws, wills, and
charters. According to Cuthbert, who was a monk at Jarrow, Bede had just
finished a translation of the Gospel of St. John at the time of his death,
though this does not survive; and two medical tracts, a Herbarium and Medicina de
quadrupedibus, very likely date from the 8th century. |
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But the earliest literary prose dates
from the late 9th century, when King Alfred,
eager to improve the state of English learning, led a vigorous program to
translate into English "certain books that are necessary for all men to
know." Alfred himself translated St. Gregory I the Great's Pastoral Care, Boethius' Consolation
of Philosophy, St. Augustine of Hippo's Soliloquies
and the first 50 psalms. His Pastoral
Care is a fairly literal translation, but his Boethius is extensively
restructured and revised to make explicit the Christian message that medieval
commentators saw in that work. He revised the Soliloquies even more radically, departing from his source to draw
from St. Jerome, Gregory, and other works by Augustine. Alfred's prefaces to
these works are of great historical interest. |
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At Alfred's urging Bishop Werferth of
Worcester translated the Dialogues of
Gregory; probably Alfred also inspired anonymous scholars to translate Bede's Historia
ecclesiastica and Paulus Orosius' Historiarum
adversum paganos libri vii ("History Opposing the Pagans, In Seven
Books"). Both of these works are much abridged; the Bede translation
follows its source slavishly, but the translator of Orosius added many details
of northern European geography and also accounts of the voyages of Ohthere the
Norwegian and Wulfstan the Dane. These accounts, in addition to their
geographical interest, show that friendly commerce between England and
Scandinavia was possible even during the Danish wars. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle probably originated in Alfred's reign. Its earliest annals (from
60 BC) are laconic, except the entry for 755, which records in detail a feud
between the West Saxon king Cynewulf and the would-be usurper Cyneheard. The
entries covering the Danish wars of the late 9th century are much fuller, and
those running from the reign of Aethelred I to the Norman Conquest in 1066 (when
the Chronicle exists in several
versions) contain many passages of excellent writing. The early 10th century is
not notable for literary production, but some of the homilies in the Vercelli
Book and the Blickling manuscript (Scheide Library, Princeton University) may
belong to that period. |
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The Benedictine reform of the mid-10th
century brought about a period of lively literary activity. Aethelwold,
bishop of Winchester and one of the leaders of the reform, translated the Rule
of St. Benedict. But the greatest and most prolific writer of this period was
his pupil Aelfric, abbot of Eynsham, whose works
include three cycles of 40 homilies each (Catholic
Homilies, 2 vol., and the Lives of the
Saints), as well as homilies not in these cycles; a Latin grammar; a
treatise on science; pastoral letters; and several translations. His Latin Colloquy, supplied with an Old English version by an anonymous
glossarist, gives a charming picture of everyday life in Anglo-Saxon England.
Aelfric wrote with lucidity and astonishing beauty, using the rhetorical devices
of Latin literature frequently but without ostentation; his later alliterative
prose, which loosely imitates the rhythms of Old English poetry, influenced
writers long after the Norman Conquest. Wulfstan,
archbishop of York, wrote legal codes, both civil and ecclesiastical, and a
number of homilies, including Sermo
Lupi ad Anglos ("Wulf's Address to the English"), a
ferocious denunciation of the morals of his time. To judge from the number of
extant manuscripts, these two writers were enormously popular. Byrhtferth of
Ramsey wrote several Latin works and the Enchiridion,
a textbook on the calendar, notable for its ornate style. Numerous anonymous
works, some of very high quality, were produced in this period, including
homilies, saints' lives, dialogues, and translations of such works as the
Gospels, several Old Testament books, liturgical texts, monastic rules,
penitential handbooks, and the romance Apollonius
of Tyre (translated from Latin but probably derived from a Greek original).
The works of the monastic reform were written during a few remarkable decades
around the turn of the millennium. Little original work can be securely dated to
the period after Wulfstan's death (1023), but the continued vigour of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle shows that good Old English prose was written
right up to the Norman Conquest. By the end of this period English had been
established as a literary language with a polish and versatility unequaled among
European vernaculars. |
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The Norman Conquest worked no immediate
transformation on either the language or literature of the English. Older poetry
continued to be copied during the last half of the 11th century; two poems of
the early 12th century--"Durham," which praises that city's cathedral
and its relics, and "Instructions for Christians," a didactic
piece--show that correct alliterative verse could be composed well after 1066.
But even before the Conquest rhyme had begun to supplant rather than supplement
alliteration in some poems, which continued to use the older four-stress line
but the rhythms of which varied from the set types used in classical Old English
verse. A post-Conquest example is "The Grave," which contains several
rhyming lines; a poem from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the death of William the Conqueror,
lamenting his cruelty and greed, has more rhyme than alliteration. (see also
Middle English literature) |
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By the end of the 12th century English
poetry had been so heavily influenced by French models that such a work as the
long epic Brut
(c. 1200) by Lawamon,
a Worcestershire priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with
rhyming couplets while generally eschewing French vocabulary. The Brut
mainly draws upon Wace's Anglo-Norman Roman
de Brut (1155; based in turn upon Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia
regum Britanniae, or History of the
Kings of Britain), but in Lawamon's hands the Arthurian story takes on a
Germanic and heroic flavour largely missing in Wace. The Brut exists in two manuscripts, one written shortly after 1200 and
the other some 50 years later. That the later version has been extensively
modernized and somewhat abridged suggests the speed with which English language
and literary tastes were changing in this period. The Proverbs of Alfred also were written in the late 12th century;
these deliver conventional wisdom in a mixture of rhymed couplets and
alliterative lines, and it is hardly likely that any of the material they
contain actually originated with the king whose wisdom they celebrate. The early
13th-century Bestiary mixes
alliterative lines, three- and four-stress couplets, and septenary lines, but
the logic behind this mix is more obvious than in the Brut and the Proverbs, for
the poet was imitating the varied metres of his Latin source. More regular in
form than these poems is the anonymous Poema
morale in septenary couplets, in which an old man delivers a dose of moral
advice to his presumably younger audience. (see also French literature) |
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By far the most brilliant poem of this
period is The Owl and the Nightingale (written
after 1189), an example of the popular debate genre. The two birds argue topics
ranging from their hygienic habits, looks, and songs to marriage,
prognostication, and the proper modes of worship. The nightingale stands for the
joyous aspects of life, the owl for the sombre; there is no clear winner, but
the debate ends as the birds go off to state their cases to one Nicholas of
Guildford, a wise man. The poem is learned in the clerical tradition but wears
its learning lightly as the disputants speak in colloquial and sometimes earthy
language. Like the Poema morale, The Owl
and the Nightingale is metrically regular (octosyllabic couplets), but it
uses the French metre with an assurance that is astonishing in so early a poem. |
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The 13th century saw a rise in the
popularity of long didactic poems presenting biblical narrative, saints' lives,
or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French. The most
idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum
by Orm, an Augustinian canon in the north of
England. Written in some 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid
couplets, the work is interesting mainly in that the manuscript that preserves
it is Orm's autograph and shows his somewhat fussy (and ineffectual) efforts to
reform and regularize English spelling. Other biblical paraphrases are Genesis
and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph, and the vast Cursor
mundi, whose subject, as its title suggests, is the whole history of the
world. An especially popular work was the South
English Legendary, which began as a miscellaneous collection of saints'
lives but was expanded by later redactors and rearranged in the order of the
church calendar. The didactic tradition continued into the 14th century with Robert
Mannyng's Handlyng
Synne, a confessional manual the expected dryness of which is
relieved by the insertion of lively narratives, and the Pricke
of Conscience, a summary of theology sometimes attributed to Richard Rolle.
(see also didactic
literature) |
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The earliest examples of verse romance,
a genre that would remain popular through the Middle Ages, appeared in the 13th
century. King Horn and Floris and
Blauncheflour both are preserved in a manuscript of around 1250. King
Horn, oddly written in short two- and three-stress lines, is a vigorous tale
of a kingdom lost and regained, with a subplot concerning Horn's love for
Princess Rymenhild. Floris and Blauncheflour is more exotic, being the tale of a pair of
royal lovers who become separated and, after various adventures in eastern
lands, reunited. Not much later than these is The Lay of Havelok the Dane, a tale of princely love and adventure
similar to King Horn but more
competently executed. Many more such romances were produced in the 14th century.
Popular subgenres were "the matter of Britain" (Arthurian romances
such as Of Arthour and of Merlin and Ywain
and Gawain); "the matter of Troy" (tales of antiquity such as The Seege of Troye and Kyng
Alisaunder); and the English Breton lays, stories of otherworldly magic,
such as Lai le Freine and Sir
Orfeo, modeled after those of professional Breton storytellers. These
relatively unsophisticated works were no doubt written for a bourgeois audience,
and the manuscripts that preserve them are early examples of commercial book
production. The humorous beast epic makes its first appearance in the 13th
century in The Fox and the Wolf, taken indirectly from the Old French Roman
de Renart. In the same manuscript with this work is Dame
Sirith, the earliest English fabliau. Another sort of humour is found in The
Land of Cockaygne, which depicts a utopia better than heaven, where rivers
run with oil, milk, honey, and wine, geese fly about already roasted, and monks
hunt with hawks and dance with nuns. |
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The lyric was virtually unknown to Old
English poets: poems like "Deor" and "Wulf and Eadwacer,"
which have been called lyrics, are thematically different from those that began
to circulate orally in the 12th century and to be written down in great numbers
in the 13th; and these Old English poems have a stronger narrative component
than the later productions. The most frequent topics in the Middle English
secular lyric are springtime and romantic love; many rework such themes
tediously, but some, such as "Foweles in the frith" (13th century) and
"Ich am of Irlaunde" (14th century), convey strong emotions in a few
lines. Two lyrics of the early 13th century, "Mirie it is while sumer
ilast" and "Sumer is icumen in," are preserved with musical
settings, and probably most of the others were meant to be sung. The dominant
mood of the religious lyrics is passionate: the poets sorrow for Christ on the
Cross and for Mary, celebrate the "five joys" of Mary, and import
language from love poetry to express religious devotion. Excellent early
examples are "Nou goth sonne under wod" and "Stond wel, moder,
ounder rode." Many of the lyrics are preserved in manuscript anthologies,
of which the best is British Library manuscript Harley 2253 from the early 14th
century. The love poems in this collection, such as "Alysoun" and
"Blow, Northerne Wynd," take after the poems of the Provençal
troubadours but are less formal and abstract and therefore more lively. The
religious lyrics also are of high quality; but the most remarkable of the Harley
Lyrics, "The Man in the Moon," far from being about love or religion,
imagines the man in the Moon as a simple peasant, sympathizes with his hard
life, and offers him some useful advice on how to best the village hayward. |
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A poem such as "The Man in the
Moon" serves as a reminder that, although the poetry of the early Middle
English period is increasingly influenced by the Anglo-Norman literature
produced for the courts, it is seldom "courtly." Most English poets,
whether writing about kings or peasants, looked at life from a middle-class
perspective. If their work sometimes lacks sophistication, it nevertheless has a
vitality that comes from preoccupation with daily affairs; its practicality, as
much as its language, gives it a distinctly English flavour. |
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Old English prose texts were copied for
more than a century after the Norman Conquest; the homilies of Aelfric were
especially popular, and King Alfred's translations of Boethius and Augustine
survive only in 12th-century manuscripts. In the early 13th century an anonymous
worker at Worcester supplied glosses to certain words in a number of Old English
manuscripts, demonstrating that by this time the older language was beginning to
pose difficulties for readers. |
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The composition of English prose also
continued without interruption. Two manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle exhibit very strong prose for years after the
Conquest, and one of these, The
Peterborough Chronicle, continues to the year 1154. Two manuscripts of
around 1200 contain 12th-century sermons, and another has a workmanlike
compilation on the "Vices and Virtues," composed around 1200. But the
English language faced stiff competition from both Anglo-Norman (the insular
dialect of French being used increasingly in the monasteries) and Latin, a
language intelligible to speakers of both English and French. It was inevitable,
then, that the production of English prose should decline in quantity, if not in
quality. The great prose works of this period were composed mainly for those who
could read only English--women especially. In the West Midlands the Old English
alliterative prose tradition remained very much alive into the 13th century,
when the several texts known collectively as the Katherine
Group were written. "St. Katherine," "St. Margaret,"
and "St. Juliana," found together in a single manuscript, have rhythms
strongly reminiscent of those of Aelfric and Wulfstan. So, to a lesser extent,
do "Hali Meithhad" ("Holy Maidenhood") and "Sawles
Warde" ("The Guardianship of the Soul") from the same book, but
newer influences can be seen in these works as well: as the title of another
devotional piece, "The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd" ("The Wooing of Our
Lord"), suggests, the prose of this time often has a rapturous, even
sensual flavour, and, like the poetry, it frequently employs the language of
love to express religious fervour. |
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Further removed from the Old English
prose tradition, though often associated with the Katherine Group, is the Ancrene
Wisse ("Guide for Anchoresses," also known as the Ancrene
Riwle, or "Rule for Anchoresses"), a manual for the guidance of
women recluses outside the regular orders. This anonymous work, which was
translated into French and Latin and remained popular until the 16th century, is
notable for its humanity, practicality, and insight into human nature but even
more for its brilliant style. Like the other prose of its time, it uses
alliteration as ornament, but it is more indebted to new fashions in preaching,
which had originated in the universities, than to native traditions. With its
richly figurative language, rhetorically crafted sentences, and carefully
logical divisions and subdivisions, it manages to achieve in English the effects
that such contemporary writers as John of Salisbury and Walter Map were striving
for in Latin. |
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Little noteworthy prose was written in
the late 13th century. In the early 14th century Dan Michel produced in Kentish
the Ayenbite of Inwit ("Prick of
Conscience"), a translation from French. But the best prose of this time is
by the mystic Richard Rolle, the hermit of
Hampole, whose English tracts include The
Commandment, Meditations on the Passion, and The Form of Perfect Living, among others. His intense and stylized
prose was among the most popular of the 14th century and inspired such later
works as Walter Hilton's Scale of
Perfection, Julian of Norwich's Sixteen
Revelations of Divine Love, and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. (P.S.Ba.) |
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One of the most important factors in the
nature and development of English literature between about 1350 and 1550 was the
peculiar linguistic situation in England at the beginning of the period. Among
the small minority of the population that could be regarded as literate,
bilingualism and even trilingualism were common. Insofar as it was considered a
serious literary medium at all, English was obliged to compete on uneven terms
with Latin and with the Anglo-Norman dialect of French widely used in England at
the time. Moreover, extreme dialectal diversity within English itself made it
difficult for vernacular writings, irrespective of their literary pretensions,
to circulate very far outside their immediate areas of composition, a
disadvantage not suffered by writings in Anglo-Norman and Latin. Literary
culture managed to survive and in fact to flourish in the face of such
potentially crushing factors as the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death
(1347-51), chronic external and internal military conflicts in the form of the
Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses, and serious social, political, and
religious unrest, as evinced in the Peasants' Revolt (1381) and the rise of
Lollardism (centred on the religious teachings of John Wycliffe). All the more
remarkable then was the literary and linguistic revolution that took place in
England between about 1350 and 1400 and that was slowly and soberly consolidated
over the subsequent 150 years. |
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The most puzzling episode in the
development of later Middle English literature was the apparently sudden
reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th century. Debate
continues as to whether the group of long, serious, and sometimes learned poems
written between about 1350 and the first decade of the 15th century should be
regarded as an "alliterative revival" or rather as the late flowering
of a largely lost native tradition stretching back to the Old English period.
The earliest examples of the phenomenon, William
of Palerne and Winner and Waster,
are both datable to the 1350s, but neither poem exhibits to the full all the
characteristics of the slightly later poems central to the movement. William
of Palerne, condescendingly commissioned by a nobleman for the benefit of
"them that know no French," is a homely paraphrase of a courtly
continental romance, the only poem in the group to take love as its central
theme. The poet's technical competence in handling the difficult syntax and
diction of the alliterative style is not, however, to be compared with that of Winner and Waster's author, who exhibits full mastery of the form,
particularly in brilliant descriptions of setting and spectacle. This poem's
topical concern with social satire links it primarily with another, less formal
body of alliterative verse, of which William
Langland's Piers Plowman was the
principal representative and exemplar. Indeed, Winner and Waster, with its sense of social commitment and
occasional apocalyptic gesture, may well have served as a source of inspiration
for Langland himself. |
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The expression alliterative revival
should not be taken to imply a return to the principles of classical Old English
versification. The authors of the later 14th-century alliterative poems either
inherited or developed their own conventions, which resemble those of the Old
English tradition in only the most general way. The syntax and particularly the
diction of later Middle English alliterative verse were also distinctive, and
the search for alliterating phrases and constructions led to the extensive use
of archaic, technical, and dialectal words. Hunts, feasts, battles, storms, and
landscapes were described with a brilliant concretion of detail rarely
paralleled since, while the abler poets also contrived subtle modulations of the
staple verse-paragraph to accommodate dialogue, discourse, and argument. Among
the poems central to the movement were three pieces dealing with the life and
legends of Alexander, the massive Destruction
of Troy, and the Siege of Jerusalem.
The fact that all of these derived from various Latin sources suggests that the
anonymous poets were likely to have been clerics with a strong, if bookish,
historical sense of their romance "matters." The "matter of
Britain" was represented by an outstanding composition, the alliterative Morte
Arthure, an epic portrayal of King Arthur's conquests in Europe and his
eventual fall, combining a strong narrative thrust with considerable density and
subtlety of diction. A gathering sense of inevitable transitoriness gradually
tempers the virile realization of heroic idealism, and it is not surprising to
find that the poem was later used by Sir Thomas Malory as a source for his prose
account, Le Morte Darthur (completed c.
1470). |
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The alliterative movement would today be
regarded as a curious but inconsiderable episode, were it not for four other
poems now generally attributed to a single anonymous author: the chivalric
romance Sir
Gawayne and the Grene Knight, two homiletic poems called Patience
and Purity (or Cleanness), and
an elegiac dream vision known as Pearl,
all miraculously preserved in a single manuscript dated c. 1400. The poet of Sir
Gawayne far exceeded the other alliterative writers in his mastery of form
and style, and though he wrote ultimately as a moralist, human warmth and
sympathy (often taking comic form) were also close to the heart of his work. Patience
relates the biblical story of Jonah as a human comedy of petulance and
irascibility set off against God's benign forbearance. Purity
imaginatively re-creates several monitory narratives of man's impurity and its
consequences in a spectacular display of poetic skill: the Flood, the
destruction of Sodom, and Belshazzar's Feast. The poet's principal achievement,
however, was Sir Gawayne, in which he
used the conventional apparatus of chivalric romance to engage in a serious
exploration of man's moral conduct in the face of the unknown. The hero, a
questing knight of Arthur's court, embodies a combination of the noblest
chivalric and spiritual aspirations of the age, but instead of triumphing in the
conventional way, he fails when tested (albeit rather unfairly) by mysterious
supernatural powers. No paraphrase can hope to recapture the brilliant
imaginative resources displayed in the telling of the story and the structuring
of the poem as a work of art. The Pearl
stands somewhat aside from the alliterative movement proper. In common with a
number of other poems of the period, it was composed in stanzaic form, with
alliteration used for ornamental effect. Technically it is one of the most
complex poems in the language, an attempt to work in words an analogy to the
jeweler's art. The jeweler-poet is vouchsafed a heavenly vision in which he sees
his pearl, the discreet symbol used in the poem for a lost infant daughter who
has died to become a bride of Christ. She offers theological consolation for his
grief, expounding the way of salvation and the place of human life in a
transcendental and extra-temporal view of things. |
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The alliterative movement was primarily
confined to poets writing in northern and northwestern England, who showed
little regard for courtly, London-based literary developments. It is likely that
alliterative poetry, under aristocratic patronage, filled a gap in the literary
life of the provinces caused by the decline of Anglo-Norman in the latter half
of the 14th century. Alliterative poetry was not unknown in London and the
southeast, but it penetrated those areas in a modified form and in poems that
dealt with different subject matter. |
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William Langland's
long alliterative poem Piers
Plowman begins with a vision of the world seen from the Malvern Hills
in Worcestershire, where, tradition has it, the poet was born and brought up,
and where he would have been open to the influence of the alliterative movement.
If what he tells about himself in the poem is true (and there is no other source
of information), he later lived obscurely in London as an unbeneficed cleric.
Langland wrote in the unrhymed alliterative mode, but he modified it in such a
way as to make it more accessible to a wider audience by treating the metre more
loosely and avoiding the arcane diction of the provincial poets. His poem exists
in three versions: A, Piers Plowman in
its short, early form, dating from the 1360s; B, a major revision and extension
of A made in the late 1370s; and C (1380s), a less "literary" version
of B, apparently intended to bring its doctrinal issues into clearer focus. The
poem takes the form of a series of dream visions dealing with the social and
spiritual predicament of later 14th-century England against a sombre apocalyptic
backdrop. Realistic and allegorical elements are mingled in a phantasmagoric
way, and both the poetic medium and the structure are frequently subverted by
the writer's spiritual and didactic impulses. Passages of involuted theological
reasoning mingle with scatological satire, and moments of sublime religious
feeling appear alongside forthright political comment. This makes it a work of
the utmost difficulty, defiant of categorization, but at the same time Langland
never fails to convince the reader of the passionate integrity of his writing.
His bitter attacks on political and ecclesiastical corruption (especially among
the friars) quickly struck chords with his contemporaries. Among minor poems in
the same vein were Mum and the Sothsegger
(c. 1399-1406) and a Lollard piece
called Pierce the Ploughman's Creed (c.
1395). In the 16th century Piers Plowman
was issued as a printed book and was used for apologetic purposes by the early
Protestants. |
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Apart from a few late and minor
reappearances in Scotland and the northwest of England, the alliterative
movement was over before the first quarter of the 15th century had passed. The
other major strand in the development of English poetry from about 1350 proved
much more durable. The cultivation and refinement of human sentiment with
respect to love, already present in earlier 14th-century writings such as the
Harley Lyrics, took firm root in English court culture during the reign of
Richard II (1377-99). English began to displace Anglo-Norman French as the
language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and signs of royal and
noble patronage for English vernacular writers became evident. These processes
undoubtedly created some of the conditions in which a writer of Chaucer's
interests and temperament might flourish, but they were encouraged and given
direction by his genius in establishing English as a literary language. (see
also courtly
love) |
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Geoffrey Chaucer, a Londoner of
bourgeois origins, was at various times a courtier, diplomat, and civil servant.
His poetry frequently (but not always unironically) reflects the views and
values associated with the term "courtly." It is in some ways not easy
to account for his decision to write in English, and it is not surprising that
his earliest substantial poems, the Book
of the Duchess (c. 1370) and the House
of Fame (c. 1380), were heavily indebted to the fashionable French
love-vision poetry of the time. Also of French origin was the octosyllabic
couplet used in these poems. Chaucer's abandonment of this engaging but
ultimately jejune metre in favour of a 10-syllable or iambic
pentameter line was a portentous moment for English poetry. His mastery
of it was first revealed in stanzaic form, notably the seven-line stanza (rhyme
royal) of the Parlement of Foules (c.
1382) and Troilus and Criseyde (c.
1385), and later was extended in the decasyllabic couplets of the prologue to
the Legend of Good Women and large
parts of The Canterbury Tales. |
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Though Chaucer wrote a number of moral
and amatory lyrics, which were imitated by his 15th-century followers, his major
achievements were in the field of narrative poetry. The early influence of
French courtly love poetry (notably the Roman
de la Rose, which he translated) gave way to an interest in Italian
literature. Chaucer was acquainted with Dante's writings and took a story
from Petrarch for the substance of his "Clerk's Tale." Two of his
major poems, Troilus and Criseyde and "The Knight's Tale," were based,
respectively, on the Filostrato and
the Teseida of Boccaccio.
The Troilus, Chaucer's single most
ambitious poem, is a moving story of love gained and betrayed set against the
background of the Trojan War. As well as being a poem of profound human sympathy
and insight, it also has a marked philosophical dimension derived from Chaucer's
reading of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, a work that he also translated in
prose. His consummate skill in narrative art, however, was most fully displayed
in The Canterbury
Tales (c. 1387-1400), an
unfinished series of stories purporting to be told by a group of pilgrims
journeying from London to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket and back. The illusion
that the individual pilgrims (rather than Chaucer himself) tell their tales gave
him an unprecedented freedom of authorial stance, which enabled him to explore
the rich fictive potentialities of a number of genres: pious legend (in
"The Man of Law's Tale" and "The Prioress's Tale"), fabliaux
("The Shipman's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," and "The
Reeve's Tale"), chivalric romance ("The Knight's Tale"), popular
romance (parodied in Chaucer's "own" "Tale of Sir Thopas"),
beast fable ("The Nun's Priest's Tale" and "The Manciple's
Tale") and more--what Dryden later summed up as "God's plenty." |
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A recurrent concern in Chaucer's
writings was the refined and sophisticated cultivation of love, commonly
described by the modern expression "courtly love." A contemporary
French term, fine amour, gives a more
authentic description of the phenomenon; Chaucer's friend John
Gower translated it as "fine loving" in his long poem Confessio
amantis (begun c. 1386).
The Confessio runs to some 33,000
lines in octosyllabic couplets and takes the form of a collection of exemplary
tales placed within the framework of a lover's confession to a priest of Venus.
Gower provides an interesting and sometimes refreshing contrast to Chaucer, in
that the sober and earnest moral intent behind his writing is always clear,
whereas Chaucer can be irritatingly noncommital and evasive. On the other hand,
though Gower's verse is generally fluent and pleasing to read, it has a thin
homogeneity of texture that cannot compare with the colour and range to be found
in the language of his great contemporary. Gower was undoubtedly extremely
learned by lay standards, and many classical myths (especially those deriving
from Ovid's Metamorphoses) make the
first of their numerous appearances in English literature in the Confessio.
