6 Key excerpts on "Elizabethan Age"

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  eBook - ePub

  England Under the Tudors

  • G.R. Elton(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Cantiones Sacrae , Wilbye at his best, or Dowland’s sad, sweet songs. In the reign of Elizabeth, England reached the highest concentration of musical genius in all her history and led Europe in this field.

  3. Literature

  Any attempt to summarise here the work of the writers, poets, and dramatists who made of the sixteenth century one of the few really great periods of literature must obviously be hopeless. It was in language and its use that the English Renaissance mainly expressed itself. The visual arts played little part in it; music recorded astonishing achievements but for technical reasons remained a restricted expression of the age; in poetry, on the other hand, no more remarkable work has ever been done. Within the short space of some sixty years, and thanks to the labours of a few men of genius and many men of unusual talent, the English language shed the awkwardness and insufficiency which clung to it and became the flexible and all-competent instrument of an incomparable out-pouring. The greatest of all poets (perhaps in any language) was part of that band, but others beside Shakespeare added their efforts—more than can be listed here. Another difficulty is raised by the fact that the death of Queen Elizabeth marked a date of no importance in this story. There are differences between the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, but the significant years are really 1580–1630. Yet we cannot include here the whole reign of James I. As far as possible we shall therefore confine ourselves to work done before Elizabeth died and to men who were prominent before 1603, taking three subjects in turn—prose, lyrical poetry, and the drama.

  Prose has always been later to reach perfection than poetry because poetic language is always the first to undergo the discipline of literary treatment. The age of Elizabeth is no exception. Some decent literary prose appeared under Henry VIII, though most of it was cumbersome and long-winded; under the influence of their Greek and Latin studies, Cheke and Ascham wrote a clear if rather pedestrian style; but when the literary men really got hold of prose they did terrible things to it. Dissatisfied with the plainness of daily speech and the artlessness of his predecessors, John Lyly, in his two romances Euphues (1579) and Euphues his England (1580), developed a style of his own which, by the name of Euphuism, became the model and bane of English writing. Its essence lay in a laborious display of rhetorical devices; Lyly was particularly fond of pointless but well-balanced antitheses, frequent alliteration, a prodigality of similes arranged in wearisome strings, and rhetorical questions. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (c. 1580) suffers from much the same faults, though they are less glaring; oddly enough—in view of the large number of versified romances that ought to have been in prose—the episodic and often exalted Arcadia

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  Gloriana

  Elizabeth I and the Art of Queenship

  • Linda Collins, Siobhan Clarke(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  7

  ELIZABETHAN ARTS: THE GOLDEN AGE

  ‘AND SHE THE QUEENE OF MUSES IS ’

  MICHAEL DRAYTON

  The Golden Age of Elizabethan arts reached its height in the last decade or so of the Queen’s reign, from the 1590s until her death in 1603, when the English Renaissance fully blossomed. Drama was the dominant art form, attracting an estimated 15,000 people from the growing population of London to attend the theatre each week. Christopher Marlowe was arguably the first great playwright of the era, but after his death in 1593, it was William Shakespeare who dominated the London theatre.

  The Royal Shakespeare Company consider The Taming of the Shrew to be the dramatist’s earliest play, believed to have been written before 1592. Two Gentlemen of Verona , A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II are examples from the mid-1590s. Hamlet was written around 1600 and All’s Well that Ends Well is thought to span the period between the death of Elizabeth and the coronation of James I. Macbeth (also known as ‘The Scottish Play’) and King Lear are among a large body of work that falls within the Jacobean period.

  GLORIANA AND THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

  In the early days of Elizabeth’s rule, the morality plays of the medieval era were still being performed, as were stories enacted by strolling players. These were tales written in the vernacular, acted by semi-professional groups, generally in the streets, without scenery and with a minimum of props. But as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, plays became more complex, playhouses opened and the stage of the later Tudor era became accessible to the public on a level that was only rivalled by the Church. Theatregoing became hugely popular with the poorer classes, who somehow found the time and money to go and see plays that today might be considered elitist.

  The first purpose-built playhouse was the unimaginatively named Theatre, opened in Shoreditch in 1576, followed by the Curtain a year later. By 1587 the Rose, known for its connections with Christopher Marlowe, had been built beside the Thames in Southwark. In 1572, players were defined as vagabonds and criminals who were subject to arrest, whipping or branding. Religious and civic authorities condemned the playhouses as a scandal and an outrage. To avoid prosecution, theatres clustered around the Southwark area, which was known as a ‘liberty’. In other words, it was outside the city boundaries, beyond the control of the Lord Mayor, and a part of London where all sorts of prohibited activities could take place openly. The original Globe Theatre opened in Southwark in 1599, to house a group of players known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. They were a company of six actors who each took shares in the theatre to fund its construction. The young William Shakespeare was a member and wrote most of their plays. His genius for wordplay and dramatic dialogue was unprecedented.

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  The Elizabethan World

  • Susan Doran, Norman Jones, Susan Doran, Norman Jones(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter One Introduction Susan Doran and Norman Jones DOI: 10.4324/9781315736044-1

  T he idea of a book on the ‘Elizabethan World’ may seem to give an undue importance to England in the second half of the sixteenth century. Certainly, other volumes in this series have a better claim to use the all-encompassing term ‘world’. Even Andrew Pettegree’s The Reformation World or Beat Kümin’s The European World, 1500–1800 incorporate an entire continent, not to mention its overseas empires. England from 1558 until 1603, however, was just a kingdom, within a relatively small archipelago off Continental Europe; it had no permanent colonies, was limited in its military manpower and consequently exercised far less power and influence on the Continent than either Valois France or Habsburg Spain. So why the ‘Elizabethan World’?

  Elizabethan England occupies an unusual and important historical space in the world. In all of the ‘Anglo zone’ – those global places where English is spoken and written – Elizabethan history and culture have long enjoyed a mythic status. The ‘Golden Age of English Literature’ is securely, if not entirely accurately, located in the Elizabethan period, as it was a time when the commercial theatre flourished, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney produced their poetic masterpieces and William Shakespeare was in full creative bloom. The Church of England traces its roots back to the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement of the Church, reveres John Jewel and Richard Hooker as its founders, and sees the Elizabethan ‘middle way’ as a crucial element in the Anglican identity. The Elizabethan period also marks the foundation of the early British Empire owing to Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe and Walter Ralegh’s sponsorship of the early colonisation of Roanoke (renamed Virginia in Elizabeth’s honour). The events and people of the time are some of the most colourful and best known in British history; the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 provides one of its most famous victories and seems to mark England’s emergence as a naval power; Elizabeth I is perhaps the best known of its monarchs; and who hasn’t heard of William Shakespeare? While Hollywood has obviously contributed to the period’s fame in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the people and events in Elizabeth’s reign appeared much earlier as subjects of novels by Sir Walter Scott, a play by Friedrich Schiller, operas by Rossini and Donizetti and a significant number of Victorian paintings and children’s books.

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  Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I

  • Edmund Spenser, George Armstrong Wauchope, (Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Add to this intense delight in life, with all its mystery, beauty, and power, the keen zest for learning which filled the air that men breathed, and it is easy to understand that the time was ripe for a new and brilliant epoch in literature. First among the poetic geniuses of the Elizabethan period came Edmund Spenser with his Faerie Queene, the allegory of an ideal chivalry. This poem is one of the fruits of that intellectual awakening which first fertilized Italian thought in the twelfth century, and, slowly spreading over Europe, made its way into England in the fifteenth century. The mighty impulse of this New Learning culminated during the reign of the Virgin Queen in a profound quickening of the national consciousness, and in arousing an intense curiosity to know and to imitate the rich treasures of the classics and romance. Its first phase was the classical revival. The tyrannous authority of ecclesiasticism had long since been broken; a general reaction from Christian asceticism had set in; and by the side of the ceremonies of the church had been introduced a semi-pagan religion of art—the worship of moral and sensuous beauty. Illiteracy was no longer the style at court. Elizabeth herself set the example in the study of Greek. Books and manuscripts were eagerly sought after, Scholars became conversant with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the great tragic poets Sophocles, Euripides, and Æschylus; and translations for the many of Vergil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca poured forth from the printing-presses of London. The English mind was strongly tempered by the idealistic philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the influence of Latin tragedy and comedy was strongly felt by the early English drama. Along with this classical culture came a higher appreciation of the beauty of mediævalism

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  The Legacy Of A Monarch's Majestic Translation

  The Kings James Bible The Remarkable Relevance of a Seventeenth-Century Book to the Twenty-First Century

  • Donald L. Brake(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

    (Publisher)

  The period is often referred to as Elizabethan English and included the greatest of all English poets, William Shakespeare. Latin, and to a lesser degree Greek and French, was still considered the language of scholars. The fixation on classic education and the inability of English to adequately communicate the new concepts introduced hundreds of new vocabulary words, many borrowed from Latin, Greek, and French (i.e. pathetic, pungent, excavate, meditate, adapt, insane, factious, comedy, tragedy, sarcasm, and crisis). During this period, Greek based suffixes “-ize and -ism were introduced. A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation that took place in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a result long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short vowel sounds remained unchanged). The shift started gradually in the centuries before the fifteenth century and continued into the late eighteenth century. The change between 1500 and 1700 was more dramatic. 47 One needs only look at the difference between the Wycliffe Bible (1382) and the King James (1611) to observe the vast differences. By the end of the 16th century, English had become widely accepted as a language of learning equal, if not superior, to the classical languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular literature and criticized throughout Europe as crude, limited, and undeveloped now became recognized for its inherent qualities. 48 The translation of the King James Bible occurred within this evolving environment

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  The Age of Thomas Nashe

  Text, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England

  • Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan Pong Linton(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: The Age of Thomas Nashe

  Steve Mentz DOI: 10.4324/9781315612331-1

  For a long time, literary critics described the Age of Elizabeth through C.S. Lewis's mid-twentieth-century term: “golden.” During Elizabeth's reign, out of the ashes of the earlier Tudor poetry that Lewis called “drab,” sprang the splendid phoenixes who would exemplify the English Renaissance: fiery Marlowe, idealistic and idolized Sidney, honey-tongued Shakespeare, the sage and serious poet Spenser. Early modern studies have come a long way from Lewis's vision, but his approach still casts a shadow over idiosyncratic Elizabethan writers such as Thomas Nashe. For Lewis and his traditional conception of Elizabethan literature, Nashe presents a basic conundrum. “In a certain sense of the word, ‘say,’” Lewis famously intoned in 1944, “when asked what Nashe ‘says,’ we should have to reply ‘nothing.’”1 Lewis recognized Nashe's talent and his influence on other writers, but the literary works themselves baffled his critical faculties. Even after Lewis's day passed, Elizabethan scholarship continued to treat Nashe as an outsider and oddity.2

  1 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954) 416. This material was first presented as the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1944.

  2 Critics from Lewis to Jonathan Crewe and others often refer to “the Nashe problem.” For a summary of responses, see Steve Mentz , Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 183–7.

  In the final decades of the twentieth century and increasingly in the early twenty-first, this conception of Nashe and of Elizabethan literature has changed radically. More opportunity than problem, Nashe has come to represent what we have overlooked for too long, so that the 1590s can more engagingly be thought of as the “Age of Nashe” rather than Elizabeth's “Golden Age.” Nashe's work now figures prominently in many emerging trends in late sixteenth-century studies, in large part because of this author's multiplicity. He touches many of the areas of early modern literary culture that interest today's critics. He was a jobbing playwright, occasional poet, a “man in print,” a polemicist, an amateur theologian, and an enthusiastic pornographer. His variety and productivity have led recent critics to see in him the seamy and multifaceted side of Elizabethan literary culture that critics like Lewis overlooked. Nashe today sits at the center of many dominant and emerging trends in early modern literary scholarship, including print culture and the history of the book; histories of sexuality and pornography; urban culture; the changing nature of patronage, including theatrical patronage; polemic and “cheap print”; religious controversy; and evolving definitions of authorship and even “literature” as such.3

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