Being Elizabethan

Understanding Shakespeare's Neighbors

Norman Jones

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119168249, 9781119168232
• eBook ISBN: 9781119168263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

Captures the worldviews, concerns, joys, and experiences of people living through the cultural changes in the second half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare's age.

Elizabethans lived through a time of cultural collapse and rejuvenation as the impacts of globalization, the religious Reformation, economic and scientific revolutions, wars, and religious dissent forced them to reformulate their ideas of God, nation, society and self. This well-written, accessible book depicting how Elizabethans perceived reality and acted on their perceptions illustrates Elizabethan life, offering readers well-told stories about the Elizabethan people and the world around them. It defines the older ideas of pre-Elizabethan culture and shows how they were shattered and replaced by a new culture based on the emergence of individual conscience. The book posits that post-Reformation English culture, emphasizing the internalization of religious certainties, embraced skepticism in ways that valued individualism over older communal values. 

Being Elizabethan portrays how people's lives were shaped and changed by the tension between a received belief in divine stability and new, destabilizing, ideas about physical and metaphysical truth. It begins with a chapter that examines how idealized virtues in a divinely governed universe were encapsulated in funeral sermons and epitaphs, exploring how they perceived the Divine Order. Other chapters discuss Elizabethan social stations, community, economics, self-expression, and more. 

• Illustrates how early modern culture was born by exposing readers to events, artistic expressions, and personal experiences
• Provides an understanding of Elizabethan people by summarizing momentous events with which they grew up
• Appeals to students, scholars, and laymen interested in history and literature of the Elizabethan era
• Shows how a new cultural era, the age of Shakespeare, grew from collapsing late Medieval worldviews.

Being Elizabethan is a captivating read for anyone interested in early modern English culture and society. It is an excellent source of information for those studying Tudor and early Stuart history and/or literature.

1
Idealized Lives: Speak Nothing but Good of the Dead

On December 10, 1558, Bishop White of Winchester preached at the funeral of Queen Mary Tudor. He took as his theme the Biblical text, “ladudam mortuas magis quam viventes”—“it is better to praise the dead than the living.”

By praising Mary’s exemplary life, White was trying to convince the clergy and magistracy of England to resist the pestilential wolves of heresy coming out of Geneva and Germany, at the new Queen Elizabeth’s invitation, full of blasphemy and heresy. Their duty called them to be faithful dogs who barked to protect England from heresy and rebellion. Better a lively dog than a dead lion!¹

He extolled Mary’s godly virtues. He told of how, as she was dying, she received the Eucharistic viaticum, the passport into heaven. While receiving the sacrament of Extreme Unction, she was saying the Psalms from memory as the priest read them. At the elevation of the host, she, weak as she was, lifted up her eyes with a devout heart. Then, bowing her head at the benediction, she surrendered “a mild and glorious spirit into the hands of her maker.”² “I verily believe,” he said, “the poorest creature in all this city feared not God more than she did.” All the bishop’s hearers were urged to be careful not to die “without charity, without devotion, without good works, murmuring and blaspheming against Jesus Christ and his church.”³

This was a brave sermon, barking at the new queen, but it took a familiar form. The dead queen was a model of Christian virtue, leading the way to heaven. Mary would have agreed with William Peryn, the newly restored Prior of the Dominican house at Blackfriars, who confessed his sins as defined by the Roman Catholic Church in 1554:

I confess my innumerable iniquities wherein I have continued and offended the chief in breaking of the holy ten commandments, in the 12 articles of the Catholic faith, the statutes and commandments of holy Church, in the 12 counsels of the gospel, in breaking such private vows as I have promised, in the 7 mortal sins, omitting the 7 works of mercy ghostly, and in not doing the 7 works of the holy inspirations. I have misused the gift of grace lent unto me⁴

As he says elsewhere, we should all admit, “I am the most wicked wretch and unkind sinner.”⁵

Later, Elizabeth’s Protestant preachers were not interceding for the souls of the dead or keeping the commandments of the Roman Catholic Church. But they were still celebrating the departed as role models for the living. When Mistress Katherine Brettergh died in June of 1601, she was praised as an ideally godly woman, able to reject Satan on her deathbed and accept her salvation. The proofs of her ideal Christian life were very different from those of Mary Tudor.

Born late in Elizabeth’s reign, Katherine Brettergh had taken her faith into her own hands, reading and meditating on scripture, keeping her mind and heart oriented toward God. She needed no priest; nor did she need Peryn’s list of mortal sins and works of mercy. As William Harrison said in her funeral sermon:

The Scriptures she knew from a child, and by reading thereof, gained such knowledge, that she was able readily to apply them when occasion was offered, as we may see at the time of her death, and that so fitly, and effectually, that she seemed to have made them her daily meditation. For the things of this world she was moderate, and sober, and by her Christian life and death, she might teach many Gentlewomen, how vain the pleasures and fashions of this world are, and how far unable to bring that peace to a distressed heart, that the embracing of true Religion can.⁶

Katherine was celebrated as a paragon among women. In an age when many thought women too dim to read and understand scripture, she was living the ideal for all Christians. As Thomas Gattaker said when he published the funeral sermon of Rebecca Crisp,

Examples of this sex are in some respect of the twain the more needful. That Popish conceit sticketh still in the minds of many: that knowledge and book‐learning is for great Clerks only; mean men, and women much more then, have no need of it, neither indeed can attain unto it. Yet God telleth us, that they must all know him from the highest to the lowest, whom he showeth mercy unto in remission of their sins. And surely, if to know God in Christ be life eternal; then to be ignorant of him, cannot be, or bring but eternal destruction. Besides that, Christianity worketh no distinction of Sex. The same common salvation is propounded to both Sexes; the same means of attaining it are likewise common to either.⁷

In the world into which Mary Tudor was born in 1516, it was unexpected—even heretical—for common folk of either sex to read and comprehend the Bible in the common tongue. Good people did not need to know the Bible to be good, but they had to act in accord with Christian virtue taught by their priests. Henry VIII put the Bible in English in every parish, but in 1540 he and his parliament had second thoughts. They concluded that the holy book was too dangerous for uneducated men and all women to read.⁸

Nonetheless, by the time Katherine Brettergh was born in the 1580’s, popular access to the Bible was highly desirable, and Katherine could demonstrate her godliness by being a Bible‐reading Christian. She was thought capable of wrestling with sin and salvation personally. Her ideas of virtue were very different from Queen Mary’s, but Mary Tudor and Katherine Brettergh were both ideals of the good Christian life for their times.

All women and men were challenged by the question of what it means to be a good person; to live virtuously; to be a model for your associates and your descendants. It was universally agreed that “We should in our lifetimes, when fit occasion is offered, perform all good duties which are commanded in the word of God.” This makes the précises of lives found in wills, funerals, and tombs excellent descriptions of lives ideally lived, the departed modeling for the edification of the living. As Robert Pricke said at the funeral of Sir Edward and Lady Susan Lewknor, there was “no greater comfor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Idealized Lives: Speak Nothing but Good of the Dead
• 2 Divine Social and Political Orders
• 3 Roles
• 4 Taming the Natural Child: Preparations for Living
• 5 Seeing the World Anew
• 6 Reimagining England’s Past
• 7 Living Under Divine Providence
• 8 Personal Virtue
• 9 Moral Economies
• 10 Creating the Godly State
• 11 A Generation of Hearers
• 12 Elizabethan Lives Lived
• Primary Bibliography
• Secondary Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement