Jacobean Age

4 Key excerpts on "Jacobean Age"

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  eBook - ePub

  A Preface to Shakespeare's Tragedies

  • Michael Mangan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part Two Shakespeare and the Theatre of His Time Passage contains an image

  6 Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy

  The great age of English tragedy

  Not every age has produced tragedies - or at least, not tragedies that are still read today. Broadly speaking, when we look back over the history of English literature, certain ages seem to have put their best energies into particular literary forms: for the Victorians it was the large-scale realist novel that demanded their greatest effort; for the early eighteenth century it was the urbane satire in verse or prose; for the Romantics it was the contemplative poem. This is not to imply that there were no novels written during the Romantic period, or that the Victorians did not write poetry: we are talking here only about some basic trends and the way in which particular art forms capture the imagination of a culture at particular times. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England was a period when there was a variety of literary activity going on: lyrics, epics, satires, jestbooks, sermons, sonnets, essays all abounded. But it is usual to see this age as the great age of the English drama, and in particular as the great age of English tragedy. It is worth asking why this was so.

  A relationship may be posited, for example, between the writing of great tragedies in the early years of the seventeenth century and the social and economic conditions which were prevalent in England at the time. This relationship, it should be warned, is not a simple and direct one. Perhaps it would be reassuringly straightforward if it were: if, for example, one could say that the predominance of tragedies in this period were a direct result or expression of a social and economic crisis. Things are rarely that neat in literary history, however. The years we are talking about, from about 1590 through to about 1615 were not devoid of social, political and economic problems, as earlier sections have shown, but the crises of the period were no greater than those of the years immediately before and after this period. The constitutional and ideological upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century and the revolutionary years of the mid-seventeenth were more traumatic than anything that was happening between 1590 and 1615. If anything, it is more realistic to see this period as a comparative lull between the various storms which preceded and followed it.

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  Renaissance Hybrids

  Culture and Genre in Early Modern England

  • Gary A. Schmidt(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5Jacobean Absolutism and the Rise of Tragicomedy

  Crisis and Compromise

  In 1616 the poet-sovereign King James I of England published his collected Workes ; in the same year, the esteemed jurist Sir Edward Coke was dismissed from the King’s Bench and the Privy Council for repeatedly invoking common law to hedge the King’s absolute power. In 1616, finally, the great Royalist poet and author of Jacobean masques, Ben Jonson, published his own Works ; the frontispiece of this audacious volume featured the figure of Tragicomoedia at the top of a Romanesque architectural façade, standing above (and therefore superior to) the lower figures of Satyr, Pastor, and the muses of Tragoedia and Comoedia.1 Linking these three contemporary events may at first seem a rather aimless exercise in ‘connect the dots’; however, as I shall argue here, the rise of tragicomedy in the early Stuart period owes its force and relevance to the political developments, philosophy, and contestations of the period. Tragicomedy emerged in the early years of James’s reign, in part, to mediate between the demands of the King’s absolutist philosophy and a society that had increasingly to account for the emerging interests of the landed gentry and radical groups such as the Puritans and Levellers.

  From the conservatism of the court masque to the festive misrule of city comedy, Jacobean literary genres consciously attempted to register and adapt to new social reorganizations and contemporary political developments. The pastoral tragicomedy inaugurated by Giambattista Guarini, in particular, emerged in its English incarnation as an ideal vehicle for such considerations. Franco Moretti maintains, for example, that ‘the ‘mixed’ form of tragicomedy embodies in its dramatic structure that compromise between the sphere of the state and civil society that was one of the great Elizabethan aspirations’ (61). Moretti emphasizes the essential conservatism of tragicomedy, seen in works that stage the monarch’s ability to effect an ‘organic restoration of hierarchy and meaning’ by satisfying nostalgia for a feudal worldview in which ‘man is what his sovereign makes him’ (67, 60).2

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  Literature

  A Student's Guide

  • Louis Markos, David S. Dockery(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Crossway

    (Publisher)

  The Hind and the Panther , English letters adapted a more artificial, self-conscious pose that was less grand than that of the Renaissance but more cultured and refined.

  In his mastery of the heroic couplet, his off-and-on relationship as a court poet, his interest in literary criticism, and his positioning of himself in dialogue with the ancient poets of Rome, Dryden helped pave the way for the full flowering in England of an age known variously as the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, The Neoclassical Age, and the Augustan Age—an age that was also strongly influenced by such French neoclassical satirists as Boileau (1636–1711), tragedians as Racine (1639–1699) and Corneille (1606–1684), and men of letters as Voltaire (1694–1778). All these writers influenced the work of England’s three central eighteenth-century writers: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784).

  The greatest developments of England’s Augustan Age were in the genres of the verse epistle (Pope’s Essay on Man and Essay on Criticism ), the mock epic (Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad ), satire (Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels , The Tale of the Tub , The Battle of the Books , and “A Modest Proposal”) and moral and aesthetic criticism (Johnson’s Rasselas , Lives of the Poets , “Preface to Shakespeare,” and, of course, his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language ). Much of the spirit of the eighteenth century is captured in James Boswell ’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and in the urbane yet spirited essays of Johnson, Joseph Addison (1672–1719), and Richard Steele (1672–1729), which appeared in such periodicals as The Tatler , The Spectator , and The Rambler

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  A Short Sketch of English Literature

  From Chaucer to the Present Time

  • El. Mann(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  The Elizabethan Period. 9 T h e E l i z a b e t h a n P e r i o d . 1558—1642 (including the reign of James I., and that of Charles I., to the out-break of the Civil War.) This period which includes the reign of James I. and partly that of Charles I., extends over a much greater space than the reign of Queen Elizabeth proper. As it was the most brilliant in English literature, its influence continued to be felt for a long time. The drama constituted its chief literary feature; and its close is contemporary with the outbreak of the Civil War.' It contains the noblest names of English literature, those of Spenser, Shakspeare, Hooker, Bacon, besides a host of others who have almost been overlooked in the crowd. The reign of Elizabeth was also one of important political activity and the time of great discoveries, and counted as many heroes as poets, and not seldom, both these characters were united in the same per-son, as in the case of Sir Philip Sidney (1554—1586). A far greater poet, Edmund Spenser (1553—1599), the author of the Fcerie Queene (Fairy Queen), was a native of London. He was descended from a good family, though not rich, and received his education at the university of Cambridge. When he left the university, he resided for some time in the north of England, and there published his first poem, The Shepherd's Calendar, a series of pastorals, divided into twelve parts or months. A friend, (Mr. Gabriel Harvey), persuaded him to return to London and introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney, himself a poet and one of the greatest ornaments of the brilliant court of Elizabeth. Sidney, in his turn, recommended the poet to Dudley, Earl of Leicester (his uncle) the favourite of Eliza-beth, and after a long delay, he received a grant of for-feited land in the county of Cork, Ireland.

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