Elizabethan Humanism

Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century

Michael Pincombe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317888284
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The term 'humanist' originally referred to a scholar of Classical literature. In the Renaissance and particularly in the Elizabethan age, European intellectuals devoted themselves to the rediscovery and study of Roman and Greek literature and culture. This trend of Renaissance thought became known in the 19th century as 'humanism'. Often a difficult concept to understand, the term Elizabethan Humanism is introduced in Part One and explained in a number of different contexts. Part Two illustrates how knowledge of humanism allows a clearer understanding of Elizabethan literature, by looking closely at major texts of the Elizabethan period which include Spenser's, 'The Shepherd's Calendar'; Marlowe's 'Faustus' and Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'.

PART ONE

Contexts

CHAPTER ONE

Elizabethan Humanism

Around the year 1601, an unhappy and disappointed scholar called Gabriel Harvey cast a somewhat bitter retrospective look on the ‘humanists’ who had emerged during the last decades of the sixteenth century. In the margin of his copy of Thomas Twyne’s translation of Dionysius Periegetes’ The Survey of the World (1572), Harvey wrote the following remark (Marginalia, pp. 160–1):¹

Other commend Chawcer, & Lidgate for their witt, pleasant veine, varietie of poetical discourse, & all humanitie: I specially note their Astronomie, philosophic, & other parts of profound or cunning art. Wherein few of their time were more exactly learned. It is not sufficient for poets to be superficial humanists: but they must be exquisite artists, & curious universal schollers.

As far as Harvey was concerned, at least in the long years of his retirement from public life and letters, humanism was essentially ‘superficial’ in comparison with other arts which he deemed ‘profound’ (astronomy was one of his own particular interests). No doubt some humanists were even more superficial than others, but they were all triflers in comparison with philosophers and other with the library or the lecture-hall, but with the common-room, or, more likely, with the parlour, where ‘their witt, pleasant veine, varietie of poetical discourse, & all humanitie’ may shine most luminously. They are not ‘true poets’, even, but ingenious rhymesters out to please.

This may seem an unpromising place to begin a book on Elizabethan humanism, but I believe it provides a salutary perspective on a literary culture which has perhaps too often been taken at its own evaluation. Fifty years ago, C.S. Lewis drew attention to the problem of achieving the right kind of critical distance between ourselves and what we now call ‘Renaissance humanism’ (1954, p. 20):

The difficulty of assessing this new temper which the humanists introduced lies in the fact that our educational system descends from them and, therefore, the very terms we use embody humanistic conceptions. Unless we take care, our language will beg every question in their favour. We say, for example, that they substituted ‘classical’ for ‘medieval’ Latin. But the very idea of the ‘medieval’ is a humanistic invention.

And so, we might add, are the ideas of the ‘Renaissance’ and ‘humanism’. Lewis was no friend to Renaissance humanism, but his unsympathetic account of its pedantry and vulgarity in his monumental study of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954) should be read carefully by anyone who is interested in the topic. It provides an enlightening critique of the literary character of Elizabethan humanism which has rarely been matched by later writers, and may profitably be set against a recent tendency amongst some Renaissance scholars to more-or-less openly accept and declare their descent from the old humanists.² Naturally, they see the Elizabethan humanist in a rather more positive light than Lewis or I do – or, indeed, than the Elizabethans themselves did.

There is much evidence to suggest that the ‘humanist’ – the word is an Elizabethan coinage – was regarded as a trifler or dilettante quite as much as a scholar or critic in late sixteenth-century England. Harvey’s sceptical remarks on his ‘superficial humanists’ strike the true Elizabethan note; and we need to change our own ideas about what ‘humanism’ means in order to accommodate, indeed, where necessary, to emphasise its adverse aspects. This chapter, then, is designed to introduce a range of Elizabethan perspectives – negative as well as positive – on the set of ideas and attitudes we have come to call ‘humanism’.

Humanity may have a threefold sense

The word ‘humanism’ is notoriously difficult to define. In the past century or so, it has acquired so many different senses, and so many nuances within these different senses themselves, that it has consistently succeeded in evading capture by those who wish to pin it down to a more-or-less easily recognisable meaning. Fortunately, the present study is concerned only with how we might best use the term ‘humanism’ when applying it to the literature and learning of the later sixteenth century in England. Even in this narrowly restricted area, however, we will find that there is a good deal of semantic range, and perhaps a little contradiction. But the attempt to unravel this complex lexical situation seems worthwhile, as the term ‘humanism’ is one which students of Elizabethan literature will encounter almost everywhere in books and articles devoted to the topic. Unfortunately, it means different things to different critics and scholars.³ It is possible that the present contribution to the field will only make matters worse by adding to the confusion; but I hope that my novel approach to the question will prove illuminating rather than distracting.

It is well known that the word ‘humanism’ itself is a late coinage, emerging only in the early part of the nineteenth century. But cognate terms were actually used by the Elizabethans themselves. The word ‘humanist’ first appeared in 1589; and the now obsolete term ‘humanitian’ was first used even earlier in 1577. What did the Elizabethans mean by these terms? if we can discover the senses (for there are several) which were assigned to these words in the late sixteenth century, then perhaps we can generate a sense of the term ‘humanism’ which might have been comprehensible to an educated Elizabethan reader, were we able to go back in time and ask him or her what he or she thought it meant.⁴ But we need to go back a stage further, to the word ‘humanity’, in order properly to lay the foundations of the present study. It is by investigating the various senses attached to this all-important term that we can begin to explore what the Elizabethans might have meant if they had invented the word ‘humanism’ for themselves. We shall return to this question again and again as we proceed through this study, but let us start with the earliest full definition of the word ‘humanity’ that I have so far encountered. It comes from a work by the minor Caroline poet Robert Aylett called Peace with her Four Guarders (1622). This is not, strictly speaking, an Elizabethan definition; but it sums up the Elizabethan lexical and cultural situation so neatly that it will serve very well as a point of departure for our present investigations.

Peace with her Four Guarders is a series of ‘Five Morall Meditations’ and the fourth of these is called ‘Of Courtesy, or Humanity’. The synonymity of these two terms needs to be emphasised from the start. Since the publication of G.K. Hunter’s very influential chapter on humanism and courtship in his study John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (1962), we have come to accept that ‘the Humanist’s and the courtier’s interests pointed in different directions’ (p. 31). But it would be better to say that the real conflict of interests lay between the courtier and the philosopher, not the ‘humanist’. Indeed, the first time we hear of the humanist, in the prefatory material to Abraham Fleming’s 1589 translation of Virgil’s Georgics, it is in the pregnant phrase ‘courtly Humanists’ (sig. A2v). Of course, Aylett and Fleming are the real authorities in the terms of the present study: it is how they and other early modern writers use the words ‘humanity’ and ‘humanist’ that matter, rather than how later critics and scholars have chosen to interpret them. And the reinstatement of the courtly aspect of Elizabethan humanism is one of my main aims in this book. However, let us begin by examining the full variety of senses which Aylett mentions in his poem.

For Aylett, ‘humanity’ is most obviously related to peace because its courteous element is clearly conciliatory. However, he identifies several other aspects (p. 40):

Humanitie may have a threefold sense,

Mans Mature, Vertue, and his education

In humane Arts, and pure Intelligence;

From whence she seemes to have denomination:

And therefore Liberall Arts by ev’ry Nation,

Are call’d the studies of humanity,

And breed in man a courteous conversation,

With gentle manners and civility,

Which onely heav’ns bestow on Muses Nursery.

And hence it is, that rustique Boores and Clownes,

Who want the good of civill education

So rude and rustique are in Countrey townes

When those, that have with Muses conversation

Or neere to Princes Courts their habitation

Become more civill, sociable, kinde

Hence ’tis that ev’ry rude and savage nation

Where gentle Arts abide not, are inclin’d

To rustique force, and savage cruelty of mind.

