THE LITERATURE OF ENGLISH REFORMATION

 fostered and reshaped by 4 Tudor Monarchs and their ministers

 began with violent severance and ended with an uneasy compromise
 THOMAS CRANMER
- Archbishop of Canterbury (appointed by Henry VIII)
- sympathetic to the reform
- chief instrument of the King’s policy for the removal of papal supremacy in England
- annulled the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragorn and crowned Anne
Boleyn
- responsible for the promulgation1 of the ‘Ten Articles’ (1536) – first statement of faith
issued by the independent English Church
- responsible for the first official dissemination of the Bible in English language
 King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell – set in motion the wholesale dissolution of the
monasteries, created 6 new bishoprics
 dissolution of monasteries led to the extinction of traditional religious communities,
destruction of their buildings, dispersal of historic libraries and changes in the ownership of
the land
 disappearance of the women’s communities – left a hiatus in the development of women’s
consciousness and culture
 Henry VIII remained theologically and liturgically conservative
 Henry VIII – ‘Whip with 6 Strings’ (Act of 6 Articles of 1539) – denial of transubstantiation 2
became automatically punishable with burning, communion remained in one kind only, and
reinforcement of clerical celibacy
 after Henry VIII – short reign of Edward VI (a child)
 Edward VI was under the influence of protestant aristocrats
 by the order of the Privy Council images were removed from churches and clerical marriages
were recognized
 the Acts of Parliament against Lollardy and the Act of Six Articles were repealed
 Act of Uniformity imposed the English liturgy
 under Edward VI – new Book of Common Prayer
 after Edward VI – short reign of his sister Mary
 Mary attempted to undo the reforming zeal of the 2 previous reigns (unsuccessful)
 after Mary – Elizabeth I
 Elizabeth chose religious and political expediency, striving to shape and consolidate a
national Church
 the established norm of Elizabethan religious life – the via media (the middle way of the
Church of England)
 Puritanism – became increasingly vociferous and contentious (left a mark on the religious
and literary history of Britain)
 The Reformers of the English Church placed a consistent stress on the use of vernacular in
worship and on the importance of Holy Scriptures in a scholarly translation

1
The public announcement of
2
The idea that during mass, the bread and wine used for communion become the body and the blood of Jesus
Christ
  a need for an English Bible translated directly from Hebrew and Greek originals
 ‘The Great Bible’ – revision of the work of several distinct translators, the most important
was William Tyndale
 Tyndale expressed a confidence in the ‘grace’ of English language and propriety of knowing
Scriptures better than a bishop
 Tyndale claimed that his native tongue was unfit to translate the Bible – The Obedience of a
Christen Men (1528) – Greek and Hebrew agree much more with English than Latin
 the first complete printed English Bible of 1535 by Miles Coverdale (master of little Greek and
even less Hebrew)
 Coverdale combined Tyndale’s translation, Latin text of the Vulgate and Martin Luther’s
German Bible
 Impact on English Letters – combined Book of Psalms and Book of the Common Prayer into
Psalter (became an integral part of the formal daily worship of the Church of England)
 The Book of Common Prayer – statement of one of the most influential liturgical reforms of
the 16th century; distinctive for its avoidance of emotional language and imagery
(Christocentric)
 in 1549, it was deliberately open-ended and conservative
 in 1552, its emphasis became more Protestant
 The Collects – short prayers appointed for the mayor feast-days and Sundays of the Christian
year (translations of Latin texts)
 John Fox – ‘Book of Martyrs’ : description of the sufferings of martyrs and great persecution
of the faithful
 It presented a series of pictures that suggested that history was a nightmare from which
Elizabethan England has awoken