He was also deeply concerned with the moral and social condition of contemporary
society, and he dealt with it in two weighty compositions in French and Latin,
respectively: the Mirour de l'omme (c. 1374-78; "The Mirror of Man") and Vox clamantis (c. 1385). |
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The numerous 15th-century followers of
Chaucer continued to treat the conventional range of courtly and moralizing
topics, but only rarely with the intelligence and stylistic accomplishment of
their distinguished predecessors. The canon of Chaucer's works began to
accumulate delightful but apocryphal trifles such as "The Flower and the
Leaf" and "The Assembly of Ladies" (both c. 1475), the former, like a surprising quantity of 15th-century
verse of this type, purportedly written by a woman. The stock figures of the
ardent but endlessly frustrated lover and the irresistible but disdainful lady
were cultivated as part of the "game of love" depicted in numerous
courtly lyrics. Vernacular literacy spread rapidly among both lay men and women,
the influence of French courtly love poetry remaining strong. Aristocratic and
knightly versifiers such as Charles, duc d'Orléans (captured at Agincourt
in 1415), his "jailer" William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Sir
Richard Ros (translator of Alain Chartier's influential La
Belle Dame sans merci) were widely read and imitated among the gentry and in
bourgeois circles well into the 16th century. |
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Both Chaucer and Gower had to some
extent enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage, and the active seeking of
patronage became a pervasive feature of the 15th-century literary scene. Thomas
Hoccleve, a minor civil servant who probably knew Chaucer and claimed to
be his disciple, dedicated his Regiment of Princes (c. 1412),
culled from an earlier work of the same name, to the future Henry V. Most of
Hoccleve's compositions seem to have been written with an eye to patronage, and
though they occasionally yield interesting and unexpected glimpses of his daily
and private lives, they have little to recommend them as poetry. Hoccleve's
aspiration to be Chaucer's successor was rapidly overshadowed, in sheer bulk if
not necessarily in literary merit, by the formidable oeuvre of John
Lydgate, a monk at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Lydgate, too, was
greatly stimulated at the prospects opened up by distinguished patronage,
producing as a result a number of very long pieces that were greatly admired in
their day. A staunch Lancastrian, Lydgate dedicated his Troy
Book and Life of Our Lady to Henry
V and his Fall of Princes (based
ultimately on Boccaccio's De casibus
virorum illustrium) to Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester. He also
essayed courtly verse in Chaucer's manner (The
Complaint of the Black Knight and The
Temple of Glas), but his imitation of the master's style was rarely
successful. Both Lydgate and Hoccleve admired above all Chaucer's
"eloquence," by which they meant mainly the Latinate elements in his
diction. Their own painfully polysyllabic or "aureate" style
unfortunately came to be widely imitated for more than a century. In sum, the
major 15th-century English poets were generally undistinguished as successors of
Chaucer, and for a significant but independent extension of his achievement one
must look to the Scots makaris ("makers"), among whom were King James I of
Scotland, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar. |
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Lydgate's following at court gave him a
central place in 15th-century literary life, but the typical concerns shown by
his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral,
historical, and didactic writing, much of it anonymous. A few identifiable
provincial writers turn out to have had their own local patrons, often among the
country gentry. East Anglia may be said to have produced a minor school in the
works of John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenam, and John Metham, among others also
active around the middle of the century. Some of the most moving and
accomplished verse of the time is to be found in the anonymous lyrics and carols
(songs with a refrain) on conventional subjects such as the transience of life,
the coming of death, the sufferings of Christ, and other penitential themes. The
author of some distinctive poems in this mode was John Audelay of Shropshire,
whose style was heavily influenced by the alliterative movement. Literary
devotion to the Virgin Mary was particularly prominent and at its best could
produce masterpieces of artful simplicity, such as the justly famous "I
sing of a maiden that is makeless." |
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The art that conceals art was also
characteristic of the best popular and secular verse of the period, outside the
courtly mode. Some of the shorter verse romances, usually in a form called tail
rhyme, were far from negligible: Ywain and
Gawain from the Yvain of Chrétien
de Troyes; Sir Launfal, after Marie de
France's Lanval; and Sir
Degrevant. Humorous and lewd songs, versified tales, folk songs, ballads,
and others form a lively but essentially subliterary body of compositions. Oral
transmission was probably common, and the survival of much of what is extant is
fortuitous. The Percy Folio manuscript, a 17th-century antiquarian collection of
such material, may be a fair sampling of the repertoire of the late medieval
itinerant entertainer. In addition to a number of more or less execrable popular
romances of the type satirized long before by Chaucer in "Sir Thopas,"
the Percy manuscript also contains a number of impressive ballads very much like
those collected from oral sources in the 18th and 19th centuries. The extent of
medieval origin of the poems collected in Francis J. Child's English
and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) is debatable. Several of the Robin
Hood ballads undoubtedly were known in the 15th century, and the characteristic
laconically repetitious and incremental style of the ballads is also to be seen
in the enigmatic Corpus Christi Carol, preserved in an early 16th-century London
grocer's commonplace book. In the same manuscript, but in a rather different
vein, is The Nut-Brown Maid, an
enchanting and expertly managed dialogue-poem on female constancy. |
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A genre that does not fit easily into
the categories already mentioned is political verse, of which a good deal was
written in the 15th century. Much of it was avowedly and often crudely
propagandist, especially during the Wars of the Roses, though a piece like the Agincourt
Carol shows that it was already possible to strike the characteristically
English note of insular patriotism soon after 1415. Of particular interest is
the Libel of English Policy (c. 1436)
on another typically English theme of a related kind: "Cherish merchandise,
keep the admiralty,/That we be masters of the narrow sea." (see also
political literature) |
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The continuity of a tradition in English
prose writing, linking the later with the early Middle English period, is
somewhat clearer than that to be detected in verse. The Ancrene Wisse, for example, continued to be copied and adapted to
suit changing tastes and circumstances. But sudden and brilliant imaginative
phenomena like the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and the author of Sir
Gawayne are not to be found. Instead, there is a steady growth in the
composition of religious prose of various kinds and the first appearance of
secular prose in any quantity. |
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Of the first importance was the
development of a sober, analytical, but nonetheless impressive kind of
contemplative or mystical prose, represented by Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these pieces certainly knew the
more rugged and fervent writings of their earlier 14th-century predecessor
Richard Rolle, and to some extent they reacted against what they saw as excesses
in the style and content of his work. It is of particular interest to note that
the mystical tradition was continued into the 15th century, though in very
different ways, by two women writers, Julian of Norwich
and Margery Kempe of King's Lynn. Julian, often
regarded as the first English woman of letters, underwent a series of mystical
experiences in 1373 about which she went on to write in her Revelations
of Divine Love, one of the foremost works of English spirituality by
the standards of any age. Rather different religious experiences went into the
making of The Book
of Margery Kempe (c. 1438),
the extraordinary autobiographical record of a highly emotional bourgeoise,
apparently dictated to a priest. The nature and status of its spiritual content
remain controversial, but its often engaging colloquial style and vivid
realization of the medieval scene are of abiding interest. |
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Another important branch of the
contemplative movement in prose involved the translation of continental Latin
texts. A major example, and one of the best loved of all medieval English books
in its time, was The Mirror of the Blessed
Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1410),
Nicholas Love's translation of the Meditationes
vitae Christi, attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love's work was particularly
valued by the church as an orthodox counterbalance to the heretical tendencies
of the Lollards, who espoused the teachings of John
Wycliffe and his circle. The Lollard movement generated a good deal of
interesting and stylistically distinctive prose writing, though as the Lollards
soon came under threat of death by burning, nearly all of it remains anonymous.
A number of English works have been attributed to Wycliffe himself, and the
first English translation of the Bible to Wycliffe's disciple John Purvey, but
there are no firm grounds for these attributions. The Lollard Bible, which
exists in a crude early form and in a more impressive later version (supposedly
Purvey's work), was widely read in spite of being under doctrinal suspicion. It
later influenced William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, completed
in 1525, and, through Tyndale, the Authorized Version (1611). (see also
biblical translation) |
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Secular compositions and translations in
prose also came into prominence in the last quarter of the 14th century, though
their stylistic accomplishment does not always match that of the religious
tradition. Chaucer's "Tale of Melibeus" and his two astronomical
translations, the Treatise on the
Astrolabe and the Equatorie of the
Planetis, were relatively modest endeavours beside the massive efforts of
John of Trevisa, who translated from Latin both Ranulph Higden's universal
history, Polychronicon (c.
1385-87), and Bartholomaeus Anglicus' encyclopaedia De
proprietatibus rerum (1398). Judging by the number of surviving manuscripts,
however, the most widely read secular prose work of the period is likely to have
been The Travels
of Sir John Mandeville, the supposed
adventures of Sir John Mandeville, knight of St. Albans, on his journeys through
Asia to the Orient. Though the work now is believed to be purely fictional, the
exotic allure of the Travels and the
occasionally arch style of their author were popular with the English reading
public down to the 18th century. |
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The 15th century saw the consolidation
of English prose as a respectable medium for serious writings of various kinds.
The anonymous Brut chronicle survives
in more manuscripts than any other medieval English work and was instrumental in
fostering a new sense of national identity. John Capgrave's Chronicle
of England (c. 1462) and Sir John
Fortescue's On the Governance of England
(c. 1470) were part of the same trend.
At its best, the style of such works could be vigorous and straightforward,
close to the language of everyday speech, like that found in the chance
survivals of private letters of the period. Best known and most numerous among
letters are those of the Paston family of Norfolk, but significant collections
were also left by the Celys of London and the Stonors of Oxfordshire. More
eccentric prose stylists of the period were the religious controversialist
Reginald Pecock and John Skelton, whose "aureate" translation of the Bibliotheca
historica of Diodorus Siculus stands in marked contrast to the demotic
exuberance of his verse. |
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The crowning achievement of later Middle
English prose writing was Sir Thomas Malory's cycle of Arthurian legends, which
was given the title Le
Morte Darthur by William Caxton when he printed his edition in 1485.
There is still uncertainty as to the identity of Malory,
who described himself as a "knight-prisoner." The characteristic
mixture of chivalric nostalgia and tragic feeling with which he imbued his book
gave fresh inspiration to the tradition of writing on Arthurian themes. The
nature of Malory's artistry eludes easy definition, and the degree to which the
effects he achieved were a matter of conscious contrivance on his part is
debatable. Much of the Morte Darthur was translated from prolix French prose romances, and Malory
evidently selected and condensed his material with instinctive mastery as he
went along. At the same time he cast narrative and dialogue in the cadences of a
virile and natural English prose that admirably matched the nobility of both the
characters and the theme. |
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Because the manuscripts of medieval
English plays were usually ephemeral performance scripts rather than reading
matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have been a very
large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century
includes some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been
given in English or Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience.
From the late 14th century onward two main dramatic genres are discernible, the
mystery or Corpus Christi cycles and the morality plays. The mystery
plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption of
mankind, based mostly on biblical narratives. They usually included a selection
of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain and Abel and Abraham and
Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus Christ. They
always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and
performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of
the towns. Texts of the cycles staged at York, Chester, Wakefield, and at an
unstated location in East Anglia have survived, together with fragments from
Coventry, Newcastle, and Norwich. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York
cycle (probably the oldest) has a most impressively realized version of Christ's
Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative style in verse. Wakefield
has several particularly brilliant plays, attributed to the anonymous Wakefield
Master, and his Second Shepherds' Play is
one of the masterpieces of medieval English literature. The morality
plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of a single
character, representing the whole of mankind, from the cradle to the grave and
sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil
but usually consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and
Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and so forth. An interesting and varied
collection of the moralities is known as the Macro Plays (The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind), but the single most
impressive piece is undoubtedly Everyman,
a superb English rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of
death. Both the mystery and morality plays have been frequently revived and
performed in the 20th century. (see also York
plays, Wakefield plays) |
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The 15th century was a major period of
growth in lay literacy, a process powerfully expedited by the introduction into
England of printing by William Caxton in 1476. Caxton's Malory (1485) was
published in the same year that Henry Tudor acceded to the throne as Henry VII,
and the period from this time to the mid-16th century has been called the
transition from medieval to Renaissance in English literature. A typical figure
was the translator Alexander Barclay. His Eclogues
(c. 1515), drawn from 15th-century Italian humanist sources, was an
early essay in the fashionable Renaissance genre of pastoral, while his
rendering of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff
as The Ship of Fools (1509) is a
thoroughly medieval satire on contemporary folly and corruption. The
Passetyme of Pleasure (1506) by Stephen
Hawes, ostensibly an allegorical romance in Lydgate's manner,
unexpectedly adumbrates the great Tudor theme of academic cultivation as a
necessary accomplishment of the courtly knight or gentleman. |
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The themes of education and good
government predominate in the new humanist writing of the 16th century, both in
discursive prose (such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke
Named the Governour and Roger Ascham's Toxophilus
and Scholemaster) and in the drama
(the plays of Henry Medwall and Richard Rastall). The preeminent work of English
humanism, Sir Thomas More's Utopia
(1516), was composed in Latin and appeared in an English translation in 1551.
Undoubtedly the most distinctive voice in the poetry of the time was that of John
Skelton, tutor to Henry VII's sons and author of an extraordinary range
of writing, often in an equally extraordinary style. His works include a long
play, Magnyfycence, like his Bowge
of Courte an allegorical satire on court intrigue; intemperate satirical
invectives, such as Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (both 1522); and unusual reflexive essays
on the role of the poet and poetry, in Speke, Parrot (written 1521) and The Garland of Laurel (1523). The first half of the 16th century was
also a notable period for courtly lyric verse in the stricter sense of poems
with musical settings, such as those found in the Devonshire manuscript. This is
very much the literary milieu of the "courtly makers" Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey,
but though the courtly context of much of their writing is of medieval origin,
their most distinctive achievements look to the future. Poems like Wyatt's
"They flee from me" and "Whoso list to hunt" vibrate with
personal feeling at odds with the medieval convention of anonymity, while
Surrey's translations from the Aeneid introduce
blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English for the first time,
providing an essential foundation for the achievements of Shakespeare and
Milton. ( Ri.B.) |
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In a tradition of literature remarkable
for its exacting and brilliant achievements, the Elizabethan and early Stuart
periods have been said to represent the most brilliant century of all. (The
reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603; she was
succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland, who took the title James I of
England as well. English literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625,
is properly called Jacobean.) These years produced a gallery of authors of
genius, some of whom have never been surpassed, and conferred on scores of
lesser talents the enviable ability to write with fluency, imagination, and
verve. From one point of view, this sudden renaissance looks radiant, confident,
heroic--and belated, but all the more dazzling for its belatedness. Yet from
another point of view, this was a time of unusually traumatic strain, in which
English society underwent massive disruptions that transformed it on every front
and decisively affected the life of every individual. In the brief, intense
moment in which England assimilated the European Renaissance, the circumstances
that made the assimilation possible were already disintegrating and calling into
question the newly won certainties, as well as the older truths that they were
dislodging. This doubleness, of new possibilities and new doubts simultaneously
apprehended, gives the literature its unrivaled intensity. (see also
Tudor, House of, Renaissance
art, Elizabethan literature) |
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In this period England's population
doubled; prices rocketed, rents followed, old social loyalties dissolved, and
new industrial, agricultural, and commercial veins were first tapped. Real wages
hit an all-time low in the 1620s, and social relations were plunged into a state
of unprecedented fluidity from which the merchant and ambitious lesser gentleman
profited at the expense of the aristocrat and labourer, as satires and comedies
current from the 1590s complain. Behind the Elizabethan vogue for pastoral
poetry lies the fact of the prosperity of the enclosing sheep farmer, who
aggressively sought to increase pasture at the expense of the peasantry. Tudor
platitudes about order and degree could neither combat nor survive the challenge
posed to rank by these arrivistes. The position of the crown, politically
dominant yet financially insecure, had always been potentially unstable, and
when Charles I lost the confidence of his greater subjects in the 1640s his
authority crumbled. Meanwhile, the huge body of poor fell ever further behind
the rich; the pamphlets of Thomas Harman (1566) and Robert Greene (1591-92), and
Shakespeare's King Lear (1605),
provide glimpses of a horrific world of vagabondage and crime, the Elizabethans'
biggest, unsolvable social problem. |
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The barely disguised social ferment was
accompanied by an intellectual revolution, as the medieval synthesis collapsed
before the new science, new religion, and new humanism. While modern mechanical
technologies were pressed into service by the Stuarts to create the scenic
wonders of the court masque, the discoveries of astronomers and explorers were
redrawing the cosmos in a way that was profoundly disturbing: |
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And freely men confess that this
world's spent, |
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When in the planets, and the firmament |
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They seek so many new . . . |
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(John Donne, The First Anniversary, 1611) |
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The majority of people were more
immediately affected by the religious revolutions of the 16th century. The man
in early adulthood at the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 would, by her death in
1603, have been vouchsafed an unusually disillusioning insight into the duty
owed by private conscience to the needs of the state. The Tudor church was an
instrument of social and political coercion, yet the mid-century controversies
over the faith had already wrecked any easy confidence in the authority of
doctrines and forms and had taught men to question carefully the rationale of
their own beliefs (as Donne does in his third Satire, c. 1596). The Elizabethan ecclesiastical compromise was the
object of continual criticism, both from radicals within (who desired
progressive reforms, such as the abolition of bishops) and from papists without
(who desired the return of England to the Roman Catholic fold), but the
incipient liberalism of individuals like John Milton and William Chillingworth
was held in check by the majority's unwillingness to tolerate a plurality of
religions in a supposedly unitary state. Nor was the Calvinist orthodoxy that
cradled most English writers comforting, for it told them that they were
corrupt, unfree, unable to earn their own salvations, and subject to heavenly
judgments that were arbitrary and absolute. It deeply informs the world of the
Jacobean tragedies, whose heroes are not masters of their fates but victims of
divine purposes that are terrifying yet inscrutable. |
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The third complicating factor was the
race to catch up with continental developments in arts and philosophy. The
Tudors badly needed to create a class of educated diplomats, statesmen, and
officials and to dignify their court by making it a fount of cultural as well as
political patronage. The new learning, widely disseminated through the Erasmian
educational programs of such men as John Colet and Sir Thomas Elyot, proposed to
use a systematic schooling in Latin authors and some Greek to encourage in the
social elites a flexibility of mind and civilized serviceableness by which
enlightened princely government could walk hand in hand with responsible
scholarship. Humanism fostered an intimate familiarity with the classics that
was a powerful incentive for the creation of an English literature of answerable
dignity. It fostered as well a practical, secular piety that left its impress
everywhere on Elizabethan writing. Humanism's effect, however, was modified by
the simultaneous impact of the flourishing continental cultures, particularly
the Italian. Repeatedly, crucial innovations in English letters developed
resources originating from Italy, such as the sonnet of Petrarch, the epic of
Ariosto, the pastoral of Sannazzaro, the canzone, and blank verse, and values
imported with these forms were in competition with the humanists' ethical
preoccupations. Social ideals of wit, many-sidedness, and sprezzatura
(accomplishment mixed with unaffectedness) were imbibed from Baldassare
Castiglione's Il cortegiano,
translated as The Courtyer by Sir
Thomas Hoby in 1561, and Elizabethan court poetry is steeped in Castiglione's
aristocratic Neoplatonism, his notions of universal proportion, and the love of
beauty as the path to virtue. Equally significant was the welcome afforded to Niccolò
Machiavelli, whose lessons were vilified publicly and absorbed in
private. The
Prince, written in 1513, was unavailable in English until 1640, but
as early as the 1580s Gabriel Harvey, a friend of the poet Edmund Spenser, can
be found enthusiastically hailing its author as the apostle of modern
pragmatism. "We are much beholden to Machiavel and others," said
Bacon, "that write what men do, and not what they ought to do." (see
also "Book
of the Courtier, The," ) |
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So the literary revival occurred in a
society deeply torn and rife with tensions, uncertainties, and competing
versions of order and authority, religion and status, sex and the self. The
Elizabethan compromise was exactly that; the Tudor pretense that all the nation
thought the same disguised the actual fragmentation of the old consensus under
the strain of change. The new scientific knowledge proved both man's littleness
and his power to command nature; against the Calvinist idea of man's
helplessness pulled the humanist faith in his dignity, especially that
conviction, derived from the reading of Seneca and so characteristic of the
period, of man's constancy and fortitude, his heroic and almost divine capacity
for self-determination. It was still possible for Elizabeth to hold these
divergent tendencies together in a single, heterogeneous culture, but under her
successors they would eventually fly apart. The philosophers speaking for the
new century would be Francis Bacon, who argued for the gradual advancement of
science through patient accumulation of experiments, and the skeptic Michel de
Montaigne (his Essais translated from
the French by John Florio, 1603), who denied that it was possible to formulate
any general principles of knowledge. |
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Cutting across all of these was the
persistence of popular habits of thought and expression. Both humanism and
puritanism set themselves against vulgar ignorance and folk tradition, but,
fortunately, neither could remain aloof for long from the robustness of popular
taste. Sir Philip Sidney, in England's first neoclassical literary treatise, The
Defence of Poesie (written c.
1578-1583, published 1595), candidly admitted that "the old song of Percy
and Douglas" would move his heart "more than with a trumpet," and
his Arcadia is a representative instance of the continual, fruitful
cross-fertilization of genres in this period--the contamination of aristocratic
pastoral with popular tale, the lyric with the ballad, comedy with romance,
tragedy with satire, and poetry with prose. The language, too, was undergoing a
rapid expansion that all classes contributed to and benefited from,
sophisticated literature borrowing without shame the idioms of colloquial
speech. Macbeth's allusion to heaven peeping "through the blanket of the
dark" only became a problem in an age when tragic dignity implied
politeness, when it was below the dignity of a tragic hero to mention so lowly
an object as a blanket. The Elizabethans' ability to address themselves to
several audiences simultaneously and to bring into relation opposed experiences,
emphases, and worldviews invested their writing with complexity and power. |
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English poetry and prose burst into
sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste toward a fluent
artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge
in literary production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades
of astonishing productivity by writers of every persuasion and calibre. |
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The groundwork was laid in the 30 years
from 1550, a period of slowly increasing confidence in the literary competence
of the language and tremendous advances in education, which for the first time
produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and possessing
cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological
maturity and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of
Elizabethan printing. The Stationers' Company,
which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and Richard
Tottel's Miscellany (1557)
revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by making publicly
available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Edmund Spenser was the first considerable English poet deliberately to
use print for the advertisement of his talents. |
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The prevailing opinion of the language's
inadequacy, its lack of "terms" and innate inferiority to the eloquent
classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists Thomas Wilson, Roger
Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and
even archery argued in favour of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious
attitude toward linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic ideals are attractively
embodied in Ascham's educational tract The Scholemaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that
particularly Elizabethan art, translation, can be felt in the earliest important
examples, Sir Thomas Hoby's Castiglione (1561) and Sir Thomas North's Plutarch
(1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took place in the
middle of the century. The desire of Reformers to address as comprehensive an
audience as possible--the bishop and the boy who follows the plough, as Tyndale
put it--produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed Anglican
Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe's Actes
and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the martyrs, great and small, of
English Protestantism; and the various English versions of Scripture, from
William Tyndale's (1525), Miles Coverdale's (1535), and the Geneva Bible
(1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version
(1611). The latter's combination of grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated,
even if it represents an idiom never spoken in heaven or on earth. Nationalism
inspired by the Reformation motivated the historical chronicles of the capable
and stylish Edward Hall (1548), who bequeathed
to Shakespeare the tendentious Tudor interpretation of the 15th century, and of
the rather less capable Raphael Holinshed (1577). John Ponet's remarkable Short Treatise of Politic Power (1556) is a vigorous polemic against
Mary Tudor, whom he saw as a papist tyrant. |
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In verse, Tottel's much reprinted Miscellany
generated a series of imitations and, by popularizing the lyrics of Wyatt
and Surrey, carried into the 1570s the tastes of the early Tudor court. The
newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists include Nicholas Grimald,
Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George Gascoigne, Sir John
Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most considerable. The
modern preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed
these poets, who continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing
themselves to ethical and didactic themes and favouring the meditative lyric,
satire, and epigram. But their taste for economy, restraint, and aphoristic
density was, in the verse of Ben Jonson and Donne, to outlive the cult of
elegance. The period's major project was A
Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions 1563, 1578, 1587), a
collection of verse laments, by several hands, purporting to be spoken by
participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of
obedience. The quality is uneven, but Thomas Sackville's "Induction"
and Thomas Churchyard's Legend of Shore's
Wife are distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy, and
political morality was to be influential on the drama. |
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With the work of Sidney and Spenser,
Tottel's contributors suddenly began to look old-fashioned. Sir Philip Sidney
epitomized the new Renaissance "universal man": a courtier, diplomat,
soldier, and poet whose Defence
of Poesie included the first considered account of the state of
English letters. Sidney's treatise defends literature on the ground of its
unique power to teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to
depict the world not as it is but as it ought to be. This quality of
"forcefulness or energia" he
himself demonstrated in his sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel
and Stella (written c. 1582,
published 1591). His Arcadia,
in its first version (written c.
1577-80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers disguised as Amazons and
shepherds make love and sing delicate experimental verses. The revised version
(written c. 1580-84, published 1590),
vastly expanded but abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of heroism
in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and set pieces of
aristocratic etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured innovator whose
pioneering of new forms and stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His
public fame was as an aristocratic champion of an aggressively Protestant
foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for idealistic warmongering, and thus
his fictions abound with situations of inhibition and withheld
satisfactions--unresolved conflicts of desire against restraint, heroism against
patience, rebellion against submission--that mirror his own position as an
unsuccessful courtier. |
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Protestantism also loomed large in the
life of Edmund Spenser. He enjoyed the patronage
of the Earl of Leicester, who sought to advance militant Protestantism at court,
and his poetic manifesto, The
Shepheardes Calender (1579), covertly praised Archbishop Edmund
Grindal, who had been suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies.
