Click a unit below:
Text: | Faith in Conflict |
Contexts: | William Tyndale, "W. T. to the Reader" |
Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) | |
Robert Aske's Defense of the Pilgrimage of Grace | |
A Song for the Pilgrims of Grace | |
A Ballad of Anne Askew [I Am a Woman Poor and Blind] | |
Topics: | Transgressive Translation: The Bible in English |
Religion and Rebellion | |
Representing Martyrdom: Anne Askew |
The English Reformation was not a single event but a series of ruptures and conflicts on every level of society. The Reformation brought England into conflict with most of the continent and the English language into conflict with Latin. It pitted the north of England against the south, and individual men and women against the authority of church and state. The Reformation had an extraordinary impact on subsequent English literature. At the same time, literature played a vital role in the events of the Reformation. One of the central conflicts was over who was to be allowed to read a book, and in what language. Rebels and martyrs on both sides expressed their faith and their defiance in poetry and songs. Above all, the Reformation proved to people of all faiths the extraordinary power of the English language when allied to a relatively new invention, the printing press.
Before going further, read the section on "The Reformation" in the Introduction to the Sixteenth Century.
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Transgressive Translation: The Bible in English
The section on "The English Bible" describes the controversy surrounding the translation of the Bible into the vernacular in the Reformation era. The English Lutheran William Tyndale ultimately had to leave England in order to translate the Scriptures. In "W. T. to the Reader," Tyndale's preface to his translation of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), he describes the opposition he encountered from church authorities in England, and how he was eventually forced to flee English soil.
One source of the controversy over the translation of the Bible was a problem inherent in the nature of translation. Often a word in one language may be translated by two different words in another, and it is difficult, often impossible, to say which is correct. Thus, one of Tyndale's most controversial decisions was to translate the Latin ecclesia as "congregation" rather than as "church." Another was his choice of "love" instead of "charity" in 1 Corinthians 13, the passage given in four different translations in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Such cases drove the Catholic Thomas More to complain that Tyndale, by his own stated principles as a translator, might as well translate the word "world" as "football."
English Protestant reformers like Tyndale were not the first to contemplate the translation of the Bible into the English tongue. The project had previously been undertaken by, among others, John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century religious reformer who was claimed by later Protestants as a forerunner. But Tyndale and his fellows had an advantage unknown to previous translators. The technological innovation of the printing press made it almost impossible for the authorities to suppress unwelcome ideas. "How many printing presses there be in the world," wrote the Protestant polemicist John Foxe, "so many blockhouses there be against the high castle" of the Pope in Rome, "so that either the pope must abolish knowledge and printing or printing at length will root him out." An anecdote from the chronicler Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) reveals how such traditional methods of censorship as book-burning were made suddenly and comically obsolete by the printing press.
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Religion and Rebellion
Opponents of the English Reformation included not only lofty figures like Thomas More but thousands of ordinary people of all social classes, appalled by changes that included the dissolution of monasteries and abbeys and the seizure of church property. They were horrified as well by the removal or defacement of religious images by Protestant iconoclasts.
Popular resistance to Protestantism was especially strong in the north and west of the country, far from the center of government. In October 1536, the determination of the townsfolk of Louth in Lincolnshire to defend the treasures of their church from confiscation blossomed into an uprising of twenty thousand men. This disorganized revolt collapsed as swiftly as it had begun, but not before inspiring similar uprisings in the counties to the north. Led by the eloquent lawyer Robert Aske, the rebels took control of York and other cities in the north. They called their movement "The Pilgrimage of Grace." Surviving records of the uprising include the "Song of the Pilgrims of Grace" and the "Pilgrims' Oath," of which this is a part:
ye shall not enter into our said Pilgrimage for no particular profit to yourself, nor to do any displeasure to any private person, but by counsel of the commonwealth, nor slay nor murder for no envy, but in your hearts put away all fear and dread, and take afore you the Cross of Christ, and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the Church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions, by all the holy contents of this book.
By the end of October the government was forced to negotiate a truce, promising to seriously consider the rebels' grievances, and peace was restored. The next year, however, Henry VIII moved suddenly to have the leaders of the rebellion arrested and executed. In the interrogation that preceded his execution, Aske gave a powerful account of how the government's move to dissolve the monasteries and abbeys had driven him and his followers to revolt.
The Pilgrimage of Grace was the greatest uprising of the Tudor era, but it was also one of a string of rebellions that pitted the north and west of England against London and the southeast, and Catholics against Protestants. Later disturbances included the Western Rising of 1549 and the Northern Rising of 1569. It was in response to this last rebellion by a few northern Catholic lords and their followers that the Homily Against Disobedience was added to the Book of Homilies. Thenceforth, Elizabeth's subjects would be instructed that "all sins possible to be committed against God or man be contained in rebellion."
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Representing Martyrdom: Anne Askew
In the face of a religious and political establishment determined to silence her, Anne Askew fought to make her voice heard in her life and after her death. Like the medieval spiritual writer Margery Kempe and many women before and after her, Askew's public activities attracted hostile attention from the religious authorities. In such cases, the prosecutors of women invariably had recourse to the words of St. Paul:
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.
