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6. Seventeenth-Century England.
Early Stuart England: The Civil Wars / Cavalier and Metaphysical Poets:
Jonson & the Cavalier Poets, Donne & the Metaphysical Poets /
Shakespeare’s Contemporaries & Post-Shakespearean Drama: Non-
Professional Theatre, Private Theatre, The Mood of Jacobean Drama.
The Age of Milton (1642 – 1660): John Milton.
The Restoration (1660 – 1690): Restoration Comedy / Prose Voices of the
Restoration: Samuel Pepys and John Bunyan / Restoration Poetry: John
Dryden and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
SEMINAR: Cavalier & Metaphysical Poetry “Paradise Lost”
THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND
17th.century England opens a period of great political changes and turmoils. However, economy and trade flourish in parallel with Europe (trade and colonizing America).
Unlike Europe’s heavy absolutism, the English Crown loses its strength and authority, now replaced by a strong Parliament. The TENSION monarchy/Parliament owes to
- James I’s authoritarian, abusive yet largely dependant policy (1603-1625), which ignores or violates parliamentary consent yet asks frequently for financial aid. Moreover, James sympathizes with Scottish Calvinists yet will have to rely heavily on Anglican bishops, supporters of monarchy.
- Charles I (James’s philo-Catholic son) (1625-1649), who was highly intolerant in religious matters (deposition of Protestant/Anglican posts in favour of Catholics) and continues to be as abusive, disregarding with respect to Parliament and prone to favoritism as James.
Such PROGRESSIVE DISCONTENT AND TENSION ends up in a CIVIL WAR (1642),
fought between two factions:
- The MONARCHIC /ROYALIST SIDE (gentry, conservative and feudalistic sections of society, Anglican clergy and peasantry).
- The PARLIAMENTARIANS /REPUBLICANS (enriched urban middle-classes representing new power relationship according to wealth, dissenters or radical groups such as Puritans, Presbyterians, Levellers, … ). Not inherently anti-royalist yet resisting royal abuse.
Oliver Cromwell was the military leader of the republicans, a pious army of ‘Ironsides’ praying soldiers. The battle of Marston Moor (1644) proved crucial for Cromwells’s success whereas Charles’s royalist army was defeated by the Scotts, who sent the king to the Parliament and made him submit to its terms.
As the king refused, he was tried by the high court and sentenced to die in 1649. The nation declared itself a commonwealth or republic (1649-1660), and Cromwell the Lord Protector.
Cromwell’s rule was highly pragmatic (more inclined to obtain social freedom and liberties than religious intolerance) and utilitarian, as he dismisses any radical outburst or utopian idealism. After his death, his son Richard won’t be able to prolong the Protectorate and the Parliament eventually invites exiled Charles II (Charles I’s son) to return to England as king of England, Scotland and Ireland.
ARTS enter into a period of splendor, specially plastic arts (music, scenic arts, architecture, …) yet it is the NEW SCIENCE that extends over Europe to question profoundly—and disturbingly —inherited authority, calling all into doubt. The Elizabethan ordered, liberal, classical and humanist training gives way to a sense of reality where all coherence is lost. New Science owes much to Machiavellian influences (realist, secular, pragmatic and sceptic approach to truth) and to scientific advancement (discoveries, Robert Boyle’s modern chemistry vs former alchemy, William Harvey’s blood stream, Christopher Wren’s neo-classic architecture; the Royal Society, 1645/1660).
- The figure of Francis Bacon is worth-underlining. His The Advancement of Learning (1605) manages to extricate science from its philosophical entanglements and gives, instead, an elaborate system based on experiment and empirical validation: the inductive method, from particulars to universals. He thus rejects accepted authorities (philosophical debates of the times, prone to theological over-interpretation) to welcome reason, empiricism and observation of nature as driving principles. The CONSEQUENCES are manifold and profound: a sense of disbelief that manifests in growing materialism and scepticism, progressive scientificism of reality (transformation of values , importance of facts and causes over dogma and faith in the eternal and fixed plan of God’s design) and amoral relativism/individualism.
The JACOBEAN and CAROLINE mood permeates an atmosphere characterized by disunity, disharmony, unrest, incoherence and fragmentariness: constant and distressing wars, whether religious (Protestan vs. Roman Catholics, or Anglican vs them), domestic or continental are felt like sundering menaces to English society, which triggers off a sense of anxiety and tension, imbalance, disproportion, utter pessimism and death wish. Artifice and form, the wilful and grotesque, and irreconcilable separation idealism/realism (and apperance/reality), which manifest in the existence of separate groups or cliques, each one pursuing its own path.
