Paper no 01 Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age & Discuss major poets.

Name: Vidhya Pandya

Semester: MA – 1

Roll No : 43

Paper No: 1 The Renaissance Literature

Enrolment No: 2069108420190031

Email id: vidhupandya10497@gmail.com

Year: 2018 – 20

Submitted to: Department of English, Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Assignment’s topic: Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age and Discuss major poets of the age.

◆  Introduction :-

The Renaissance period started in 1500 and continued until 1660. The Renaissance period is divided into 4 remarkable age – 1. Elizabethan Age,2. Jacobean Age,3.Caroline Age, 4.Commonwealth period. The reign of Queen Elizabeth lasted from 1558 until her death in 1603, during which time arts in England has increased. This period is generally regarded as the greatest in the history of our literature.

The Elizabethan Age is considered the “ Golden Age” of English literature. English writers were intrigued and heavily influenced by Italian Renaissance writing and readily adopted this model.This period also saw the introduction of a new genre in English theatre, the tragic – comedy, which became very popular. The era is also considered “ the era of sonnet”.

◆ Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age:-

1. Religious Toleration:-

The most characteristic feature of the age was the comparative religious tolerance, which was due largely to the Queen’s influence. The frightful excesses of the religious war known as the Thirty Years' War on the Continent found no parallel in England. Upon her accession Elizabeth found the whole kingdom divided against itself; the North was largely Catholic, while the Southern countries were as strongly Protestant. Scotland had followed the Reformation in its own intense way, while Ireland remained true to its old religious traditions, and both countries were openly rebellious. The court, made up of both parties, witnessed the rival intrigues of those who sought to gain the Royal favor. It was due partly to the intense absorption of men's mind in religious questions that the preceding century, through an age of advancing learning, produced scarcely any literature worthy of the name. Elizabeth favored both religious parties, and presently the saw of amazement Catholics and Protestants acting together as trusted counselors of a great sovereign.

For the first time since the Reformation began, the fundamental question of religious Toleration seemed to be settled, and the mind of man,freed from religious fears and persecutions,turned with a great creative impulse to other forms of activity. It is partly from this new freedom of the mind that the Age of Elizabeth received its great literary stimulus.

2. Social contentment:-

It was an age of comparative social contentment, in strong contrast with the days of Langland. The rapid increase of manufacturing towns gave employment to thousands who had before been idle and discontented. Increasing trade brought enormous wealth to England, and this wealth was shared to this extent, at least, that for the first time some systematic care for the needy was attempted. The increase of wealth, the improvement of living, the opportunities for labour, the new social content, -- these also are factors which help to account for the new literary activity.

We3. Enthusiasm:-

It is an age of dreams, of adventure, of unbounded enthusiasm springing from the new lands of fabulous riches revealed by English explorers. Drake sails around the world, shaping the mighty course which England colonizers shall follow through the centuries ; and presently the young philosopher ....

Bacon is saying confidently, “ I have taken all knowledge for my province,”

The mind must search further than the eye; with  new, rich lands opened to the sight, the imagination must create new forms to people the new worlds.

Marston- writes: “Why ,man,all their dripping pans are pure gold. The prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and as for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather them by the seashore to hang on their children’s Coates.”

Cabot, Drake, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh, Willoughby, Hawkins, -- a score of explorers reveal a new earth to men's eyes, and instantly literature created a new heaven to match it. So dreams & deeds increase side by side, and the dream is ever greater than the deed. That is the meaning of literature.

4. The Drama:-

To sum up, the Age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and comfort among all classes, of unbounded patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad. For a parallel we must go back to the Age of Pericles in Athens, or of Augustus in Rome, or go forward a little to the magnificent court of Louis XIV, when Corneille, Racine, and Moliere brought the drama in France to the point where Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson had left it in England half a century earlier. Such an age of great thought and great action, appealing to the eyes as well as to the imagination and intellect, finds but one adequate literary expression; neither poetry nor the story can express the whole man, -- his thought, feeling, action, and the resulting character; hence in the Age of Elizabeth literature turned instinctively to the drama and brought it rapidly to the highest stage of its development.

◆ Major POETS of the Age:

The major poets of the Elizabethan period are given below:

1.    Edmund Spenser

2.    Sir Philip Sidney

3.    John Donne

4.    Ben Jonson

1.    Edmund Spenser: [1552 – 1599]

He was born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, and was poor. His education began at the Merchant Tailors' school in London and was continued in Cambridge. His schoolmates include Kyd and Lodge. He graduated BA and MA from Cambridge , where he began his friendship with Gabriel Harvey.

