THEMATIC CLASS UNIT

Click a unit below:

1. JOHN DONNE

  1. Jack Donne and Dr. Donne
  2. The Jacobean Phoenix
  3. The "Metaphysical" Conceit

2. BEN JONSON
  1. Jonson and the Role of the Laureate Poet
  2. Jonson and the "Tribe of Ben"
  3. "Sell him for mummia": Volpone and Commodification

3. UTOPIAN VISIONS
  1. Masques
  2. The Country-House Poem
  3. Utopias

4. MARRIAGE, MADNESS, AND MELANCHOLY: JACOBEAN THEMES
  1. The Marriage Question
  2. Malfi and Mariam: Tragedies of Marriage
  3. Madness and Melancholy

5. THE NEXT GENERATION: HERRICK, HERBERT, AND CRASHAW
  1. Robert Herrick and the Social Order
  2. George Herbert: Devotion and Artifice
  3. Richard Crashaw: Shock and Ecstacy

6. THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN
  1. Seeking the Source: Debating Political Authority
  2. Representing Regicide: Andrew Marvell and Katherine Philips
  3. Writing the Self

7. JOHN MILTON AND PARADISE LOST
  1. Background: Versions of Genesis
  2. Background: The Epic
  3. Paradise Lost: The Legacy


JOHN DONNE

Text:John Donne
  
Contexts:William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, scene 2
 Ben Jonson, "To John Donne"
 Izaak Walton, The Life of Dr. John Donne
 Samuel Johnson, [Metaphysical Wit]
 T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets"
  
Topics:Jack Donne and Dr. Donne
 The Jacobean Phoenix
 The "Metaphysical" Conceit

John Donne had a long and extraordinarily varied career as a writer and as a man. Like William Shakespeare, he began writing in the waning years of Queen Elizabeth I's long reign (1558-1603) and carried on into the next century and the reign of King James I (1603-1625). Donne also outlived that monarch, who lifted him from poverty to the prestigious post of Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral. He died under the next king, Charles I, in 1631, when the young John Milton was already producing accomplished poetry.

Although he is now regarded as belonging in the first rank of early-seventeenth-century poets, Donne's verse spent several centuries out of fashion. This surprising neglect resulted from the difficulty of his conceits and the general disdain expressed for the so-called metaphysical poets (a term coined as a deliberate insult). In addition, Donne's mixture of erotic and religious imagery scandalized many, and still has the power to shock.

A large part of the pleasure and wonder of reading Donne is following the poet's ingenious and singular mind as it twists and turns, looking at an idea from different perspectives, turning back on itself or digressing brilliantly. His poems require more close attention and intellectual effort than those of most of his predecessors and contemporaries, but the rewards are equally great.

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Jack Donne and Dr. Donne

When John Donne sent the manuscript of Biathanatos, his paradoxical defense of suicide, to a friend, he reminded him that "it is a book written by Jack Donne, and not by D[r]. Donne." In this way, Donne divided his career neatly into two halves, and drew a firm distinction between the irreverent rake Jack, author of erotic verses and witty paradoxes, and the holy and serious Doctor. Yet this distinction fails to hold up under inspection. In fact, Donne wrote much of his finest religious verse before he entered the church, and he may even have continued to compose love poetry after he was ordained. Moreover, many of his most amorous poems are full of theologically informed conceits, while daringly erotic images appear in his devotional verse.

As an example of the former, consider "The Canonization," in which Donne attempts to justify his single-minded devotion to love. In one particularly daring image, Donne compares the lovers' sexual union with the Resurrection of Christ: "We die, and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love" (lines 26-27). The poet then goes on to assert that he and his lover will be worshipped as saints in later ages.

Equally bold, and to some offensive, is Donne's use of unmistakable sexual images in his most heartfelt religious poems. Holy Sonnet 18 ,for instance, pursues the traditional image of the Church as "bride of Christ" into dangerous territory:

Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights,
And let mine amorous soul court thy mild dove,
Who is most true and pleasing to thee then
When she is embraced and open to most men.
    (lines 11-14)

For the next class, select one of Donne's "Songs and Sonnets" (not "The Canonization") that employs religious imagery, and one of his Holy Sonnets (not 18) that employs images of romantic or sexual love. Write down what these images are, and how you think they add to (or detract from) the poem. Do the religious references heighten the charge of Donne's love poems, or are they distracting? Do the references to physical passion serve to suggest the intensity of the poet's desire for God, or are they merely blasphemous?

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The Jacobean Phoenix

Shakespeare's King Lear was written early in the reign of James I and, like much of Donne's poetry, reflects the troubled and pessimistic mood of the period. Act 1, scene 2, of Lear includes an encounter between the bastard Edmund and his father Gloucester. Read over this scene, noting especially Edmund's soliloquy addressed to the Goddess Nature, and Gloucester's pessimistic view of the future: "in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father. . . . We have seen the best of our time." Many critics see the conflicting perspectives of Edmund and Gloucester as significant of opposing forces in English society at the time. While Gloucester still clings to old "feudal" truths, in which custom and traditional loyalties are paramount, Edmund is a "new man" produced by a new, market-oriented society in which the individual must fend for him- or herself.