And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
(1 Corinthians 14: 34-35, King James Version)
Like Kempe before her, Askew boldly answered the religious authorities who accused her of transgression and heresy. Askew suffered martyrdom for her beliefs—but she left a record of her examination that survived her. The accounts she wrote of her two interrogations by the church authorities were smuggled out of England and published by the reformer John Bale, and subsequently by John Foxe in his great book of martyrs, Acts and Monuments.
Anne Askew was also said to have written a ballad while in prison awaiting execution. No one knows if "I Am a Woman Poor and Blind," a ballad popular in various versions for more than a century after her death, was by Askew herself or by a later writer. Whoever its author was, the ballad provides a different perspective on the circumstances and significance of Askew's interrogation and martyrdom.
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Text: | Women in Power |
Contexts: | Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: "A Letter of the Authors" |
Topics: | Two Tudor Queens |
The Cult of Elizabeth and the Queen's Two Bodies | |
Writing Mary Queen of Scots: The Casket Letters |
The four powerful women who ruled in England and Scotland in the second half of the sixteenth century remain a source of fascination to this day. In countries unused to any form of female authority, these women rulers were faced with enormous challenges. Their status did not preserve them from misogyny, manipulations, and attempts to exert control over the most intimate aspects of their lives. Yet their deadliest rivals, as well as their chief points of comparison, were often each other.
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Two Tudor Queens
For fifty years (1553-1603), after centuries of uninterrupted male rule, England and Wales were governed by two female monarchs in succession. Daughters of Henry VIII by different wives, Mary and Elizabeth differed in religion, temperament, and in their fortunes as queens. What they had in common, besides a father, was their sex. As women, Mary and Elizabeth had to face many of the same challenges—public scepticism, difficult relations with their male courtiers and advisors, endless pressure to marry, or not to marry.
Mary can be heard reflecting on some of these pressures and challenges in "The Oration of Queen Mary in the Guildhall, on the First of February, 1554." A dozen years later, it was Elizabeth's turn to try to define what it meant to be a female monarch, in "A Speech to a Joint Delegation of Lords and Commons, November 5, 1566." Reading these two speeches side by side, you will notice many points of contact. Both women speak, reluctantly but forcefully, on the subject of their marriage choices. How does each queen handle this delicate subject? What similarities or differences in tone and imagery do you notice? What do the speeches tell us about the public personalities of these two women?
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Writing Mary Queen of Scots: The Casket Letters
The so-called Casket Letters are among the most famous writings attributed to Mary Queen of Scots. Yet no one knows for certain whether they are really hers, or cunning forgeries designed to implicate her in adultery and murder. The letters were first heard of when Mary stood trial in England in 1568-69 for complicity in the assassination of her second husband, Darnley. The Queen of Scots was not allowed to handle them and, conveniently, they disappeared forever after the trial. (The original letters were in French, Mary's preferred language. What survive are transcriptions into English and Scots, made before the originals had vanished.)
The text of "Casket Letter Number 2," excerpted in the Norton Anthology, involves every reader in the game of interpretation (a game that was, for Mary, deadly serious). As you read this letter, you will probably find yourself forming an opinion as to whether or not these words are really Mary's. On what grounds might it be possible to make such a judgment? Are there particular passages that seem to indicate her authorship, or that the letters are forgeries? To what extent does the letter seem to implicate Mary in a plot against Darnley? Are there passages or words whose meaning might vary, depending on who wrote them?
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The Cult of Elizabeth and the Queen's Two Bodies
In sixteenth-century England, literary treatments of women could not help but be affected by the fact that the country was ruled by a virgin queen. Elizabeth customarily received adulation in language similar to the Petrarchan mistress. Foreign ambassadors, noble courtiers, and members of Parliament all participated in Elizabeth's cult of love, showering her with extravagant compliments. "We all loved her," her godson Sir John Harrington wrote, "for she said she loved us." Among the most extravagant literary compliments paid to the Queen was Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. As he explains in "A Letter of the Authors" (written to the courtier Sir Walter Ralegh, who himself had a turbulent relationship with the Queen), the Queen of Fairies is none other than Elizabeth herself. "Yet . . . ," adds Spenser, a little awkwardly, "considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene of Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady," he has been compelled to divide her attributes between two separate allegorical characters.
Not only her subjects but the Queen herself sometimes found it difficult to negotiate the distinction between her "two bodies." The works by Elizabeth included in the Anthology include poems such as "The doubt of future foes" and "On Monsieur's Departure," which seem to reveal something of her private self. At the same time, these verses testify to her constant anxiety over appearances and public opinion. By contrast, "Golden Speech" and "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" are propaganda pieces in which the queen expertly manipulates the emotions of her auditors. Reading Elizabeth's writings involves us in the puzzle of where, if anywhere, her true self is to be found. Perhaps, like some of the monarchs in Shakespeare's plays, Elizabeth found that a genuine inner self was a luxury she could not afford.