EARLY AND MID-SIXTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA

 most important effect was the result of increasingly secular, as opposed to devotional
emphases
 official ideology: God was best served in the world, not in the cloister – merely tacitly
accepted in a broad range of the literature of that period
 stress on secular – evident in the development of vernacular drama
 protestant suspicion gradually suppressed local traditions of popular religious drama
 a shift away from a drama based on sacred subjects (due to civic intolerance, government
censorship, banning plays which conflicted with religion)
 John Skelton – play ‘Magnyfycence’
- battle between Virtues and Vices for the human soul
- treats the importance of moderation in the affairs of great Someone
- advice and warning against pride, corruption, profligacy and folly
- represents the stages if political and moral collapse
- ‘Magnificence’ is distorted by pride, pride leads to false magnificence
 John Bale (author of 21 plays)
a) Kyng Johan – first English drama based on national history, although history is used to
make propagandists points and it balances historically based characters with traditional
embodiments of virtue and vice
 b) Three Laws, God’s Promise, John the Baptist, The Temptation of Our Lord – human
corruption of the divine scheme of redemption; distortion of the pure Law of Christ;
restoring humankind to grace
 John Heywood
a) The Playe called the foure PP – untidy farces with tidily orthodox conclusions
b) The Pardoner and The Friar
 Nicholas Udall – concentrated on writing plays for the boys in his charge
a) Ralph Roister Doister – writer who possessed a talent for finding English equivalents to
the stock of modern characters of the ancients (divided into acts and scenes)
 anonymous – ‘Gammer Gurtons Needle’ (a comedy)
 Native English tragedy was marked by the bloody, high-flown influence of Seneca
 Jasper Heywood – English translation of Seneca’s Troas, Thyestes, Hercules Furens
 Sir Phillip Sidney – ‘Defence of Poesie’
 Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville – ‘Gorboduc’ (‘The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex)
- the most striking and novel of the dramas during Elizabeth’s reign
- it naturalizes Seneca for an educated English audience
- to harness the potential of national history and myth as dramatic contribution to a
political discourse
- exploration of political decay
- considers the end of the dynasty brought about by the follies of the old and the
jealousies of the young

THE DEFENCE AND THE PRACTICE OF POETRY: PUTTENHAM AND THE SIDNEYS

 2 most articulate and acute Elizabethan critics of poetry: George Puttenham and Sir Phillip
Sidney
 Puttenham wrote ‘The Arte of English Poesie’ and Sidney wrote ‘The Defence of Poesie’ –
trace a poetic tradition which embraces the work of the ancient and selected vernacular
poets
 for them, poetry acted as the great communicator and the encourager of learning
 Puttenham’s treatise is the notion of enhancement of the dignity of the modern gentleman
poet by the values and social standing of a princely court
 Puttenham takes the figure of Queen Elizabeth as the focus of his modern enterprise
 ‘The Arte of English Poesie’:
- attempts to establish codes of literary good manners
- acceptable poets are Chaucer and Gower and unacceptable is Skelton
- main emphasis is to define and explain genre, form, metre and imagery
- attempts to dazzle the readers with display of cleverness, with illustrative diagrams and a
plethora of Greek definitions
 ‘The Defence of Poesie’
- overall tone seems easy and conversational
- fascination with words and unpretentious projection of himself into his writings
- shaped by need to reply to the case put by Plato and his fellow Poet-haters and
displaying his own enthusiasm and observation
- poetry, especially lyric poetry, gives delight it and also breeds virtue
 - true poetry draws from the experience of sinful humankind, offers vision of freedom and
injection of herculean strength, celebration of mortal love and the hope of immortality
 the memory of Sidney became public property and his writings emerges as crucial to the
political, literary, and sexual discourses of the late 16 th century
 Sidney’s works – all suggest processes of negotiation, persuasion, self-projection, and self-
fashioning which interrelate affairs of state with affairs of heart
a) The Arcadia – long prose romance interspersed with poems and pastoral elegies, written
for Mary Sidney
b) The Lady of May – royal entertainment; takes form of dignified dispute between
shepherd and a forester for the hand of the Lady of the title – very formal speechifying is
relieved by the comic Latinate pedantry
c) Astrophil and Stella – sonnet sequence; innovative variety, mastery of register and
narrative shaping – describe the development of the unrequited love of a star-lover (Gk.
Astrophil) for a distant star (lat. Stella)
 the influence of Astrophil and Stella on later English sonneteers war profound
 Phillip Sidney’s poetry had an influence on poetry of his younger brother Robert Sidney
 Robert Sidney also wrote sonnets which project an often ambiguous picture on self-
fashioning, self-indulging male lover
 his song: ‘Yonder comes a sad pilgrim’ – pseudo-medieval dialogue between a pilgrim
returning from the East and the Lady to whom he narrates the circumstances of her
melancholy and frustrated lover’s death
 his most striking poems are vividly dark, almost obsessive meditations on decay and
dissolution
 Mary Sidney provided a centre for the Sidney circle at her home, she approved the
posthumous publication of Phillip Sidney’s works and made her own distinct contribution to
English poetry
 Mary continued her brother’s translation of the Psalms which reveals her as a remarkably
resourceful experimenter with words and sounds
 Mary is one of the most precise, eloquent and unsolemn Protestant voices of 16 th century