Now turn to John Donne's "An Anatomy of the World." In this poem, Donne like Gloucester laments the decline of the world, humanity, and society, declaring that everything has begun to fall apart since the death of Elizabeth Drury:

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, subject; father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that there can be
None of that kind of which he is, but he. (lines 213-18)

According to legend, the phoenix was a unique bird that periodically burnt itself up on a pyre, arising anew from its own ashes. The phoenix was one of a kind, its own parent and its own child.

Consider how the phoenix works as a metaphor for a society in decline. What, according to Donne, is the problem with Jacobean English society? What can we tell from the poem about the shape of the traditional world before it was broken in pieces? What sort of society has replaced it?

Now compare Donne's reflections in "An Anatomy of the World" with the scene from King Lear. To what extent do Donne and Shakespeare appear to share a common perspective on their society? What, according to Gloucester and according to Donne, is the cause of society's decline?

In the course of studying the early seventeenth century, we will encounter many examples and forms of the "phoenix." One of the distinctive features of this period was a new and controversial stress on individual choice—in matters of religion, marriage, politics, and economic life. When Salome in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam declares "I'll be the custom-breaker" and demands sexual freedom for women, or when John Milton defends individuals' right to read and find the truth for themselves in Areopagitica, they are both, in Donne's terms, phoenixes.

So too is Donne himself in his "Satire 3," written when the poet was involved in the painful process of leaving the Roman Catholic Church, the church of his fathers. Read "Satire 3," paying special attention to how Donne represents the bond between father and son, and between prince and subject. Is Donne's voice here more like Gloucester's or like Edmund's?

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The "Metaphysical" Conceit

Only in this century has Donne regained the reputation for poetic brilliance that he possessed for a generation after his death. Intellectual and aesthetic fashions changed following the Restoration in 1660, and Donne was relegated to the status of a footnote in literary history, being seen as witty but difficult, arrogant, and offensive. In A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, John Dryden condemned Donne because "he affects the metaphysics . . . and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."

Samuel Johnson amplified these criticisms, coining the phrase "Metaphysical Poets" for all those, such as Abraham Cowley, who shared Donne's perceived faults (see his life of Cowley). In such poetry, Johnson complained:

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

This "yoking together" of images produces what are known as "conceits." Broadly speaking, conceits are comparisons—what distinguishes the metaphysical poets is a preference for comparisons between things that are as different as possible and (in T. S. Eliot's words) "the elaboration . . . of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it."

To choose a famous example, Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" compares the souls of the two lovers to the two legs of a compass:

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
   Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if th' other do.
 
And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
   It leans and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.
 
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
   Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.
    (lines 25-36)

When the conceit is first introduced, the grounds of the comparison seem relatively restricted and straightforward. The lovers' souls are like the legs (or feet) of a compass because, though distinct, they together form a single entity.

But Donne almost immediately expands the grounds of the comparison by introducing movement, which is the theme of the poem as a whole. In the second stanza above, he elaborates on the affinity between the two legs of the compass that is demonstrated by the fixed foot's sympathetic leaning after the moving one. This stanza concludes with an image suggesting the lover's reunion, as the moving foot returns to the center and both stand erect.

The third stanza seems to follow on in this train of thought, but in fact Donne has silently altered the terms of the comparison. Now he emphasizes the firmness, rather than the sympathetic leaning, of the fixed foot, which allows the moving foot to describe an exact circle around it.

The two final stanzas both conclude with an assurance of reunion after separation. In the first, Donne comes home; in the second he ends where he began. Yet when we consider how the compass works, we immediately see that these two elaborations of the conceit are mutually exclusive. In the first, the legs of the compass are parted and then joined again as the moving foot returns to the center; the suggestion is of physical reunion, with sexual implications. In the final stanza, on the other hand, the moving foot is always at an equal distance from the fixed foot. The union suggested here is perhaps more "metaphysical" than physical.

The brilliance of Donne's "conceited" verse lies partly in the intellectual rigor with which he pursues all the implications of a comparison, and partly in the elegance and agility with which he shifts from one comparison to another. To explore Donne's use of conceits further, read "A Valediction: Of Weeping." To what things are tears compared in the course of the poem? How does Donne introduce and elaborate the conceits, and how does one give way to the next?

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BEN JONSON

Text:Ben Jonson
  
Contexts:Thomas Carew, "To Ben Jonson"
 Robert Herrick, "His Prayer to Ben Jonson"
 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
 Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial
  
Topics:Jonson and the Role of the Laureate Poet
 Jonson and the "Tribe of Ben"
 Volpone and Commodification

Ben Jonson was the master of an extraordinary array of forms and styles: lyric poem, ode, epigram, satire, dramatic comedy, dramatic tragedy, masque, and prose criticism, among others. He also knew—and usually influenced—a great many writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented in the Norton Anthology: among them William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Nashe, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, and Edmund Waller. Those poets who called themselves the "Sons of Ben" were influenced as much by Jonson's forceful personality as by his style. For while Jonson's style is changeable, depending on his matter and his mode, his personality is unmistakable. His wit, his pugnacity, his learning, and his fierce honesty shine through in every line.