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Text: | Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (1.617-22) |
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1.622-863) | |
Contexts: | John Derricke, The Image of Ireland (1581) |
Anon, Fúbún fúibh, a shluagh Gaoidheal (Fooboon upon you, ye hosts of the Gael) | |
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland | |
Topics: | The Kingdom of Our Own Language |
Reading Book 1 of The Faerie Queene | |
Spenser's View of Ireland |
Edmund Spenser was the most "English" of Elizabethan poets, yet he spent much of his adult life in Ireland, and his greatest work is set in an imaginary realm: Faerieland. His works record the response to a complex cultural situation by a yet more complex mind. More even than most of his contemporaries, Spenser was immersed in the political and religious controversies of his time. His works serve as examples of how literature can be influenced by politics, but they also suggest the power of literature to shape our responses to events, ideas, and people—for better and for worse.
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The Kingdom of Our Own Language
In a letter written to his friend Gabriel Harvey in 1580, Spenser demanded, "Why a God's name may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language . . . ?" This question sums up the remarkable shift in attitudes toward the English language in the sixteenth century. No longer was English to be viewed as an inferior vernacular, incapable of rising to the literary heights of Latin and Greek. Writers like Spenser were determined to prove that English was second to no other tongue in beauty, dignity, and versatility.
However, Elizabethan writers committed to glorifying English were faced with a dilemma. In order to match the standard set by classical literature, should they set about remodeling and refining the English language after classical models? Or should they instead reject foreign influences, and seek their models in older English writers like Chaucer?
Those who took the first course of classicizing the English language were responsible for introducing many thousands of words from Latin, Greek, and the Romance languages that today we think of as standard English. (Most words ending in "-ize" and "-ate" are early modern coinages of this kind.) One of the foremost defenders of this practice was the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe:
To the reprehenders that complain of my boisterous compound words, and ending my Italianate coined verbs all in -ize, thus I reply. . . . For the compounding of my words, therein I imitate rich men who, having gathered store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little scutes into great pieces of gold. . . . Our English tongue of all languages most swarmeth with the single money of monosyllables, which are the only scandal of it. Books written in them and no other seem like shop-keepers boxes, that contain nothing else save half-pence, three-farthings and two-pences. Therefore what did me I, but having a huge heap of those worthless shreds of small English in my Pia mater's purse, to make the royaller show with them to men's eyes, had them to the compounders immediately, and exchanged them four into one, and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian?
Edmund Spenser took the opposite course from Thomas Nashe. In The Shepheardes Calender, he employed a deliberately archaic form of English, full of old words that had long fallen into disuse among educated English people. His linguistic model was Chaucer, whose work he praised as "the well of English undefiled." The Faerie Queene though more elevated in tone than The Shepheardes Calender, is also full of archaic words. Elizabethan readers would have found the language of these poems perfectly intelligible, but would have recognized its distinctiveness and occasional difficulty. It is for this reason that Spenser's poems, unlike those of his contemporaries, are reproduced in their original spelling.
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Reading Book 1 of The Faerie Queene
No text responds more closely and intriguingly to the English Reformation and the social forces it unleashed than Spenser's Faerie Queene Spenser's letter to Ralegh is written in the spirit of English nationalism and Protestant humanism. As indicated by the references to such "antique Poets historicall" as Homer, Virgil, and Ariosto, The Faerie Queene is intended as an English national epic to rival the great Greek, Latin, and Italian models.
Yet the poem is not only an epic but also an allegory—as Spenser writes, "a continued Allegory, or darke conceit" (1.624). In the letter, Spenser is careful to explain that the Redcrosse Knight represents Holiness, and the armor he wears is "the armour of a Christian man" (1.626). He also explains that the Faerie Queene herself (who never appears in the poem, though she is spoken of) is Elizabeth. But Spenser leaves it to his readers to work out most of the allegorical identifications for themselves. He expected his audience to have an intimate knowledge of the religious and political controversies springing from the English Reformation.
Some of the identifications are easily made, and you will find them explained in the notes. The first book allegorizes the history of the Church of England (represented by the pure Una) in its rivalry with the Roman Catholic Church (the villainous Duessa). Spenser sees this history from a militant Protestant perspective. The separation of Redcrosse from Una early in the book and his disastrous partnering with Duessa represents the centuries in which the Roman church held sway in England, before the Reformation. The horrors of Orgoglio's dungeon point to atrocities committed against Dutch Protestants by Spanish soldiers in the Netherlands and to the notorious Spanish inquisition.
Book 1, however, involves a mixture of different kinds of allegory, and some episodes are difficult to relate to any consistent allegorical schema. How, for instance, should we interpret Una's rescue by the lion (Canto 3) and later by the wild satyr people (Canto 6)? Do these episodes relate to particular episodes in the history of the English church? Or is Spenser merely delighting, like a modern science-fiction writer, in creating imaginary beings who respond to good and evil at different levels of instinct, intuition, and reason?
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Spenser's View of Ireland
Spenser wrote the larger part of The Faerie Queene in Ireland, where he served and profited from the often-oppressive English colonial regime. His experience in Ireland had a profound and complex impact on his poetry, and is a vital context for interpreting his work.