SIXTEENTH-AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION

 the last quarter of 16th century saw a vast increase in the amount of prose fiction available to
the reading public
 explosion of vernacular fiction established new patterns of reading and writing
 Arcadia by Sidney was very popular; recommended by critic Gabriel Harvey
 George Gascoigne
a) ‘The Adventures of Master F.J.’ (published in his anthology A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres’ -
- comments on the amatory affectations of his time and he debunks the posturing of
courtly love
-F.J.’s amorous adventures are recounted by 2 intermediary narrators, G.T. and his friend
H.W. – comic representation of a triangle of lovers
b) ‘The Posies of George Gascoigne’ – insisted that his fiction was purely imaginary
 John Lyle – more interested in the art of speaking than in the art of telling
a) ‘Euphues: The Triumph of Wyt’ – representation of triangular relationship
 b) ‘Euphues and his England’ – sequel, a witty, courtly, rhetorical fit for all gentleman to
read, and to remember
 Thomas Nashe
- tends to exhibit less confidence in the traditional standing, values and authority of an
aristocratic elite
- fascinated by the potential of English Prose
- allows his various narrators to express themselves in styles appropriate both to their
condition and to the often disorientating circumstances in which they find themselves
- purports to speak in propria persona
- ‘Nashes Lenten Stuffe’ – burlesque encomium of herrings; his style can veer towards the
carnivalesque
- ‘The Behemoth of Constantinople’ – English ambassador pleading to Ottoman Empire to
release certain captives
- ‘Christ Teares over Jerusalem’ – meditates on the sins of modern London
- ‘Pierce Peinnilesse his Supplication to the Divell’ – complaint of an impoverished
professional writer in search of patronage, takes the form of a satirical diatribe; Pierce
bemoans the decline of aristocratic patronage
- ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’ – equally sanguine in its view of the shortcomings of the
ruling class
- ‘The Life of Jacke Wilton’ – a reader’s view of manners and events is controlled by Jack’s
vigorous first-person narration and his unflattering observation (not what, but how Jack
sees it)
 Thomas Deloney – his works are informed by the values of a hardworking and successful
tradesman
- ‘Jack of Newherie’ – four short novels about Berkshire clothier who proved his loyalty to
king by sewing coats and caps for soldiers
- ‘The gentle craft’
- ‘Thomas of Reading’
 Robert Greene
- experimented with romances which intermix Sidneian pastoral with Greek romance
- prolific writer of pamphlets concerned with low life and urban criminality (for example:
‘A Notable Discovery of Coosnage’)
- pastoral romances: ‘Pandosto’ (basis for Shakespeare’s work ‘The winter’s tale’), ‘The
Triumph of Time’ and ‘Menaphon’ – developing art of story-telling in prose
 Thomas Lodge
- ‘Rosalynde’ (Shakespeare used it for ‘As you like it’) – intermixture of love and politics,
chivalry and philosophy
- ‘Robert Second Duke of Normandie’ – forays into historical
- ‘A Margarite of America’
 Lady Mary Wroth: ‘The Countesse of Montgomoeries Urania’
- the first work of fiction published by an English woman writer
- reveals a pleasure in the rituals of chivalry, in knightly quests, and in the refined pursuit
of love which is both earthly and heavenly
- emerges as a master of character and discourse as a determined champion of the dignity
of her many women characters
 - looks back to medieval romances and looks forward to new patterns of courtship and
emotional fulfilment