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Jonson and the Role of the Laureate Poet

Ben Jonson was never actually granted the title of "Poet Laureate," but he may be said to have created the role. Jonson's privileges included a pension, granted him by King James I in 1616, and a yearly butt of canary wine, granted by Charles I in 1630. That title was first conferred on John Dryden in 1668, when it became clear that the position and privileges once held by Jonson (and later by William Davenant) should be given an official status.

For Jonson, the role of laureate poet did not mean churning out a poem to celebrate every royal wedding and birthday, as his tamer successors were required to do. Indeed, he did not see himself as serving the king so much as the high ideals that the king too was supposed to serve. As a laureate poet, Jonson sought to express the highest and best values of his society. Where his contemporaries appeared to fulfill or embody those values, he would praise them. Where they fell short, they would be told of it.

In late poems such as the Ode on Cary and Morrison, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare," and "Ode to Himself," Jonson presents himself as the keen-sighted and unbiased judge of what is fair and foul in others, and himself. Having read these poems, write down your brief answers to the following questions:

  1. What qualities would you say Jonson values most highly in human beings?
  2. Of what faults is he most critical?
  3. Does Jonson hold himself to the same standards as others?
  4. Whence does he derive his authority to act as arbiter and judge?

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Jonson and the "Tribe of Ben"

Although notorious for his grudges and his ungovernable temper, Ben Jonson was also famous for his friendships. He gathered around himself a clique of younger poets—known as the Tribe or Sons of Ben—and met regularly with some of them in the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern in London. Among his most talented "Sons" were Robert Herrick and Thomas Carew, both of whom addressed poems to their literary "father."

Read Carew's "To Ben Jonson" (1.1659) and Herrick's "His Prayer to Ben Jonson" (1.1652). What image of Jonson is built up in these two poems? How does each poet represent his relationship with Jonson? Is either poem entirely respectful? What, in each, is the role of irony, and of honesty? Do you think Jonson had reason to feel proud of his "Sons"?

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"Sell him for mummia": Volpone and Commodification

In Volpone, Jonson depicts a society in which literally everything, and everyone, is potentially for sale. Greed rules both in the hearts of almost all the characters and in the courts, the supposed guardians of civil society. Throughout much of the play, the sympathies of the audience are drawn to Volpone and Mosca, not because they are less greedy than the other characters (they are not), but because they are the most ingenious in devising schemes for their personal gain.

In Act 4, scene 4, Corvino asks Mosca what is to be done with old Corbaccio when he has served his purpose.

MOSCA:        Why, we'll think: Sell him for mummia; he's half dust already.
(4.4, lines 13-14)

Here, Mosca refers to one of the stranger practices of early-seventeenth-century medicine, the use of the ground dust of ancient mummies as a pharmaceutical. "Mummia" was a prized and expensive substance which had to be purchased illegally from tomb-raiders in Egypt before it was shipped to England. In this passage, Mosca jokes that he has hit upon a way to acquire mummia much more cheaply and conveniently. His joke casts light on the still-young market economy, and on the disquiet of observers like Jonson at a world where even dead bodies were for sale.

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UTOPIAN VISIONS

Texts:Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness
 Ben Jonson, "To Penshurst"
 Aemilia Lanyer, "The Description of Cooke-ham"
 Andrew Marvell, "Upon Appleton House"
 Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis [Solomon's House]
 Gerrard Winstanley, A New Years Gift Sent to the Parliament and Army
 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
 Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation; "Wonder"
  
Contexts:Thomas More, Utopia
 Inigo Jones, Costumes for Masques
  
Topics:Masques
 The Country-House Poem
 Utopias

Except for a brief period in the early 1640s, when the nation was in tumult, governments in the seventeenth century exerted strict control over the press severely curtailing the freedom to write openly about political ideas. As a result, ideas about the good life, the good society, and the proper form of government are often expressed in the literature of this period through apparently nonpolitical genres. The masque, the country-house poem, and utopian writing all present ideal visions of society that contrast, sometimes sharply, with social and political realities. It is usually up to the reader or viewer to make the connections and recognize the ways in which the literary work reflects on contemporary politics. Such literature, then, requires a particular kind of engaged and active reader. As you read the selections that are grouped together in this session, reflect on how reading, as well as writing, can be a political act. What kind of reader are you?

Before proceeding further, read the section on State and Church, 1603-1640, in the "Introduction to the Early Seventeenth Century."

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Masques

As you can read in the introduction to Jonson's Masque of Blackness, the court masque was an important genre in the early seventeenth century. These entertainments were supposed to present an ideal image of society, and in particular of the royal family that stood at the pinnacle of that society. Yet in Masque of Blackness and other similar productions, subversive currents are also evident.

The masque was not solely the work of the writer. The scene designs and costumes created by Inigo Jones were equally if not more important. In the case of The Masque of Blackness, the "outlandish" and "courtesan-like" costumes seem to have stuck in spectators' minds more than Jonson's poetry.

Inigo Jones also designed the Whitehall Banqueting House, where King James witnessed masques and held feasts as well as other ceremonies of state.

How does viewing the setting and costumes contribute to your reading of Masque of Blackness? How did spectacle and poetry complement each other on these occasions? Which contributed more to the idealization of the monarch and his rule, and which had more capacity to be subversive?