Spenser's masterpiece, The
Faerie Queene (1590-1609), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in
which the villains are infidels or papists, the hero is King Arthur, and the
central value is married chastity. |
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Spenser was one of the humanistically
trained breed of public servants, and the Calender,
an expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents
and announced his epic ambitions, the exquisite lyric gift that it reveals being
voiced again in the marriage poems Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion
(1596). With The Faerie Queene he
achieved the central poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses the medieval
allegory with the Italian romantic epic; its purpose was "to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." The plan was
for 12 books (six were completed), focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the
quests of 12 knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a symbol for
Elizabeth herself. Arthur, in quest of Gloriana's love, would appear in each
book and come to exemplify Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the
decorative chivalry of the Elizabethan court festivals and reworked it through a
constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the knight's adventures and loves
build into a complex, multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise
to an unrivaled sensuousness. |
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The
Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the
Queen, and politically it echoed the hopes of the Leicester circle for
government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser's increasing
disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in
the later books and in his bitter satire Colin
Clouts Come Home Againe of 1591, voiced the fading of these
expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the
"Mutabilitie Cantos," melancholy fragments of a projected seventh
book, Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous
consolations of eternity. |
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The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser
in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and graceful refinement appear to good
effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and sonnets. These are
among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was
itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office
or preferment but faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new
directions in search of patronage. For Sidney's fellow courtiers, pastoral and
love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing one's relationship with the
Queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal. |
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Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried
his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one that is not still
anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was
continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably in the latter's Rosalynde,
1590, the source for Shakespeare's As You
Like It), and in the theatres plays of every kind were diversified by songs
both popular and courtly. Fine examples are in the plays of John Lyly, George
Peele, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker (though all, of course, are
outshone by Shakespeare's). The most important influence, though, was the
outstanding richness of late Tudor music, in both the native tradition of
expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland, and the complex Italianate
madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The foremost talent
among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was composer as
well as poet; his songs (four Bookes of
Ayres, 1601-17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and
rhythmic subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas
Breton, is remarkable for the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest
performances; the smoothness and apparent spontaneity of Elizabethan lyric
conceals a consciously ordered and laboured artifice, attentive to decorum and
rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for
singing and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of
addressing the moral sense, harmonizing the auditor's mind and attuning it to
the discipline of reason and virtue. This necessitates a deliberate narrowing of
scope--to the readily comprehensible situations of pastoral or Petrarchan hope
and despair--and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an agreeable
one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The
Phoenix Nest (1593), Englands Helicon
(1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody
(1602). (see also music,
history of) |
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The publication of Sidney's Astrophel
and Stella in 1591 generated an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet
sequence, Sidney's principal imitators being Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton,
Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare, and his lesser, Henry Constable,
Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher, Thomas Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and many more. Astrophel
had re-created the Petrarchan world of proud beauty and despairing lover in
a single, brilliant stroke, though in English hands the preferred division of
the sonnet into three quatrains and a couplet gave Petrarch's contemplative form
a more forensic turn, investing it with an argumentative terseness and
epigrammatic sting. Within the common ground shared by the sequences there is
much diversity. Only Sidney's endeavours to tell a story, the others being more
loosely organized as variations focusing on a central (usually fictional)
relationship. Daniel's Delia (1592) is
eloquent and elegant, dignified and high-minded; Drayton's Ideas
Mirrour (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to a strongly imagined,
passionate intensity; Spenser's Amoretti
(1595) celebrates, eccentrically, fulfilled sexual love achieved within
marriage. Shakespeare's sonnets (published 1609) present a different world
altogether, the conventions upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and
treacherous, the loved one genuinely beyond considerations of sexual possession
because he is a boy. The sonnet tended to gravitate toward correctness or
politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical,
in its forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but under the
pressure of Shakespeare's urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and
shifting and highly charged ironies, the form's conventional limits were
exploded. |
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Sonnet and lyric represent one tradition
of verse within the period, that most conventionally delineated as Elizabethan,
but the picture is complicated by the coexistence of other poetic styles in
which ornament was distrusted or turned to different purposes; the sonnet was
even parodied by Sir John Davies in his Gulling
Sonnets (c. 1594) and by the
Jesuit poet Robert Southwell. A particular stimulus to experiment was the
variety of new possibilities made available by verse translation,
from Richard Stanyhurst's extraordinary Aeneid
(1582), in quantitative hexameter and littered with obscure or invented diction,
and Sir John Harington's version of Ariosto's Orlando
furioso (1591), with its Byronic ease and narrative fluency, to Christopher
Marlowe's blank verse rendering of Lucan's
First Book (published 1600), probably the finest Elizabethan translation. |
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The genre to benefit most from
translation was the epyllion, or little epic.
This short narrative in verse was usually on a mythological subject, taking most
of its material from Ovid, either his Metamorphoses
(English version by Arthur Golding, 1565-67) or his Heroides (English version by Turberville, 1567). This form
flourished from Thomas Lodge's Scillaes
Metamorphosis (1589) to Francis Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602) and is best represented by
Marlowe's Hero and Leander (published
1598) and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis
(1593). Ovid's reputation as an esoteric philosopher left its mark on George
Chapman's Ovid's Banquet of Sense
(1595) and Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe
(1595), in which the love of mortal for goddess becomes a parable of wisdom. But
his real attraction was as an authority on the erotic, and most epyllia treat
physical love with sophistication and sympathy, unrelieved by the gloss of
allegory--a tendency culminating in John Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image (1598), a poem that has
shocked tender sensibilities. Inevitably, the shift of attitude had an effect on
style: for Marlowe the experience of translating (inaccurately) Ovid's Amores
meant a gain for Hero and Leander in
terms of urbanity and, more important, wit. |
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With the epyllion comes a hint of the
tastes of the following reign, and a similar shift of taste can be felt among
those poets of the 1590s who began to modify the ornamental style in the
direction of native plainness or classical restraint. An astute courtier like
Sir John Davies might, in his Orchestra
(1596) and Hymns of Astraea
(1599),write confident panegyrics to the aging Elizabeth, but in Sir
Walter Raleigh's "Eleventh Book of the Ocean to Cynthia," a
kind of broken pastoral eclogue, praise of the Queen is undermined by an obscure
but eloquent sense of hopelessness and disillusionment. For Raleigh the
complimental manner seems to be disintegrating under the weight of disgrace and
isolation at court; his scattered lyrics, notably that contemptuous dismissal of
the court, "The Lie," often draw their resonance from the resources of
the plain style. Another courtier whose writing suggests similar pressures is Fulke
Greville, Lord Brooke. Greville's Caelica
(published 1633) begins as a conventional sonnet sequence but gradually abandons
Neoplatonism for pessimistic reflections on religion and politics. Other works
in his sinewy and demanding verse include philosophical treatises and
unperformed melodramas (Alaham and Mustapha)
that have a sombre Calvinist tone, presenting man as a vulnerable creature
inhabiting a world of unresolved contradictions: |
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Oh wearisome condition of humanity! |
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Born under one law, to another bound; |
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Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, |
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Created sick, commanded to be sound. |
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(Mustapha,
chorus) |
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Greville was a friend of the Earl of
Essex, whose revolt against Elizabeth ended in 1601 on the scaffold, and other
poets on the edge of the Essex circle fueled the taste for aristocratic heroism
and individualist ethics. George Chapman's
masterpiece, his translation of Homer (1598), is dedicated to Essex, and his
original poems are intellectual and recondite, often deliberately cultivating
obscurities; his abstruseness is a means of restricting his audience to a
worthy, understanding elite. Samuel Daniel, in
his verse Epistles (1603) written to
various noblemen, strikes a mean between plainness and compliment; his Musophilus
(1599), dedicated to Greville, defends the worth of poetry but says there are
too many frivolous wits writing. The cast of Daniel's mind is stoical, and his
language is classically precise. His major project was a verse history of The
Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York (1595-1609), and
versified history is also strongly represented in the Legends
(1593-1607), Barons' Wars (1596,
1603), and Englands Heroicall Epistles
(1597) of Michael Drayton. (see also
historiography) |
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The form really to set its face against
Elizabethan politeness was the satire. Satire
was related to the complaint, of which there were notable examples by Daniel (The
Complaint of Rosamond, 1592) and Shakespeare (The
Rape of Lucrece, 1594), and these are dignified and tragic laments in supple
verse, but the Elizabethans mistakenly held the term satire to derive from the
Greek satyros, a satyr, and so set out
to match their manner to their matter and make their verses snarl. In the works
of the principal satirists, John Donne (five
satires, 1593-98), Joseph Hall (Virgidemiarum,
1597-98), and John Marston (Certaine
Satyres and The Scourge of Villainy,
1598), the denunciation of vice and folly repeatedly tips into invective,
raillery, and sheer abuse. The versification of Donne's satires is frequently so
rough as barely to be verse at all; Hall apologized for not being harsh enough,
and Marston was himself pilloried in Ben Jonson's play Poetaster
(1601) for using ridiculously difficult language. "Vex all the world,"
wrote Marston to himself, "so that thyself be pleased." The satirists
popularized a new persona, that of the malcontent who denounces his society not
from above but from within, and their continuing attraction resides in their
self-contradictory delight in the world they profess to abhor and their evident
fascination with the minutiae of life in court and city. They were
enthusiastically followed by Everard Guilpin, Samuel Rowlands, Thomas Middleton,
and Cyril Tourneur, and so scandalous was the flood of satires that in 1599
their printing was banned. Thereafter the form survived in Jonson's classically
balanced epigrams and poems of the good life, but its more immediate impact was
on the drama, in helping to create the vigorously skeptical voices that people The
Revenger's Tragedy and Hamlet. |
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Description of the development of
Elizabethan prose begins with the 1570s. Prose was easily the principal medium
in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-century uncertainties over the
language's weaknesses and strengths--whether coined and imported words should be
admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose on Latin writing was
beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a pursuit of "choiceness of
phrase" at the expense of "soundness of argument"--the general
attainment of prose writing was uniformly high, as is often manifested in
contexts not conventionally imaginative or "literary," such as tracts,
pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of such casual success is Richard
Hakluyt's Principall
Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589;
expanded 1598-1600), a massive collection of travelers' tales, of which some are
highly accomplished narratives. William Harrison's gossipy, entertaining Description
of England (1577), Philip Stubbes's excitable and humane social critique The
Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Reginald Scot's anecdotal Discovery
of Witchcraft (1584), and John Stow's invaluable Survey
of London (1598) also deserve passing mention. William Kempe's account of
his morris dance from London to Norwich, Kempe's
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The writers listed above all use an
unpretentious style, enlivened with a vivid vocabulary; the early prose fiction,
on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal embellishment at the expense of
narrative economy. This runs up against preferences ingrained in the modern
reader by the novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and finds
room for debate, song, and the conscious elaboration of style. The unique
exception is George Gascoigne's "Adventures
of Master F. J." (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an English great
house, which is the first success in English imaginative prose. Gascoigne's
story has a surprising authenticity and almost psychological realism (it may be
autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the influence of
Castiglione. |
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The existence of an audience for polite
fiction was signaled in the collections of stories imported from France and
Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577), and George Pettie
(1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care "to displease twenty men to please
one woman," believed his readership was substantially female. There were
later collections by Barnaby Rich (1581) and George Whetstone (1583);
historically, their importance was as sources of plots for many Elizabethan
plays. The direction fiction was to take was established by John
Lyly's Euphues:
The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues
and His England (1580), set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical
mannerism that came to be known as "euphuism." The priggish plot of Euphues--a
rake's fall from virtue and his recovery--is but an excuse for a series of
debates, letters, and speechifyings, thick with assonance, antithesis,
parallelism, and balance and displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly's
style was to be successful on the stage, but in fiction its density and monotony
are wearying. The other major prose work of the 1570s, Sidney's Arcadia,
is no less rhetorical (Abraham Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The
Arcadian Rhetoric, 1588, almost entirely with examples from the Arcadia),
but with Sidney rhetoric is in the service of psychological insight and an
exciting plot. Dozens of imitations of Arcadia
and Euphues followed from the pens of
Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel Forde, and others; none has
much distinction. |
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Prose was to be decisively transformed
through its involvement in the bitter and learned controversies of the 1570s and
'80s over the reform of the English Church and the problems the controversies
raised in matters of authority, obedience, and conscience. The fragile
ecclesiastical compromise threatened to collapse under the demands made by
Elizabeth's more godly subjects for further reformation, and its defense
culminated in Richard Hooker's Of
the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593-1662), the first
English classic of serious prose. Hooker's is a monumental work, structured in
massive and complex paragraphs brilliantly recreating the orotund style of
Cicero. His air of maturity and detachment has recommended him to modern tastes,
but no more than his opponents was he above the cut and thrust of controversy.
On the contrary, his magisterial rhetoric was designed all the more effectively
to fix blame onto his enemies, and even his account (in books VI-VIII) of the
relationship of church and state was deemed too sensitive for publication in the
1590s. (see also religious
literature) |
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More decisive for English fiction was
the appearance of the "Martin Marprelate" tracts of 1588-90. These
seven pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an unpuritanical scurrility and
created great scandal by hurling invective and abuse at Elizabeth's bishops with
comical gusto. The bishops employed Lyly and Thomas
Nashe to reply to Marprelate, and the consequence may be read in Nashe's
prose satires of the following decade, especially Piers Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The
Unfortunate Traveller (1594), and Lenten
Stuffe (1599), the latter a mock encomium on red herring. Nashe's
"extemporal vein" makes fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial
speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and disconcerting shifts of tone,
which demand an answering agility from the reader. His language is probably the
most profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers', and he even makes the
low-life pamphlets of Robert Greene (1591-92), with their sensational tales from
the underworld, look conventional. His only rival is Thomas
Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury
(1597), The Gentle Craft (1597-98),
and Thomas of Reading (1600) are
enduringly attractive for their depiction of the lives of ordinary citizens,
interspersed with elements of romance, jest book, and folktale. Deloney's
entirely convincing dialogue indicates how important for the development of a
flexible prose must have been the example of a flourishing theatre in
Elizabethan London. In this respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama
was crucial. (see also Marprelate
Controversy) |
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In the Elizabethan and early Stuart
period the theatre was the focal point of the age. Public life was shot through
with theatricality--monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and status
were defined in a rigid code of dress--while on the stages the tensions and
contradictions working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More
than any other form, the drama addressed itself to the total experience of its
society. Playgoing was inexpensive, and the playhouse yards were thronged with
apprentices, fishwives, labourers, and the like, but the same play that was
performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would often be restaged at
court by night. The drama's power to activate complex, multiple perspectives on
a single issue or event resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices
and sympathies of this diversely minded audience. (see also
Elizabethan Age) |
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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 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 first purpose-built London playhouse in 1576, and during the next 70 years
some 20 theatres more are known to have operated. The quantity and diversity of
plays they commissioned is little short of astonishing. (see also
theatrical production) |
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So 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 first 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. Another survival was the clown or 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. |
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The first generation of professional
playwrights in England was 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
pageant-like; The
Arraignment of Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to
compliment Elizabeth. Robert Greene's speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic
action involving clowns. In his Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James
IV (1598) the antics of vulgar characters complement but also criticize the
follies of their betters. Only John Lyly, writing for the choristers,
endeavoured to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make
rarefied love in intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly
dreaming. |
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Outshining all these is Christopher
Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential inherent in the popular
style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous)
elevation, their "high astounding terms" embodying the challenge that
they pose to the orthodox norms and limitations of the societies they disrupt.
In Tamburlaine
the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward
II (c.
1591; published 1594) traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors
and politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The
Jew of Malta (c.
1589; published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and
trickery give him unrestrained power; The
Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c.
1593; published 1604) shows the overthrow of a man whose learning and atheism
threaten even 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. (see also
"Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus,
The", "Spanish Tragedie, The," ) |
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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 Keats called his "negative
capability"--means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every
attitude or ideology finds its resemblance there, yet also finds itself subject
to criticism and interrogation. In part, Shakespeare achieved this by the total
inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in
his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with the
spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in
his society. The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to
lead the English Renaissance without privileging or prejudicing any one of its
divergent aspects, while as actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord
Chamberlain's players he was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level.
His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) was exactly coterminous with the period of
greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities
of the Renaissance fully realized. (see also
Renaissance art) |
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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 (1589-92), begins as a patriotic celebration of English valour
against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal
of Richard III--probably the first "character," in the modern sense,
on the English stage--who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3, that he can "set the
murtherous Machevil to school." Ostensibly Richard
III 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), Henry IV (two
parts, 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' faction paid for a performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against
Elizabeth.) In the Henry IV plays,
which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes
among those who are ruled to create a multifaceted composite picture of national
life at a particular historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is
increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V
a patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and
qualifications about the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by
the Agincourt story. Through all these plays runs a concern for the individual
and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a concern that is
essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare's
other history plays, King
John (c.
1591) and Henry VIII (1613) approach similar
questions through material drawn from John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. (see also
"Henry VI, Part 2", "Henry
VI, Part 1", "Henry IV, Part 2", "Henry
IV, Part 1") |
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The early comedies share the popular and
romantic forms used by the university wits but overlay them with elements of
elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of comedy's fragility
and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. One group, The
Comedy of Errors (c. 1589-94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590-94), The
Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597-1601), and Twelfth
Night (1601), are comedies of intrigue, fast moving, often farcical,
and placing a high premium on wit. A second group, The
Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.
1592-93), Love's
Labour's Lost (c. 1595), A
Midsummer Night's Dream (c.
1595-96), and As
You Like It (1599), have as a common denominator a journey to a
natural environment, such as a wood or park, in which the restraints governing
everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake themselves
untrammeled by society's forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness. All the comedies share a belief in
the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is completely innocent of
doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space, and in 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 (1602-03), and Measure
for Measure (1604), festivity is in direct collision with the
constraints of normality, with time, business, law, human indifference,
treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic
resolutions are openly acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by
manipulation, compromise, or the exclusion of one or more major characters. The
unique play Troilus
and Cressida (c. 1601-03)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man's-land between comedy and tragedy, between
satire and savage farce. Shakespeare's reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism
against its parody in a way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of
man's confused and divided individuality. |
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The confusions and contradictions of
Shakespeare's age find their highest expression in his tragedies.
In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are
tested and found wanting, and all society's latent conflicts are activated.
Shakespeare sets husband against wife, father against child, the individual
against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the nobleman with the beggar, and
interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies Titus
Andronicus (c. 1592-94),
with its spectacular violence, and Romeo
and Juliet (c. 1595), 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
(1600), domestic tragedy in Othello
(c. 1603-04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605), political tragedy in Macbeth
(1606), and heroic tragedy in Antony
and Cleopatra (1607). In each category Shakespeare's play is
exemplary and defines its type; the range and brilliance of this achievement is
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 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.
(see also Jacobean
literature) |
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In his last period, Shakespeare's
astonishingly fertile invention returned to experimentation. In Coriolanus
(1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a dispassionate analysis of
the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot (not
unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire
enclosure riots of 1607. Timon
of Athens (1607-08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragical
satire. The last group of plays comprises the four romances, Pericles
(c. 1607-08), Cymbeline (c. 1609-10), The
Winter's Tale (c. 1610-11), and The
Tempest (1611), which develop a long, philosophical perspective on
fortune and suffering. (A final work, The
Two Noble Kinsmen, 1613, was written in collaboration with John
Fletcher.) In these plays Shakespeare's imagination returns to the popular
romances of his youth and dwells on mythical themes--wanderings, shipwrecks, the
reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of people long thought dead.
There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance loss, and
unkindness, and Shakespeare's subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the
nature of his own art, which alone makes these consolations possible. Even in
this unearthly context a subtle interchange is maintained between the artist's
delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own disillusionment. |
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Shakespeare's perception of a crisis in
public norms and private belief became the overriding concern of the drama until
the closing of the theatres in 1642. The prevailing manner of the playwrights
who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their comedies
and tragedies focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city
and the court, with their typical activities, the pursuit of wealth and power.
"Riches and glory," wrote Sir Walter Raleigh, "Machiavel's two
marks to shoot at," had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by both "city comedy" and "tragedy of state."
Increasingly, it was on the stages that the rethinking of early Stuart
assumptions took place. (see also Stuart,
House of) |
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On the one hand, in the works of Thomas
Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel Rowley, and others, the old tradition
of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of confidence in the
dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood
claimed to have been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic
adventures starring citizen heroes, spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a
leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (1603),
is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred
spirit, best seen in his Shoemakers'
Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick
Whittington-like success, which 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 aggression, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society at
large. |
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The crucial innovations in satiric
comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what has
subsequently been the dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays,
particularly Every
Man in His Humour (1598) and Every
Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques,
scornful detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the
verse satires of the 1590s; they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and
direct anatomizing of "the time's deformities," the language, habits,
and humours of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-appointed social
legislator, aristocratic, conservative, and authoritarian, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism and ambitious through his mammoth
learning to establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and
faithful mentor and companion to kings; but he was ill at ease with a court
inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice. Consequently the
greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments
explicit: in Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily
eclipses the sordid legacy hunters whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and
frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever
London rogues; and Bartholomew
Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the
annual fair at Smithfield, a vast panorama of a complete society. 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. (see also "Volpone;
or, the Foxe", "Epicoene, or The
Silent Woman") |
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Of Jonson's successors in city comedy, Francis
Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle
(1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing their taste for
romantic plays. John Marston adopts so sharp a
satirical tone that his plays in this genre frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston's bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The
Dutch Courtezan (1604), set in London, quotes a defense of
libertinism from Montaigne. His tragicomedy The
Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and
political disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason
by a dizzying interplay of parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas
Middleton was Jonson's moral concern with greed and self-ignorance
bypassed, for Middleton accepts the pursuit of money as, inevitably, the sole
human absolute and presents buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of
rich widows as the dominant modes of social interaction. His unprejudiced satire
touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and detachment;
the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of
the audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful
prodigal and dexterous whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas
Terme (1605) and A
Tricke to Catch the Old-One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which
enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a mechanism in which each sex
and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned less to
characterize the individual in depth than to examine the inequalities and
injustices of the world that cause him to behave as he does. The
Roaring Girle (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. |
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Middleton's social concerns are also
powerfully operative 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 Atheist's
Tragedie (c.
1611). Here the breakdown of old codes of deference before a progressive
middle-class morality is strongly in evidence, and 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 White Divel (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.
(see also "White
Divel, The") |
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In the early Stuart period signs of a
more polite drama, such as would prevail after 1660, were already beginning to
appear in the comedies of fashionable manners written by John Fletcher and James
Shirley, but even these playwrights lampooned courtiers and their overbearing
ways. The traditions of a socially and politically critical theatre were carried
down to the Civil War in the tragedies of John Ford
('Tis Pitty Shee's a Whore, 1633) and Philip
Massinger (Believe as You List,
1631) and in comedies by Massinger (A
New Way to Pay Old Debts, 1624; The
City Madam, 1632) and Richard Brome (The Antipodes, 1638), which continued to probe at the tensions that
were soon completely to undermine the basis of Stuart government. The outbreak
of fighting in 1642 brought about the closing of the playhouses, but this was
not because of any hostility by dramatists to politics or to change; rather, the
crisis in which they were embroiled was one that had been the drama's continuing
preoccupation for three generations. (see also
" 'Tis Pity She's a Whore") |
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In the early Stuart period the failure
of consensus was dramatically announced in the political collapse of the 1640s
and in the growing sociocultural divergences of the immediately preceding years.
While it was still possible for the theatres to address the nation very much as
a single audience, the court, with the baroque, absolutist style it encouraged
in painting, masque, and panegyric, was becoming increasingly remote from the
country at large and was regarded with justifiable distrust. In fact, a growing
separation between polite and vulgar literature was to dispel many of the
characteristic strengths of Elizabethan writing. Simultaneously, long-term
intellectual changes were beginning to impinge on the status of poetry and
prose. Sidney's defense of poetry, which maintained that poetry depicted what
was ideally rather than actually true, was rendered redundant by the loss of
agreement over transcendent absolutes; the scientist, the Puritan with his inner
light, and the skeptic differed equally over the criteria by which truth or
meaning was to be established. From the circle of Lord Falkland at Great Tew,
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 novel. At the same time,
these influences were neither uniform nor consistent; Hobbes might repudiate the
use of metaphor as senseless and ambiguous, yet his own prose is frequently
enlivened by half-submerged metaphors. |
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Writers responded to these conditions in
different ways, and in poetry three types of practice may broadly be
distinguished, which have been coupled with the names of Spenser, Jonson, and
Donne. John Donne heads the tradition that
Samuel Johnson typified for all time as the Metaphysicals;
what unites them as a group is less the violent yoking of unlike ideas to which
Johnson objected than that they were all poets of personal and individual
feeling, responding to their time's pressures privately or introspectively (this
very privateness, of course, was new; the period in general experienced a
massive trend toward contemplative or devotional verse). |
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Donne has been taken to be the apex of
the 16th-century tradition of plain poetry, and certainly the love lyrics of his
that parade their cynicism, indifference, and libertinism pointedly invert and
parody the conventions of Petrarchan lyric, though no less than the Petrarchans
he courts admiration for his poetic virtuosity. A "great haunter of
plays" in his youth, he is always dramatic; his verse cultivates
"strong lines," dissonance, and colloquiality. Thomas Carew praised
him for exiling from poetry the "train of gods and goddesses"; what
fills it instead is a dazzling battery of language and argument drawn from
science, law and trade, court and city. Donne is the first London poet: his
early satires and elegies are packed with the busy metropolitan milieu, and the
songs and sonnets, which include his best writing, with their kaleidoscope of
contradictory attitudes, ironies, and contingencies, are authentic to the modern
phenomenon 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 "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. |
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Donne's influence was vast; the taste
for wit and conceits reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them
courtiers such as Aurelian Townshend, William Habington, and William Cartwright
and religious poets such as Francis Quarles and Henry King. The only true
Metaphysical, in the sense of a poet with genuinely philosophical pretensions,
was Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury),
important as an early proponent of religion formulated by the light of reason.
Donne's most interesting imitators were the three major religious poets--George
Herbert, with his practical piety and richly domestic world, who substituted for
Donne's tortured selfhood a humane, meditative assurance; the Roman Catholic Richard
Crashaw, whose hymns introduced the sensuous ecstasies and effusions of
the continental baroque; and Henry Vaughan, with
his hermetic naturalism and mystical raptures. |
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In the context of the Civil War,
however, Vaughan's and Crashaw's introspection begins to look like retreat, and
when the satires of John Cleveland and the
lyrics of Abraham Cowley take the Donne manner
to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it suggests a loss of control in the face
of political and social traumas. The one poet for whom metaphysical wit became a
strategy for enforcing accommodations between conflicting allegiances was
Donne's outstanding heir, Andrew Marvell.
Marvell's finest writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and precise, uniquely
combining a cavalier lyric grace with puritanical economy of statement. It seems
to have been done at the time of greatest strain, in about 1650-53, and under
the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax, parliamentarian general but opponent of the
King's execution, 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. |
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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 crafted as exactly articulated objects, achieving a
classical symmetry and monumentality. For Jonson the plain style meant not
colloquiality but labour, restraint, and control; a good poet had first to be a
good man, and his verses lead his society toward an aristocratic ethic of
gracious but responsible living. With the Cavalier
poets who succeeded him, 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 poignancy
by their implied contrast with the disruptions of the Civil War. The courtiers
Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard
Lovelace developed a manner of ease and naturalness suitable to the world of
gentlemanly pleasure in which they moved; Suckling's A
Session of the Poets lists more than 20 wits then in town. The Cavalier
poets were writing England's first vers de société, lyrics of
compliments and casual liaisons, often cynical, occasionally obscene; this was a
line to be picked up again after 1660, as was 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 Dryden named as the first exponents of "good writing."
Waller's polite lyrics now seem rather insipid, but Denham's topographical poem "Cooper's
Hill" (1641), a considerable work in its own right, is plainly an
important precursor of the balanced Augustan couplet (as is the otherwise slight
oeuvre of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland). The growth of Augustan gentility was
further encouraged by work done on translations in mid-century, particularly by
Sir Richard Fanshawe (Il Pastor Fido,
1647) and Thomas Stanley. |
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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 and
Phineas Fletcher, the former in his long religious poem Christs Victorie (1610), which is also indebted to Josuah Sylvester's
highly popular translations from the French Calvinist poet Guillaume du Bartas,
the Divine Weeks and Works (1605). Similarly, Spenserian pastorals still
flowed from the pens of William Browne (Britannia's Pastorals, 1613-16), George Wither (The
Shepherd's Hunting, 1614), and Michael Drayton,
who at the end of his life returned nostalgically to portraying an idealized
Elizabethan golden age (The Muses Elizium,
1630). Nostalgia was a dangerous quality under the progressive and absolutist
Stuarts; the taste for Spenser involved a respect for values--traditional,
patriotic, and Protestant--that were popularly, if erroneously, linked with the
Elizabethan past but thought to be disregarded by the new regime. These poets
believed they had a spokesman at court in the heroic and promising Prince Henry,
but his death in 1612 disappointed many expectations, intellectual, political,
and religious, and this group in particular was forced further toward the puritanical
position. Increasingly their pastorals and fervently Protestant poetry aligned
them in opposition to a court of Cavalier wits and of suspiciously pro-Spanish
and pro-Catholic sympathies in foreign affairs; so sharp became Wither's satires
that he earned imprisonment and was lampooned by Ben Jonson in a court masque.