THIS ISLAND AND THE WIDER WORLD: HISTORY, CHOROGRAPHY, AND GEOGRAPHY

 habits, rituals, ceremonies, and religious language of centuries were all subjected to a
rigorous process of reform
 the Church was deprived of much of its wealth and many of its traditional educational
resources
 the antiquaries found patrons in Matthew Parker and William Cecil, Lord Burghley
 John Leland – posthumous ‘The Itinerary of John Leland’
 Pioneer antiquaries: John Stow and William Camden
 Stow:
- A Survay of London. Conteyning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne estate and
description of that City – London’s real distinction lays in its actual rather than its
legendary history
 Camden
- Britannia sive…Angliae,Scotiae,Hiberniae…ex antiquitate…descriptio – great Latin history
of Britain and Ireland
- aim was to provide a scholarly ‘chorography’ (a historical delineation which combined
aspects of geography, topography and archaeology) of the entire British Isles
- argues for the continuity of British traditions
- ‘Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha’ – chronicle of reign of
Queen Elizabeth
- ‘Remains of a greater worke concerning Britaine’ – studies of the origins and
development of the English language, derivations of names and surnames…
 Raphael Holinshed: ‘Chronicles’
- often a plagiarist and his texts are semi-original enhanced by series of borrowings from
earlier historians
- ‘Holinshed’ – became an especially important quarry for Shakespeare
- In Chronicles, he describes kings in metaphors and views history from a narrowly
monarchic perspective
 Richard Hakluyt
- ‘Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation – collection of
testimonies and celebrations of exploits of sailors, traders, adventurers, and explorers
- further supplemented by Samuel Purchas (Hakluytus Posthumus…)
- the most sophisticated Hakluyt’s narrator was Sir Walter Ralegh
 Sir Walter Ralegh (arrogant and passionate Elizabethan)
- ‘The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana’ – stresses that he had
come to a paradisal land as its liberator
- first published prose work: ‘A Report of the Truth of The Fight About the Isles of the
Azores…Betwixt the Revenge…and an Armada of the King of Spain’
- ‘The History of the World’ – written during the long period of imprisonment in the
Tower, it is an extended elegiac reflection on disappointment and defeat – deals with the
rise and fall of the empires of the ancient worlds
 - poem: ‘What is our life’ – theatrical metaphors

RALEGH, SPENSER, AND THE CULT OF ELIZABETH

 Sir Walter Ralegh

- his lyric poems suggest a man self-consciously playing out a role as the formal knightly
lover, as the courtly poet, as the bold actor in a drama of passion, adventure and
morality
- later mediations on impending death: ‘What is our life?’, ‘Even such is Time’ and ‘On the
snuff of a candle, the night before he died’ – hope of Christian resurrection
- haunting pilgrim lyric: ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet’ – imagines a heavenly
transformation of the earthly body
- revised Petrarchan conventions
- adaption of ballad: ‘As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsinghame’ – shaped as a
dialogue between a despairing lover and a pilgrim returning from the Marian shrine at
Walsinghame, links Elizabeth to both Virgin Mary Queen of Heaven and to eternally
youthful nymph
- powerful lyric ‘The Lie’ – erupts with bitterness against a court, overly supportive of the
queen Elizabeth
 Queen ruled a court which embodied the idea of perfection
 her persona was compared to moon-goddess Diana and Cynthia and her reign linked to the
promised return of heavenly justice and peace under virgin Astraea
 her birthday fell on Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
 she accepted the flattering addresses of courtly poets and ideologically approved painters
 she was ‘married’ to England
 tribute: Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’
- figure of the warrior virgin, Britomart
- a truly British heroine who had actively assumed the port of Mars
- here, Elizabeth is the ‘Magnificent Empresse’, ‘Gloriana’ and ultimate focus of each of the
knightly quests
- her dual dignity as Head of State and as Supreme Governor of the Church of England
- 12 books each to describe adventures undertaken by knights and knightly dames in
honour of the 12 days of Gloriana’s annual fest (outlined in letter to Ralegh)
- debt of honour to Virgil
- influence of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gersualemme Liberata – imitated
phrases, verbal patterns and knightly images, directly borrowed characters and incidents
- looked back on past from an essentially Renaissance perspective but also response to
native literary traditions
- to understand Faerie Queene, one must understand literal meaning and allegorical
constructions, deconstruct his metaphors and discriminate between variety of possible
‘meanings’
- Spenser was fully aware of the methods employed by a major medieval allegorist
 - his own poetic language was neither a close imitation of the old, nor an assertively
modern one – artificial language served to draw attention to the very artifice of his poem
(romance – archaic terminology)
- his English style – full of historicizing and artificiality – exerted a powerful influence on
18th and 19th century poets
- is emphatically the work of an artist of the international Renaissance
- he blends old and new, Pagan and Christian, revived Roman and residual Gothic, pastoral
and country
- incorporates elements of classical philosophy and biblical lore