Is there an equivalent to the court masque in modern culture? What modern genre or genres do you think most resemble the masque as an ideological form, and as a mixture of language and spectacle?

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The Country-House Poem

Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cooke-ham," Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst," and Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" represent the small genre of the country-house poem, which flourished briefly in the early seventeenth century. These poems are about much more than domestic architecture and are more than simple exercises in praising and pleasing a wealthy patron. In country-house poetry, poets use the conjunction of the ideal family (the patron's) and the ideal site (the house, and the grounds surrounding it) as a means of reflecting on social values, the nature of the good life, and the ways in which other households fall short of the mark. The country-house poem, in other words, can be a vehicle of social criticism as well as of praise.

Click on the links below to see images of some of the houses and families praised in these poems, along with records of their lives:

Penshurst Place
Lady Sidney of Penshurst and Her Children
Letters from Robert Sidney to Barbara
The "Great Picture" of the Clifford Family, praised by Aemilia Lanyer
Knole, the Country Estate of Anne Clifford, after her marriage
Anne Clifford's Diary for 1616-19

As you read the three poems and compare them with the pictures and records, consider the ways in which Lanyer, Jonson, and Marvell praise their patrons and their households. How "realistic" are these poems? In each poem, which values receive most emphasis or are singled out for praise? What aspects of society are criticized in these poems, either explicitly or implicitly, by comparison with the praiseworthy household?

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Utopias

The early seventeenth century witnessed a remarkable vogue for utopias of all sorts. By means of this fascinating and flexible form, writers were able to indulge in a degree of social criticism and political speculation that their society would not otherwise allow. Utopian writing also allowed for flights of daring fancy. Both the modern political manifesto and the fantasy novel have roots in early-modern utopian literature.

Sir Thomas More's Utopia, written in the early sixteenth century, inaugurated the genre. Reading More's seventeenth-century followers, particularly Sir Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis and Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World, note the ways in which their imagined worlds resemble and differ from More's. What appears to be the central feature of each ideal world—that is, the thing that makes it utopian? Is it something present in the utopian world that is lacking in the real world, or is it the opposite—the absence of something with which the real world is burdened?

Several other works in the Norton Anthology seem influenced by or related to utopian writing. Gerrard Winstanley (in A New Years Gift Sent to the Parliament and Army) and Thomas Traherne (in Centuries of Meditation and "Wonder") both describe worlds in which there is no greed or private property, but all the riches of the world are held in common. The difference is that Winstanley is describing the world as it might actually be, if people followed the Diggers' program of Christian Communism, while Traherne is describing the world as it appeared to him as a child, in a vision at once false and holy. Which of the two is more utopian? To what extent does the answer to this question depend on one's own political and religious views?

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MARRIAGE, MADNESS, AND MELANCHOLY: JACOBEAN THEMES

Texts:John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
 Elizabeth Cary, selections from The Tragedy of Mariam
  
Contexts:Katherine Philips, "A Married State"
 The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth, Widow
 Francis Bacon, "Of Marriage and Single Life"
 T. E., The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights
 John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government
 The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony from The Book of Common Prayer
  
Topics:Malfi and Mariam: Tragedies of Marriage
 Madness and Melancholy

In this unit you will read John Webster's Duchess of Malfi and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry. Both of these tragedies center on themes of marriage, madness, and melancholy. These themes preoccupied many writers in the early seventeenth century. Although apparently not closely related, both are constitutional questions. At the heart of the "marriage question" was a debate over how the family should be constituted; madness and melancholy, on the other hand, were held to spring from the unbalanced constitution of the body. This was an age in which political ideology made much use of analogy—the state was constantly compared to the family (with the king as father) and to the human body (with the king as head). Literary representations of marriage and melancholy thus offered a means of covertly reflecting on the constitution of the state.

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The Marriage Question

In early-modern England, gender hierarchy, with the married man at the top, was assumed to have been instituted by God and nature. The husband was to be the patriarchal governor of his family and household—wife, children, wards, and servants. So ordered, the family was seen as the secure foundation of society. By a system of powerfully resonant analogies, the patriarch's role in the household was equated with that of God in the universe and the king in the state. (Remnants of this system of thought are still recognizable in contemporary American culture. What clichés and popular phrases can you think of that depend on analogies between the government and the family?)

Women were continually instructed that their spiritual and social worth resided above all else in their practice of and reputation for chastity. Unmarried virgins and wives were to maintain silence in the public sphere and give obedience to father and husband, though widows had some scope for making their own decisions and managing their affairs. Children and servants were bound to the strictest obedience. Inevitably, however, tension developed when such norms met with common experience, as registered in the records of actual households and especially in the complexities and ambiguities represented in literary treatments of love, courtship, marriage, and family relations.

Click on the highlighted text below and consider these brief extracts from some of the texts that shaped early-seventeenth-century thought about marriage and the family:

Solemnization of Matrimony [The Marriage Service] from The Book of Common Prayer (1.553) shows us the directives most English men and women heard at their own wedding and every wedding they attended, as to their respective roles and duties in marriage and the family.

John Dod and Robert Cleaver's A Godly Form of Household Government (1598) was a highly popular advice book that counseled husbands and wives on their rights and duties within marriage.