The 1580s and 1590s were troubled years in Ireland, with low-level guerrilla resistance by the native Irish building toward full-scale rebellion. A succession of English lord deputies in Ireland tried by various methods—almost always brutal—to pacify the country. In the eyes of English settlers, the Irish were little better than savages, perhaps even not fully human. John Derricke, in The Image of Ireland (1581) mockingly described the Irish as vicious nymphs and sprites seeking to seduce and corrupt the English. Derricke also describes how the bards, Ireland's traditional poets, incited the people to rebellion with seditious songs. (Derricke's slanderous description of the bards makes an interesting contrast with the real work of a sixteenth-century Irish bard, the scathing Fœbœn fœibh, a shluagh Gaoidheal (Fooboon upon you, ye hosts of the Gael).
Spenser was a settler and minor colonial administrator in late-Elizabethan Ireland. He contributed to the debate over how Ireland could be fully conquered and controlled in his prose tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland. In the View, which remained unpublished for years after his death, Spenser endorses both military domination and the strategic use of famine as means of pacifying—or eliminating—the troublesome natives.
As a "New English" settler in Ireland, Spenser was deeply troubled by the fact that the "Old English"—descendants from the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquerers of Ireland—seemed closer to the Irish than to the Elizabethan English in their customs, language, and religion. In a section of A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser discusses how the Old English came to "degenerate" in this way, becoming "much more lawless and licentious than the very wild Irish."
To what extent did Spenser's experience and behavior in Ireland find reflection in his poetry? To what extent should we judge him, as a human being and as a poet, on the basis of his colonial activities? Bring these questions to your reading of The Faerie Queene, and above all the last canto of Book 2. Does Acrasia's "Bower of Bliss," which corrupts human nature and transforms men into beasts, remind you of anything in the View?
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Text: | Sir Thomas More, Utopia |
Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of . . . Guiana | |
The Wider World | |
Michael Drayton, "Ode. To the Virginian Voyage" | |
Contexts: | Arthur Golding, Ovid's Metamorphoses [The Golden Age] |
Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals | |
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil | |
Topics: | Looking for Utopia |
New World Encounters | |
Visions of the Golden Age |
English men and women of the sixteenth century experienced an unprecedented increase in knowledge of the world beyond Europe, particularly the "New World" reached by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The aim of the Elizabethan voyagers was, in the words of Sir Walter Ralegh, "To seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory." Poets and other writers were inevitably attracted both by the glory of the enterprise and by the opportunity to imagine other worlds. Yet perhaps the most profound effect of the Elizabethan voyages of discovery was that they allowed—even forced—the English to look at their own society in startlingly new ways.
Before going further, read the section on "The English and Otherness" in the Introduction to the Sixteenth Century.
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Looking for Utopia
Perhaps most nations define what they are by defining what they are not. This negative self-definition is, in any case, what the English in the sixteenth century seem constantly to be doing, in travel books, sermons, political speeches, civic pageants, public exhibitions, and theatrical spectacles of otherness. The extraordinary variety of English responses to the "other" include public executions and anti-foreigner riots, but also instances of searching self-criticism. Many English writers used descriptions of foreign lands as a means of commenting on things at home. While some sixteenth-century travelers' tales are full of chauvanistic bigotry, others leave the impression that other societies just might be better—wiser, more just, or more noble—than England.
Inspired by Amerigo Vespucci's accounts of the New World discoveries, Thomas More fashioned in Utopia a powerful critique of English society. In Book 1 of Utopia, the returned traveler Raphael Hythloday explains to More why he will never go into the service of any European king, even the king of England. In the course of this, Hythloday gives a devastating account of the greed, arrogance, ignorance, and cruelty that riddle English society. He asserts that only through the abolition of private property and the introduction of common ownership can society be made just. In Book 2, Hythloday describes the imaginary commonwealth of Utopia, which claims to have solved the problems that so beset England and every other nation.
As you read Hythloday's account of a perfect society, you may conclude that Utopia is not without problems of its own. The state punishes crime with slavery, and keeps a close watch over almost every aspect of its citizens' lives. But these troubling aspects of Utopia do not detract from the force of More's critique of English society. (To subject willful criminals to forced labor is surely not as immoral as to hang men and women for stealing the food they need to live.) Aside from being a great and thought-provoking work on its own account, More's Utopia inaugurates a tradition of self-reflective travel writing. For many later writers, including Michel de Montaigne, descriptions of the furthest-flung corners of the globe became a means of revealing uncomfortable truths about life at home in Europe.
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New World Encounters
The European "discovery" of the Americas was an almost unmitigated disaster for the peoples and civilizations that were found there. Untold millions of people died as a result of European brutality, enslavement, and (above all) diseases such as smallpox to which they had no immunity. As Hariot's Brief and true report of the new-found land of Virginia shows, both the English and some natives were inclined to interpret the devastation wrought by disease as a sign of divine intervention on behalf of the colonists.
Given the barbaric treatment of New World peoples by Europeans, we might expect accounts of first encounters between them to be full of the most crude and vicious stereotypes. In fact, such accounts are often far more complex and ambiguous. Europeans often found their preconceptions overturned in practice. Thus, the Eskimo in Best's account of Frobisher's voyage indignantly denies the charge of cannibalism. In Brazil, Jean de Léry is baffled by how "barbarians . . . utterly ignorant of the Art of Music" can produce such complex vocal harmonies.
