The Seventeenth - Century Literature Handbook

Marshall Grossman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780631220916, 9780631220909
• eBook ISBN: 9781444390117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE HANDBOOK

"Never a dull read, Marshall Grossman's elegant volume bristles with sharp ideas to inform, stimulate and challenge his audience."

Thomas Corns, Bangor University

The seventeenth century was a dramatic period in British history, witnessing two revolutions, huge constitutional change, the widening of the political and literary classes, and the gradual acceptance of women as authors. This easy-to-use Handbook offers readers a succinct overview of this complex period, guiding them through the principal literary works, figures and innovations of the time. Focusing on studying texts in context, Marshall Grossman explores the ways in which major works, including Hamlet, Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress, both reflected and helped to shape the history of the time, while concise sections on topics such as the Gunpowder Plot and the Pamphlet Wars allow the reader to engage more fully with the central themes and preoccupations of the period. Concluding with a series of brief biographical profiles describing the life and works of the century's most significant and influential writers, The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook is essential reading for anyone interested in British Literature across the civil war and restoration periods.

Part 1

Texts and Contexts: An Overview

Reading the Historical Landscape

The seventeenth century was a turbulent period in English history during which government, agriculture, and manufacture, learning, letters, and religion, underwent irreversible changes with broad and lasting effects on production, exchange, and culture. From a literary historical standpoint the seventeenth century continued the great European projects of renaissance and reformation. In its last decades it prepared the groundwork of the Enlightenment. Its rediscovery of the ancient world extended from the Greek and Latin languages and cultures to the languages and contexts of the Hebrew Scriptures and the republican politics of ancient Rome. The expanding recovery of ancient knowledge combined with the development of experimental science, technological advances in optics and navigation, and increasingly precise instruments of measurement combined to disrupt and rework the ways in which people thought about the world and their relationship to it. New technology and the increasing rationalization of agriculture changed the material conditions of daily life; the work of religious reformation became urgent, its claims and counterclaims issuing finally in the fitful violence of the civil wars, the interregnum, and the Stuart Restoration. In a more secular, less millenarian form, these forces also shaped the revolution of 1688 and the political supremacy of Parliament over monarchy that survives today.

For the purposes of this introduction, the seventeenth century in Britain will be understood to encompass four distinct settlements of uneven and overlapping duration: the last years of Elizabeth I and the Stuart succession, the mid-century civil wars and the interregnum, the restored Stuart monarchy, and the more decisively limited monarchy after 1688. Division into these four periods privileges political history as the index of the time, but it should be remembered that each of these regimes may also be understood at a higher level of generalization as a continuous series of reactions to changes in the underlying infrastructures of thought, technology, and economics. As this is to be a literary history, we will be most interested in the way these events are manifest in the distinctive writing of the time and how these writings were, in themselves, events. Thus we will be offering not the history of social or political or material life in seventeenth-century Britain but rather an episodic narrative of the literature in which that life was presented by and to those who lived it. Any such narrative must be selective and exclusionary, for the writing of a time, speaking with many voices, addressing many, differently situated ears, necessarily tells more than one story. To render a coherent account of what must have been experienced as inchoate, partial, and fragmented by those who lived it, one must be reductive. It is my view that a frankly reductive story will serve better than either the brutish imposition of a false comprehension and coherence or the collocation of a number of limited and contradictory stories. This latter course, aiming at presenting the multiplicity of voices, ends only in suppressing the criteria of their selection and the interactions among them. I have pursued the first course, endeavoring to make my choices and the reasons for making them as clear as possible while suggesting the indistinct shapes of other, less fully told stories, that lie just beyond its horizons.

History of any sort is necessarily retrospective. In this respect it ought also be said at the outset that, as this is to be a literary history, its narrative will be shaped according to what turns out to have mattered to the literature of succeeding times, and it will necessarily also include some attempt to think about how what matters came to matter. Therefore we will ask two parallel questions of the literary records we interrogate: what did they do for and to the people that produced and consumed them? and in what ways do they continue to matter now, for us? “You cannot have your history in the future tense.” So, W. H. Auden playfully tweaked Vergil for structuring the Aeneid as a “historical” account of events that will have turned out to be the founding of the empire of his patron, Augustus. Literary history, however, must be told in the future tense because what will turn out to have been historical is revealed only to those who come after, noting and appraising change. The literary historical event is visible in the literary works that succeed it.