Richard Braithwaite's The English Gentlewoman (1631) counseled widows on how to conduct themselves honorably.

The Law's Resolutions of Women's Rights (1632) examines the legal status of women in this period, including a husband's right to beat his wife.

When you have read these, look at two poems in which seventeenth-century women consider the rights and wrongs of the married state:

Martha Moulsworth, "The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth, Widow"
Katherine Philips, "A Married State"

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Malfi and Mariam: Tragedies of Marriage

John Webster's Duchess of Malfi and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam are tragedies that share a number of common themes and plot devices. Both plays explore issues of marriage, female independence and female choice, jealousy, murder, and madness. Both also have an extremely pessimistic vision of society, in which the good can do little or nothing to struggle against the power of the self-willed, sadistic, and corrupt.

But there are also important differences between the two plays. Most importantly, The Tragedy of Mariam is the first example in English literary history of a published drama by a woman author. Elizabeth Cary brings a new and different perspective to the old problems of matrimony, jealousy, and fidelity. Indeed, some features of her heroine's situation closely resemble Elizabeth Cary's own difficult marriage to a domineering and "very absolute" husband.

A second key difference is that while The Duchess of Malfi was performed before a public audience, Mariam is a "closet drama," never meant to be performed at all. Closet drama was a form that allowed the author to develop complex ideas and characters and experiment with perspectives in ways that would not be possible (for political or practical reasons) on the stage.

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Madness and Melancholy

In the first scene of The Duchess of Malfi, the audience is made aware that Bosola's dangerous capacity for evil is physical in origin: "This foul melancholy / Will poison all his goodness" (Act 1, scene 1, lines 69-70). What this means is that all of the ensuing tragedy, or at least the large part of it in which Bosola has a hand, can be traced to an excess of black bile in his body.

Melancholy was one of the four bodily humors that were supposed to determine human personality. Yet in many early-seventeenth-century works, melancholy seems to be not so much the result of an imbalanced constitution as an individual's response to an imbalanced society. Like the Fool in King Lear, the melancholic man has a kind of license to speak truth to power.

Ferdinand sees Bosola as wearing a "garb of melancholy" (Act 1, scene 2, line 185) rather than suffering from a psychological malady. Why does he say this? What do his words suggest about how melancholy was perceived and what its uses might be?

Two writers who expressed paradoxical enthusiasm for melancholy in this period were Robert Burton and John Milton. In "Il Penseroso," Milton calls it "divinest Melancholy" (line 12), and expresses his preference for "staid Wisdom's hue" (line 16)—that is, the dark complexion brought on by black bile. At the end of the poem, the speaker declares that he will live with melancholy in exchange for the pleasures it can give.

title page, The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is also a text full of unusual "pleasures" (click on the image to the left to see a larger version of the title page of The Anatomy). Burton represents himself as a descendant of the "laughing philosopher" Democritus. At one point in his preface he declares:

thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes; that it is (which Epicthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many years since in a map) made like a fool's head . . . a crazed head, cavea stultorum, a fool's paradise . . . a common prison of gulls, cheaters, flatterers, etc., and needs to be reformed.

Click here to see an image of the remarkable fool's head map.

What commonalities, if any, exist between the melancholy of Bosola, "Il Penseroso," and Burton's Anatomy? Is it the case that melancholy in this period could mean anything, or is there a common thread? Why do you think people in this period were preoccupied by this particular humor?

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THE NEXT GENERATION: HERRICK, HERBERT, AND CRASHAW

Texts:Robert Herrick, poems, including "Corinna's Going A-Maying," "The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home"
 George Herbert, poems, including "Jordan (1)," "Jordan (2)," "The Altar," "Easter Wings," "Denial"
 Richard Crashaw, poems, including "On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord," "To the Infant Martyrs," "Luke 11," "The Flaming Heart"
  
Contexts:William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix
 Bernini, St. Teresa and the Seraph
  
Topics:Robert Herrick and the Social Order
 George Herbert: Devotion and Artifice
 Richard Crashaw: Shock and Ecstacy

The generation of poets who came after John Donne and Ben Jonson were profoundly influenced by their predecessors. Those who pursued Donne's religious themes and his fascination with conceits are sometimes referred to as "Metaphysical Poets." Those who emulated Jonson's frankness, his royalist politics, and his interest in the "good life" (in all its forms) are known today as "Cavalier Poets." Yet the best poets of this generation were far from being slavish imitators. Robert Herrick was a devoted "Son of Ben," yet he celebrates rural pastimes and budding sexuality in a manner distinctively his own. George Herbert and Richard Crashaw are both "metaphysical" in outlook and style, yet they differ as much from Donne as they do from one another.

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Robert Herrick and the Social Order

Robert Herrick's "Corinna's Going A-Maying" and "The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home" celebrate traditional rural festivals. These poems present us with a charming, timeless world governed by custom and the changing seasons. In his celebration of country pastimes, Herrick offers the reader few if any hints of the social changes and ideological battles taking place in England in the years before the English Revolution. Nevertheless, "Corinna's Going A-Maying" and "The Hock-Cart" are thoroughly ideological works. Each poem selects a particular moment in English country life and endows it with a larger significance, making it stand for a social order that is natural, inevitable, and, on the whole, good.