These few lines contain the basic scheme of early modern humanism which Aylett inherited from the Elizabethans, and which they in turn inherited from ancient Roman writers, especially the statesman, orator and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

In the next chapter we shall pursue the Ciceronian origins of Elizabethan humanism in some detail; but here it will be sufficient to note how the legacy of his thinking on the word ‘humanitas’ was made available to Elizabethan writers by means of pedogogical aids such as Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (‘Latin–English Dictionary’: 1565). Here the gloss for the word ‘humanitas’ reads: ‘Humanitie: mans nature: gentlenesse: courtesie: gentle behaviour: civilitie: pleasantnesse in maners: doctrine: teaching: liberall knowledge’.⁵ His list of examples (almost all from Cicero) indicate that these terms can be divided up under three headings: (1) ‘The state of humaine nature commen to us all’; (2) ‘Courtesie: gentleness: humanitie’; and (3) ‘Liberall knowledge: learning: humanitie’. These correspond, then, to Aylett’s threefold disposition: Nature, Virtue, Education. Each of these senses may be said to give rise to a specific inflection of Elizabethan humanism, which, for the purposes of the present study, we may designate as: ‘philosophical’ ‘courtly’ ‘literary’. These terms require a little explanation.

By ‘philosophical humanism’ I mean discourse centred on the word ‘humanity’ which explores human nature in its complex relation to ‘divinity’ and ‘brutality’. This is what allows Aylett to call humanity, paradoxically, ‘the summe of Divinity’ (p. 43). He does not mean that God is human, but rather that the most noble part of human nature is the divine element of the soul, and that, therefore, if humanity is to be cultivated as a positive virtue, then human nature will approach perfection in so far as it approaches the full realisation of its own natural divinity. However, for various reasons, humanity was most frequently coupled with words signifying ‘brutality’: those aspects of human nature which we share with the animals, usually seen in an adverse light, ranging from stupidity to ferocity. Humanism tended to define itself by how different human beings were from brute creation, rather than by how similar it was to divine being. The main reason for this was because the philosophical aspect of humanism was strongly influenced by the other two inflections, especially the ‘courtly’.

‘Courtly humanism’ is a phrase which needs to be treated with some caution, but it is the only expression which will do in the present circum-stances. The Elizabethans inherited from the works of Cicero the notion that humanitas was both ‘inclusive’ – Cooper’s ‘state of humaine nature commen to us all’ – and also (and more importantly) ‘exclusive’. It was hard for the upper-class gentleman Cicero to resist the idea that some people might, in fact, be more human than others if they cultivated what made them different from the brutes to a greater degree than their fellow men did. For Cicero, this difference was mainly constituted as reason (ratio) and speech (oratio); but he also perceived that human beings were naturally inclined to be more sociable than most other animals. Briefly, then, Cicero tended to view humanitas as the capacity to live at ease with other people, especially where daily intercourse was marked by a graceful consideration for others (‘courtesy’), and, even more importantly, where it was confirmed by witty and elegant conversation, in which the uniquely human virtue of speech could be exercised most fully. Ciceronian humanism is thus ‘exclusive’ because it is really the property of a social elite which has the wealth and leisure to develop such graces.⁶

For Cicero, and every other Roman writer of the period, human culture had reached its peak at Rome, which was simply referred to as the urbs (‘city’). Hence Ciceronian humanitas is very closely related to urbanitas (Ramage, 1973, p. 56). This is one of the most important areas of difference between Ciceronian and Elizabethan humanism. Cicero could never have designated this particular nexus of ideas concerning humanitas as ‘courdy’ (aulicus). Cicero’s Rome was a republic; and Cicero himself was a staunch republican. But the Elizabethans lived under a prince, and were, on the whole, partisans of monarchy. For them, generally, the royal court seemed to be the acme of ‘civilisation’. This word comes from the Latin civis, ‘citizen’. But the boundary between civil and courtly life was not easy to draw in the Elizabethan period, partly because the court was usually resident in London. For example, the anonymous author of a dialogue called Civil and Uncivil Life (1579) reveals that discussion is really centred on the far more familiar and traditional contrariety between ‘the Countrey and Courtly lyves’ (sig. A4v). Country life is deprecated as ‘uncivil’ because it lacks the graces which osmotically creep into the minds and hearts of those ‘that have … neere to Princes Courts their habitation’ as Aylett puts it (p. 40).

There are one or two exceptions to the general rule that the Ciceronian urbanity is transformed into Elizabethan ‘courtliness’. For example, in Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters (1580), Gabriel Harvey locates a typically humanistic dialogue in his home town of Saffron Walden in Essex, which Aylett would probably have dismissed as one of those ‘Countrey townes’ inhabited ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Contexts
• Part Two: Texts
• Conclusion
• Works Consulted
• Index