Apparent in many accounts of first encounters is the sense of wonder experienced by both peoples. Europeans and natives of the New World alike found themselves suddenly exposed to utterly unfamiliar—sometimes incomprehensible—societies and ways of life. Moreover, both seem to have discovered in the wondering eyes of the other new ways of looking at themselves. Hariot claims of the Algonkian priests that "through conversing with us they were brought into great doubts" about their religion. But this incitement to doubt worked both ways. As a result of his observations, Hariot reaches conclusions that cast sharp doubt on Europeans' beliefs as well. His description of how the Algonkian priests control the "common and simple sort of people" with tales of torments after death in a place called Popogusso is obviously relevant to the Christian belief in a place called Hell.
The New World encounter allowed the English to look at their Old World culture with fresh eyes. While Hariot becomes involved in daring speculations about religion, the account of Frobisher's voyage invites the reader to think anew about practices of representation. When the Eskimo captive mistakes a painting of another Eskimo first for a living being and then for a work of wondrous and frightening magic, we are forced to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and purpose of what we casually call "art."
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Visions of the Golden Age
Descriptions of the lands and peoples of America often invoke visions of unspoiled Paradise or the "Golden Age." Michael Drayton in his "Ode. To the Virginia Voyage" praises Virginia as "Earth's only paradise" and describes its inhabitants as those to whom "the golden age / Still nature's laws doth give." Similarly, Arthur Barlowe describes the people of Virginia as "most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age." These ideal descriptions of New World society did not of course prevent the English from seeking to conquer them—even as he praises the native way of life, Drayton exhorts the English voyagers to "Let cannons roar."
The notion that humanity once experienced a Golden Age of simplicity matched with abundance is common to many cultures. The Renaissance dream of the earthly paradise drew on both the description of Eden in the Book of Genesis and the Roman poet Ovid's legend of the Golden Age (translated by Arthur Golding).
The idea of the Golden Age differs from that of Utopia in that while Utopia refers to a perfected society, the Golden Age refers to a time before society came into being—when human beings still existed in the state of nature. Europeans in the sixteenth century evolved the idea of the "noble savage"—a human being uncorrupted by civilization, whose natural dignity and virtue were superior to anything more advanced societies had to offer. Perhaps the most profound exploration of the idea of the "noble savage" was written not by an Englishman but by the French nobleman Montaigne, whose brilliant essay "Of Cannibals", translated by the gifted Elizabethan John Florio, directly influenced Shakespeare's Tempest and no doubt worked its subversive magic on many other readers as well.
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Text: | Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus |
Contexts: | A Note Containing the Opinion of One Christopher Marly |
Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God's Judgments | |
The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus | |
News from Scotland | |
Christopher Marlowe, A Scene from the B-Text of Doctor Faustus | |
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft | |
Topics: | Marlowe's "Mighty Line" |
The Diabolical Marlowe | |
Faustus and the Witch Hunters |
Christopher Marlowe was a risk-taker, like many of the great characters he created for the theater. The son of a provincial cobbler, he managed, in a world with very little social mobility, to make his way to Cambridge University. He then plunged into the unstable world of spies, blackmailers, and agents provocateurs, and the almost equally unstable world of actors and playwrights. Marlowe was fascinated, it seems, by extremes: ambition on a vast scale, boundless desire, a restless, reckless willingness to transgress limits. Such are the passions that drive Faustus to sell his soul to Lucifer in exchange for knowledge and power. And such perhaps are the passions that enabled Marlowe in six short years to transform the English theater.
Before going further, read the section on "The Elizabethan Theater" in the Introduction to the Sixteenth Century.
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Marlowe's "Mighty Line"
Nothing like Marlowe's plays had been seen or heard before. The new drama that had grown up in London after the opening of the first public theater in 1576 was still crude in many respects, especially in its language. Take, for example, this clumsy expression of passionate love by the title character in Cambyses, King of Persia, a popular play written around 1560 by another Cambridge graduate, Thomas Preston:
For Cupid he, that eyeless boy, my heart hath so enflamed
With beauty, you me to content the like cannot be named;
For since I entered in this place and on you fixed mine eyes,
Most burning fits about my heart in ample wise did rise.
The heat of them such force doth yield, my corpse they scorch, alas!
And burns the same with wasting heat as Titan doth the grass.
And sith this heat is kindled so and fresh in heart of me,
There is no way but of the same the quencher you much be.
Now compare Preston's couplets, written in a meter called "fourteeners," with the lines in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592-93) with which Faustus greets the conjured figure of Helen of Troy:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies!
Come Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena! (Scene 12, lines 81-87)
Though both passages deal with passionate love, the enormous difference between them makes clear the impact of Marlowe's writing on the British stage. Marlowe created and mastered a new theatrical language—a superb, unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse—far more expressive than anything that anyone accustomed to the likes of Preston could have imagined. This was a language capable of remarkable intensity, intellectual rigor, and emotional complexity. Ben Jonson admiringly dubbed this new kind of writing "Marlowe's mighty line."