What image of rural life is built up in these two poems? As you read them, what images strike you most, and what do these images suggest about the social order? Why do you think Herrick speaks of wine and oil at the beginning of "The Hock-Cart" (neither was a product of English agriculture)? Why, at the end of that poem, does he suddenly remind us of the laborers' "pain"?

Many Puritans in this period were fiercely opposed to the sort of festivals Herrick celebrated. An alternative perspective on the custom of "Maying" is found in the Puritan Philip Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses:

Against May, Whitsunday, or other time all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes. . . . And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sports namely Satan, prince of hell. But their chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they bring home with great veneration, . . . this Maypole (this stinking idol, rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs. . . . And then fall they to dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly reported . . . by men of great gravity and reputation, that of forty, three-score, or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home undefiled.

Another Puritan, William Prynne, was even more violent in his denunciation of traditional festivals, along with masques, stage plays, and all occasions for dancing. Prynne's barbed references to Queen Henrietta Maria, who danced in masques, led the authorities to punish him by burning his books, cropping his ears, and imprisoning him for life. Herrick's verses describe what seems to be an innocent and merry world, but the authorities were ready to defend that world with rigor and with cruelty.

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George Herbert: Devotion and Artifice

George Herbert is among the greatest and most devout religious poets of the seventeenth or any other century. His surviving poetry is entirely devoted to religious subjects, in particular the subtle movements of the sometimes doubtful soul and the boundless mercy of God. In the two poems entitled "Jordan," Herbert attempts to define what Christian poetry—or, at least, his own—should be.

"Jordan (1)" scorns the standard romantic and erotic subjects of contemporary verse as "fictions only and false hair." Herbert's poetry will instead be devoted to "My God, My King." In "Jordan (2)" he seeks for the appropriate poetic style to suit his divine subject. Having experimented with "quaint words" and grandiose conceits, he hears the voice of a friend (the Holy Spirit) whisper:

There is in love a sweetness ready penned:
Copy out only that, and save expense.

Herbert's conclusion in this poem is that true devotional poetry will be content simply to reflect an experience of God's love, rather than resorting to artificial technical effects.

Yet, curiously enough, much of Herbert's poetry is full of artifice and technical virtuosity. In addition to being among the most devout poets of his age, he is also among the most playful and experimental. In poems like "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," he crafts "shaped verses" whose visual forms on the page reflect their subject matter. In "Denial," he lets the first five stanzas, in which the speaker laments his distance from God, trail off awkwardly without a concluding rhyme; when a rhyme is finally heard at the end of the final stanza, it signals the final "chime" or meeting of the speaker's mind with God.

As these examples indicate, Herbert's formal games and experiments were by no means frivolous. Rather, his goal was a poetry absolutely devoted to God—a poetry that expressed devotion in its form as well as its content. Herbert is loved by many today, yet his poems are not to every reader's taste. Whether you warm to his work may depend on whether you find his technical flourishes effective or merely distracting.

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Richard Crashaw: Shock and Ecstasy

Richard Crashaw wrote to shock. His poems are full of surreal and disturbing images, of wounds that are at once mouths and eyes ("On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord"), of murdered infants sipping milk from the stars ("To the Infant Martyrs"), of nature reversed so that a mother sucks sustenance from her son ("Luke 11"). At times his graphic images seem to verge on blasphemy, but this is the farthest thing from his intention. Crashaw shocks the reader in order to jolt him or her out of the normal patterns of thought and perception. The grotesque is a battering ram against the mundane, opening up a breach in consciousness through which the divine can enter in.

Crashaw often expresses spiritual devotion in explicitly erotic terms. There are many precedents for this in English literature, including Margery Kempe's visions of marriage and intimacy with Christ and John Donne's Holy Sonnets. Yet the closest parallels for Crashaw's brand of erotic devotion come from the European continent. A convert to Catholicism, Crashaw was much influenced by the autobiography of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, in which she describes the ecstatic trances she was plunged into by visits of the Holy Spirit. In Bernini's statue of Saint Teresa and the Seraph, Teresa's writhing body and the dart the angel is about to plunge into her have unmistakable erotic connotations. Crashaw may or may not have seen Bernini's statue, but his thoughts are running along similar lines in "The Flaming Heart," which begins by suggesting that the saint and the seraph should change places.

As you read Crashaw's poems, notice the many images involving bodily fluids: blood, tears, and milk. What do these substances signify for Crashaw? Why do you think they recur so frequently in his verse?

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THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN

Texts:Crisis of Authority
 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
 Andrew Marvell, "An Horatian Ode"
 Katherine Philips, "Upon the Double Murder of King Charles"
  
Contexts:The Trial of Charles
 The Execution of Charles I
  
Topics:Seeking the Source: Debating Political Authority
 Representing Regicide: Andrew Marvell and Katherine Philips
 Writing the Self

Almost every writer who lived through the middle decades of the seventeenth century was deeply affected by the English Revolution and its aftermath. Some wrote and fought in defense of the old order; others penned poems and propaganda justifying rebellion and regicide. Some fled to Paris and other foreign cities to await the Restoration; while abroad, they absorbed the continental influences that would have such a deep impact on Restoration manners and literature. The Revolution affected the stream of English literature in many ways, some negative (theaters were closed), others positive (without his experiences of rebellion and defeat, Milton could not have written Paradise Lost). The old order of things had been turned upside-down, and neither England nor its literature could be the same again.