CAVALIER AND METAPHYSICAL POETRY
BEN JONSON AND THE CAVALIER POETS
- No clear-cut division into Cavalier and Metaphysical poetry, since poets drew from both standpoints, and they all rebelled—in different ways—against pictorial fluidity, decorative rhetorics, idealism and created new techniques, new realism of style, sharp, condensed, fit for the intellectual/critical realism of their stances.
- Called Cavalier as they supported the royalist cause, and the aristocratic manners and style. Elegant, polished manners as courtiers, soldiers, gallants and wits.
- Social verse with (neo-)classical virtues (clarity, proportion, symmetry, decorum, plainness, propriety, straightforwardness) and deeply informed by civilized reasonableness, ceremonious respect and inner self-sufficiency (stoicism).
- BEN JONSON (1572-1637) somehow sets the pace and pattern. His poetry is ethically sober and judicious, and the poet the supreme instructor leading society toward aristocratic ethic of gracious and responsible living; artifice and plain style (classic clarity and conciseness, yet
spectacle. Private theatre also included private drama by choir boys in roofed and enclosed galleries, being music and artifical scenery more important than verse. Courtly and well-to-do audiences.
PUBLIC DRAMA: JACOBEAN DRAMA.
- The Jacobean mood. Marlowe anticipates this new approach to dramatic sensibility: highly secular, and skeptical about the ideal world, yet suspicious about the real world (corrupt, nonsensical, violent, fragmentary, despairing, frustrating, uncertain). (matter-of-factness and materialism): weakness,
- Machiavellian influence ingratitude and ill-will as drives of human character and society. Demystifying of spiritual world and leadership but open admission of cruelty, pragmatism and betrayal of faith if necessary. In Jacobean drama, the Machiavellian villain or discontent, bitterly cynical and fascinated with the mechanics of violence and (self-)destruction (bloody, unnatural acts, casual slaughters, ghosts, brutality, sadistic pleasure in punishing corrupt humanity).
- Tragedy: Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, John Webster’s The White Devil or The Duchess of Malfi. Comedy: Ben Jonson’s “comedy of humours”, The Alchemist, Volpone.
THE AGE OF MILTON (1642-1660)
- Cromwell’s Protectorate abolished both Parliament and monarchy, proclaiming England a free State or Commonwealth, ruled by the Assembly of Saints, or devout reforming Puritans who seek to apply Moses law to the new Commonwealth. Courtly life and entertainment was forbidden, theatres closed, sociability almost vanished. Instead, it was a period of active pamphleteering and newspaper.
- John Milton supported the republican cause, to the point of being appointed Minister of Languages. His religious and political thought is permeated by his Puritan affinities. He attempts to integrate the classics into the Christian, yet he objects to trinitarian belief, or to the idea that the soul transcends the death of the body and welcomes divorce, polygamy, and simplicity and virtue over deceiving courtly excesses.
- He is the last humanist, and his political-philosophical views record the influence of a more integrating “animist materialism” whereby there is one only material substance –free, self-active and animate—which composes everything in the universe, from stones to trees, bodies and souls. In so doing he rejects dualisms or determinisms (mind-soul, reason-spirit, etc. I.E.. In Paradise Lost, angels can eat or have sex).
- Paradise Lost, (an epic on man’s fall, whose free will is proclaimed) (1667)Paradise Regained (on Christ’s temptation and man’s recovery of salvation) (1671). Hedonism and profound reflection, the Christian and the pagan, insular and continental are unified.
RESTORATION ENGLAND (1660-1690)
BACKGROUND
- The return of Charles II from France does not only bring about a strong reaction against Puritan excesses, manners and morals, for it also brings to England French culture, wit, gallantry and hedonistic liveliness at court.
- The Court Wits are non-professional artists, writing for their own amusement, confined to London’s courtly and fashionable circles, which laughed at country uncouthness and lack of sophistication.
- Yet social-political tensions: wars, natural disasters, political instability on account of Charles’s catholic sympathies and dissenter resentment. After his death, James II (Charles’s brother) pushed the tensions with parliamentary petitions further as he intended jesuists to shatter Anglican primacy down. The Glorious Revolution (1688) deposes James, and parliamentary army joined the Dutch forces led by William of Orange (married to James’s daughter, Queen Anne) successfully took hold of the throne of England thus securing parliamentary and protestant liberties. WILLIAM III OF
ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND IRELAND.
- The great philosophical and scientifical change is starred by relevant figures who displace Puritan moralist continence and self-discipline in favour of hedonism, materialism, pragmatism and scientific analysis. This New Science promotes empiricism and experiment in all areas of knowledge, which courtly wits , intellectuals and well-to-do classes alike embrace.