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The Diabolical Marlowe
On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe, at twenty-nine years old perhaps England's most famous playwright and poet, went to a tavern in the London suburb of Deptford to spend the afternoon with friends. According to the coroner's inquest, there was an argument about the bill, in the course of which Marlowe drew his knife and lunged at Ingram Frizer, who was seated on the opposite side of the table. In the scuffle that followed, Marlowe's knife ended up stuck in his own head, just above his eye, fatally wounding him. Frizer was briefly held, but then released without punishment. Case closed. Puritan moralists such as Thomas Beard considered the murder of Marlowe, who had a dangerous reputation for atheism, as a manifest sign of God's judgment.
Literary sleuths in the twentieth century, reopening the case, discovered that it was not so simple. At the time of his death, Marlowe was under official investigation for atheism and treason; in the search for evidence against him, his roommate, the playwright Thomas Kyd, had been arrested and tortured, and a police spy, Richard Baines, had given Queen Elizabeth's secret police, headed by Thomas Walsingham, a list of Marlowe's alleged "monstrous opinions." Moreover, it turns out that Ingram Frizer was on Walsingham's payroll, as were several of the other men who were present in the room at the tavern when Marlowe was killed. Perhaps Marlowe's death really was the consequence of an argument about the tavern "reckoning," as it was called, but it is also possible that it was a rather different reckoning that Marlowe was settling with his life.
In their libelous writings, Beard and Baines present Marlowe as a kind of Faustus-figure, a man in league with the devil, if not the devil himself. In particular, both associate him with the blasphemous view that the divine prophet Moses was in fact "a conjuror and seducer of the people": the Ten Commandments which Moses claimed to have received from God were nothing more than a confidence trick. We do not know if Marlowe really said this, or any of the other scandalous utterances attributed to him. But it is clear that in his life and after his death, Marlowe was associated with the same irreligious desire for knowledge that leads to the downfall of Doctor Faustus.
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Faustus and the Witch Hunters
Marlowe's achievement in Doctor Faustus is both astonishing and unprecedented. Although the play owes much to Marlowe's unique personality, poetic gifts, and career, it cannot be understood in isolation from the larger cultural context. The story of Faustus was not Marlowe's invention but came from a German narrative about an actual historical figure. The German book was translated into English as The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Faustus. This text is the immediate source of Marlowe's play.
The powerful fears aroused by a figure like Faustus, and the legends associated with his name, are inseparable from widespread anxieties about sorcery and magic. This was the era when witch-hunting was at its height, especially in Scotland, England's northern neighbor. News from Scotland, a pamphlet printed in London in 1591, describes the chilling case of Doctor Fian, a man accused, brutally tortured, and finally executed for witchcraft. Doctor Fian, like Doctor Faustus, was believed to have made a pact with the devil.
The resemblances between Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, its prose source, and the nonfictional News from Scotland go beyond the obvious fact that all deal with the life and death of a male sorcerer. All, for instance, juxtapose scenes of terror and torment with moments of comedy and farce. In News from Scotland, Doctor Fian's attempts to cast a love-spell on a young maiden result instead in his being pursued by a lust-crazed cow. As you read the excerpt from this brief and chilling pamphlet, keep an eye out for other parallels with Marlowe's play.
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Text: | Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, "The long love that in my thought doth harbor" (1.527) |
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, "Love, that doth reign and live within my thought" (1.571) | |
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1.916-31) | |
William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1.1028-43) | |
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night | |
Contexts: | Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Courtier |
Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus | |
Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir (1620) | |
Topics: | Petrarchan Love and the English Sonnet |
Anti-Petrarchan Shakespeare | |
Cross-Dressing, Convention, and Controversy in Twelfth Night |
The Elizabethan era is sometimes thought of as one of the great ages of love poetry. Yet love, as Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood it, was a strange and disturbing emotion. Male sonnet writers in the Petrarchan tradition stocked their poems with images of cruel, unattainable mistresses, and of their own almost unbearable suffering. Reacting against this convention, Shakespeare and others emphasized the earthy and vicious sides of human sexuality. Both Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan sonnets often seem to be motivated by fear and even hatred of women. Yet, as a play like Twelfth Night suggests, defining "woman" was not always a simple matter.
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Petrarchan Love and the English Sonnet
The writer who exerted the greatest influence over sixteenth-century English poetry was a fourteenth-century Italian, Francesco Petrarca—usually known in English as Francis Petrarch. The first major English poet to translate Petrarch's Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes) was Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, followed by his younger contemporary, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Wyatt's sonnet, "The long love that in my thought doth harbor" and Surrey's "Love, that doth reign and live within my thought" are both based on the same Petrarchan original.
A comparison between these two sonnets reveals much about the differences between Wyatt and Surrey as English poets, and also much about the essentials of Petrarchism. Wyatt, in his knotty and vigorous style, and Surrey, with his smoother and more regular verses, portray the lover as the victim of both intemperate Love and an ideal but cruelly indifferent mistress. The lover is exalted and suffers by turns, is tossed between hope and despair. (In Wyatt's work as a whole, despair and bitterness tend to predominate, while in later English sonnets, as in Petrarch, the emphasis is on the hope for transcendence.)