The failure of the Stuarts to conciliate attitudes such as these was to be
crucial to their inability to maintain the cohesion 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 Scotus or Aquinas." |
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Puritanism also had a powerful effect on
early Stuart prose. The best-sellers of the period were godly manuals that ran
to scores of editions, like Arthur Dent's Plain
Man's Pathway to Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly's Practice
of Piety (1611; some 50 editions followed), the two of which formed the
meagre dowry of John Bunyan's first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the
plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely profitable treatment of
doctrine, though equally some famous godly preachers, such as Henry Smith and
Thomas Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other
shaping factor was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian prose that
would accurately and concretely represent the relationship between words and
things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope, repeatedly voiced in the 1640s
and '50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the
Royal Society (incorporated 1662), which decisively affected prose after
the Restoration. Its impact on earlier prose, though, was limited; most early
Stuart science was written in the baroque style. |
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The impetus toward a scientific prose
derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the
towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in
advance of his generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement
of Learning (1605) and the Novum
Organum (1620) Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge,
rationally and comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit
from the discoveries of the others. The two radical novelties of his scheme were
his insight that there could be progress in learning, that the limits of
knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward, and his inductive method,
by which scientific principles were to be established by experimentation,
beginning at particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working
backward from preconceived systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke,
removing the tyranny of authority and lifting scientific inquiry free of
religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating second causes
(though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God's
glory). The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement
that the preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first
"distemper" of learning; his own prose, however, was far from plain.
The level exposition of idea in the Advancement
is underpinned by a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric; and the famous Essayes
(1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward
unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended complications. |
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The Essayes
are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the
reflectively aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essais
of Montaigne. Lesser collections were published by Sir William Cornwallis
(1600-01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson (his posthumous Timber;
or, Discoveries). A related genre was the "character,"
a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from
Theophrastus, and practiced first by Joseph Hall
(Characters of
Vertues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John
Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle's (Micro-cosmographie,
1628). Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography;
the chief practitioners of this genre were Thomas
Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The
Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the
biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker. Walton's hagiographies
are entertaining, but he manipulated the facts shamelessly; his biographies seem
lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville's tragical and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period
was Sir Walter Raleigh's unfinished History
of the World (1614), with its rolling periods and sombre skepticism,
written from the Tower during his disgrace. Raleigh's providential framework
would recommend his History to
Cromwell and Milton; King James found it "too saucy in censuring
princes." Bacon's History of the
Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular,
Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in pragmatism.
(see also character
sketch, "Historie of the Raigne of King
Henry the Seventh, The") |
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The essayists and character writers
initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious Elizabethan prose that
has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or Senecan, but
these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped,
aphoristic prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for
looseness, asymmetry, and open-endedness. The age's professional stylists were
the preachers, and in the sermons of Lancelot
Andrewes and John Donne the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher's
exegesis into tiny, hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated
restlessness. An extreme example of the loose style is Robert
Burton's Anatomy
of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of learning,
pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human
psychopathology. Burton's compendiousness, his fascination with excess,
necessitated a style that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir
Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of Gargantua
and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even Rabelais. In the Religio Medici (1635), The
Garden of Cyrus, and Hydriotaphia,
Urne-buriall, or A discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk
(1658) of Sir Thomas Browne the loose style
serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation, content with
uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne's
majestic prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and
scientific tracts alike with an almost Byzantine richness and melancholy. |
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These were all learned styles, Latinate
and sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of the first corantos,
or courants (news books), generated by interest in the Thirty Years' War,
heralded the great 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass readership, a
change effected by the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the
political confusion of the 1640s. The search for new kinds of political order
and authority generated an answering chaos of styles, as voices were heard that
had hitherto been denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Thomas Hobbes and the republican James Harrington were
advanced within the traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless) debate, but
they spoke in competition with vulgar writers who deliberately breached the
literary canons of good taste--Levellers, such
as John Lilburne and Richard Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers,
like Gerrard Winstanley with his call for a general Law
of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose
language and syntax were as disruptive as the libertinism they professed. The
outstanding examples were Milton's tracts
against the bishops (1641-42), which revealed an unexpected talent for
scurrilous abuse and withering sarcasm. Milton's later pamphlets, on divorce,
education, and free speech (Areopagitica,
1644) and in defense of tyrannicide (The
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649), adopt a loosely Ciceronian
sonorousness, but their language is plain and always intensely imaginative and
absorbing. (see also newspaper) |
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Milton had a concept of the public role
of the poet even more elevated, if possible, than Jonson's; he early declared
his hope to do for his native tongue what "the greatest and choicest wits
of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy" had done for theirs. But where Jonson's
humanism had led him toward a classical absolutism, Milton's was crossed by a
respect for the conscience acting in pursuance of those things that it,
individually, knew were right; he wished to "contribute to the progress of
real and substantial liberty; which is to be sought for not from without, but
within." His early verse aligned him, poetically and politically, with the
Spenserians: religious and pastoral odes; "Lycidas"
(1637), a pastoral elegy that incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus
(1634), a masque against "masquing," performed privately in the
country and opposing a private heroism in chastity and virtue to the courtly
round of revelry and pleasure. |
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During the interregnum, between the
execution of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II, Milton saw his role as
the intellectual serving the state in a glorious cause; he devoted his energies
to pamphleteering, and he became Oliver Cromwell's Latin secretary. But the
republic of virtue failed to materialize; Milton's courageous voice was the last
before the Restoration to propose The
Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a desperate
program for a permanent oligarchy of the puritan elect, intended to avert the
return to royal slavery. His greatest achievements, Paradise Lost, Paradise
Regained, and Samson
Agonistes, did not appear until several years after the Restoration,
but their roots are deep in the radical experience of the 1640s and '50s and in
the ensuing transformations in politics and society. For Milton and his
contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that was to necessitate a complete
rethinking of expectations and ideas and a corresponding reassessment of the
literary language, traditions, and forms appropriate to the new age. (M.H.B.) |
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The restoration of Charles II in 1660
led many to a painful revaluation of the political hopes and millenarian
expectations bred during two decades of civil war and republican government.
With the return of an efficient censorship, ambitiously heterodox ideas in
theology and politics that had found their way freely into print during the
1640s and '50s were once again denied publication. The experience of defeat
needed time to be absorbed, and fresh strategies had to be devised to encounter
the challenge of hostile times. Much caustic and libelous political satire was
written during the reigns of Charles II and James II and (because printing was
subject to repressive legal constrictions) circulated anonymously and widely in
manuscript. Andrew Marvell, sitting as member of
Parliament for Hull in three successive parliaments from 1659 to 1678,
experimented energetically with this mode, and his Last Instructions to a Painter (written in 1667) achieves a control
of a broad canvas and an alertness to apt detail and to the movement of masses
of people that make it a significant forerunner of Alexander Pope's Dunciad
(however divergent the two poets' political visions may be). Marvell also proved
himself to be a dexterous, abrasive prose controversialist, comprehensively
deriding the anti-Dissenter arguments of Samuel Parker (later bishop of Oxford)
in The Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672,
with a sequel in 1673) and providing so vivid an exposition of Whig suspicions
of the restored monarchy's attraction to absolutism in An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England
(1677) that a reward of £ 100 was offered for revealing its author's
identity. (see also Restoration
literature) |
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The greatest prose controversialist of
the pre-1660 years, John Milton, did not return to that mode but, in his
enforced retirement from the public scene, devoted himself to his great poems of
religious struggle and conviction, Paradise
Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained
and Samson Agonistes (both 1671).
Each, in its probing of the intricate ways in which God's design reveals itself
in human history, can justly be read (in one of its dimensions) as a chastened
but resolute response to the failure of a revolution in which Milton himself had
placed great trust and hope. |
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Others of the defeated republicans set
out to record their own or others' experiences in the service of what they
called the "good old cause." Lucy Hutchinson, for example, composed,
probably in the mid-1660s, her remarkable memoirs of the life of her husband,
Colonel Hutchinson, the Parliamentarian commander of Nottingham during the Civil
War. Edmund Ludlow, like Hutchinson one of the
regicides, fled to Switzerland in 1660, where he compiled his own Memoirs.
These were published only in 1698-99 after Ludlow's death, and the discovery in
1970 of part of Ludlow's own manuscript revealed that they were edited and
rewritten by another hand before printing. Civil War testimony still had
political applications in the last years of the century, but those who sponsored
its publication judged that Ludlow's now old-fashioned, millenarian rhetoric
should be suppressed in favour of a soberer commonwealthman's dialect. Some
autobiographers themselves adjusted their testimony in the light of later
developments. George Fox, the Quaker leader, for
example, dictating his Journal
to various amanuenses, dubiously claimed for himself an attachment to pacifist
principles during the 1650s, whereas it was, in fact, only in 1661, in the
aftermath of the revolution's defeat, that the peace principle became central to
Quakerism. The Journal itself only
reached print in 1694 (again, after its author's death) after revision by a
group superintended by William Penn. Such caution suggests a lively awareness of
the influence such a text could have in consolidating a sect's sense of its own
identity and continuity. |
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John Bunyan's
Grace Abounding
(1666), written while he was imprisoned in Bedford jail for nonconformity with
the Church of England, similarly relates the process of his own conversion for
the encouragement of his local, dissenter congregation. It testifies graphically
to the force, both terrifying and consolatory, with which the biblical word
could work upon the consciousness of a scantily educated, but overwhelmingly
responsive, 17th-century believer. The form of Grace
Abounding has numerous precedents in spiritual autobiography of the period,
but with The Pilgrim's Progress (the first
part of which appeared in 1678) Bunyan found himself drawn into a much more
novel experiment, developing an ambitious allegorical narrative when his intent
had been to write a more conventionally ordered account of the processes of
redemption. The resulting work (with its second part appearing in 1684) combines
a careful exposition of the logical structure of the Calvinist scheme of
salvation with a delicate responsiveness to the ways in which his experience of
his own world (of the life of the road, of the arrogance of the rich, of the
rhythms of contemporary speech) can be deployed to render with a new vividness
the strenuous testing the Christian soul must undergo. His achievement owes
scarcely anything to the literary culture of his time, but his masterpiece has
gained for itself a readership greater than that achieved by any other English
17th-century work with the exception of the King James Bible. Two other of his
works, though lesser in stature, are especially worth reading: The
Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), which, with graphic local detail,
remorselessly tracks the sinful temptations of everyday life, and The
Holy War (1682), a grandiose attempt at religious mythmaking
interlaced with contemporary political allusions. (see also
"Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The") |
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Richard Baxter,
a Nonconformist cleric who, although enduring persecution after 1660, was by
instinct and much of his practice a reconciler, published untiringly on
religious issues. He wrote, soon after the death of his wife, the moving Breviate
(1681), a striking combination of exemplary narrative and unaffectedly direct
reporting of the nature of their domestic life. His finest work, however, is the
Reliquiae
Baxterianae (published, five years after his death, in 1696), an
autobiography that is also an eloquent defense of the Puritan impulse in the
17th-century Christian tradition. |
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The voice of anti-Puritan reaction can
be heard in Samuel Butler's extensive
mock-heroic satire Hudibras
(published in three installments between 1662 and 1678). This was a massively
popular work, with an influence stretching well into the 18th century (when
Samuel Johnson, for example, greatly admired it and William Hogarth illustrated
some scenes from it). It reads partly as a consummately destructive act of
revenge upon those who had usurped power in the previous two decades, but
although it is easy to identify what Hudibras
opposes, it is difficult to say what, if anything, it affirms. Although much
admired by Royalist opinion, it shows no wish to celebrate the authority or
person restored in 1660, and its brazenly undignified use of rhyming tetrameters
mirrors, mocks, and lacerates rooted human follies far beyond the power of one
political reversal to obliterate. A comparable sardonic disenchantment is
apparent in Butler's shorter verse satires and in his incisive and densely
argued collection of prose Characters. |
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Royalists also resorted to biography and
autobiography to record their experiences of defeat and restoration. Three of
the most intriguing are by women: Margaret, duchess of Newcastle's life of her
husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of Anne, Lady Halkett
(both written in the late 1670s but not published in a fairly complete form
until, respectively, 1829 and 1875). But incomparably the richest account of
those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward
Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was begun in exile during the late
1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after Clarendon's fall from
royal favour in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is
inevitably partisan, the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of
character portraiture make the History
an extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during
his last exile, gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world
between the 1630s and '60s. |
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In 1660 feeling in the country ran
strongly in favour of the Church of England,
persecution having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and
ceremonies. The reestablished church, accepting for itself the role of staunch
defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the exploration of ambitious and
controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to expounding codes
of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen
interest in the art of preaching. In conscious reaction against the obscurantist
dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct style of sermon oratory
was favoured. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert Burnet
praised the Archbishop because he "said what was just necessary to give
clear Ideas of things, and no more" and "laid aside all long and
affected Periods." |
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A comparable preference for an
unembellished and perspicuous use of language is apparent in much of the
non-theological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing History
of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific
discovery in mind, also advocated "a close, naked natural way of speaking,
positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness." Sprat's work and a
series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning
with The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an
experimental approach to natural phenomena against both the old scholastic
philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a real struggle was involved
can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary satires to
the labours of the Royal Society's enthusiasts (see, for instance, Samuel
Butler's "The Elephant in the Moon," probably written in 1670-71, and
Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso,
1676)--a tradition to be sustained later by Swift and Pope. But evidence of
substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was being published
throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle's Sceptical
Chymist (1661), Robert Hooke's Micrographia
(1665), John Ray's Historia Plantarum
(in three volumes, 1686-1704), and, above all, Isaac (later Sir Isaac) Newton's Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). (see also
"Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in
Opinions, The") |
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The Restoration, in its turn, bred its
own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the
Oxford antiquarian, made in his Athenae
Oxonienses (1691-92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labours were aided by John
Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but enticing manuscript notes on the
famous have been published in modern times under the title Brief
Lives. After 1688 secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and
James II were popular, of which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often
reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into
English in 1714. A soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History
of My Own Time (published posthumously, 1724-34) was composed by the
industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the last months of
the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and in Some
Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester (1680) he offered
a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. |
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A sparer, more finely focused prose was
written by George Savile, 1st marquess of Halifax,
who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years, but remaining
distrustful of any simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a
series of thoughtful, wryly observant essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or
very early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter
(published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King Charles the Second (written after about 1688).
He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady's New-Year's-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he
anatomizes, with a sombre but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young
gentlewoman in life, especially in marriage. |
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Two great diarists are among the most
significant witnesses to the development of the Restoration world. Both
possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John
Evelyn was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamoured
of the conduct he observed in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable,
whether the topic in question happened to be Tudor architecture, contemporary
horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel
Pepys, whose diary, unlike Evelyn's,
covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-scrutinizing
of the two, constantly mapping his own behaviour with an alert and quizzical
eye. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and religious gravity, Pepys
immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the 1660s, and it
is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. |
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Among the subjects for gossip in London
the group known as the "court wits" held a special place. Their
conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction, who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the
preceding generation (especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund
Waller, the last two of whom themselves survived into the Restoration and
continued to write impressive verse). The court wits' best works are mostly
light lyrics, for example, Sir Charles Sedley's "Not, Celia, that I juster
am" or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset's "Dorinda's sparkling wit,
and eyes." One of their number, the previously mentioned John
Wilmot, earl of Rochester, possessed, however, a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least ambitious sense
occasional work, he also produced writing of great force and authority,
including a group of lyrics (for example, "All my past life is mine no
more" and "An age in her embraces past") that, in psychological
grasp and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He
also wrote the harsh and scornfully dismissive Satire
Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676) and experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most
brilliant of these, A Letter from
Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box
structure that masks the author's own thoughts. Rochester's determined use of
strategies of indirection anticipates Swift's tactics as an ironist. |
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John Oldham,
a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester. His
career, like his patron's, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at
age 30); but of his promise there can be no doubt. His Satires
upon the Jesuits (1679-81), written during the Popish Plot, makes too
unrelenting use of a rancorous, hectoring tone, but his development of the
possibilities (especially satiric) of the "imitation" form, already
explored by Rochester in, for example, An
Allusion to Horace (written 1675-76), earns him an honourable place in the
history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use. His imitation of
the ninth satire of Horace's first book exemplifies the agility and tonal
resource with which Oldham could adapt a classical original to, and bring its
values to bear upon, Restoration experience. |
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A poet who found early popularity with
Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose Scarronides
(1664-65), travesties of books one and four of Virgil's Aeneid,
set a fashion for poetical burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that
attracted less contemporary interest but was to be admired by Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. The posthumous Poems
on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship and love
written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and
carefully observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also
added a second part to his friend Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer
whose finest work was unknown to his contemporaries, much of it having been
published only during the 20th century, is the poet and mystic Thomas
Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings and the lengthy Platonic
tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a conviction of
the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are
perhaps to be found in the prose Centuries
of Meditations (first published in 1908). |
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A poetic accomplishment of quite another
order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years old when Charles II returned from
exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date. But for the
remaining 40 years of his life he was unwearyingly productive, responding to the
challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of
many poetic styles. He was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways
in which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the
course of his career. Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea
Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas of the return of a golden age under
Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for England's future;
whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis (the attempt to exclude Charles II's
brother James, a Roman Catholic, from succeeding to the throne) drew from Dryden
one of his masterpieces, Absalom
and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David,
through an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and
comment decisively upon the current political confrontation. Another of his
finest inventions, Mac
Flecknoe (written mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile
mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a world in which the profession of
humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the unworthiness of its
practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious poems: Religio
Laici or a Laymans Faith (1682), in which he uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The
Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate allegorical beast
fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Revolution of 1688 Dryden stayed loyal to the
Catholicism to which he had been converted a few years earlier and thus lost his
public offices. Financial need spurred him into even more literary activity
thereafter, and his last years produced immensely skilled translations of
Juvenal, Persius, and Virgil and handsome versions of Boccaccio and Chaucer, as
well as further fine original poetry. |
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Dryden was also, in Samuel Johnson's
words, the father of English criticism. Throughout his career he wrote
extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice. Such sustained
effort for which there was no precedent presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one.
His tone is consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working
author, with an eye to problems he has himself faced, and is skeptical of
theoretical prescriptions that threaten to become straitjackets for the poet or
the critic. His discussion of Ben Jonson's Epicoene,
or The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended
analysis of an English play, and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and
the preface to the Fables Ancient and
Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order. (see
also literary
criticism) |
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A contrary critical philosophy was
espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the
most rigid neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642
English drama in Tragedies of the Last Age
(1678) and A Short View of Tragedy
(1693) and found it wanting. His zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden
was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his judgments without protest. In
due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own scourge in Jeremy
Collier, whose Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of
the English Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration
stage tradition. The theoretical frame of Collier's tract is crude, but his
strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published play texts,
especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff
penalties in the courts. Even so clever a man as William Congreve was left
struggling when attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit. |
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Characteristically, Dryden, as
dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
exploring the possibilities of the rhymed heroic play in the 1660s and early
1670s and producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don
Sebastian (1689); but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway's Venice
Preserved, 1682, and Nathaniel Lee's Lucius
Junius Brutus, 1680), the splendour of the Restoration theatre lies in its
comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to that wealth.
In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege's Man of Mode (1676), William Wycherley's Country-Wife (1675) and Plain-Dealer
(1676), and Aphra Behn's two-part Rover
(1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a disabling repetitiveness
in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of The
Country-Wife and The Man of Mode
will reveal how firmly the two authors, close acquaintances, have devised
dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced
comic writing of matching mood, especially in Otway's abrasive Soldier's Fortune (1680) and Lee's extraordinary variation on the
Madame de La Fayette novella, The Princess
of Cleve (1681-82). After the Revolution of 1688 a series of major comedies
hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority.
These include, in addition to Amphitryon,
Thomas Southerne's Wives Excuse
(1691), Sir John Vanbrugh's Relapse
(1696) and Provok'd Wife (1697), and
George Farquhar's BeauxStratagem
(1707). These years also saw the premieres of Congreve's
four comedies and one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The
Way of the World (1700), a brilliant combination of intricate
plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon society
at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves
felt, the key text here being Farquhar's Recruiting
Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and civilian are placed in
suggestive proximity. |
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After 1710 contemporary writing for the
stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a period of great acting and strong
popular enthusiasm for the theatre, but only a few dramatists (Gay, Fielding,
Goldsmith, and Sheridan) achieved writing of a quality to compete with their
predecessors' best, and even a writer of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan's undeniable resource produced in his best plays--The
Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The Critic (1779)--work that seems more like a technically
ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of familiar materials than a truly
innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for the stage. A
number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, and the influence of this comic tradition was also
strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that followed. |
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One other late 17th-century figure with
a formidable influence in the 18th century demands consideration: the
philosopher John Locke. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that the mind at birth is a
tabula rasa. Experience of the world can only be accumulated through the senses,
which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define the exact limits of what the
mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the workings of human
intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the fertility
of its suggestions--for example, about the way in which ideas come to be
associated. Locke was equally influential on political thought. He came from
Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, the Earl of Shaftesbury.
His Two Treatises
of Government (published in 1690, but mainly written during the
Exclusion Crisis 10 years earlier) asserts the right of resistance to unjust
authority and, in the last resort, of revolution. To establish this he had to
think radically about the origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of
subjects and rulers, and the rights of property. The resulting work became the
crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its bearings. |
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The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695
halted state censorship of the press. During the next 20 years there were to be
10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an enormous growth
in the publication of political literature.
Senior politicians, especially Robert Harley,
saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a
wavering electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses.
Richer talents also played their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel
Defoe's industrious work on the Review
(1704-13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending,
if often by indirection, current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan
Swift's polemical skills for contributions to The
Examiner (1710-11). Swift's most ambitious intervention in the paper war,
again overseen by Harley, was The
Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument against
any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers like
Defoe and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive
techniques in their pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and
invented personae to carry the attack home. According to contemporary testimony,
Defoe's Shortest-Way
with the Dissenters (1702) so brilliantly sustained its impersonation
of a High Church extremist, its alleged narrator, that it was at first mistaken
for the real thing. This avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary
appetite for reading matter generally and, in the increasing sophistication of
its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in preparing the way for the
astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the subsequent
decades. |
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After Defoe's Review the great innovation in periodical journalism came with the
achievements of Richard Steele and Joseph
Addison in The
Tatler (1709-11) and then The
Spectator (1711-12). In a familiar, easily approachable style they
tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from aesthetics to
the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote
extensively, with descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family
relations. Their political allegiances were Whig, and in their creation of Sir
Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the landed Tory squire as
likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred
by a healthy, and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original
of the two, was an adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the
ballad through his enthusiastic account of Chevy-Chase,
wrote a thoughtful and probing examen of Paradise
Lost, and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers
deeply influential on 18th-century thought. The success with which Addison and
Steele established the periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by
the fact that they were to have more than 300 imitators before the end of the
century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about the way it was
developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left
its mark on much subsequent writing. |
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Alexander Pope
contributed to The Spectator and moved
for a time in Addisonian circles; but from about 1711 onward his more
influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His early verse shows a
dazzling precocity, his Essay
on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of argument with great
stylistic assurance and Windsor-Forest
(1713) achieving an ingenious, late Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of
topographical poetry. The mock-heroic Rape
of the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat,
marrying a rich range of literary allusiveness and a delicately ironic
commentary upon the contemporary social world with a potent sense of suppressed
energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. That he could also
write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717), which, modeled on Ovid's
heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa's struggle to reconcile grace
with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labours between
1713 and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of
Homer's Iliad (to be followed by the Odyssey
in the mid-1720s). From that decade onward his view of the transformations
wrought in Robert Walpole's England by economic individualism and opportunism
grew increasingly embittered and despairing. In this he was following a common
Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the writings of his friend, the
politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope's Essay
on Man (1733-34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the
notion of a God-ordained, perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created
things. But his most probing and startling writing of these years comes in the
four Moral Essays (1731-35), the
series of Horatian imitations, and the final four-book version of The
Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to anatomize with outstanding
imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-hallowed ideals he
sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live. |
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James Thomson
also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much more
optimistic vision. In The
Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746) Thomson meditated upon, and described
with fascinated precision, the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a
vast array of erudition and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of
post-civil war, especially Newtonian, science, from whose vocabulary he borrowed
freely. The image he developed of man's relationship to, and cultivation of,
nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization and wealth that
ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons has many Miltonian echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson's model is Spenserian, and
its wryly developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile
achievement. |
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A poet who, at his best, chose a less
ambitious song to sing is Matthew Prior, a diplomat and politician of some
distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon
on the Vanity of the World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human
knowledge, but who also wrote some of the most direct and coolly elegant love
poetry of the period. Prior's principal competitor as a writer of light verse
was John Gay, whose Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of
London (1716) catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through
a dexterous burlesque of Virgil's Georgics.
His Fables, particularly those in the
1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and his work for the stage,
especially in The What D'Ye Call It
(1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar's Opera (1728), shows a sustained ability to breed
original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization. |
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Swift,
who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay favoured
octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech.
His technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great
destructive force to the intricately textured humour of Verses
on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published 1739) and to the
delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of
course, as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as
secretary to the distinguished man of letters, Sir William Temple, gave him the
chance to extend and consolidate his reading, and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its
author's learning to chart the anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub
Street hack, whose solipsistic "modern" consciousness possesses no
respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom from
Christian or classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to
Swift's art thereafter. The Argument
Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the "Church in Danger" controversy through the
carefully assumed voice of a "nominal" Christian. That similar
techniques could be adapted to serve specific political goals is demonstrated by
"The Drapier's Letters" (1724-25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had
hoped for preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and
the ambivalent nature of his relationship to that country and its inhabitants
provoked some of his most demanding and exhilarating writing--above all, A
Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an invented
persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His
most wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous, Gulliver's
Travels (1726). Swift grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility
to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court, and that preoccupation leaves
its mark on this work. But Gulliver's Travels also hunts larger prey. At its heart is a radical
critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to part the
reader from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge him to rethink from
first principles his notions of man. |
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More consoling doctrine was available in
the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl
of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he
dissented from the latter's rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is
born with a moral sense that is closely associated with his sense of aesthetic
form. The tone of Shaftesbury's essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. His optimism was
buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable
of the Bees (1714-29), which includes "The Grumbling Hire"
(1705), takes a closer look at early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was
prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the indispensable role played by the
ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society's prosperous functioning.