Renaissance and/or Reformation: From Elizabeth to James

The seventeenth century begins in the closing years of the Tudor reign. To assess the state of affairs at this juncture, it is necessary to review some of the unsettling events of the reigns of the queen's famous and infamous father, her younger brother, Edward VI, and her older sister, Mary. Not surprisingly, then, an understanding of the seventeenth century begins with a review of the sixteenth century. There are many ways in which the history of seventeenth-century England was shaped by Henry VIII, who determined England's anomalous route to Protestantism and the succession of two female rulers of opposed religions. When the English monarchy came under attack in the middle of the seventeenth century, one of the issues republicans raised against monarchy in general was its structural inability to distinguish between public and private motives. The marital difficulties of Henry VIII are a case in point. The public motives for the king's divorce of Catherine of Aragon were her failure to produce a male heir and the king's assertion that he had come to believe his marriage to his brother's widow was incestuous and thus invalid, despite the papal dispensation that had allowed it. Only one generation removed from the Wars of the Roses, Henry wanted to see the succession settled in a self-perpetuating dynasty. However, this legitimately public concern was complicated by the king's very personal attraction to Anne Boleyn. Thus, the divorce controversy wove reasons of state, theology, and personal desire into an intractable knot that would not soon be untied; the willful efforts of the desirous king and his courtiers to untie it would be consequential long after they had left the scene.

In 1534, when, to secure his divorce, Henry broke with Rome and declared himself the head of the English church, his motives were not those of Luther or Calvin and their followers, and he preserved the episcopal structure and sacramental orders of the old church. His new Church of England was much the old Roman church without the Roman pope. However, the king's claim during the dispute that he had come to see his marriage to his brother's widow as incestuous and the papal dispensation that allowed it “a mistake,” made the protracted struggle over the royal divorce a question of scriptural interpretation and aligned it with the much broader and more potent question of authority over the meaning of Scripture that was to be a crucial element in the European Reformation. Henry's subsequent dissolution of the monasteries – also more urgently economic and political than theological in motive – further alienated the adherents of Rome and encouraged those who favored theological and ecclesiastical reformation beyond Henry's adjustment of church government. By making formerly ecclesiastical land available for royal gifts that advanced Henry's followers, the dissolution also diluted the power of the older peerage and gentry and abetted the centralization of power in a national administration at the expense of the regional magnates and their feudal privileges.

It is interesting to consider in the light of this history that an earlier, influential synthesis of Elizabethan culture, Tillyard's (1943) The Elizabethan World Picture, emphasized the orderliness of an imagined world in which a stable and divinely designated monarch presides over a hierarchal social order in which individuals participate by fulfilling their (usually hereditary) role. Subsequent historians have dismantled this picture of an orderly world by exploring the instability of the social hierarchy disrupted by changes in the organization of labor and wealth as well as the ample evidence of the roiling of conflicting interests beneath and sometimes erupting through the apparent perpetuity of a divinely ordained political settlement.

However, the idea of an Elizabethan world picture remains valuable, as long as we remember that it is a picture and not a world. If Tillyard went awry it was in suggesting that this picture answered to the world it presumed to depict sufficiently for the broad range of contemporaries to mistake it for truth. Understood as presenting an imagined rather than an existing world, the Elizabethan world picture directs our attention to what must have seemed – at least from the perspective of the social elites that generated it – a delightful world to which one could escape in fantasy or to which one could aspire in action – an unfallen Eden from which present-day reality could be seen as a dispossession. Place, for example, the prospect of a stable monarchical government mirroring on earth God's rule in heaven against what Tudor subjects (variously placed in the hierarchy) must have experienced in the years leading up to Elizabeth's long reign.