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Seeking the Source: Debating Political Authority

Today, political debates usually center on the question of who should wield power in the nation, and what use they should make of their authority. Yet behind these questions lies a deeper one: what is the ultimate source of political authority? Presidents and prime ministers may be granted permission to govern for a space of time, but what is the wellspring of the power they temporarily wield? The people? The natural order? God?

In the mid seventeenth century, the question of who should hold power was inseparable from the question of where power comes from. For the royalist Robert Filmer in Patriarchia , the right of kings to rule over their subjects has its origins in the authority granted by both God and nature to parents (especially fathers) over their children. According to this widely held view, rebellion against the monarch is both sacrilegious and equivalent to parricide.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes was a royalist like Filmer, but took a very different view of the origins of authority. As Hobbes argues in Leviathan ,the natural state of humanity is the selfish war of each against each. Human beings saved themselves from endless fighting only by placing themselves under the authority of a sovereign, to whom was granted absolute power. Although this would seem to suggest that power has its origins in the people, Hobbes insists that the contract or "covenant" between people and sovereign is unbreakable. Having ceded away their power at the dawn of history, the people can never again reclaim it.

John Milton, advocating regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, argues that "all men"—it is not at all clear whether this statement extends to women—"naturally were born free." Like Hobbes, Milton believes that the first people collectively decided to place themselves under the authority of rulers who would protect them from civil conflict. Unlike Hobbes, however, Milton believes that power still rests ultimately with the people, who can deprive the ruler of his authority when given just cause.

More radical than Milton, the "Digger" Gerrard Winstanley opposed the usurpation of autocratic power by any body, be it a king, a Parliament, or a wealthy minority. Winstanley insisted that the phrase "kingly power," which Parliament had vowed to cast out, applied not only to monarchical authority but also to all forms of political and economic oppression. For the communist Diggers, the institution of private property was perhaps the most dangerous manifestation of "kingly power." Winstanley implies that no contract is valid that deprives the common people of their fundamental rights to economic livelihood and spiritual freedom.

As you read these four political theorists, consider their views in relation to modern political debates. Are there aspects of each that seem familiar? Do some appear entirely alien? Is it possible to say that one of these thinkers has won out over the others?

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Representing Regicide: Andrew Marvell and Katherine Philips

The trial and execution of Charles I by the victorious Parliament and Army were traumatic events for the war-torn nation. They were also, in more than one sense, dramatic events. At a time when the public performance of plays was banned, accounts of the King's trial in Parliament and his last words on the scaffold were published in a form closely resembling the scripts of plays. As you read these accounts, note how the participants in this deadly drama present themselves to the public and to posterity. How does Charles seem to have understood his "role," before and after being sentenced to death? How did those involved in determining and carrying out the sentence present themselves and seek to justify their actions?

In "An Horatian Ode," Andrew Marvell emphasizes the dramatic aspect of the execution, describing Charles as a "royal actor" on a "tragic scaffold" (lines 53-54). Many readers have noticed the evenhandedness (or ambiguity) with which Marvell treats Charles I and Cromwell in this poem. While admiring Cromwell as a great leader, the poet also praises the majesty and dignity of the king in his final moments. How do the dramatic metaphors assist Marvell in achieving a "balanced" view of these two men?

Katherine Philips, in "Upon the Double Murder of King Charles," has a very different response to regicide. What images are most important in her representation of the war, the execution, and its aftermath? Does Philips also seek a balanced perspective?

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Writing the Self

The section on "Writing the Self" in the Norton Anthology of English Literature brings together four individuals who experienced the English Revolution in very different ways. One was a committed Puritan and republican (Lucy Hutchinson), another an equally committed royalist (Lady Anne Halkett), one an aristocratic politician (Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon), and one a persecuted Quaker (Dorothy Waugh). All of them took personal risks and suffered losses as a result of the stances they took during and after the war. All, moreover, found themselves drawn to the subject of the individual self in relation to the larger forces that shape human history. Halkett and Waugh wrote autobiographically about their own experiences, whilst Hutchinson and Hyde dissected the personalities of the grand actors on the political stage, Charles I and Cromwell.

Different as they are from one another, these four writers were all concerned with the questions that preoccupied seventeenth-century minds, and still concern us today. As you read over this section, keep the following questions in mind, applying them to each writer in turn:

  1. What are the factors that shape an individual personality and govern a person's conduct?
  2. What is the role of the individual in shaping history?
  3. How does God intercede in human affairs, if at all?
  4. What, for each writer, is the ultimate source of political power?