He thus favoured an altogether harsher view of man's natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose
the various contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought
to deny the truth as he saw it. He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic
rebukes by, among others, William Law, John Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George
Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and Shaftesbury, set himself
against what he took to be the age's irreligious tendencies and the obscurantist
defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense.
His Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three
Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the
17th-century debates about the nature of human perception, to which Descartes
and Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and elegance of his style
contrast markedly with the more effortful, but intensely earnest, prose of Joseph
Butler's Analogy
of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man's knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A
Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed
uncompromisingly the human mind's propensity to work by sequences of association
and juxtaposition rather than by reason. Edmund Burke's
Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator's or reader's delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of
pleasurable pain. An equally bold assumption about human psychology--in this
case, that man is an ambitious, socially oriented, product-valuing
creature--lies at the heart of Adam Smith's
masterpiece of laissez-faire economic theory, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776). |
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Such ambitious debates on society and
human nature ran parallel with the explorations of a literary form finding new
popularity with a large audience, the novel. Defoe,
for example, fascinated by any intellectual wrangling, was always willing (amid
a career of unwearying activity) to publish his own views on the matter
currently in question, be it economic, metaphysical, educational, or legal. His
lasting distinction, though earned in other fields of writing than the
disputative, is constantly underpinned by the generous range of his curiosity.
Only someone of his catholic interests could have sustained, for instance, the
superb Tour Thro' the Whole Island of
Great Britain (1724-27), a vivid, county-by-county review and celebration of
the state of the nation. He brought the same diversity of enthusiasms into play
in writing his novels. The first of these, Robinson Crusoe (1719), an immediate
success at home and on the Continent, is a unique fictional blending of the
traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the
nature of man as social creature and an extraordinary ability to invent a
sustaining modern myth. A Journal
of the Plague Year (1722) displays enticing powers of self-projection
into a situation of which Defoe can only have had experience through the
narrations of others, and both Moll
Flanders (1722) and Roxana
(1724) lure the reader into puzzling relationships with narrators the degree of
whose own self-awareness is repeatedly and provocatively placed in doubt. |
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The enthusiasm prompted by Defoe's best
novels demonstrated the growing readership for innovative prose narrative. Samuel
Richardson, a prosperous London printer, was the next major author to
respond to the challenge. His Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740,
with a less happy sequel in 1741), using (like all Richardson's novels) the
epistolary form, tells a story of an employer's attempted seduction of a young
servant woman, her subsequent victimization, and her eventual reward in virtuous
marriage with the penitent exploiter. Its moral tone is self-consciously
rigorous and proved highly controversial. Its main strength lies in the
resourceful, sometimes comically vivid imagining of the moment-by-moment
fluctuations of the heroine's consciousness as she faces her ordeal. Pamela
herself is the sole letter writer, and the technical limitations are strongly
felt, though Richardson's ingenuity works hard to mitigate them. But Pamela's
frank speaking about the abuses of masculine and gentry power sounds the
skeptical note more radically developed in Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa:
or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), which has a just claim to
being considered the most reverberant and moving tragic fiction in the English
novel tradition. Clarissa uses
multiple narrators and develops a profoundly suggestive interplay of opposed
voices. At its centre is the taxing soul debate and eventually mortal combat
between the aggressive, brilliantly improvisatorial libertine Lovelace and the
beleaguered Clarissa, maltreated and abandoned by her family but abiding sternly
loyal to her own inner sense of probity. The tragic consummation that grows from
this involves an astonishingly ruthless testing of the psychological natures of
the two leading characters. After such intensities, Richardson's final novel, The
History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), is perhaps inevitably a
less ambitious, cooler work, but its blending of serious moral discussion and a
comic ending ensured it an influence on his successors, especially Jane Austen.
(see also psychological
novel) |
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Henry Fielding
turned to novel writing after a successful period as a dramatist, during which
his most popular work had been in burlesque forms. His entry into prose fiction
was also in that mode. An Apology
for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), a travesty of
Richardson's Pamela, transforms the
latter's heroine into a predatory fortune hunter who cold-bloodedly lures her
booby master into matrimony. Fielding continued his quarrel with Richardson in The
History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
(1742), which also uses Pamela as a
starting point but which, developing a momentum of its own, soon outgrows any
narrow parodic intent. His hostility to Richardson's sexual ethic
notwithstanding, Fielding was happy to build, with a calm and smiling
sophistication, on the growing respect for the novel to which his antagonist had
so substantially contributed. In Joseph
Andrews and The History
of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) Fielding openly brought to bear upon
his chosen form a battery of devices from more traditionally reputable modes
(including epic poetry, painting, and the drama). This is accompanied by a
flamboyant development of authorial presence. Fielding the narrator buttonholes
the reader repeatedly, airs critical and ethical questions for the reader's
delectation, and urbanely discusses the artifice upon which his fiction depends.
In the deeply original Tom Jones especially, this assists in developing a distinctive
atmosphere of self-confident magnanimity and candid optimism. His fiction,
however, can also cope with a darker range of experience. The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), for instance, uses a
mock-heroic idiom to explore a derisive parallel between the criminal underworld
and England's political elite, and Amelia
(1751) probes with sombre precision images of captivity and situations of taxing
moral paradox. (see also "Life
of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, The," ) |
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Tobias Smollett had no desire to rival
Fielding as a formal innovator, and his novels consequently tend to be rather
ragged assemblings of disparate incidents. But, although uneven in performance,
all of them include extended passages of real force and idiosyncracy. His freest
writing is expended on grotesque portraiture in which the human is reduced to
fiercely energetic automatism. Smollett can also
be a stunning reporter of the contemporary scene, whether the subject be a naval
battle or the gathering of the decrepit at a spa. His touch is least happy when,
complying too facilely with the gathering cult of sensibility, he indulges in
rote-learned displays of emotionalism and good-heartedness. His most sustainedly
invigorating work can perhaps be found in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and (an altogether more
interesting encounter with the dialects of sensibility) The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). |
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An experiment of a radical and seminal
kind is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which,
drawing on a tradition of learned wit from Erasmus and Rabelais to Burton and
Swift, provides a brilliant comic critique of the progress of the English novel
to date. The focus of attention is shifted from the fortunes of the hero himself
to the nature of his family, environment, and heredity, and dealings within that
family offer repeated images of human unrelatedness and disconnection. Tristram,
the narrator, is isolated in his own privacy and doubts how much, if anything,
he can know certainly even about himself. Sterne is explicit about the influence
of Lockean psychology on his writing, and the book, fascinated with the fictive
energies of the imagination, is filled with characters reinventing or
mythologizing the conditions of their own lives. It also draws zestful stimulus
from a concern with the limitations of language, both verbal and visual, and
teases an intricate drama out of Tristram's imagining of, and playing to, the
reader's likely responses. Sterne's Sentimental
Journey Through France and Italy (1768) similarly defies conventional
expectations of what a travel book might be. An apparently random collection of
scattered experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with episodes in a
heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is secured by the delicate
insistence with which Sterne ponders how the impulses of sentimental and erotic
feeling are psychologically interdependent. |
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The work of these five giants was
accompanied by interesting experiments from a number of lesser novelists. Sarah
Fielding, for instance, Henry's sister, wrote penetratingly and gravely about
friendship in The Adventures of David
Simple (1744, with a sequel in 1753). Charlotte
Lennox in The Female Quixote
(1752) and Richard Graves in The Spiritual
Quixote (1773) responded inventively to the influence of Cervantes, also
discernible in the writing of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. John
Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure (known as Fanny Hill; 1748-49)
chose a more contentious path; in his charting of a young girl's sexual
initiation, he experiments with minutely detailed ways of describing the
physiology of intercourse. In emphatic contrast, Henry
Mackenzie's Man of Feeling
(1771) offers an extremist, and rarefied, version of the sentimental hero, while
Horace Walpole's Castle
of Otranto (1765) somewhat laboriously initiated the vogue for Gothic
fiction. William Beckford's Vathek
(1786), Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis' Monk
(1796) are among the more distinctive of its successors. But the most engaging
and thoughtful minor novelist of the period is Fanny
Burney, who was also an evocative and self-revelatory diarist and letter
writer. Her Evelina (1778) and Camilla
(1796) in particular handle with independence of invention and emotional insight
the theme of a young woman negotiating her first encounters with a dangerous
social world. (see also "Fanny
Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure", "Evelina,
or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World") |
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Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope
produced nothing that can compete with achievements on the scale of Clarissa
and Tristram Shandy; but much that was vital was accomplished. William
Collins' Odes on Several
Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for instance, displays great
technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry's true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality
of personification as a medium for poetic expression. In his Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), Thomas
Gray revisited the terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell's Night-Piece
on Death (1722) and Robert Blair's poem The
Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors' powers. In later odes, particularly The
Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully sought close imitation of the
original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English, while
developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray's
fascination with the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great
ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James
Macpherson's alleged translations of Ossian (1760-63) is a further indicator. |
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Another eclectically learned and
energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate
Agno (written during confinement in various asylums between 1758/59
and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and experiments
with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A
Song to David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous
linguistic vitality with elaborate structural patterning. Both contain
encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore, numerous passages of
which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry is
continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of
material, and a unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was
also a superb writer of hymns, a talent in which his major contemporary rival
was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779). Both are worthy successors to the richly
inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the century. Elsewhere,
Cowper can write with buoyant humour and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town
life. But some of his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense
experience of withdrawal and isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods
of acute despair when he could see no hope of admission to salvation, a mood
chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem The
Castaway (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The
Task (1785), an extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working
calmly toward religious praise and pious acceptance. |
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The 1780s brought publishing success to
Robert Burns for his Poems,
Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect(1786). Drawing on the precedents of
Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and
ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the language of poetry. Although born
a poor tenant farmer's son, Burns had made himself well versed in English
literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and
religious hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy
Willie's Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding example. His work bears the
imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and recurrent in much of
it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order. |
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Two other major poets, both of whom also
achieved distinction in an impressive array of nondramatic modes, demand
attention: Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson.
Goldsmith's contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The
Deserted Village (1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death,
is a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a
group of his closest acquaintances. The
Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by
a restless wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his
brother still dwells. In The Deserted
Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village
community is ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable
story of a rural idyll destroyed (though, this time, narrative artifice allows
its eventual restoration) is at the centre of his greatly popular but tonally
elusive novel, The
Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals
between 1759 and 1773. His Citizen
of the World, originally published in The
Public Ledger in 1760-61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose
letters home comment tolerantly but shrewdly on his English experiences. He also
produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible
masterpieces of the theatre after the death of Farquhar in 1707. |
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Goldsmith belonged to the circle of a
writer of still ampler range and outstanding intellect, Samuel Johnson. Pope
recognized Johnson's poetical promise in London
(1738), an invigorating reworking of Juvenal's third satire as a castigation of
the decadence of contemporary Britain. His finest poem, The
Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), also takes its cue from Juvenal, this
time his 10th satire. It is a tragic meditation on the pitiful spectacle of
human unfulfillment, which yet ends with an urgent prayer of Christian hope.
But, great poet though he was, the lion's share of his formidable energies was
expended on prose. From his early years in London he lived by his pen and gave
himself unstintingly to satisfy the booksellers' demands. Yet he managed to
sustain a remarkable coherence of ethical ambition and personal presence
throughout his voluminous labours. His twice-weekly essays for The
Rambler (1750-52), for instance, consistently show his powers at
their fullest stretch, handling an impressive array of literary and moral topics
with a scrupulous intellectual gravity and attentiveness. Many of the
preoccupations of The Vanity of Human
Wishes and the Rambler essays
reappear in Rasselas
(1759), which catalogues with profound resource the vulnerability of human
philosophies of life to humiliation at the hands of life itself. His forensic
brilliance can be seen in his relentless review of Soame
Jenyns' Free Inquiry into the
Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), which caustically dissects the latter's
complacent attitude to human suffering, and his analytic capacities are
evidenced at their height in the successful completion of two major projects,
his innovative Dictionary of the English
Language (1755) and the great edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765). His
last years produced much political writing (including the humanely resonant Thoughts
on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands, 1771); the socially
and historically alert Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland, 1775; and the consummate Lives
of the Poets, 1779-81. The latter was the climax of 40 years' writing of
poetical biographies, including the multifaceted Account
of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744). These last lives, covering the
period from Cowley to the generation of Gray, show Johnson's mastery of the
biographer's art of selection and emphasis and (together with the preface and
notes to his Shakespeare edition) contain the most provocative critical writing
of the century. Although his allegiances lay with neoclassical assumptions about
poetic form and language, his capacity for improvisatory responsiveness to
practice that lay outside the prevailing decorums should not be underrated. His
final faith, however, in his own creative practice as in his criticism, was that
the greatest art eschews unnecessary particulars and aims toward carefully
pondered and ambitious generalization. The same creed was eloquently expounded
by another member of the Johnson circle, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, in his 15 Discourses
(delivered to the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, but first
published collectively in 1797). |
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The other prime source of Johnson's
fame, his reputation as a conversationalist of epic genius, rests on the
detailed testimony of contemporary memorialists including Fanny Burney, Hester
Lynch Piozzi, and Sir John Hawkins. But the key text is James
Boswell's magisterial Life
of Samuel Johnson (1791). This combines in unique measure a deep
respect for its subject's ethical probity and resourceful intellect with a far
from inevitably complimentary eye for the telling details of his personal habits
and deportment. Boswell manifests rich dramatic talent and a precise ear for
conversational rhythms in his re-creation, and orchestration, of the debates
that lie at the heart of this great biography. Another dimension of Boswell's
literary talent came to light in the 1920s and '30s when two separate hoards of
unpublished manuscripts were discovered. In these he is his own subject of
study. The 18th century had not previously produced much autobiographical
writing of the first rank, though the actor and playwright Colley Cibber's
flamboyant Apology for the Life of Mr.
Colley Cibber (1740) and William Cowper's sombre Memoir
(written about 1766, first published in 1816) are two notable exceptions. But
the drama of Boswell's self-observations has a richer texture than either of
these. In the London Journal
especially (covering 1762-63, first published in 1950), he records the processes
of his dealings with others and of his own self-imaginings with a sometimes
unnerving frankness and a tough willingness to ask difficult questions of
himself. |
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Boswell narrated his experiences at the
same time as, or shortly after, they occurred. Edward
Gibbon, on the other hand, taking full advantage of hindsight, left in
manuscript at his death six autobiographical fragments, all having much ground
in common, but each telling a subtly different version of his life. Though he
was in many ways invincibly more reticent than Boswell, Gibbon's successive
explorations of his own history yet form a movingly resolute effort to see the
truth clearly. These writings were undertaken after the completion of the great
work of his life, The History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). He brought to
the latter an untiring dedication in the gathering and assimilation of
knowledge, an especial alertness to evidence of human fallibility and failure,
and a powerful ordering intelligence supported by a delicate sense of aesthetic
coherence. His central theme--that the destruction of the Roman Empire was the
joint triumph of barbarism and Christianity--is sustained with formidable ironic
resource. (M.Co.) |
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As a term to cover the most distinctive
writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first
decades of the 19th, "Romantic" is indispensable but also a little
misleading: there was no self-styled "Romantic
movement" at the time, and the great writers of the period did not
call themselves Romantics. |
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Many of the age's foremost writers
thought that something new was happening in the world's affairs, nevertheless.
Blake's affirmation in 1793 that "A new Heaven is begun . . . " was
matched a generation later by Shelley's "The world's great age begins
anew." "These, these shall give the world/Another heart, and other
pulses" wrote Keats, referring to Rousseau and Wordsworth. Fresh ideals
came to the fore: in particular the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England,
was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept
through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon
end. (see also aesthetics) |
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The feature most likely to strike a
reader turning to the poets of the time after reading their immediate
predecessors is the new role of individual feeling and thought. Where the main
trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as
a spokesman of society, addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and
having as his end the conveyance of "truth," the Romantics found the
source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake's marginal comment
on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses
expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: "to generalise is to
be an idiot; to particularise is the alone distinction of merit." The poet
was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his
perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind.
The implied attitude to an audience varied accordingly: although Wordsworth
maintained that a poet did not write "for Poets alone, but for Men,"
for Shelley the poet was "a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to
cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds," and Keats declared "I never
wrote one single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought."
Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by
which it was to be judged. Provided the feeling behind it was genuine, the
resulting creation must be valuable. |
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The emphasis on feeling--seen
perhaps at its finest in the poems of Burns--was in some ways a continuation of
the earlier "cult of sensibility"; and it is worth remembering that
Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the
heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most
of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called it "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling," and in 1833 John Stuart Mill
defined "natural poetry" as "Feeling itself, employing Thought
only as the medium of its utterance." It followed that the best poetry was
that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new
importance was attached to the lyric. The degree of intensity was affected by
the extent to which the poet's imagination had
been at work; as Coleridge saw it, the imagination was the supreme poetic
quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being.
Romantic theory thus differed from the neoclassic in the relative importance it
allotted to the imagination: Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as
"invention, imagination and judgement" but William Blake wrote:
"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision." The
judgment, or conscious control, was felt to be secondary; the poets of this
period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious
mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or
primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its
clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized
"reason." Rousseau's sentimental conception of the "noble
savage" was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the
phrase is Dryden's or that the type was adumbrated in the "poor
Indian" of Pope's Essay on Man. A
further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic
attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be
fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination.
Wordsworth advised a young poet, "You feel strongly; trust to those
feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from
the vital principle that actuates it." This organic view of poetry is
opposed to the classical theory of "genres," each with its own
linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was
unattainable except in short passages. |
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Hand in hand with the new conception of
poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of
writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing
poetic diction of the later 18th century stale and stilted, or "gaudy and
inane," and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It
could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly
sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. His
theories of diction have been allowed to loom too large in critical discussion:
his own best practice very often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when
Wordsworth published his preface to Lyrical
Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of
earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language
and, with the notable exceptions of Blake and Burns, little first-rate poetry
had been produced (as distinct from published) in Britain since the 1740s. |
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Useful as it is to trace the common
elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets
themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics -- William
Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, for example--as
if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was
rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. Blake had been
dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and the drabness of
contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking
humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art
inconsequential is visible in the satirical An
Island in the Moon (written c.
1784-85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the
visionary Songs
of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view
the outbreak of the French Revolution as a
momentous event. Tradition has it that he openly wore the revolutionary red
cockade in the streets of London. In powerful works, such as The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) and Songs
of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the
impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in
contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were
not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his
contemporaries' view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred
not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a figure of reason and law who he
believed to be the true deity worshiped by his contemporaries. The story of
Urizen's rise to provide a fortification against the chaos created by loss of a
true human spirit was set out first in "Prophetic Books" such as The
First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished
manuscript Vala, or The Four Zoas,
written from about 1796 to about 1807. |
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Later Blake shifted his poetic aim once
more. Instead of attempting a narrative epic on the model of Paradise
Lost he produced the more loosely organized visionary narratives of Milton
(1804-08) and Jerusalem (1804-20) where, still
using mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero
of society and forgiveness as the greatest human virtue. |
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Wordsworth
and Coleridge, meanwhile, were exploring the implications of the Revolution more
intricately. Neither could easily forget the excitement of the period
immediately following its outbreak. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791-92
and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his
return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. While
sharing the horror of his contemporaries at the massacres in Paris, he knew at
first hand the idealism and generosity of spirit to be found among the
revolutionaries. For the rest of his career he was to brood on the implications
of those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to
his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and of the unrealized
potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early
manuscript poems "The Ruined Cottage" and "The Pedlar" (both
to form part of the later Excursion);
the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy,
with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge.
Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy's immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere
in her Journals (written 1798-1803,
published 1897), and by Coleridge's imaginative and speculative genius, he
produced the poems collected in Lyrical
Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge's "Rime of the
Ancient Mariner," continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of
nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the
meditative "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey," an attempt
to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. (see also
"Excursion, The") |
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His investigation of the relationship
between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem
addressed to Coleridge and later entitled The
Prelude (1805; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here
he traced the value for a poet of having been a child "fostered alike by
beauty and by fear" (in true Gothic style) by an upbringing in sublime
surroundings. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme that
reaches its most memorable expression in the "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."
In poems such as "Michael" and "The Brothers," by contrast,
written for the second volume of Lyrical
Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of
ordinary lives. (see also "Prelude,
or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, The") |
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Coleridge's poetic development during
these years paralleled Wordsworth's. Having briefly brought together images of
nature and the mind in "The Eolian Harp" (1796), he had devoted
himself to more public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such
as "Religious Musings" and "The Destiny of Nations."
Becoming disillusioned with contemporary politics, however, and encouraged by
Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human
mind. Poems such as "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "The
Nightingale," and "Frost at Midnight" (now sometimes called the
"conversation poems" but entitled more accurately by Coleridge himself
"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse") combine sensitive descriptions of
nature with subtlety of psychological comment. "Kubla
Khan" (1797, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him
in "a kind of Reverie," opened a new vein of exotic writing, which he
exploited further in the supernaturalism of "The Ancient Mariner" and
the unfinished "Christabel." After his visit to Germany in 1798-99,
however, renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and
the human psyche bore fruit in letters and notebooks; simultaneously, his poetic
output became sporadic. "Dejection: An Ode"
(1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a letter to Sara
Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of
his "shaping spirit of Imagination." |
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The work of both poets was directed back
to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon. In 1802
Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in
1805 of his brother John, who was serving as a sea captain, was a grim reminder
that while he had been living in retirement as a poet others had been willing to
sacrifice themselves for the public good. From this time the theme of duty was
to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal .
. .
as Affected by the Convention of Cintra
(1809) agreed with Coleridge's periodical The
Friend (1809-10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When
The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon's first exile),
Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work,
The Recluse. This work was to be
"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society,"
and Wordsworth hoped to complete it by adding "meditations in the Author's
own Person." The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The
Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of consolation for
those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. |
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Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited
from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the
arts. Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare and literature became fashionable, his
plays were briefly produced, and he gained further celebrity from the
publication in 1816 of a volume of poems called Christabel, Kubla Khan, A Vision: The Pains of Sleep. Biographia
Literaria (1817), the account of his own development, combined
philosophy and literary criticism in a new way; the account was lastingly
influential for the insights it contained. Coleridge settled at Highgate in
1816, and he was sought there as "the most impressive talker of his
age" (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious
writings made a considerable impact on the Victorians. |
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Several of the lesser poets of this
generation were more popular in their own time. The somewhat insipid Fourteen
Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles
were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Thomas
Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as
"Ye Mariners of England" and "The Battle of Hohenlinden"
(1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens
of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers
has survived for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as Recollections
of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers), rather than for his poetry. One
of the most popular poets of the day was Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1807. His highly coloured Oriental
fantasy Lalla
Rookh (1817) was also immensely popular. |
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Robert Southey
was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a
prominent member, with them, of the "Lake School" of poetry. His
grandiose epic poems, such as Thalaba the
Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of
Kehama (1810), were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on
his prose work--the vigorous Life of
Nelson (1813), the History of the
Peninsular War (1823-32), and his classic formulation of the children's tale
"The Three Bears." (see also Lake
poet) |
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George Crabbe
wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction,
and his heroic couplet verse form belong very firmly to the 18th century. He
differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter,
concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and
the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of
verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great
powers of description. His main works, The
Village (1783), The Borough
(1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales
of the Hall (1819), gained him great popularity in the earlier 19th century;
after a long period of neglect he is widely recognized once more as a major
poet. |
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The poets of the next generation shared
their predecessors' passion for liberty (now set in a new perspective by the
Napoleonic wars) and were in a position to learn from their experiments. Percy
Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming
early under the spell of the anarchistic views of William Godwin, whose Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley's revolutionary
ardour, coupled with a zeal for the liberation of mankind and a passion for
poetry, caused him to claim in his critical essay A Defence of Poetry (1821, published
1840) that "the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the
awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or
institution, is poetry," and that poets are "the unacknowledged
legislators of the world." This fervour burns throughout the early Queen
Mab (1813), the long Laon and Cythna
(retitled The Revolt of Islam, 1818),
and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound
(1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine "Ode
to the West Wind" (1819) makes clear. Despite his firm grasp of practical
politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where
his concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of
nature: his most characteristic image is of sky and weather, of lights and
fires. His poetic stance invites the reader to respond with similar outgoing
aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in
individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behaviour evinced and
approved by society. In that sense his material is transcendental and cosmic and
his expression thoroughly appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance,
he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and power. |
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John Keats,
by contrast, was a poet so richly sensuous that his early work, such as Endymion
(1818)--"a trial of my Powers of Imagination" he called it--could
produce an over-luxuriant, cloying effect. As the program set out in his early
poem "Sleep and Poetry" shows,
however, Keats was also determined to discipline himself: even before February
1820, when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long
to live, and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish
intensity. He experimented with many kinds of poem: "Isabella"
(published 1820), an adaptation of a tale by Boccaccio, is a tour de force of
craftsmanship in its attempt to reproduce a medieval atmosphere. His epic
fragment Hyperion
(begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published as
The Fall of Hyperion, 1856) has a new
spareness of imagery, but Keats soon found the style too Miltonic and decided to
give himself up to what he called "other sensations." Some of these
"other sensations" are found in the poems of 1819, Keats's annus
mirabilis: "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the great odes, "To a
Nightingale," "On a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn."
These, with the Hyperion poems, represent the summit of Keats's achievement, showing
what has been called "the disciplining of sensation into symbolic
meaning," the complex themes being handled with a concrete richness of
detail. Study of his poems is incomplete without a reading of his superb
letters, which show the full range of the intelligence at work in his poetry. |
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George Gordon, Lord
Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner, was at
one with them in reflecting their shift toward "Mediterranean" themes.
Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he directed
particular scorn at poems and poets of sensibility and sympathy and declared his
own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he developed a poetry of dash and
flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two longest poems, Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18) and Don
Juan (1819-24), his masterpiece, provided alternative personae for
himself, the one a bitter and melancholy exile among the historic sites of
Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series of amorous
adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic vein was further mined in dramatic poems
such as Manfred (1817) and Cain
(1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now
remembered best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which he first used the ottava rima form. The easy,
nonchalant, biting style developed there became a formidable device in Don
Juan and in his satire on Southey, The
Vision of Judgment (1822). (see also "Vision
of Judgement, The") |
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Of the lesser poets of this generation
the best is undoubtedly John Clare, a
Northamptonshire man of humble background. His natural simplicity and lucidity
of diction, his intent observation, his almost classical poise, and the
unassuming dignity of his attitude to life make him one of the most quietly
moving of English poets. Thomas Lovell Beddoes,
whose violent imagery and obsession with death and the macabre recall the
Jacobean dramatists, represents an imagination at the opposite pole;
considerable metrical virtuosity is displayed in the songs and lyrical passages
from his over-sensational tragedy Death's
Jest-Book (begun 1825; published posthumously, 1850). Another minor
writer who found inspiration in the 17th century was George
Darley, some of whose songs from Nepenthe
(1835) keep their place in anthologies. The comic writer Thomas
Hood once enjoyed a great vogue but is now little read, although such
poems of social protest as The Song of the
Shirt (1843) and "The Bridge of Sighs," and the graceful Plea
of the Midsummer Fairies (1827), are by no means negligible. |
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At the turn of the century the Gothic
mode, with its alternations between evocation of terror and appeal to
sensibility, reached a peak of popularity with novels such as Ann
Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) and The Italian (1797) and Matthew
Gregory Lewis' sensational The Monk
(1796). These writers dealt with the supernatural and with human psychology far
less adequately than did the poets, however, and appear to modern readers all
the more shallow when compared with the great novelist Jane
Austen. Her Northanger
Abbey (begun in 1797; published posthumously, 1817) satirizes the
Gothic novel, among other things, with complex irony; Sense and Sensibility (begun 1797;
published 1811) mocks the contemporary cult of sensibility, while also
displaying sympathetic understanding of the genuine sensitivities to which it
appealed; Pride
and Prejudice (begun 1796; published 1813) shows how sanity and
intelligence can break through the opacities of social custom. The limitation
suggested by her narrow range of settings and characters is illusory; working
within these chosen limits, she observed and described very closely the
subtleties of personal relationships, while also appealing to a sense of
principle which, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, she believed to be threatened in
a fragmenting and increasingly cosmopolitan society. These qualities come to
full fruition in Mansfield Park
(1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion
(1817). A master of dialogue, she wrote with economy, hardly wasting a word. |
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The underlying debate concerning the
nature of society is reflected also in the novels of Sir
Walter Scott. After his earlier success as a poet in such narrative
historical romances as The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808),
and The Lady of the Lake (1810), he
turned to prose and wrote more than 20 novels, several of which concerned heroes
who were growing up, as he and his contemporaries had done, in a time of
revolutionary turmoil. In the best, such as Waverley (1814), Old Mortality
(1816), and The Heart of Midlothian
(1818), he reconstructs the recent past of his country, Scotland, from still
surviving elements. His stress on the values of gallantry, fortitude, and human
kindness, along with his picture of an older society in which all human beings
have a recognized standing and dignity, appealed to an England in which class
divisions were exacerbated by the new industrialism. His historical romances
were to inspire many followers in the emerging new nations of Europe. Thomas
Love Peacock's seven novels, by contrast, are conversation pieces in
which many of the pretensions of the day are laid bare in the course of witty,
animated, and genial talk. Nightmare
Abbey (1818) explores the extravagances of contemporary
intellectualism and poetry; the more serious side of his satire is shown in such
passages as Mr. Cranium's lecture on phrenology in Headlong
Hall (1816). The Gothic mode was developed interestingly by Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley (the daughter of William Godwin), whose Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) explores the horrific possibilities
of new scientific discoveries, and Charles Robert
Maturin, whose Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) has,
with all its absurdity, a striking intensity. Among lesser novelists may be
mentioned Maria Edgeworth, whose realistic
didactic novels of the Irish scene inspired Scott; Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, a
Scot with her own vein of racy humour; John Galt,
whose Annals of
the Parish (1821) is a minor classic; and James
Hogg, remembered for his remarkable Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a powerful
story of Calvinism and the supernatural. |
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The Romantic emphasis on individualism
is reflected in much of the prose of the period, particularly in criticism and
the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous, forthright, and least mannered
writing is that of William Hazlitt, an
energetic, enthusiastic, and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is
seen in his collections of lectures On the
English Poets (1818) and On the
English Comic Writers (1819) and in The
Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his
contemporaries. In The Essays
of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833) Charles Lamb,
an even more personal essayist, projects, with apparent artlessness, a carefully
managed portrait of himself--charming, whimsical, witty, sentimental,
warmhearted, nostalgic, and sociable; as his fine Letters
show, however, he could on occasion produce mordant satire. Thomas
De Quincey also appealed to the new interest in personal writing,
producing a colourful account of his early experiences in Confessions
of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His
unusual gift of evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays
such as "The English Mail Coach" and "On the Knocking at the Gate
in Macbeth" and in his various
autobiographical pieces. |
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Of writers who might be called surviving
classicists, the most notable is Walter Savage Landor,
whose detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some brief lyrics and in a
series of erudite Imaginary
Conversations, which began to appear in 1824. The anti-Romantic point
of view received its most pungent expression in the pages of the journals: the
Whig quarterly Edinburgh Review (begun 1802),
edited by Francis Jeffrey, was followed by its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun 1809)
and the monthly Blackwood's
Magazine (begun 1817). Their criticism was by no means always unjust
and summed up much contemporary opinion; but the reviewers were too willing to
judge the new poetry by their own settled standards, missing what was genuinely
innovative. In their attacks on many kinds of prejudice and abuse, on the other
hand, they set a notable standard of fearless and independent journalism.
Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt,
whose outspoken journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of
considerable influence, and by William Cobbett,
whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830
from his Political Register) gives a
telling picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his
day. |
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Despite the unusually strong interest in
the theatre, little drama of note emerged at this time. Most major poets
produced plays, but although Coleridge's Osorio
and Zapolya were produced in 1813 and
1818, respectively, and Byron's Marino
Falieri in 1821, the achievements were literary rather than dramatic. At the
Theatre Royal in Drury Lane where the acting of John Philip Kemble and his
sister, Sarah Siddons, had been much admired, the centre of attention from 1814
onward was Edmund Kean, whose impassioned
performances captivated Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron and of whom Coleridge said
"To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
Coleridge's lectures and notes, which, along with the essays of Lamb and
Hazlitt, brought a psychological and historical approach to Shakespeare and
other early dramatists, set new standards of dramatic criticism during the
period. (R.P.C.M. /J.B.B.) |
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Self-consciousness was the quality that
John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838, as "the daemon of the men of genius
of our time." Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an
immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to
self-analysis as were its individual authors. William Hazlitt's essays The
Spirit of the Age (1825) were echoed by Mill's articles of the same title in
1831, by Thomas Carlyle's essays "Signs of the Times" (1829) and
"Characteristics" (1831), and by Richard Henry Horne's New
Spirit of the Age in 1844. (see also Victorian
literature) |
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This persistent scrutiny was the product
of an acute sense of change. Britain had emerged from the long war with France
(1793-1815) as a great power and as the world's predominant economy. Visiting
England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the English
that "The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by
day." |
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This new status as the world's first
urban and industrialized society was responsible for the extraordinary wealth,
vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed
themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by
rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy. |
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The juxtaposition of this new industrial
wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes that
characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the climax of the
Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges
to faith. In politics a widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom
was, nonetheless, accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. The
prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with
an equally violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon Charles
Swinburne's poetry or the writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all,
the rapid change that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a
fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan
England, and, especially, the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and
designers made this age of change simultaneously an age of active and determined
historicism. |
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John Stuart Mill
caught this contradictory quality, with characteristic acuteness, in his essays
on Jeremy Bentham (1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Every contemporary
thinker, he argued, was indebted to these two "seminal minds." Yet
Bentham, as the enduring voice of the Enlightenment, and Coleridge, as the chief
English example of the Romantic reaction against it, held diametrically opposed
views. |
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A similar sense of sharp controversy is
given by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833-34). An
eccentric philosophical fiction in the tradition of Swift and Sterne, the book
argues for a new mode of spirituality in an age that Carlyle himself suggests to
be one of mechanism. Carlyle's choice of the novel form and the book's humour,
generic flexibility, and political engagement point forward to distinctive
characteristics of Victorian literature. |
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Several major figures of English
Romanticism lived on into this period. Coleridge died in 1834, De Quincey in
1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843 and held the post
until his own death seven years later. Posthumous publication caused some
striking chronological anomalies. Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" was
not published until 1840. Keats's letters appeared in 1848 and Wordsworth's Prelude
in 1850. |
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Despite this persistence critics of the
1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary tradition, which
they identified with the death of Byron in 1824. The deaths of Jane Austen in
1817 and Sir Walter Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been seen as even more
significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the
age of the novel. |
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Charles Dickens first attracted
attention with the descriptive essays and tales originally written for
newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches
by "Boz" (1836). On the strength of this volume Dickens contracted
to write a historical novel in the tradition of Scott (eventually published as Barnaby
Rudge in 1841). By chance his gifts were turned into a more
distinctive channel. In February 1836 he agreed to write the text for a series
of comic engravings. The unexpected result was The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), one
of the funniest novels in English literature. By July 1837 sales of the monthly
installments exceeded 40,000 copies. Dickens' extraordinary popular appeal and
the enormous imaginative potential of the Victorian novel were simultaneously
established. |
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The chief technical features of Dickens'
fiction were also formed by this success. Serial publication encouraged the use
of multiple plot and required that each episode be individually shaped. At the
same time it produced an unprecedentedly close relationship between author and
reader. Part dramatist, part journalist, part mythmaker, and part wit, Dickens
took the picaresque tradition of Smollett and Fielding and gave it a
Shakespearean vigour and variety. |
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His early novels have been attacked at
times for sentimentality, melodrama, or shapelessness. They are now increasingly
appreciated for their comic or macabre zest and their poetic fertility. Dombey
and Son (1846-48) marks the beginning of Dickens' later period. He
thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a stronger sense of
personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used symbolism to give his
books greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the next decade, David Copperfield (1849-50) uses the
form of a fictional autobiography to explore the great Romantic theme of the
growth and comprehension of the self. Bleak
House (1852-53) addresses itself to law and litigiousness, Hard
Times (1854) is a Carlylian defense of art in an age of mechanism,
and Little Dorrit
(1855-57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both literal and spiritual. Two
great novels, both involved with issues of social class and human worth,
appeared in the 1860s: Great
Expectations (1860-61) and Our
Mutual Friend (1864-65). His final book, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood (published posthumously, 1870), was left
tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death. |
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Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace
Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated background. The loss of his fortune
at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the field of sketch
writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials
in Fraser's Magazine or as
contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch
(founded 1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity
Fair (1847-48), however, he adopted Dickens' procedure of publication
in monthly parts. Thackeray's satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of
fiction, and an ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English
life in the years between the Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later
novels never match this sharpness. Vanity
Fair was subtitled "A Novel Without a Hero." Subsequently, it has
been suggested, a more sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains. |
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Elizabeth Gaskell
began her career as one of the "Condition of England" novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley
to the economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary
Barton (1848) and Ruth
(1853) are both novels about social problems, as is North and South (1854-55), although, like her later work, this book
also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot's novels of
provincial life. |
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Political novels, religious novels,
historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime novels, and comic novels
all flourished in this period. The years 1847-48, indeed, represent a pinnacle
of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity
Fair, Dombey and Son, and Mary Barton,
they saw the completion of Disraeli's trilogy of political novels--Coningsby
(1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred
(1847)--and the publication of first novels by Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë;
Charles Kingsley; and Anthony Trollope. For the first time literary genius
appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather than
in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that
"the modern novel is preferred to the modern poem." |
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In many ways, however, the qualities of
Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than simply superseded, by the
Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë;
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they
invented, as children, the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These
inventions supplied the context for many of the poems in their first, and
pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer,
Ellis and Acton Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also
informed the novels that began to be published in the following year. (see also
"Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell") |
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Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters,
appears at first sight to have been writing a literal fiction of provincial
life. In her first novel, Jane
Eyre (1847), for example, the heroine's choice between sexual need
and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. But her
hair's-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer, and the death
by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the
Gothic novel. In Shirley (1849)
Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, "as unromantic as
Monday morning." In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend
this study of the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and
drama. |
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Emily Brontë united these diverse
traditions still more successfully in her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely
observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a sophisticated use of
multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an extravagantly
Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel
must also be an age of realism. |
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Despite the growing prestige and
proliferation of fiction (some 40,000 titles are said to have been published in
this period), this age of the novel was in fact also an age of great poetry. Alfred
Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems
(1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as the
natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems
(1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his early work with a
second volume of more recent writing. The collection established him as the
outstanding poet of the era. |
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In his early work Tennyson brought an
exquisite lyric gift to late-Romantic subject matter. The result is a poetry
that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the 1880s.
The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less sympathetic critics that this highly
subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day.
The second volume of the Poems of 1842
contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic
monologue, a technique developed independently by both Tennyson and Browning in
the 1830s and the greatest formal innovation in Victorian poetry. The other is
the form that Tennyson called the English Idyl, in which he combined brilliant
vignettes of contemporary landscape with relaxed debate. |
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In the major poems of his middle period
Tennyson combined the larger scale required by his new ambitions with his
original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short ones. In
Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Arthur Hallam, formed by 133
individual lyrics. Eloquent, vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute
pathological study of individual grief and the central Victorian statement of
the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud
(1855) assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that
disturbingly explores the psychology of violence. (see also
"Maud and Other Poems") |
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Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850
and wrote some apt and memorable poems on patriotic themes. The chief work of
his later period, however, was Idylls
of the King (1859, revised 1885). An Arthurian epic, it offers a
sombre vision of an idealistic community in decay. Some passages are brilliant,
but even Tennyson's contemporaries found it on the whole oddly inhibited and
lacking in intellectual substance. |
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G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as
"a suburban Virgil." The elegant Virgilian note was the last thing
aimed at by his great contemporary Robert Browning.
Browning's work was Germanic rather than Italianate, grotesque rather than
idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences between Browning
and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period. |
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Deeply influenced by Shelley, Browning
made two false starts. One was as a playwright, an ambition in which he
persisted until 1846 and of which the one memorable product is Pippa Passes (1841). The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the
confessional meditation Pauline
(1833), the closet drama Paracelsus
(1835), and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840). |
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Browning found his individual and
distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of
dramatic monologues, among them "Porphyria's Lover," "Johannes
Agricola in Meditation," and "My Last Duchess." The monologues
make clear the radical originality of Browning's new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or
unconventional minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in
the processes of moral judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and
some equally striking lyrics make up Men
and Women (1855). |
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In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth
Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love poems Sonnets
from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than
her husband. Only with the publication of Dramatis
Personae (1864) did Browning achieve the sort of fame that Tennyson
had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in "Rabbi Ben
Ezra," the most extreme statement of Browning's celebrated optimism. Hand
in hand with this reassuring creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and
the sense of the grotesque displayed in such poems as "Caliban upon
Setebos" and "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium.' " |
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The
Ring and the Book (1868-69) gives the dramatic
monologue format unprecedented scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel,
it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both explores moral issues and
suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning's work after this
date, though voluminous, is uneven. |
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Matthew Arnold's first volume of verse, The
Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric grace with an acute
sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The title poem of his
next collection, Empedocles on Etna
(1852), is a sustained statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic
embodiment of the process that Arnold called "the dialogue of the mind with
itself." Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a more
impersonal manner. His greatest work ("Switzerland," "Dover
Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy") is, however, always elegiac in tone.
In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and became, with Essays
in Criticism (1865), Culture and
Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious
criticism. |
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Arnold's friend Arthur
Hugh Clough died young but managed, nonetheless, to produce three highly
original poems. The Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern life, written in
hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858)
goes beyond this to the full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal
narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus
(published posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version
until 1951) is a remarkable closet drama that debates issues of belief and
morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness, unequaled in Victorian
verse. |
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Carlyle
may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor
Resartus. He continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its
development. The French Revolution (1837), the
book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously
postrevolutionary age. On Heroes,
Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea of
the genius with a further statement of the German transcendentalist philosophy,
which Carlyle opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and
utilitarianism. Carlyle's political writing, in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past
and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar "prophetic"
denunciations of laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics. The first
importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic
who, in Modern
Painters, five volumes (1843-60), brought Romantic theory to the
study of painting and forged an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The
Stones of Venice, three volumes (1851-53), Ruskin took the political
medievalism of Carlyle's Past and Present
and gave it a poetic fullness and force. This imaginative engagement with social
and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild
Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera
(1871-84). John Henry Newman was a poet,
novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833-41), that promoted the Oxford Movement in the
Church of England. His subsequent religious development is memorably described
in his Apologia
pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great autobiographies of this
introspective century. (see also French
Revolution) |
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"The modern spirit," Matthew
Arnold observed in 1865, "is now awake." In 1859 Charles Darwin had
published On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection. Historians, philosophers, and scientists were
all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human
experience. Traditional conceptions of man's nature and place in the world were,
as a consequence, under threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by
stating that "Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its
cultivation of the 'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute.' " |
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The economic crisis of the 1840s was
long past. But the fierce political debates that led first to the Second Reform
Act of 1867 and then to the battles for the enfranchisement of women were
accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief. |
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Late Victorian fiction may express
doubts and uncertainties, but in aesthetic terms it displays a new
sophistication and self-confidence. The American novelist Henry James wrote in
1884 that until recently the English novel had "had no air of having a
theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it." Its acquisition
of these things was due in no small part to Mary Ann Evans, better known as George
Eliot. Initially a critic and translator, she was influenced, after the
loss of her Christian faith, by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte.
Her advanced intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated sense of the
novel form to shape her remarkable fiction. Her early novels, Adam
Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss
(1860), and Silas Marner (1861), are
closely observed studies of English rural life that offer, at the same time,
complex contemporary ideas and a subtle tracing of moral issues. Her
masterpiece, Middlemarch
(1871-72), is an unprecedentedly full study of the life of a provincial town,
focused on the thwarted idealism of her two principal characters. George Eliot
is a realist, but her realism involves a
scientific analysis of the interior processes of social and personal existence. |
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Her fellow realist Anthony
Trollope published his first novel in 1847 but only established his
distinctive manner with The Warden
(1855), the first of a series of six novels set in the fictional county of
Barsetshire and completed in 1867. This sequence was followed by a further
series, the six-volume Palliser group (1864-80), set in the world of British
parliamentary politics. Trollope published an astonishing total of 47 novels,
and his Autobiography (1883) is a
uniquely candid account of the working life of a Victorian writer. |
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The third major novelist of the 1870s
was George Meredith, who also worked as poet,
journalist, and publisher's reader. His prose style is eccentric and his
achievement uneven. His greatest work of fiction, The
Egoist (1879), however, is an incisive comic novel that embodies the
distinctive theory of the corrective and therapeutic powers of laughter
expressed in his lecture "The Idea of Comedy" (1877). |
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This flowering of realist fiction was
accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by a revival of its opposite, the romance. The
1860s produced a new subgenre, the sensation novel, seen at its best in the work
of Wilkie Collins. Gothic novels and romances by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis
Stevenson, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde; utopian fiction by Morris and Samuel
Butler; and the early science fiction of H.G. Wells make it possible to speak of
a full-scale romance revival. |
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Realism continued, however, to flourish,
sometimes encouraged by the example of European Realist and Naturalist
novelists. Both George Moore and George Gissing were influenced by Émile
Zola, though both also reacted against him. The greatest novelist of this
generation, however, was Thomas Hardy. His first
published novel, Desperate Remedies,
appeared in 1871 and was followed by 13 more before he abandoned prose to
publish (in the 20th century) only poetry. His major fiction consists of the
tragic novels of rural life, The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the
D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the
Obscure (1895). In these novels his brilliant evocation of the landscape and
people of his fictional Wessex is combined with a sophisticated sense of
"the ache of modernism." |
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The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, formed in 1848 and unofficially reinforced a decade later,
was founded as a group of painters but also functioned as a school of writers
who linked the incipient Aestheticism of Keats and De Quincey to the Decadent
movement of the fin de siècle. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti collected his early writing in Poems
(1870), a volume that led the critic Robert Buchanan to attack him as the leader
of "The Fleshly School of Poetry." Rossetti combined some subtle
treatments of contemporary life with a new kind of medievalism, seen also in The
Defence of Guenevere (1858) by William Morris.
The earnest political use of the Middle Ages found in Carlyle and Ruskin did not
die out--Morris himself continued it and linked it, in the 1880s, with Marxism.
But these writers also used medieval settings as a context that made possible an
uninhibited treatment of sex and violence. The shocking subject matter and vivid
imagery of Morris' first volume were further developed by Algernon
Charles Swinburne, who, in Atalanta
in Calydon (1865) and Poems and
Ballads (1866), combined them with an intoxicating metrical power. |
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The carefully wrought religious poetry
of Christina Rossetti is perhaps truer to the original, pious purposes of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. More interesting as a religious poet of this period,
however, is Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit
priest whose work was first collected as Poems in 1918, nearly 30 years after his death. Overpraised by
modernist critics, who saw him as the sole great poet of the era, he was in fact
an important minor talent and an ingenious technical innovator. |
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The 1890s witnessed a flowering of lyric
verse, influenced intellectually by the critic and novelist Walter Pater and
formally by contemporary French practice. Such writing was widely attacked as
"decadent" for its improper subject matter and its consciously amoral
doctrine of "art for art's sake." This stress upon artifice and the
freedom of art from conventional moral constraints went hand in hand, however,
with an exquisite craftsmanship and a devotion to intense emotional and sensory
effects. Outstanding among the numerous poets publishing in the final decade of
the century were John Davidson, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson, and A.E. Housman. In The
Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) Symons suggested the links between
this writing and European Symbolism and Impressionism. Thompson provides a vivid
example of the way in which a decadent manner could, paradoxically, be combined
with fierce religious enthusiasm. A rather different note was struck by Rudyard
Kipling, who combined polemical force and sharp observation (particularly
of colonial experience) with a remarkable metrical vigour. |
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Early Victorian drama was a popular art
form, appealing to an uneducated audience that demanded emotional excitement
rather than intellectual subtlety. Vivacious melodramas did not, however, hold
exclusive possession of the stage. The mid-century saw lively comedies by Dion
Boucicault and Tom Taylor. In the 1860s T.W. Robertson pioneered a new realist
drama, an achievement later celebrated by Arthur Wing
Pinero in his charming sentimental comedy Trelawny of the "Wells"
(1898). The 1890s were, however, the outstanding decade of dramatic innovation. Oscar
Wilde crowned his brief career as a playwright with one of the few great
high comedies in English, The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895). At the same time the influence of
Henrik Ibsen was helping to produce a new genre of serious "problem
plays," such as Pinero's Second Mrs.
Tanqueray (1893). J.T. Grein founded the Independent
Theatre in 1891 to foster such work and staged there the first plays of
George Bernard Shaw and translations of Ibsen. |
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Victorian literature began with such
humorous books as Sartor Resartus and The
Pickwick Papers. Despite the crisis of faith, the "Condition of
England" question, and the ache of modernism, this note was sustained
throughout the century. The comic novels of Dickens and Thackeray; the squibs,
sketches, and light verse of Thomas Hood and Douglas Jerrold; the nonsense of
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll; and the humorous light fiction of Jerome K.
Jerome and George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith are proof that this
age, so often remembered for its gloomy rectitude, may in fact have been the
greatest era of comic writing in English literature. (N.Sh.) |
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The 20th century opened with great hope
but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the onset of a new
millennium. For many, mankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G.
Wells's utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations
of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and
Thought (1901) and A
Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic
mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology
would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation,
outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the
growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901
and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited
era had begun. |
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Many writers of the Edwardian period,
drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th
century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and
Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the
trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century
to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of
which Man and
Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major
Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are the most substantial, George
Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon
the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the
morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the
validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation.
Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John
Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife
(1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice
(1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley
Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did
much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The
Voysey Inheritance (performed 1905, published 1909) and Waste
(performed 1907, published 1909) the hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and
professional life. |
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Many Edwardian novelists were similarly
eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. Wells--in Love
and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps
(1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-suffragette novel; and The
History of Mr. Polly (1910)--captured the frustrations of lower- and
middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic
touches. In Anna of the Five Towns
(1902) Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions
of provincial life among the self-made business classes in the area of England
known as the Potteries; in The Man of
Property (1906), the first volume of The
Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the
professional bourgeoisie; and in Where
Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The
Longest Journey (1907) E.M. Forster
portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the
English middle classes. |
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These novelists, however, wrote more
memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The
Old Wives' Tale (1908) Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the
lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he
never matched in his other fiction; in Tono-Bungay
(1909) Wells showed the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments
taking place within a British society still dependent upon the institutions of a
long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards
End (1910) Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important
world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture,
although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even
as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists,
like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that
constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure
be advanced by their writing. |
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Other writers, including Thomas Hardy
and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during the previous
century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who established
their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were less confident
about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms--the ballad, the
narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the
essay--that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and perceptions. The
revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a
unique event. There have been many such revivals during the 20th century, and
the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose
book A Shropshire
Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success
during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and
Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English
literature in the first half of the century. |
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The most significant writing of the
period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension
but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a
whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the
South African War (the Boer War; 1899-1902), and it seemed to some that the
British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without,
as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy
(whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a
novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of
empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to
use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to engender
pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short
stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring. |
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No one captured the sense of an imperial
civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American
novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) he had
briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and in The
Princess Casamassima (1886) had described more directly the various
instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the
patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral
obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a
disturbing change. In The
Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What
Maisie Knew (1897) members of the upper class no longer seem troubled
by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had
become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an
ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James's dismay at this
condition gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden
Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment. |
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James's awareness of crisis affected the
very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world
about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or unambiguously intelligible
to its inhabitants. His fiction still presented characters within an
identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world
increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear
in The Sacred Fount (1901), the
questionable consequence of artistic will. |
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Another expatriate novelist, Joseph
Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the
Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James's sense of crisis but attributed it
less to the decline of a specific civilization than to the failings of mankind
itself. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed
his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not
reflect his central place within it. In Almayer's
Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900)
he had seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in "Heart of
Darkness" (1902), Nostromo
(1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under
Western Eyes (1911) he detailed such imposition, and the psychological
pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a
philosophical novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge
affected not only the content of his fiction but also its very structure. His
writing itself is marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do not fully
grasp the significance of the events they are retelling, and by characters who
are unable to make themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the
conventions of 19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are
considered to be peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties. |
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From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably
productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook,
in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of
the recent past but of the entire Post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London,
which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European
capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin,
even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and
many of its most notable figures were American. |
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The spirit of modernism--a radical and
utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy,
political theory, and psychoanalysis--was in the air, expressed rather mutedly
by the pastoral and often anti-modern poets of the Georgian movement (1912-22)
and more authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist
movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes
(1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des
Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the
English poets T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington and the Americans
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell. |
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Reacting against what they considered to
be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to refine the language of
poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral sentiment or imperialistic
rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood. To this end they
experimented with free or irregular verse and made the image their principal
instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and
economical forms. |
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Meanwhile, painters and sculptors,
grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham
Lewis under the banner of vorticism,
combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example of the Italian
Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature the new
sensations of movement and scale associated with such modern developments as
automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and
1915) vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in its editor, Wyndham Lewis,
its most active propagandist and accomplished literary exponent. His
experimental play Enemy of the Stars,
published in Blast in 1914, and his
experimental novel Tarr (1918) can
still surprise with their violent exuberance. |
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World War I brought this first period of
the modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and
utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American modernists all too aware of the gulf
between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied
received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and
horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound's angry and
satirical Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish
that writers might again make form and style the bearers of authentic meanings. |
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In his two most innovative novels, The
Rainbow (1915) and Women
in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced
the sickness of modern civilization--a civilization in his view only too eager
to participate in the mass slaughter of the war--to the effects of
industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of
the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his
deeply-felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons
and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that
individual and collective rebirth could come through human intensity and
passion. |
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On the other hand, the poet and
playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident
in London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock
and Other Observations (1917) and The
Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization--a
civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life
to life--to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he
rejected the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew
upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth,
but he differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come
through self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no
less than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a
civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the first World War, ensured that
Lawrence and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of
Anglo-American modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period. |
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During the 1920s, Lawrence (who left
England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds with the
reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo
(1923) and The
Plumed Serpent (1926) Lawrence revealed the attraction to him of
charismatic, masculine leadership, while in For
Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928) Eliot (whose influence
as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was
a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in
religion" and committed himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and
paternalistic, they did not, however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who
left England in 1920 and settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing
upon the ideas of the left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy
as a sham and argued that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant
factor. For some the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American modernists
simply made explicit the reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from
its beginning; for others they came from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by
World War I. This issue is a complex one, and judgments upon the literary merit
and political status of Pound's ambitious but immensely difficult imagist epic The
Cantos (1917-70) and Lewis' powerful sequence of politico-theological
novels The Human Age (The
Childermass, 1928; Monstre Gai and
Malign Fiesta, both 1955) are sharply divided. |
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Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot were
the principal figures of Anglo-American modernism, but important contributions
also were made by the Irish poet and playwright William
Butler Yeats and the Irish novelist James Joyce.