In the works of some of Petrarch's Renaissance imitators, such as Sir Philip Sidney, the idealization of woman is taken as far as it can go, to the point that woman becomes the embodiment of virtue and intellectual beauty. Even when a sonnet sequence is addressed to a real woman, as Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is to his cousin Penelope Devereaux Rich, she is almost always given the same attributes as every other ethereal sonnet mistress. Sidney and his fellow Petrarchan sonneteers explore the powerful Renaissance idea that physical beauty is only a limited manifestation of a higher spiritual or divine beauty. This idea is derived not only from Petrarch but from Castiglione's The Courtier an enormously influential Italian work, translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby. According to the theory of the "Ladder of Love," expounded in the last book of The Courtier, a man's falling in love with a woman through the senses ought to be a step on a stair ascending to the higher spiritual love, which no longer seeks sexual gratification.
The typical sonnet lover, like Sidney's Astrophil, finds it exceedingly difficult to rise above the level of physical desire. Although professing to celebrate a feminine ideal, Petrarchan poetry is preoccupied with the psychological status of male lovers. These are poems about sublimation instead of fulfillment. The ideal woman often plays the role of a personified superego, checking the male libido, which sometimes retires humbly (as in the Wyatt and Surrey translations), sometimes breaks into bitter reproach (as in Sidney's Sonnet 31). In contrast, the woman is calm and remote and never seems to experience the emotional turmoil of her lover—except, as in the case of the early-seventeenth-century poet Lady Mary Wroth, when the woman herself is the speaker.
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Anti-Petrarchan Shakespeare
The extremes of Petrarchan artificiality and idealization inevitably inspired satirical reactions. Among the most successful of such satires is Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 :
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
In these lines and in the next two quatrains (before the "twist" of the closing couplet), Shakespeare ridicules the trite and sometimes silly comparisons used to describe the mistress's beauty in Petrarchan poetry. Hair, for instance, was commonly compared to fine golden wire, as it is in Spenser's sonnet 37 , though Spenser too takes issue with the convention:
What guyle is this, that those her golden tresses,
She doth attire under a net of gold:
And with sly skill so cunningly them dresses,
That which is gold or heare, may scarse be told?
Although Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 can be read on its own as a witty exercise, the so-called Dark Lady of his sonnet sequence is the very antithesis of the Petrarchan mistress. It is important to bear in mind that Sonnets 1-126, which employ many conventional Petrarchan themes, are addressed to a young man. (This is made explicit in, for instance, Sonnets 3, 20, and 126.) Whatever the nature of the poet's love for the young man, this idealized male love is contrasted with sheer lust for the dark mistress (sonnet 129), who seduces not only the speaker but the fair young man himself (sonnet 144). Unlike the cruelly chaste Petrarchan mistress, the Dark Lady tempts and corrupts. Her sexuality is described as the poisoned "bait, / On purpose laid to make the taker mad" (sonnet 129), and her love is "the heaven that leads men to this hell" (line 14). Read alongside contemporary sonnets in the Petrarchan tradition, these powerful but disturbing poems strike a bitterly discordant note.
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Cross-Dressing, Convention, and Controversy in Twelfth Night
For all but her first scene in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the female character Viola is disguised as an adolescent male page, Cesario. Although her true sex is made known at the end of the play, she remains in male attire. Even in the last scene, Orsino, who loves Viola and will soon marry her, continues to call her Cesario. He will do so, he explains, until she resumes her feminine attire, for only then will she be transformed back into a woman:
Cesario, come—
For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen.
(5.1.380-83)
Is Viola/Cesario at this moment in the play a man or a woman? Is gender a matter of biology or of dress? The question is made still more complex by the fact that, on the Shakespearean stage, the actor playing the part was a boy. Where Orsino sees a woman playing a man, the audience would see a boy playing a woman playing a man. This must have required a large measure of mental agility on the part of the audience, who would simultaneously have to remember that Cesario was Viola, and forget that Viola was an adolescent male actor.
For some people in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century society, the ambiguities raised by the theatrical convention of cross-dressing were unacceptable. Puritans railed against the theater and its adherents, reminding male members of the audience that when they found the "woman" on stage desirable, they were really committing the sin of desiring a boy. In a closely related controversy, authors denounced the gender-bending fashions adopted by both men and women in everyday life. The pamphlets Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir (1620) branded masculine women and effeminate men as monstrosities. The authors of such works saw themselves as upholding the essential difference between women and men—but the very fact that they felt obliged to make such arguments revealed their fear that the difference might not be so essential after all.
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Text: | William Shakespeare, King Lear |
Contexts: | Thomas More, Utopia |
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night | |
Anthony Munday, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia | |
Topics: | Shakespeare and the Fetishism of Dress |
Nature in King Lear | |
King Lear and the "Division of the Kingdoms" |
Often regarded as Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece, King Lear explores conflicts that were central to the playwright's culture and his art: conflicts between custom and innovation; men and women; social classes; the nations of Britain; and appearances and inner truth.