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JOHN MILTON AND PARADISE LOST

Text:John Milton, Paradise Lost
  
Contexts:Aemilia Lanyer, "Eve's Apology in Defense of Women"
 Saint Augustine, The City of God
 John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis
 Rachel Speght, A Muzzle for Melastomus
 John Milton, "The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty"
 John Milton, Christian Doctrine
 Homer, Virgil, and Tasso: Epic Themes and Invocations
 George Chapman, The Odyssey
 John Dryden, The Aeneid
 Adam and Eve, A Gallery of Renaissance Images
 Andrew Marvell, "On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost"
  
Topics:Background: Versions of Genesis
 Background: The Epic
 Paradise Lost: The Legacy

After leaving Cambridge University, John Milton devoted six more years to reading works of theology, philosophy, science, and literature in more than half-a-dozen ancient and modern languages. All of these ideas and influences helped form the mind that eventually produced Paradise Lost. This session includes only a tiny sampling of Milton's voluminous reading, but enough to shed light on how the previously distinct traditions of epic poetry and biblical commentary came together in the making of his great poem.

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Background: Versions of Genesis

Milton's great epic is built upon the stories and myths—in the Bible and in the classical tradition—through which Western men and women have sought to understand the meaning of their experience of life. Exploring some of these texts and the ways in which Milton draws upon, and departs from, other versions and interpretations of those stories will enrich your reading of his poem.

The foundation story, of course, is the Genesis account of the creation of Adam and Eve culminating in the drama of their temptation and Fall. As you read Paradise Lost, keep referring back to Genesis. How far does Milton rely on Genesis, and which elements of his narrative have no basis in Genesis? By Milton's time, the biblical story had been reformulated in many translations in many languages and had accumulated many centuries of interpretive commentary, both Jewish and Christian. Milton, in undertaking an imaginative, poetic recreation of that story, had necessarily to accept, revise, or counter the views offered by such influential commentators as Saint Augustine and the Reformation theologian John Calvin. Nor was Milton alone in his century in reworking the story of the Creation and Fall. He probably did not know Rachel Speght's commentary, A Muzzle for Melastomus, or Aemilia Lanyer's poem "Eve's Apology in Defense of Women" but these texts provide the first examples of women turning Genesis commentary to feminist account.

How closely does Milton's representation of work, sex, emotions, and human life in Eden before the Fall correlate with the accounts of Augustine, Calvin, Lanyer, and Speght? Why, according to each of these commentators, does the Fall happen? And is God at all responsible for it?

During his tour of Italy in 1638-39, Milton probably saw some of the numerous representations of aspects of the Genesis story in Renaissance paintings and tapestries. We do not know which ones he saw, but certain remarkable images may have stimulated his imagination. Consider the portrayals of Adam, Eve, and the Fall by Veronese, Cranach, Dürer, Masaccio, and others in "Adam and Eve, A Gallery of Renaissance Images". What ideas and mental images might Milton have taken away from pictures like this? Do any of these pictures seem especially close to Milton's imaginative portrayal?

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Background: The Epic

From early on in his poetic career, Milton had seen himself as the future author of a great English epic. Yet, as revealed in "The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty," his initial idea was to write about the heroes and battles of British history, rather than the conflict of heaven and hell. By the time he came to write his great work, Milton had reconceived not only his particular subject matter but also the epic form itself.

Among the epics that influenced Milton's idea of the genre—works that he both emulated and rebelled against—were Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. How do the statements of epic themes and invocations in these works compare with Milton's statement of his theme and invocation of his heavenly muse in Paradise Lost (lines 1-26)? How does Milton undertake to reconceive the epic subject and the epic poet's relation to his muse?

Homer and Virgil did not use rhyme, and in his note on "The Verse," Milton scorned it as a "troublesome and modern bondage." But Tasso did employ rhyme, as did his Elizabethan translator Edward Fairfax. Moreover, seventeenth-century translations of Homer and Virgil, such as George Chapman's Odyssey and John Dryden's Aeneid, made use of rhyme. Do you find Milton's objections valid in respect to these rhymed epics?

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Paradise Lost: The Legacy

Milton's great epic has exerted an enormous influence on later writers in English, second only to the influence of Shakespeare. The significance of the poem and its capacity to change the way others thought about the power of poetry were apparent from the beginning. The first important critical response to Milton's epic was provided by his good friend, the poet Andrew Marvell in a commendatory poem, published in 1674 along with the second edition of Paradise Lost. Marvell's poem invites comparison with later prose criticism by Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, included in the Norton Anthology. There has been an equally long history of visual responses to Paradise Lost, beginning with a set of engravings by John Baptist Medina included in the elaborate folio edition of the poem in 1688. Several of the Medina images provide their own interesting interpretations of crucial scenes in the poem.

Although the poem has been loved by writers of all temperaments and every generation, there has never been anything like unanimity about the meaning or motive of Milton's epic. To readers like Marvell, the poem expressed the deepest religious devotion. To Romantic poets such as Blake, Shelley, and Byron, on the other hand, Satan could be seen as the true hero of Paradise Lost. The image of the Satanic/Byronic hero had an enormous impact on nineteenth-century literature and continues to influence our way of reading Paradise Lost.

As you explore the many legacies of Paradise Lost, consider which elements of the poem especially impress those who respond to it. What cultural and aesthetic concerns do they bring to their reading of the poem, and how do these differ from Milton's probable concerns? Do any of the various interpreters—Marvell, Addison, Johnson, Medina, Blake, Shelley, or Byron—strike you as especially insightful in their response to the poem, or especially wrongheaded?

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