After leaving Cambridge Spenser went to the north of England, on some unknown work or quest. Here his chief occupation was to fall in love and to record his melancholy over the lost Rosalind in the” Shepherd’s Calendar.” Upon his friend Harvey's advice he came to London, bringing his poem ; and here he met Leicester, then at the height of royal favor, and the latter took him to live at Leicester House. Here he finished the  Shepherd’s Calendar, and here he met Sidney and all the  queen' s favourites.

In 1580, he became secretary to Lord Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland. From then on, Spenser lived in Ireland as a English planter. Irish uprisings English rule was a regular occurrence at this time. For a while he lived in the ruined castle of Kilcolman in Cork. Spenser was driven away and the Kilcolman Castle was burned during Tyrone's rebellion in 1598. Spenser’s infant child and first wife are believed to have died at this time.

● His notable works:-

1.The  Shepherd' s Calendar.

2. The Faerie Queens

3. Astrophel

4. Amoretti

5.Epithalamion

6.Prothalamion

● Characteristics of Spenser's Poetry:

The 5 main qualities of Spenser's Poetry are:

1.    A perfect melody

2.    A rare sense of beauty

3.    A splendid imagination

4.    A lofty moral purity and seriousness

5.    A delicate idealism.

2.    Sir Philip Sidney: [ 1554 – 1586]

Among the prose writers of this wonderful literary age there are many others that deserve passing notice, through they fall far below the standard of Bacon & Hooker.

Sir Philip Sidney , who has already been considered as a Poet, is quite as well known by his prose works. He was born in Kent into an aristocratic family, King Philip II was his godfather. His lifelong friend and future biographer was Fulke Greville. He had left Oxford without taking a degree.

 ● His notable works:

1.Astrophel and Stella

2. Arcadia

3.Revision of Arcadia

4. Apologie for Portie

5.The plan

6. Synopsis

3.    John Donne: [1572 – 1631]

The briefest outline of Donne's life shows it’s intense human interest. He was born in London, the son of a rich iron merchant, at the time when the Merchants of England were creating a new and higher kind of princes. On his father's side he came from an old Welsh family, and on his mother’s side he came from the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More's family. Both family were Catholic. Then later he conversion to Anglican religion.

●His major poems are below:

1. The Flea

2. The Canonization

3. A Hymn to God the Father

4. The Relic

5. Velediction : Forbidding Mourning

6. Sum Rising

7. Love's Alchemy

 ● His sonnets are also given below:

1. Sonnet 10 : Death , Be Not Proud

2. Sonnet 14 : Batter My Heart

He wrote approx. 5 satires, 20 elegies epigraphs, verse letters, songs and sonnets, 19 Holy sonnets.

Donne wrote the 2 anniversary poems , An Anatomy of the World(1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul(1612) for his patron Robert Drury.

In 1610 and 1611 he wrote 2 anti- Catholic polemics:

1.Pseudo Martyr &

2. Ignatius his Conclave.

4.    Ben Jonson:[1573 – 1637]

Ben Jonson, by name of Benjamin Jonson, was an English Stuart dramatist, playwright, poet, & literary critic. He is generally regarded as the second most important dramatist after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.

Jonson was a classically educated, well- read & cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights & the poet’s of the Jacobean era &of the Caroline era.

● His Notable Works are given below:

1. A Tale of a Tub – 1596

2. The Isle of Dogs – 1597

3. The Case of Altered – 1597- 98

4. The Alchemist - 1610

5. Epicene or The Silent Woman – c. 1609

6. Bartholomew Fair – 1614

7. Every Man in His Humour – 1598

 ● Early Comedies:-

1. Every Man Out of His Humour – 1599

2. Cynthia's Revels – 1600

3. The Poetaster – 1601

◆ Conclusion:-

To sum up the Age , it’s tells that the period is generally regarded as the greatest in the history of our literature.

Historically, we note in this age tremendous impetus received from the Renaissance, from the Reformation , and from the exploration of the New world. It was marked by a strong national spirit, by patriotism, by religious tolerance, by social content, by intellectual progress, and by unbounded enthusiasm.

◆ References :-

1.    http://bcsenglish.com/introduction-to-the-elizabethan-age/

2.    History of English literature by W. J Long.

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