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Shakespeare and the Fetishism of Dress
In Utopia, Thomas More describes a society that puts gold and silver to a seemingly paradoxical use: children, slaves, and criminals go about adorned with these metals, while their betters dress simply and without ornament. More's point is that value resides not in the substances themselves, but in their social use. If we all agree to regard gold as contemptible, or coarse cloth as a mark of grandeur, than that is what they are. It is a point with special relevance to Renaissance culture, for in this period power and status were closely bound up with costumes, symbols of authority, and visible signs of rank—the fetishism of dress. For every office and every social class there were customs and laws dictating what sort of dress and ornaments must—or must not—be worn. Just as kings and queens wore crowns, so a steward like Malvolio in Twelfth Night would wear a chain, and a Fool, like the one in King Lear would wear a fool's cap, or coxcomb. And, of course, men and women dressed very differently from one another.
Clothing in this culture—as in ours today—was used as a sign of identity. In Shakespeare's plays, however, it sometimes seems as if identity resides in the garments themselves. When Viola puts on a young man's clothes and calls herself Cesario in Twelfth Night, she becomes unrecognizable. The same thing happens in King Lear when Kent disguises himself as Caius and Edgar wraps himself in a filthy blanket to become the mad beggar, Poor Tom. These plays challenge us to wonder whether our selfhood is really a matter of inner truth, or rather—like the value of gold and silver—a matter of social perception. As King Lear declares in a moment of clarity-in-madness:
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all.
(4.6.161-62)
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Nature in King Lear
Shakespeare's King Lear properly belongs to the early seventeenth century, and to the reign of Elizabeth's successor, James I. In its themes and in its somber mood, the play reveals the precariousness of the Tudor and Stuart establishments and the gloom that seems to have overtaken the country at the turn of the century. King Lear calls into question all the familial, social, and political bonds that had been invoked to rationalize and justify the Tudor monarchy in the sixteenth century. More fundamentally, the play comes close to shattering the faith in nature on which the whole social order was supposed to rest.
It was not on the stage alone that old certainties were being shattered. The anxious questioning and generalized pessimism of Lear reflect wider social processes and ideological tensions. Shakespeare lived and wrote in an era when one very old and well-honored social system was giving way to another. According to the older, "feudal" way of living, one's position in society rested on the relatively intangible bases of rank, lineage, and loyalty; individuals were supposed to remain in the station to which they were born. But in the early modern period, new social forces associated with the rise of capitalism called feudal assumptions into question. Real authority now seemed to lie not in fuzzy concepts like social rank, but in how much power—most fundamentally, economic power—one could bring to bear. In feudal terms, then, King Lear's aspiration to remain a king while giving up his power makes perfect sense. But in the coldly pragmatic terms of the emerging society (represented by Regan, Goneril, and especially Edmund), it is patently absurd.
The ideological debate in King Lear does not refer directly to "economics" or "society," but rather to "nature." The word recurs constantly in the play. Both Edmund and Lear refer to nature as a goddess, but with opposing meanings. When Edmund declares "Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound" (1.2.1-2), he means that he is not bound by worn-out old ideas of custom, legitimacy, and loyalty. In "nature," Edmund worships the chaotic social forces unleashed by the market economy. On the other hand, when Lear cries out "Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!" (1.4.271), he invokes a feudal conception of nature as upholding the innate authority of fathers and kings. It is not clear which version of nature is responsible for the storm that batters Lear and his companions in Act 3. Perhaps in the storm, nature is revolting against the unnatural cruelty of Goneril and Regan; or perhaps the natural world is simply mocking all human appeals to hierarchy, reason, and morality.
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King Lear and the "Division of the Kingdoms"
King Lear is set in the distant past, at a time when, according to tradition, Britain had been a powerful united kingdom. Lear himself first appears in the medieval chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who invented a glorious history for the ancient Britons stretching back to 1200 BC. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Geoffrey's history was looking increasingly untrustworthy and implausible. Nevertheless, many English writers still clung to the belief that Britain had once been united under a single ruler, largely because this belief suited contemporary political interests.
In 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I, King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I. Technically, James would henceforth be the ruler of two distinct kingdoms, England and Scotland. Yet James would have much preferred the status of monarch over a united insular kingdom, known as Great Britain. The king encouraged playwrights and poets to write in favor of the union of the two kingdoms. Many who did so made reference to the legends of ancient Britain, which allowed them to argue that a united kingdom would not be an innovation, but a restoration of Britain's original mode of government. Anthony Munday's pageant, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia, performed around the time of King Lear, is typical of this sort of pro-union propaganda.
King Lear's take on the question of union is rather more difficult to determine. Early audiences would no doubt have expected a play about "the division of the kingdoms" to carry a strong pro-union moral. The tragedy begins with the division of Lear's united Britain into two smaller realms (originally intended to be three, before Cordelia's banishment). Yet it is not clear to what extent the ensuing disasters result from the division of the realm, or whether they are more the result of Lear's mistake in denying Cordelia her portion. The end of the play also allows for various conjectures about the future status of Britain. King Lear has been read both as pro-union propaganda, and as a play with a coded anti-union message. What kinds of evidence should we take into account in deciding which of these it is?
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