By virtue of nationality, residence, and, in Yeats's case, an unjust reputation
as a poet still steeped in Celtic mythology, they had less immediate impact upon
the British literary intelligentsia in the late 1910s and early 1920s than
Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot, although by the mid-1920s their influence had
become direct and substantial. Many contemporary critics argue that Yeats's work
as a poet and Joyce's work as a novelist are the most important modernist
achievements of the period. |
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In his early verse and drama Yeats, who
had been influenced as a young man by the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements,
evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland in language that was often vague and
grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish nationalism he had hoped to
instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities
(1914), however, was marked not only by a more concrete and colloquial style but
also by a growing isolation from the nationalist movement, for Yeats celebrated
an aristocratic Ireland epitomized for him by the family and country house of
his friend and patron, Lady Gregory. |
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The grandeur of his mature reflective
poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole
(1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer
(1921), The Tower
(1928), and The
Winding Stair (1929) derived in large measure from the way in which
(caught up by the violent discords of contemporary Irish history) he accepted
the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory. At its best his mature style
combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong rhythm, and lucid
diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon public themes, he never
ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the
individual's relationship to nature, time, and history. |
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Joyce, who spent his adult life on the
continent of Europe, expressed in his fiction his sense of the limits and
possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his collection of short
stories, Dubliners
(1914), and his largely autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), he described in fiction at once realist and symbolist the individual
cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by
provocative contrast, his panoramic novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank
and imaginatively profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned by the New
York postal authorities, and British customs officials seized the second edition
in 1923.) Employing extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including
the so-called stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the experiences and
the fantasies of various men and women in Dublin on a summer's day in June 1904.
Yet his purpose was not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic
range of European literature to stress the rich universality of life buried
beneath the provincialism of pre-independence Dublin, still in 1904 a city
within the British Empire. In his even more experimental Finnegans
Wake (1939), extracts of which had already appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, Joyce's commitment to cultural
universality became absolute. By means of a strange, polyglot idiom of puns and
portmanteau words he not only explored the relationship between the conscious
and the unconscious but also suggested that the languages and myths of Ireland
were interwoven with the languages and myths of many other cultures. |
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The example of Joyce's experimentalism
was followed by the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones and by the Scottish poet Hugh
MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve). Whereas Jones
concerned himself, in his complex and allusive poetry and prose, with the
Celtic, Saxon, Roman, and Christian roots of Great Britain, MacDiarmid sought
not only to recover what he considered to be an authentically Scottish culture
but also to establish, as in his In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), the truly cosmopolitan nature of
Celtic consciousness and achievement. MacDiarmid's masterpiece in the
vernacular, A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), helped to inspire the Scottish
renaissance of the 1920s and '30s. |
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The impact of World
War I upon the Anglo-American modernists has been noted. In addition the
war brought a variety of responses from the more traditionalist writers,
predominantly poets, who saw action. Rupert Brooke
caught the idealism of the opening months of the war (and died in service);
Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney caught the mounting anger and sense of waste
as the war continued; and Isaac Rosenberg
(perhaps the most original of the war poets), Wilfrid Owen,
and Edmund Blunden not only caught the comradely compassion of the trenches but
also addressed themselves to the larger moral perplexities raised by the war
(Rosenberg and Owen were killed in action). |
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It was not until the 1930s, however,
that much of this poetry became widely known. In the wake of the war the
dominant tone, at once cynical and bewildered, was set by Aldous
Huxley's satirical novel Crome
Yellow (1921). Drawing upon Lawrence and Eliot, he concerned himself in his
novels of ideas-- Antic Hay (1923), Those
Barren Leaves (1925), and Point
Counter Point (1928)--with the fate of the individual in rootless
modernity. His pessimistic vision found its most complete expression in the
1930s, however, in his most famous and inventive novel, the anti-utopian fantasy
Brave New World (1932), and his
account of the anxieties of middle-class intellectuals of the period, Eyeless
in Gaza (1936). |
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Huxley's frank and disillusioned manner
was echoed by the poet Robert Graves in his
autobiography, Good-bye
to All That (1929), and by the poet Richard
Aldington in his Death
of a Hero (1929), a semiautobiographical novel of prewar bohemian
London and the trenches. Exceptions to this dominant mood were found among
writers too old to consider themselves, as did Graves and Aldington, members of
a betrayed generation. In A Passage to India (1924) E.M.
Forster examined the quest for and failure of human understanding among
various ethnic and social groups in India under British rule. In Parade's
End (1950; comprising Some Do
Not, 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A
Man Could Stand Up, 1926; and Last
Post, 1928) Ford Madox Ford, with an obvious debt to James and Conrad, examined
the demise of aristocratic England in the course of the war, exploring on a
larger scale the themes he had treated with brilliant economy in his short novel
The Good Soldier
(1915). And in Wolf Solent (1929) and A
Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys
developed an eccentric and highly erotic mysticism. |
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These were, however, writers of an
earlier, more confident era. A younger and more contemporary voice belonged to
members of the Bloomsbury group. Setting
themselves against the humbug and hypocrisy that, they believed, had marked
their parents' generation in upper-class England, they aimed to be
uncompromisingly honest in personal and artistic life. In Lytton
Strachey's iconoclastic biographical study Eminent
Victorians (1918) this amounted to little more than amusing
irreverence, even though Strachey had a profound effect upon the writing of
biography; but in the fiction of Virginia Woolf
the rewards of this outlook were both profound and moving. In short stories and
novels of great delicacy and lyrical power she set out to portray the
limitations of the self, caught as it is in time, and suggested that these could
be transcended, if only momentarily, by engagement with another self, a place,
or a work of art. This preoccupation not only charged the act of reading and
writing with unusual significance but also produced, in To
the Lighthouse (1927), The
Waves (1931)--perhaps her most inventive and complex novel--and Between the Acts (1941), her most
sombre and moving work, some of the most daring fiction produced in the 20th
century. |
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Woolf believed that her viewpoint
offered an alternative to the destructive egotism of the masculine mind, an
egotism that had found its outlet in World War I, but she did not consider this
viewpoint, as she made clear in her essay A
Room of One's Own (1929), to be the unique possession of women. In
her fiction she presented men who possessed what she held to be feminine
characteristics, a regard for others and an awareness of the multiplicity of
experience; but she remained pessimistic about women gaining positions of
influence, even though she set out the desirability of this in her feminist
study Three Guineas (1938). Together
with Joyce, who greatly influenced her Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf transformed the treatment of
subjectivity, time, and history in fiction and helped create a feeling among her
contemporaries that traditional forms of fiction--with their frequent
indifference to the mysterious and inchoate inner life of characters--were no
longer adequate. Her eminence as a literary critic and essayist did much to
foster an interest in the writing of other significant women novelists, such as
Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson. |
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World War I created a profound sense of
crisis in English culture, and this became even more intense with the worldwide
economic collapse of the late 1920s and early '30s, the rise of Fascism, the
Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and the approach of another full-scale conflict in
Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the writing of the 1930s
was bleak and pessimistic: even Evelyn Waugh's
sharp and amusing satire on contemporary England, Vile Bodies (1930), ended with another, more disastrous war. |
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Divisions of class and the burden of
sexual repression became common and interrelated themes in the fiction of the
1930s, a fiction that largely neglected the modernist revolution in technique of
the 1920s and returned to the realist modes of the first decade of the century.
In A Scots Quair
(Sunset Song, 1932; Cloud
Howe, 1933; and Grey Granite,
1934) the novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon
(pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell) gives a panoramic account of Scottish rural
and working-class life. The work resembles Lawrence's novel The
Rainbow in its historical sweep and intensity of vision. Walter Greenwood's Love
on the Dole (1933) is a bleak record, in the manner of Bennett, of the
economic depression in a northern working-class community; and Graham
Greene's It's a Battlefield
(1934) and Brighton
Rock (1938) are desolate studies, in the manner of Conrad, of the
loneliness and guilt of men and women trapped in a contemporary England of
conflict and decay. A
Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep
the Aspidistra Flying (1936), by George
Orwell, are evocations, in the manner of Wells and, in the latter case
unsuccessfully, of Joyce, of contemporary lower middle-class existence, and The
Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a report of northern working-class
mores. Elizabeth Bowen's Death
of the Heart (1938) is a sardonic analysis, in the manner of James, of
contemporary upper-class values. |
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Yet the most interesting writing of the
decade grew out of the determination to supplement the diagnosis of class
division and sexual repression with their cure. It was no accident that the
poetry of W.H. Auden and his Oxford
contemporaries, C. Day-Lewis, Louis
MacNeice, and Stephen (later Sir Stephen)
Spender, became quickly identified as the authentic voice of the new
generation, for it matched despair with defiance. These self-styled prophets of
a new world envisaged freedom from the bourgeois order being achieved in various
ways. For Day-Lewis and Spender technology held out particular promise. This,
allied to Marxist precepts, would in their view bring an end to poverty and the
suffering it caused. For Auden especially, sexual repression was the enemy, and
here the writings of Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence were valuable. Whatever
their individual preoccupations, these poets produced in the very play of their
poetry, with its mastery of different genres, its rapid shifts of tone and mood,
and its strange juxtapositions of the colloquial and esoteric, a blend of
seriousness and high spirits irresistible to their peers. |
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The adventurousness of the new
generation was shown, in part, by its love of travel (as in Christopher
Isherwood's novels Mr. Norris
Changes Trains [1935] and Goodbye to
Berlin [1939], which reflect his experiences of postwar Germany); in part by
its readiness for political involvement; and in part by its openness to the
writing of the avant-garde of the Continent. The verse dramas coauthored by
Auden and Isherwood, of which The Ascent
of F6 (1936) is the most notable, owed much to Bertolt Brecht; the political
parables of Rex Warner, of which The
Aerodrome (1941) is the most accomplished,
owed much to Franz Kafka; and the complex and often obscure poetry of David
Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas owed much to the Surrealists. Even so, Yeats's mature
poetry and Eliot's Waste Land, with its parodies, its satirical edge, its multiplicity
of styles, and its quest for spiritual renewal, provided the most significant
models and inspiration for the young writers of the period. On the whole,
however, despite the breadth, diversity, and liveliness of the writing of the
1930s, the decade was not one of great originality or innovation but rather one
of imitation and emulation. |
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The outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914,
brought to an end an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance.
Individuals were dispersed; the rationing of paper affected the production of
magazines and books; and the poem and the short story, convenient forms for men
under arms, became the favoured means of literary expression. It was hardly a
time for new beginnings, although the poets of the New
Apocalypse movement produced three anthologies (1940-45) inspired by
neo-Romantic anarchism. No important new novelists or playwrights appeared, and
only three new poets (all of whom died on active service) showed promise: Alun
Lewis, Sidney Keyes, and Keith Douglas, the most
gifted and distinctive, whose eerily detached accounts of the battlefield
revealed a poet of potential greatness. |
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It was a poet of an earlier generation, T.S.
Eliot, who produced in his Four Quartets (1935-42; published as
a whole, 1943) the masterpiece of the war. Reflecting upon language, time, and
history, he searched, in the three quartets written during the war, for moral
and religious significance in the midst of destruction and strove to counter the
spirit of nationalism inevitably present in a nation at war. The creativity that
had seemed to end with the tortured religious poetry and verse drama of the
1920s and '30s had a rich and extraordinary late flowering as Eliot concerned
himself, on the scale of The Waste Land
but in a very different manner and mood, with the well-being of the society in
which he lived. (H.A.Da.) |
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Increased attachment to religion most
immediately characterized literature after World War II. This was particularly
perceptible in authors who had already established themselves before the war.
W.H. Auden turned from Marxist politics to Christian commitment, expressed in
poems that attractively combine classical form with vernacular relaxedness.
Christian belief suffused the verse plays of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry.
While Graham Greene continued the powerful
merging of thriller plots with studies of moral and psychological ambiguity that
he had developed through the 1930s, his Roman Catholicism loomed especially
large in novels such as The Heart of the
Matter (1948) and The End of the
Affair (1951). Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead
Revisited (1945) and his Sword of
Honour trilogy (1965; published separately as Men
at Arms [1952], Officers and Gentlemen
[1955], and Unconditional Surrender
[1961]) venerate Roman Catholicism as the repository of values seen as under
threat from the advance of democracy. Less traditional spiritual solace was
found in Eastern mysticism by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, and by Robert
Graves, who maintained an impressive output of taut, graceful lyric
poetry behind which lay the creed he expressed in The
White Goddess (1948), a matriarchal mythology revering the female principle. |
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The two most innovatory novelists to
begin their careers soon after World War II were also religious believers-- William
Golding and Muriel Spark. In novels of
poetic compactness they frequently return to the notion of original sin--the
idea that, in Golding's words, "man produces evil as a bee produces
honey." Concentrating on small communities, Spark and Golding transfigure
them into microcosms. Allegory and symbol set wide resonances quivering, so that
short books make large statements. In Golding's first novel, Lord
of the Flies (1954), schoolboys cast away on a Pacific island during
a nuclear war reenact humanity's fall from grace as their relationships
degenerate from innocent camaraderie to totalitarian butchery. In Spark's
satiric comedy similar assumptions and techniques are discernible. Her
best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie (1961), for example, makes events in a 1930s Edinburgh classroom
replicate, in miniature, the rise of fascism in Europe. |
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In form and atmosphere Lord of the Flies has affinities with George
Orwell's examinations of totalitarian nightmare, the fable Animal
Farm (1945) and the novel Nineteen
Eighty-four (1949). Spark's astringent portrayal of behaviour in
confined little worlds is partly indebted to Dame Ivy
Compton-Burnett, who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, produced a remarkable
series of fierce but decorous novels, written almost entirely in mordantly witty
dialogue, that dramatize tyranny and power struggles in secluded late Victorian
households. The stylized novels of Henry Green,
such as Concluding (1948) or Nothing
(1950), also seem to be precursors of the terse, compressed fiction that Spark
and Golding brought to such distinction. This kind of fiction, it was argued by Iris
Murdoch, a philosopher as well as a novelist, ran antiliberal risks in
its preference for allegory, pattern, and symbol over the social capaciousness
and realistic rendition of character at which the great 19th-century novels
excelled. Murdoch's own fiction, typically engaged with themes of goodness,
authenticity, selfishness, and altruism, oscillates between these two modes of
writing. A Severed Head (1961) is the
most incisive and entertaining of her elaborately artificial works; The
Bell (1958) best achieves the psychological and emotional complexity she
finds so valuable in classic 19th-century fiction. |
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While restricting themselves to socially
limited canvases, novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, and
Barbara Pym continued the tradition of depicting emotional and psychological
nuance that Murdoch felt was dangerously neglected in mid-20th-century novels.
In contrast to their wry comedies of sense and sensibility, and to the packed
parables of Golding and Spark, was yet another type of fiction, produced by a
group of writers who became known as the Angry Young
Men. From authors such as John Braine, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, Stan
Barstow, and David Storey (also a significant dramatist) came a spate of novels
often ruggedly autobiographical in origin and near documentary in approach. The
predominant subject of these books was social mobility, usually from the
northern working class to the southern middle class. Social mobility was also
inspected, from an upper-class vantage point, in Anthony
Powell's 12-novel sequence A
Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75), an attempt to apply the French
novelist Marcel Proust's mix of irony, melancholy, meditativeness, and social
detail to a chronicle of class and cultural shifts in England from World War I
to the 1960s. Satiric watchfulness of social change was also the specialty of Kingsley
Amis, whose deriding of the reactionary and pompous in his first novel, Lucky
Jim (1954), led to his being labeled an Angry Young Man. As Amis grew older,
though, his irascibility vehemently swiveled toward left-wing and progressive
targets, and he established himself as a Tory satirist in the vein of Waugh or
Powell. C.P. Snow's earnest 11-novel sequence, Strangers
and Brothers (1940-70), about a man's journey from the provincial lower
classes to London's "corridors of power," had its admirers. But the
most inspired fictional cavalcade of social and cultural life in 20th-century
Britain was Angus Wilson's No Laughing Matter (1967), a book that set a triumphant seal on his
progress from a writer of acidic short stories to a major novelist whose work
unites 19th-century breadth and gusto with 20th-century formal versatility and
experiment. |
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The parody and pastiche that Wilson
brilliantly deploys in No Laughing Matter
and the book's fascination with the sources and resources of creativity
constitute a rich, imaginative response to what had become a mood of growing
self-consciousness in fiction. Thoughtfulness about the form of the novel and
relationships between past and present fiction showed itself most stimulatingly
in the works--generally campus novels--of the academically based novelists
Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. |
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From the late 1960s onward the
outstanding trend in fiction was enthrallment with empire. The first phase of
this focused on imperial disillusion and dissolution. In his vast, detailed Raj
Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown [1966], The
Day of the Scorpion [1968], The Towers
of Silence [1971], and A Division of
the Spoils [1975]) Paul Scott charts the last years of the British in India;
he followed it with Staying On (1977),
a poignant comedy about those who remained after independence. Three half
satiric, half elegiac novels by J.G. Farrell (Troubles [1970], The Siege of
Krishnapur [1973], and The Singapore
Grip [1978]) likewise spotlighted imperial discomfiture. Then, in the 1980s,
postcolonial voices made themselves audible. Salman
Rushdie's crowded comic saga about the generation born as Indian
independence dawned, Midnight's
Children (1981), boisterously mingles material from Eastern fable,
Hindu myth, Islamic lore, Bombay cinema, cartoon strips, advertising
billboards, and Latin American magic realism. (Such eclecticism, sometimes
called "postmodern," also showed itself in other kinds of fiction in
the 1980s. Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters [1989], for example,
inventively mixes fact and fantasy, reportage, art criticism, autobiography,
parable, and pastiche in its working of fictional variations on the Noah's ark
myth.) For Rushdie, as Shame (1983)
and The Satanic
Verses (1988) further demonstrate, stylistic miscellaneousness--a way
of writing that exhibits the vitalizing effects of cultural
cross-fertilization--is especially suited to conveying postcolonial experience.
(The Satanic Verses was understood
differently in the Islamic world, to the extent that the Iranian leader
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa,
in effect a death sentence, on Rushdie.) However, not all postcolonial authors
followed his example. Vikram Seth's massive
novel about India after independence, A
Suitable Boy (1993), is a prodigious feat of realism, resembling
19th-century masterpieces in its combination of social breadth and emotional and
psychological depth. Nor was India alone in inspiring vigorous postcolonial
writing. Timothy Mo's novels report on colonial predicaments in East Asia with a
political acumen reminiscent of Conrad. Particularly notable is An
Insular Possession (1986), which vividly harks back to the founding of Hong
Kong. Kazuo Ishiguro's spare, refined novel An
Artist of the Floating World (1986) records how a painter's life and work
became insidiously coarsened by the imperialistic ethos of 1930s Japan.
Novelists such as Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri wrote of postcolonial Africa, as
did V.S. Naipaul in his most ambitious novel, A
Bend in the River (1979). Naipaul also chronicled aftermaths of empire
around the globe and particularly in his native Caribbean. Nearer England, the
strife in Northern Ireland provoked fictional response, among which the bleak,
graceful novels and short stories of William Trevor and Bernard MacLaverty stand
out. (see also postmodernism) |
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Widening social divides in 1980s Britain
were also registered in fiction, sometimes in works that purposefully imitate
the Victorian "Condition of England" novel (the best is David Lodge's
elegant, ironic Nice Work [1988]). The
most thoroughgoing of such "Two Nations" panoramas of an England cleft
by regional gulfs and gross inequities between rich and poor is Margaret
Drabble's The Radiant Way (1987). With less documentary substantiality, Martin
Amis' novels, angled somewhere between scabrous relish and satiric disgust,
offer prose that has the lurid energy of a strobe light playing over vistas of
urban sleaze, greed, and debasement. Money (1984) is the most effectively focused of his books. |
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Just as some postcolonial novelists used
myth, magic, and fable as a stylistic throwing-off of what they considered the
alien supremacy of Anglo-Saxon realistic fiction, so numerous feminist novelists
took to Gothic, fairy tale, and fantasy as countereffects to the
"patriarchal discourse" of rationality, logic, and linear narrative.
The most gifted exponent of this kind of writing, which sought immediate access
to the realm of the subconscious, was Angela Carter, whose exotic and erotic
imagination unrolled most eerily and resplendently in her short-story collection
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
(1979). Jeanette Winterson also wrote in this vein. Having distinguished herself
earlier in a realistic mode, as did authors such as Drabble and Pat Barker,
Doris Lessing published a sequence of science fiction novels about issues of
gender and colonialism, Canopus in Argos--Archives (1979-83). |
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Typically, though, fiction in the 1980s
and '90s was not futuristic but retrospective. As the end of the century
approached, an urge to look back--at starting points, previous eras, fictional
prototypes--was widely evident. Many novels juxtaposed a present-day narrative
with one set in the past. A.S. Byatt's Possession
(1990) did so with particular intelligence. It also made extensive use of period
pastiche, another enthusiasm of novelists toward the end of the 20th century.
Adam Thorpe's striking first novel, Ulverton (1992), records the 300-year history of a fictional village
in the styles of different epochs. William Golding's
veteran fictional career came to a bravura conclusion with a trilogy whose story
is told by an early 19th-century narrator (To
the Ends of the Earth [1991]; published separately as Rites
of Passage [1980], Close Quarters
[1987], and Fire Down Below [1989]).
In addition to the interest in remote and recent history, a concern with tracing
aftereffects became dominatingly present in fiction. Most subtly and powerfully
exhibiting this, Ian McEwan--who came to notice in the 1970s as an unnervingly
emotionless observer of contemporary decadence--grew into imaginative maturity
with novels largely set in Berlin in the 1950s (The
Innocent [1990]) and in Europe in 1946 (Black
Dogs [1992]). Their scenes of the 1990s were haunted by what were perceived
as the continuing repercussions of World War II. |
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The last flickerings of New Apocalypse
poetry--the flamboyant, surreal, and rhetorical style favoured by Dylan Thomas,
George Barker, David Gascoyne, and Vernon Watkins--died away soon after World
War II. In its place emerged what came to be known with characteristic
understatement as The Movement. Poets such as
D.J. Enright, Donald Davie, John Wain, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, and
Elizabeth Jennings produced urbane, formally disciplined verse in an
antiromantic vein characterized by irony, understatement, and a sardonic refusal
to strike attitudes or make grand claims for the poet's role. The preeminent
practitioner of this style was Philip Larkin,
who had earlier displayed some of its qualities in two novels: Jill
(1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). In Larkin's poetry (The Less Deceived [1955], The
Whitsun Weddings [1964], High Windows
[1974]) a melancholy sense of life's limitations throbs through lines of elegiac
elegance. Suffused with acute awareness of mortality and transience, Larkin's
poetry is also finely responsive to natural beauty, vistas of which open up even
in poems darkened by fear of death or sombre preoccupation with human solitude. John
Betjeman, poet laureate from 1972 to 1984, shared both Larkin's intense
consciousness of mortality and his gracefully versified nostalgia for 19th- and
early 20th-century life. |
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In contrast to the rueful traditionalism
of their work is the poetry of Ted Hughes, who
succeeded Betjeman as poet laureate in 1984. In extraordinarily vigorous verse,
beginning with his first collection, The
Hawk in the Rain (1957), Hughes captures the ferocity, vitality, and
splendour of the natural world. In works such as Crow (1970) he adds a mythic dimension to his fascination with
savagery (a fascination also apparent in the poetry Thom Gunn produced through
the late 1950s and '60s). Much of Hughes's poetry is rooted in his experiences
as a farmer in Yorkshire and Devon (as in his collection Moortown [1979]). It also shows a deep receptivity to the way the
contemporary world is underlain by strata of history. This realization, along
with strong regional roots, is something Hughes had in common with a number of
poets writing in the second half of the 20th century. The work of Geoffrey Hill
(especially King Log [1968], Mercian
Hymns [1971], and Tenebrae [1978])
treats Britain as a palimpsest whose superimposed layers of history are
uncovered in poems, which are sometimes written in prose. Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966) celebrates his native Northumbria. The dour poems
of R.S. Thomas commemorate a harsh rural Wales of remote hill farms where
gnarled, inbred celibates scratch a subsistence from the thin soil. |
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Britain's industrial regions received
attention in poetry, too. In collections such as Terry Street (1969) Douglas Dunn wrote of working-class life in
northeastern England. Tony Harrison, the most arresting English poet to find his
voice in the later decades of the 20th century (The Loiners [1970], From the
School of Eloquence and Other Poems [1978], Continuous [1981]), came, as he stresses, from a working-class
community in industrial Yorkshire. Harrison's social and cultural journey away
from that world by means of a grammar school education and a degree in classics
provoked responses in him that his poetry conveys with imaginative vehemence and
caustic wit: anger at the deprivations and humiliations endured by the working
class; guilt over the way his talent had lifted him away from these. Trenchantly
combining colloquial ruggedness with classic form, Harrison's poetry--sometimes
innovatively written to accompany television films--kept up a fiercely original
and socially concerned commentary on such themes as inner-city dereliction (V
[1985]), the horrors of warfare (The Gaze
of the Gorgon [1992]), and the evils of censorship (The Blasphemers' Banquet [1989], a verse film partly written in
reaction to the fatwa on Salman
Rushdie for The Satanic Verses). |
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Also from Yorkshire was Blake Morrison,
whose finest work, The Ballad of the
Yorkshire Ripper (1987), was composed in taut, macabre stanzas thickened
with dialect. Morrison's work also displayed a growing development in late
20th-century British poetry: the writing of narrative verse. Although there had
been earlier instances of this verse after 1945 (John Betjeman's blank-verse
autobiography Summoned by Bells [1960]
proved the most popular), it was in the 1980s and '90s that the form was given
renewed prominence by poets such as the Kipling-influenced James Fenton. An
especially ambitious exercise in the narrative genre was Craig Raine's History:
The Home Movie (1994), a huge semifictionalized saga, written in three-line
stanzas, chronicling several generations of his own and his wife's families.