LATE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY VERSE

 some readers regarded the epic ambitions of The Faerie Queene as a distraction from the
miscellaneous body of verse
 33 sonnet of Amoretti suggests that Spenser himself thought the reverse
 Spenser: ‘The Shepheardes Calender’ – a poet experimenting with Virgilian pastoral
conventions and with variety of metrical forms, subjects and voices
 89 Amoretti and the marriage Hymn Epithalamion – readjust the Petrarchan model by seeing
the mistress as a creature reflecting the glory of her Divine Creator; re-enacts the ceremonial
and festivities of a marriage
 Spenser’s nuptial ode ‘Prothalamion’ – written in honour of marriage of 2 daughters of the
Earl of Worcester; commemorates the journey of the noble brides
 the poetry of the last decade of the century is often marked by an assertive nationalism and
by a concern to establish a sophisticated philosophical and political discourse in English
 Samuel Daniel:
- ‘Delia’ – to follow Sidney, not Spenser; a supplement edition of Astrophil and Stella
- ‘The Civil Wars between two Houses of Lancaster and York’ – exploration of the pre-
Tudor crisis in English affairs
 Michael Dayton:
- Sonnet sequence ‘Idea’ – reign of Queen Elizabeth to the challenges posed by a new
dynasty and it charts a relationship between lovers
- one of most striking poems: ‘Love in a humour’
- ‘The Shepheards Garland’ – form of eclogues in the Spenserian pastoral manner, praise
for Queen Elizabeth and mourning for Sidney
- ‘Endimion and Phoebe’ rewritten later as ‘The Man on the Moone’ – experiments with
Ovidian mythological form
- ‘legends’: Pierce Gaveston, Matilda, Robert Duke of Normandie, Mortimeriados –
attempt to deal with subjects from national history
- Mortimeriados – study of reign of Edward II, expanded into The Barons Warres
- ‘Odes of 1606’ – medieval and modern English history
- ‘To the Virginian Voyage’ – celebration of new colonial enterprise
- ‘Englands Heroicall Epistles’ – balladry of late Victorians
- ‘Poly-Olbion’ – topographical study of England and Wales; dedicated to Henry, Prince of
Wales and seeks to discover evidence of good
 Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke
 - ‘Life’ – the reign of Elizabeth and the court of King James
- ‘Caelica’
- unchanging reality is that of Gof
- discursive poems or ‘Treaties on Monarchy, Human Learning, and Wars’
 Sir John Davies
- ‘Nosce Teipsum’ – immortality of man and nature of man
- Orchestra Or a Poeme of Dauncing’ – signification of dance
 John Dowland
 Thomas Campion
- Composer of masques for the court and noble families
- Published an elegy when Prince Henry died
- ‘Book of Airs’ – mastery of melodic and metrical proportion
- ‘Observations in the Art of English Poesie’ – argues for the primacy of quantitative
metres
- ‘Rose-cheekt Lawra, come’
- His work testifies the coming of age of the modern English language as an appropriate
vehicle for lyrical emotion