- THOMAS HOBBES. The Leviathan (1651). Personally engaged in the civil war, he suspected fanatism and posits instead materialist views and split from supernatural causes. Popular sovereignity yet royal absolutism. Human nature to be approached on the basis of material ethics (pleasurable good vs painful bad, so instinctive regulations as long as one doesn’t hurt the other).
- JOHN LOCKE. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Reason. Tabula Rasa. Rational scepticism. Anti-dogmatism. Separation State-Church.
- ISSAC NEWTON.
RESTORATION COMEDY
- Restoration theatre is not any more the popular institution it was before the closing of playgrounds by Puritans. It has circumscribed its geographic and social boundaries: London and the courtier wits and gallants, who engaged in amorous/social intrigue and display of dress and manners. Citizenship regarded theatre vicious and immoral, and avoided it, whereas court wits ridiculed middle-class virtues. Courtier AUDIENCE and tastes. AUTHORS: amateur, cultivated aristocrats that liked being portrayed as characters. George Etherege (The Man of Mode) and
William Wycherley (The Country Wife).
- Modern stage: movable, sophisticated and elaborate scenery and proper, artificial light and French influence. Actresses on stage.
- Laughter and entertainment, yet cynical and corrupt/immoral humour laughing not at morals or humours but at manners (highly protocolarian sense of existence).
- The influence of the period’s milieu is easily recorded in Restoration comedy:
Wit : sharp, clever fancifulness and invention plus intellectual superiority. Language is thus not bookish but arising out of observation of (courtly) life: puns and double entendre, outwitting,
Metaphysical poetry is more spiritual than Cavalier poetry. The tone of Cavalier poetry can be characterized as light. It focuses on the erotic and the issues of culture, the subject lends itself to ease of tone. In addition, Cavalier poetry is often written from the perspective of a military or aristocratic, with an adventure or elegant touch.
Metaphysical poems shows a high level of highly abstract intellectual ideas and word games decorated and elegant. This type of poetry makes abstract thinking, thanks to fully achieve the essence and nature of what is broadcast. An example is Marvell's poem in which a discreet language used to give the reader the feeling that sex is acceptable from an early age because no one knows when they will die, basically, live life, but it has a subtle way.
Marvel at the poetry of this shows the passion used as a method to place serious reflections on the brevity of what is happiness and also their definitions of love are subtly ironic game. Lucid poem, cool and passionless. They focus on love as a union of souls rather than a strictly erotic search.
Metaphysical poetry tends to be more severe, the use of words and images that give deep metaphysical and psychological themes. Using strong rhythm metaphysical poetry and choice of words to create an alarming tone or swiftness.
Jonson's "Song: To Celia" is a short monologue in which a lover addresses his lady in an effort to encourage her to express his love for her. Jonson includes conventional imagery, such as eyes, roses, and wine, but employs them in inventive ways. As a result, the poem becomes a lively, expressive song extolling the immortality of love.
Seminar 6. Restoration prose
Do you think Pepys describes English manners in a reliable way on his diary? It is clear that Mr. Pepys wrote this diary because he uses the first person narrator with the objective to be more reliable and to closer the person who is reading it.
In what ways? What social group does he represent? He represents to the high society, because he is the secretary of state for the British navy.
Does he show puritan attitudes or any complicity with Puritanism? We can notice a little of puritanism actitude when he compares his wife with Hennettee Princess and he thinks his wife is handsomer than she.
But on the other hand we don’t see pure puritanism, but we apreciate some puratinan ways, and he mentions to God a lot, like: Christ, God, Lord...
How would you describe his style? As an intimate diary, he writes in a polite and realist style. He describes every single detail that he sees in his environment. His work is a revelation of his historical time.
Do you find any literary value, despite the factual nature/aim of Pepy’s diaries?
- Variation: because the author mentions God’s name in different ways such as “Lord” or “Christ”.
He wrote the diary just for himself and he did not want to show it because he did not want to expose it to the public eye. It was an intimate one.
What about Pepy’s personality? He has the ability to deal with all class of social group at the same way.
La de Pepys es la historia de un hombre humilde que gracias a su valía personal e incuestionable inteligencia llegó a ser la de uno de los personajes más relevante de la Corte inglesa durante el reinado de Carlos II. Alguien políticamente correcto y con don de gentes, capaz de relacionarse de igual modo con un noble o cortesano que con un tabernero o una criada. He aquí al personaje más indicado para narrar la vida cotidiana de la Inglaterra del siglo XVII.
La guerra contra Holanda por las posesiones en Oriente, la peste que durante un año desoló el país, el incendio de Londres que destruyó gran parte de la ciudad.
A Pepys le tocó vivir un momento fundamental en la historia de su país y él, como espectador de primera fila, nos lo revela con fidelidad y todo lujo de detalles.