Before this, three books of dazzling virtuosity (The
Onion, Memory [1978], A Martian Sends
a Postcard Home [1979], and Rich
[1984]) established Raine as the founder, and most inventive exemplar, of what
came to be called the Martian school of poetry. The defining characteristic of
this school was a poetry rife with startling images, unexpected but audaciously
apt similes, and rapid, imaginative tricks of transformation that set the reader
looking at the world afresh. |
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From the late 1960s onward Northern
Ireland, convulsed by sectarian violence, was particularly prolific in
poetry. From a cluster of considerable talents--Michael Longley, Derek Mahon,
Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon-- Seamus Heaney
soon stood out. Born into a Roman Catholic farming family in County Derry, he
began by publishing verse--in his collections Death
of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into
the Dark (1969)--that combines a tangible, tough, sensuous response to rural
and agricultural life, reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes, with meditation about
the relationship between the taciturn world of his parents and his own
communicative calling as a poet. Since then, in increasingly magisterial books
of poetry--Wintering Out (1972), North
(1975), Field Work (1979), Station
Island (1984), The Haw Lantern
(1987), Seeing Things (1991)--Heaney
became arguably the greatest poet Ireland has produced, eventually winning the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1995). Having spent his formative years amid the
murderous divisiveness of Ulster, he wrote poetry particularly distinguished by
its fruitful bringing together of opposites. Sturdy familiarity with country
life goes along with delicate stylistic accomplishment and sophisticated
literary allusiveness. Present and past coalesce in Heaney's verses: Iron Age
sacrificial victims exhumed from peat bogs resemble tarred-and-feathered victims
of the atrocities in contemporary Belfast; elegies for friends and relatives
slaughtered during the outrages of the 1970s and '80s are embedded in verses
whose imagery and metrical forms derive from Dante. Surveying carnage,
vengeance, bigotry, and gentler disjunctions such as that between the unschooled
and the cultivated, Heaney made himself the master of a poetry of
reconciliations. |
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Apart from the short-lived attempt by
T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry to bring about a renaissance of verse drama,
theatre in the late 1940s and early 1950s was most notable for the continuing
supremacy of the "well-made" play, which focused upon, and mainly
attracted as its audience, the comfortable middle class. The most interesting
playwright working within this mode was Terence
Rattigan, whose carefully crafted, conventional-looking plays--in
particular, The Winslow Boy (1946), The
Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue
Sea (1952), and Separate Tables
(1954)--affectingly disclose desperations, terrors, and emotional forlornness
concealed behind reticence and gentility. In 1956 John
Osborne's Look
Back in Anger forcefully signaled the start of a very different
dramatic tradition. Taking as its hero a furiously voluble working-class man and
replacing staid mannerliness on stage with emotional rawness, sexual candour,
and social rancour, Look Back in Anger
initiated a move toward what critics called "kitchen-sink" drama.
Shelagh Delaney (with her one influential play, A Taste of Honey [1958]) and Arnold Wesker (especially in his
politically and socially engaged trilogy, Chicken
Soup with Barley [1958], Roots
[1959], and I'm Talking About Jerusalem
[1960]) gave further impetus to this movement, as did Osborne in subsequent
plays such as The Entertainer (1957),
his attack on what he saw as the tawdriness of postwar Britain. Also working
within this tradition was John Arden, whose
dramas emulate some of Bertold Brecht's theatrical devices. Arden wrote
historical plays (Serjeant Musgrave's
Dance [1959], Armstrong's Last
Goodnight [1964]) to advance radical social and political views and in doing
so provided a model that several later left-wing dramatists followed. |
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An alternative reaction against
drawing-room naturalism came from the Theatre of the
Absurd. Through increasingly minimalist plays--from Waiting for Godot (1953) to such stark brevities as his
30-second-long drama, Breath (1969)-- Samuel
Beckett used character pared down to basic existential elements and
symbol to reiterate his Stygian view of the human condition (something he also
conveyed in similarly gaunt and allegorical novels such as Molloy
[1951], Malone Dies [1958], and The
Unnamable [1960], all originally written in French). Some of Beckett's
themes and techniques are discernible in the drama of Harold
Pinter. Characteristically concentrating on two or three people
maneuvering for sexual or social superiority in a claustrophobic room, works
such as The Birthday Party (1958), The
Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming
(1965), No Man's Land (1975), and Moonlight
(1993) are potent dramas of menace in which a slightly surreal atmosphere
contrasts with and undermines dialogue of tape-recorder authenticity. Joe
Orton's anarchic black comedies--Entertaining
Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1967),
and What the Butler Saw (1969)--put
theatrical procedures pioneered by Pinter at the service of outrageous sexual
farce. Orton's taste for dialogue in the epigrammatic style of Oscar Wilde was
shared by one of the wittiest dramatists to emerge in the 1960s, Tom
Stoppard. In plays from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead (1966) to later triumphs such
as Arcadia (1993), Stoppard sets
intellectually challenging concepts ricocheting in scenes glinting with the
to-and-fro of polished repartee. The most prolific comic playwright from the
1960s onward was Alan Ayckbourn, whose often
virtuoso feats of stagecraft and theatrical ingenuity made him one of Britain's
most popular dramatists. Ayckbourn's plays showed an increasing tendency to
broach darker themes and were especially scathing (for instance, in A
Small Family Business [1987]) on the topics of the greed and selfishness
that he considered to have been promoted by Thatcherism, the prevailing
political philosophy in 1980s Britain. |
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Playwrights who had much in common with
Arden's ideological beliefs and his admiration for Brechtian theatre--Edward
Bond, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton--maintained a steady output of parable-like
plays dramatizing radical left-wing doctrine. Their scenarios were remarkable
for an uncompromising insistence on human cruelty and the oppressiveness and
exploitativeness of capitalist class and social structures. In the 1980s
agitprop theatre--antiestablishment, feminist, black, and gay--thrived. One of
the more durable talents to emerge from it was Caryl Churchill, whose Serious
Money (1987) savagely encapsulated the finance frenzy of the 1980s. David
Edgar developed into a dramatist of impressive span and depth with plays such as
Destiny (1976) and Pentecost
(1994), his masterly response to the collapse of communism and rise of
nationalism in eastern Europe. David Hare
similarly widened his range with confident accomplishment; in the 1990s he
completed a panoramic trilogy surveying the contemporary state of British
institutions--the Anglican church (Racing
Demon [1990]), the police and the judiciary (Murmuring
Judges [1991]), and the Labour Party (The
Absence of War [1993]). |
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Hare also wrote political plays for
television, such as Licking Hitler
(1978) and Saigon: Year of the Cat
(1983). Trevor Griffiths, author of dialectical stage plays clamorous with
debate, put television drama to the same use (Comedians [1975] had particular impact). Dennis
Potter deployed a wide battery of the medium's resources, including
extravagant fantasy and sequences that sarcastically counterpoint popular music
with scenes of brutality, class-based callousness, and sexual rapacity. Potter's
works transmit his revulsion, semireligious in nature, at what he saw as
widespread hypocrisy, sadism, and injustice in British society. One playwright,
Alan Bennett, excelled in both stage and television drama. Bennett's first work
for the theatre, Forty Years On
(1968), was an expansive, mocking, and nostalgic cabaret of cultural and social
change in England between and during the two world wars. His masterpieces,
though, are dramatic monologues written for television--A
Woman of No Importance (1982) and six works he called Talking
Heads (1987). In these television plays Bennett's comic genius for capturing
the rich waywardness of everyday speech combines with psychological acuteness,
emotional delicacy, and a melancholy consciousness of life's transience. The
result is a drama, simultaneously hilarious and sad, of exceptional distinction.
Bennett's 1991 play, The Madness of George
III, takes his fascination with England's past back to the 1780s and in
doing so accords with the widespread mood of retrospection with which British
literature approached the end of the 20th century. |
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(P.Ke.) |
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BIBLIOGRAPHY |
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A comprehensive reference source with
emphasis on British authors and their writings is The Oxford Companion to English Literature; the 4th edition,
compiled and ed. by PAUL HARVEY and rev. by DOROTHY EAGLE (1967, reprinted with
corrections, 1981), and the 5th edition, ed. by MARGARET DRABBLE (1985), have
somewhat different approaches but overlapping coverage. F.P. WILSON et
al. (eds.), The Oxford History of English Literature (1945- ), provides
comprehensive coverage of each period; as do The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. by A.W. WARD and
A.R. WALLER, 15 vol. (1907-27, reissued 1976); and BORIS FORD (ed.), The
New Pelican Guide to English Literature, rev. and expanded ed., 9 vol.
(1982-88). Another useful source is PETER CONRAD, The
Everyman History of English Literature (1985). (Ed.) |
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DEREK PEARSALL, Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977), is a good critical
survey of both periods. STANLEY B. GREENFIELD and FRED C. ROBINSON, A
Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the End of 1972
(1980), lists more than 6,500 items. STANLEY B. GREENFIELD, DANIEL G. CALDER,
and MICHAEL LAPIDGE, A New Critical
History of Old English Literature (1986), serves as a good introductory
survey. G.P. KRAPP and E.V.K. DOBBIE (eds.), The
Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vol. (1931-53), is the standard edition of Old
English poetry; and S.A.J. BRADLEY (trans. and ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1982, reissued 1991), anthologizes prose
translations of Old English poems. R.M. WILSON, Early Middle English Literature, 3rd ed. (1968), critically surveys
this period. J.B. SEVERS and A.E. HARTUNG (eds.), A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500 (1967- ),
contains commentaries on individual works and extensive bibliographies; while
J.A.W. BENNETT and G.V. SMITHERS (eds.), Early
Middle English Verse and Prose, 2nd ed. (1968, reissued 1982), is an
authoritative anthology, with a glossary. (P.S.Ba.) |
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A.S.G. EDWARDS (ed.), Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres
(1984), includes bibliographies and surveys of scholarship. A.S.G. EDWARDS and
DEREK PEARSALL (eds.), Middle English
Prose: Essays on Bibliographical Problems (1981), is also of interest. A
valuable source is CARL JOSEPH STRATMAN, Bibliography
of Medieval Drama, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, 2 vol. (1972). |
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Analytic studies include PIERO BOITANI, English
Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (1982;
originally published in Italian, 1980); J.A. BURROW, Ricardian
Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain Poet (1971, reissued 1992);
PAMELA GRADON, Form and Style in Early
English Literature (1971); RICHARD FIRTH GREEN, Poets
and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages
(1980); DAVID LAWTON (ed.), Middle English
Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background (1982); CHARLES MUSCATINE, Poetry
and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (1972); ROBERT POTTER, The
English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition
(1975); V.J. SCATTERGOOD, Politics and
Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (1971); A.C. SPEARING, Medieval Dream-Poetry (1976), and Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (1985); R.M. WILSON, The
Lost Literature of Medieval England, 2nd ed., rev. (1970); GEORGE KANE,
Middle English Literature (1951, reprinted 1979); DOROTHY EVERETT, Essays
on Middle English Literature (1955, reprinted 1978); C.S. LEWIS, The
Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936, reissued 1977);
DIETER MEHL, The Middle English Romances
of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (1969; originally published in
German, 1967); ARTHUR K. MOORE, The
Secular Lyric in Middle English (1951, reissued 1970); ROSEMARY WOOLF, The
English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (1968), and The
English Mystery Plays (1972, reissued 1980); ROBERTO WEISS, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century, 3rd ed. (1967);
M.J.C. HODGART, The Ballads, 2nd ed.
(1962); and THORLAC TURVILLE-PETRE, The
Alliterative Revival (1977). (Ri.B.) |
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Elizabethan
poetry and prose: CHRISTOPHER RICKS (ed.), English
Poetry and Prose, 1540-1674 (1970, reissued 1993), is a useful collection of
essays. FRANCES A. YATES, Astraea: The
Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975, reissued 1993); JOHN BUXTON, Elizabethan Taste (1963, reissued 1983); and LOUIS B. WRIGHT, Middle-Class
Culture in Elizabethan England (1935, reissued 1980), explore the
backgrounds of literature. Specific topics are discussed in HALLETT SMITH, Elizabethan
Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (1952, reissued
1968); PAUL J. ALPERS (ed.), Elizabethan
Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (1967); FRANK KERMODE, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (1971; also published as Renaissance
Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 1973); DOUGLAS L. PETERSON, The
English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne, 2nd ed. (1990); J.W. LEVER, The
Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 2nd ed. (1966, reprinted 1974); and ROSEMOND TUVE, Elizabethan
and Metaphysical Imagery (1947, reissued 1972), on rhetoric. Anthologies
include NORMAN AULT (compiler and ed.), Elizabethan
Lyrics from the Original Texts, 4th ed. (1966); NIGEL ALEXANDER (ed.), Elizabethan Narrative Verse (1967); and EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH (ed.), The
Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (1965, reprinted 1982). |
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Elizabethan
and early Stuart drama: The theatrical background
is surveyed in ANDREW GURR, The
Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 3rd ed. (1992); and KENNETH MUIR and S.
SCHOENBAUM (eds.), A New Companion to
Shakespeare Studies (1971). CHRISTOPHER RICKS (ed.), English Drama to 1710, rev. ed. (1987, reissued 1993), is a
collection of essays. Surveys of the literature include MADELEINE DORAN, Endeavors
of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (1954, reissued 1972); M.C.
BRADBROOK, The Growth and Structure of
Elizabethan Comedy, new ed. (1973); and ALFRED HARBAGE, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952, reissued 1970), on the
companies of schoolboy actors. The following are special studies: J.M.R.
MARGESON, The Origins of English Tragedy
(1967); DAVID M. BEVINGTON, From Mankind
to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England
(1962); C.L. BARBER, Shakespeare's Festive
Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959,
reissued 1972); E.M.W. TILLYARD, Shakespeare's
History Plays (1944, reissued 1991); A.C. BRADLEY, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
3rd ed. (1992); BRIAN GIBBONS, Jacobean
City Comedy, 2nd ed. (1980); MARGOT HEINEMANN, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the
Early Stuarts (1980); J.W. LEVER, The
Tragedy of State (1971, reissued 1987); and ENID WELSFORD, The
Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry & the Revels
(1927, reissued 1962). |
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Early
Stuart poetry and prose: Historical background is
explored in HIRAM HAYDN, The
Counter-Renaissance (1950, reprinted 1966); ALAN SINFIELD, Literature
in Protestant England, 1560-1660 (1983); CHRISTOPHER HILL, Intellectual
Origins of the English Revolution (1965, reprinted with corrections 1980),
and The World Turned Upside Down: Radical
Ideas During the English Revolution (1972, reissued 1991); and BASIL WILLEY,
The Seventeenth Century Background:
Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934,
reissued 1979). Information on the court is found in D.J. GORDON, The
Renaissance Imagination (1975). Special topical studies include LOUIS L.
MARTZ, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the
Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (1962, reissued 1978); MAREN-SOFIE RØSTVIG, The
Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2nd ed., 2
vol. (1962), on Cavalier poetry; C.A. PATRIDES and RAYMOND B. WADDINGTON (eds.),
The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature
(1980); BRIAN VICKERS (compiler), Essential
Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon (1968); JOAN WEBBER, The
Eloquent "I": Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (1968);
and STANLEY E. FISH (ed.), Seventeenth-Century
Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism (1971). (M.H.B.) |
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Helpful introductions include A.R.
HUMPHREYS, The Augustan World: Life and
Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (1954, reprinted 1978); MAXIMILLIAN E.
NOVAK, Eighteenth-Century English
Literature (1983); PAT ROGERS, The
Augustan Vision (1974); PAT ROGERS (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (1978); LESLIE STEPHEN, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904,
reissued 1965); and STEPHEN COPLEY (ed.), Literature
and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (1984). Useful studies
that focus on more restricted topics but cover the whole of the period include
HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL, The Augustan Idea in
English Literature (1983); PAUL FUSSELL, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift
to Burke (1965); JEAN H. HAGSTRUM, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart
(1980); IAN JACK, Augustan Satire:
Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660-1750 (1942, reissued 1978);
JAMES WILLIAM JOHNSON, The Formation of
English Neo-Classical Thought (1967, reprinted 1978); MARTIN PRICE, To
the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake
(1964, reissued 1970); ERIC ROTHSTEIN, Restoration
and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660-1780 (1981); JAMES SUTHERLAND, A
Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948, reprinted 1975); and RACHEL
TRICKETT, The Honest Muse: A Study in
Augustan Verse (1967). |
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Among important thematic or general
studies with a narrower chronological range are JOHN BARRELL, English Literature in History, 1730-80 (1983); WALTER JACKSON BATE, From
Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (1946,
reissued 1961); DONALD DAVIE, A Gathered
Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930 (1978);
CHRISTOPHER HILL, The Experience of
Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984); EARL MINER, The
Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (1974); SAMUEL HOLT MONK, The
Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (1935,
reissued 1960); MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON, Newton
Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (1946,
reprinted 1979), and Science and
Imagination (1956, reissued 1976); RONALD PAULSON, Satire
and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1967); JOHN PRESTON, The
Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1970); JOHN
J. RICHETTI, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739
(1969, reissued 1992); PAT ROGERS, Hacks
and Dunces: Pope, Swift, and Grub Street (1980); PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS, Imagining
a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1976), and The
Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (1967); GEOFFREY TILLOTSON, Augustan
Poetic Diction (1964); IAN WATT, The
Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957,
reissued 1987); BASIL WILLEY, The
Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of
the Period (1940, reissued 1986); and JOHN HAROLD WILSON, The
Court Wits of the Restoration (1948, reissued 1967). |
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Interesting explorations of individual
major writers include MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK, Defoe
and the Nature of Man (1963); G.A. STARR, Defoe & Spiritual Autobiography (1965, reissued 1971); C.J.
RAWSON, Henry Fielding and the Augustan
Ideal Under Stress (1972, reprinted 1991); W. JACKSON BATE, Samuel Johnson (1977); REUBEN A. BROWER, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (1959, reissued 1986);
MAYNARD MACK, The Garden and the City:
Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (1969);
AUBREY L. WILLIAMS, Pope's
"Dunciad": A Study of Its Meaning (1955, reprinted 1968); MARGARET
ANNE DOODY, A Natural Passion: A Study of
the Novels of Samuel Richardson (1974); DAVID M. VIETH, Attribution
in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (1963); and
IRVIN EHRENPREIS, Swift: The Man, His
Works, and the Age, 3 vol. (1962-83). |
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Theatrical history is chronicled in
ROBERT D. HUME, The Development of English
Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976, reissued 1990); PETER HOLLAND,
The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (1979);
RICHARD BEVIS, The Laughing Tradition:
Stage Comedy in Garrick's Day (1980); and ARTHUR SHERBO, English Sentimental Drama (1957). Among collections and anthologies
are DONALD DAVIE (ed.), Augustan Lyric
(1974); H.T. DICKINSON (ed.), Politics and
Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1974); SCOTT ELLEDGE (ed.), Eighteenth-Century
Critical Essays, 2 vol. (1961); H.J.C. GRIERSON and G. BULLOUGH (compilers),
The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (1934, reprinted 1981);
DAVID W. LINDSAY (ed.), English Poetry,
1700-1780: Contemporaries of Swift and Johnson (1974); GEORGE DeF. LORD et
al. (eds.), Poems on Affairs of State:
Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, 7 vol. (1963-75); HAROLD LOVE (ed.), The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse (1968, reissued 1979); GEORGE
H. NETTLETON and ARTHUR E. CASE (eds.), British
Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan (1939, reprinted 1975); DAVID NICHOL
SMITH (ed.), Characters from the Histories
& Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918, reissued 1967), and Eighteenth
Century Essays on Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (1963); DAVID NICHOL SMITH
(compiler), The Oxford Book of Eighteenth
Century Verse (1926, reprinted 1971); ROGER LONSDALE (compiler and ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984, reissued
1994); CHARLES PEAKE (compiler), Poetry of
the Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions (1967);
FRANCIS VENABLES (ed.), The Early
Augustans (1972); and TIMOTHY WEBB (ed.), English
Romantic Hellenism, 1700-1824 (1982). (M.C.O.) |
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The general literary history is
presented in R.A. FOAKES, The Romantic
Assertion: A Study in the Language of Nineteenth Century Poetry (1958,
reissued 1971); JOHN O. HAYDEN (ed.), Romantic
Bards and British Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary Reviews of
the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley (1971); and
THEODORE REDPATH (compiler), The Young
Romantics and Critical Opinion, 1807-1824: Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats
as Seen by Their Contemporary Critics (1973). The social and intellectual
background of the period is the subject of numerous works: RAYMOND WILLIAMS, Culture
and Society, 1780-1950 (1958, reissued 1987), chapters 1-3; M.H. ABRAMS, The
Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953,
reissued 1971), and Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971);
MARILYN BUTLER, Jane Austen and the War of
Ideas (1975, reissued 1990), and Romantics,
Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830
(1981); H.W. PIPER, The Active Universe:
Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets
(1962); CARL WOODRING, Politics in English
Romantic Poetry (1970); H.G. SCHENK, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History
(1966, reissued 1979); STEPHEN PRICKETT (ed.), The Romantics (1981); STEPHEN PRICKETT, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in
the Victorian Church (1976); and LILIAN R. FURST, Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study of Aspects of the
Romantic Movements in England, France, and Germany, 2nd ed. (1979). Analytic
studies of narrower topics include J.R. WATSON, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830, 2nd ed. (1992),
and Picturesque Landscape and English
Romantic Poetry (1970); THOMAS WEISKEL, The
Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence
(1976, reissued 1986); THOMAS McFARLAND,
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of
Fragmentation (1981), and Coleridge
and the Pantheist Tradition (1969); ELIZABETH SEWELL, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (1960, reissued 1971);
C.M. BOWRA, The Romantic Imagination
(1949, reissued 1984); MICHAEL G. COOKE, The
Romantic Will (1976); HAROLD BLOOM, The
Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. and enlarged
ed. (1971), and Poetry and Repression:
Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (1976); PAUL A. CANTOR, Creature
and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism (1984); G. WILSON KNIGHT, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941, reissued
1971); DAVID MORSE, Perspectives on
Romanticism: A Transformational Analysis (1981), and Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (1982); ALBERT S. GÉRARD, English
Romantic Poetry: Ethos, Structure, and Symbol in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley,
and Keats (1968); and DAVID GWILYM JAMES, The
Romantic Comedy (1948, reprinted 1980). Comprehensive collections are
represented by H.S. MILFORD (compiler), The
Oxford Book of Regency Verse, 1798-1837 (1928, reissued as The Oxford Book of English Verse of the Romantic Period, 1798-1830,
1974); HAROLD BLOOM (ed.), English
Romantic Poetry, expanded ed., 2 vol. (1963); and HAROLD BLOOM and LIONEL
TRILLING (eds.), Romantic Poetry and Prose
(1973). (J.B.B.) |
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Comprehensive studies of the period,
introducing the literary background, include WALTER E. HOUGHTON, The
Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957, reissued 1985); JEROME HAMILTON
BUCKLEY, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (1951, reissued
1981); BASIL WILLEY, Nineteenth Century
Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (1949, reissued 1980); ARTHUR POLLARD
(ed.), The Victorians, rev. ed. (1987,
reissued 1993); and G.K. CHESTERTON, The
Victorian Age in Literature (1913, reissued 1966). Studies of special
subjects are presented in GEORGE LEVINE and WILLIAM MADDEN (eds.), The
Art of Victorian Prose (1968), on nonfiction; MICHAEL WHEELER, English
Fiction of the Victorian Period: 1830-1890, 2nd ed. (1994); KATHLEEN
TILLOTSON, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties
(1954, reprinted 1983); ROBERT LANGBAUM, The
Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition
(1957, reprinted 1985), on Victorian poetry; GEORGE ROWELL, The
Victorian Theatre, 1792-1914, 2nd ed. (1978); and ROGER B. HENKLE, Comedy
and Culture, 1820-1900 (1980). ( N.Sh.) |
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From
1900 to 1945: MALCOLM BRADBURY, The
Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971), discusses the effects of
modernization on the form and content of 20th-century English literature and on
the role of the modern writer. MALCOLM BRADBURY and JAMES McFARLANE (eds.), Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976, reprinted 1991), collects essays
focusing on the international context of Anglo-American modernism. MICHAEL H.
LEVENSON, A Genealogy of Modernism: A
Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (1984), is a meticulously
detailed history of the modernist movement in England. CHRISTOPHER GILLIE, Movements
in English Literature, 1900-1940 (1975), is a straightforward introduction
to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the period. The historical background also
is explored in SAMUEL HYNES, The Auden
Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1976, reissued
1992); and ROBERT HEWISON, Under Siege:
Literary Life in London, 1939-45, rev. ed. (1988). DAVID PERKINS, A History of Modern Poetry, 2 vol. (1976-87), is a broad study
stressing the interplay between British and American poetry. JOHN PRESS, A
Map of Modern English Verse (1969), analyzes traditional and modernist
poetry from the 1900s to the 1950s. (H.A.Da.) |
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Historical and cultural context is
provided in ROBERT HEWISON, In Anger:
Culture in the Cold War, 1945-60, rev. ed. (1988); and BRYAN APPLEYARD, The
Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post-War Britain (1989).
Informative general surveys of fiction, poetry, and drama include the following:
MALCOLM BRADBURY, The Modern British Novel (1993); D.J. TAYLOR, After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945 (1993);
ALLAN MASSIE, The Novel Today: A Critical
Guide to the British Novel, 1970-1989 (1990); NEIL CORCORAN, English
Poetry Since 1940 (1993); ANTHONY THWAITE, Poetry
Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry, 1960-1992 (1996); MARTIN BOOTH, British
Poetry, 1964 to 1984 (1985); SUSAN RUSINKO, British
Drama, 1950 to the Present (1989); JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR, Anger
and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, 2nd ed. rev. (1969, reissued
1977; also published as The Angry Theatre:
New British Drama, 1969); and MICHELENE WANDOR, Drama
Today: A Critical Guide to British Drama, 1970-1990 (1993). (P.Ke.) |
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