Henry's reformation without reform would significantly shape national events through the end of the seventeenth century. Henry left three heirs, each of whom would succeed him in turn, in accordance with his will and the last of the three acts of succession passed during his reign: Jane Seymour's son, Edward (and the Protestant regents who ruled in his name), Catherine of Aragon's daughter Mary, who was raised in the Roman church, and Anne Boleyn's Protestant daughter Elizabeth. England's top-down reformation would thus stutter along through the regencies of Somerset and Northumberland during Edward's minority, the foreshortened reign of the Protestant Lady Jane Grey, and an unprecedented period of female rule under two queens of opposed religious commitments.

As it happened, the succession of Henry's three childless children was determined not by the putatively divinely ordered principles of primogeniture and patrilineal descent, but by the post-mortem extension of the will of Henry VIII. Having broken with Rome and declared himself head of the English church, in 1534 Henry obtained from Parliament the first of three Acts of Succession. The 1534 act declared Mary Tudor the illegitimate child of an incestuous union and settled the succession on the children of Henry's new wife, Anne Boleyn, thus making the seven-month-old Princess Elizabeth heir to the throne. In 1536, with Anne Boleyn on trial for adultery and treason and Jane Seymour the object of Henry's affections and dynastic hopes, the first act was superseded by a second. The Second Act of Succession rendered both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate and made Jane Seymour's children heirs to the throne. In 1543, four years before his death, Henry reconsidered once more. The Third Act of Succession restored Mary and Elizabeth to the succession, in age order, following the male heir.

Edward was nine years old when he ascended the throne in 1547. Brought up under the supervision of his father's widow, Catherine Parr, Edward was educated into a Protestantism more reformist than that of his father's pragmatic establishment. Under the regency of his uncle the Duke of Somerset, the English Reformation became more earnest, and after Somerset fell to the machinations of Northumberland, an anti-Catholic policy continued to be pursued, culminating in the failed attempt to nullify Henry's will and install Edward's Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as his successor. Mary's brief reign (1553–1558) was marked by her unpopular and violent attempt to reverse the Reformation and restore England to the papacy and by fears that the minions of Philip II, her Spanish husband, would try to subvert English sovereignty. When Elizabeth came to power, Catholic courtiers were again displaced by Protestants and the Church of England was again established as a reformed church. While the reigns of her half-brother and half-sister were short, Elizabeth would reign for 45 years, during which William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) and Sir Francis Walsingham, among others, would begin to build an administrative bureaucracy that allowed England to seek itself in its imagined world picture for nearly a half-century. Elizabeth, like the siblings who preceded her, failed to produce an heir. The literature produced as her reign and the Tudor dynasty came to an end, while the succession remained – at least publically and officially – undetermined, is an important arena in which the dissonance between expectation and reality, ideology and experience, is explored and worried over and in various configurations presented as resolved or irresolvable.

Of course there were forces at work shaping English history apart from the exigencies of monarchical succession, but these exigencies informed the anxious experience of contemporaries and the literature they produced. When Henry VIII devised and twice revised the Tudor succession he could not have anticipated that each of his children would reign but that none would produce an heir. Had any of these monarchs produced an heir English history might have been radically different. Had Edward been survived by a son, the Tudor dynasty would have been asserted into the fourth generation and possibly beyond, possibly resembling the self-perpetuating dynasty evoked by the “Elizabethan world picture.” But, of course, Edward did not survive the regency of the dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, and his older sister Mary came to the throne less than two weeks after it had passed to her cousin Lady Jane Grey. For an even more radical “what might have been,” had the hysterical pregnancy Mary experienced in 1554 been real and produced a living child, a Catholic England might have been ruled, possibly from Madrid, as a Hapsburg principality. The “what-if” most immediate to the seventeenth century is also the hardest to predict. Certainly, during the protracted negotiations over Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the Duc d'Alençon, the potentiality of, yet another, Catholic reversion occupied ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Literature Handbooks
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chronology
• Part 1: Texts and Contexts: An Overview
• Part 2: Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature
• Part 3: Some Key Texts
• Part 4: Writers of the Seventeenth Century
• Works Cited
• Index