Survey of English Literature: Renaissance to Restoration

• Complex syntax
• Point here: there are some women, who speak against women, ridiculing their gender. This is why this book, to remind men that they were born by women, if not the pain of women no men were born. She also writes about the worth of a woman. She also thinks that women should not be criticized so much.

• Tackles head on most problematic criticism of women at the time. The women are made responsible for the Fall. Eve is to be blamed for their state now.
• Aemilia protects Eve and says she just wanted to do good and at the same time blames Adam.
• Adam should have known better, if Eve was weak then he should have been strong.

• There is a lot of literature on the behalf of women.

Joseph Swetman, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615)

• Joseph says: this is all for you pleasure
• Not only about women’s virtues, but barebating of women, entertainment in which people also hoped to make money.

Rachel Speght, A Muzzle for Melastomus (1617)

• Raises the issue of gender class but also an effect of printmarket that people try to make money with.

• Writer of law, politics and science
• He was dismissed due to corruption
• In his essays he made comments on public life created new instruments for acquisition of knowledge –>e.g. the work Instauration Magna 1620
  • He thinks that we must look at the world and study, understand the law of nature. Don’t look at the texts, look at the world how it is.
  • Elaborate the theories and laws of the world
• Bacons thinking was an ancestor of the foundation of royal academy in 1660
• His works (probably a list of his most important works…)
  • Essays (1597; 1612; 1625)
  • The Advancement of Learning (1605)
  • Novum Organum (1620)
  • Instauration Magna (1620)
  • The New Atlantis (1627)

–> misguided conceptions, which are limitations or a filter of our senses

• The tribe: sense perceptions shape our world and are limited. They make us see the world as only how we can perceive the world. This is a limitation! We approach the world through our natural filter.
• The Cave: individual nature and education colour our world. Not only the senses, but also the individual’s temperament, knowledge, education and our own perspective is also set a limit
• The Marketplace: metaphor for dialogue and human interaction. Problems of communication due to language. We have a language that is imperfect. We can’t even express ourselves properly.
• The Theatre: false philosophical representations of the world. Derive from the illusions of our world. Stage plays of the world which differ from the natural world that we believe to see.

We get limitation through senses, our individual nature, false teachings, imperfect language, and disillusions that are created through false philosophical views.

Bacon has a totally patriarchal view. He’s only focused on the man and women have functions in order to serve the man.

• If you focus totally on your task it may prevent you from thinking of the future. He sees rebellious aspect in the single. They are light because they don’t have responsibilities.
• In his opinion wives are for serving the man. Wives are for each and every stage in the man. The young wive would be the older man’s nurse and to the young man they’re mistresses.

• Pillars, which stand on the southern tip of Spain and in Africa, where Europe meets Africa. This was the non-plus ultra –> you would not go any further. That the ship has already passed the pillars means to go beyond the old knowledge into the new unknown.
• Mediterranean world is bound to old views. The ship sailing through the “Pillars of Hercules” on the Street of Gibraltar describes the program of learning, the program of colonialism, the program of discovering.

• His program of learning is about power and dominating

• You have to discover things in order to develop yourself.
• Helesconte the dardanell. Is sort of the corresponding end of the old world on the other side –> where Europe meets Asia. 

He’s a mathematician, political philosopher, rigid materialis –> he doesn’t think about God as much as this age probably want him to (that’s why he’s suspected of atheism). He’s assistant to Francis Bacon.

• Human beings crave powerful self-preservation –> every man against every other man.
• He’s a political thinker and thinks about the way people should be governed.
• The climate becomes harsher. The natural state is a state of war. Aggressive atmosphere and notion of self-preservation is a part of the civil war in Europe.

• It has to be held in check. Even the strongest man may be killed by little men who get together.
• State has to do something about the strength of humans and that they need to be organized.
• Aggressiveness and self-preservation lead the human kind.The natural state is a state of war –> in context to Civil War in Europe
• This creature, Leviathan, has a head and a huge sword. This is the ruler. He is made up of heads.
• he says it’s about the strength of other people and the government 

• In such a state of war there cannot be something like civilization.
• Natural state of man is the state of war. Every man against every man
• The right of nature: gives them the rightLaw of Nature: Foster self-preservation and fight for it. Therefore, you seek peace and compromise.This leads to a Covenant kind of contract, because they have to ... their interestThis will be written down in a Commonwealth.
• Contractual situation social contract.
• As a king you read this and you’re not sure if this is a good idea… that’s a pretty different approach. We think upwards where people come together and have an upwards government.

This is an antagonistic idea about human nature. Differences between humans are not so great even strongest man can be killed by weaker men. 

Is a fighting between the supporters of monarchy of Charles I (and his son ad successor, Charles II) and opposing groups in Charles’s kingdoms (Parliament in England, Scotland, and Ireland)

• Religious tensions rise throughout the 1630s, Charles I appoints the anti-Puritan William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury; English liturgy and episcopal organization imposed upon Presbyterian Scotland
  • This starts the Bishops’ Wars 1639-40
• In order to raise more money for the war he summoned the short Parliament in order to make them give him money, but they refused to even discuss about it. Thus, he dissolved this parliament. That’s why Scotland conquered Charles I. Charles had to pay money every day until they left. Now he really needed money, that’s why he created the long Parliament. The long Parliament dismembered bit by bit the king of his personal rule…
• The king had to flee to Oxford, because the Parliament voted for army against king, which meant rebellion
• First Civil War (1642 – 46) with the defeat of the king

• Stuarts were more absolutist and focused on the representation of themselves
• The parliament was not united. Some of them were radical Puritans or something else I don’t remember…

There Puritans became

• Two military leaders who put together a new modern army. the
• The king was imprisoned, the house of lord was abolished.
• 1649: they cavitated the king
• They crushed rebellions in Ireland. They alsway tend to
• The commonwel
• Cromwell becomes Lord Protector and then he rules in an
• 1660 a new parliament was elected. Restoration, where the son of the King, James the 2^nd was crowned king, the Stuart’s dynasty
• Democracy, Parliament opptained a great deal of power and independency.
• Commonwealth, the Puritan-reign came to an end and a new kind of reign came back

• A group where they re-enact the English Civil War

• Richard Lovelace (1618 – 57)
  • Gentleman from Kent
  • Cavalier, art lover
  • Imprisoned for Royalist sympathies and actions

The old style of their ethics is about cavalier

• He has to go to war
• I can love you only because I’m like that (devoted and honorable to the king)
• Pastoral thinking
• Very straight forward

• Marlowe, Carpe Diem –> idea of courtly dissemblance
• The chief thing is dissembling. Stronger emphasis on dissembling and deceit.

In love and in politics

• We pretend to love, and if we really love we don’t show it. We have to cover our tracks. We must not be found out.
• There will always be a tension between the things he should be doing and the thing he wants.
• In the way the poem is written (comparing to John Dunne –> this is not the same level of literary)

• He didn’t really fight for any course or any side. He started celebrating the Commonwealth after the execution of the king.
• He actually also worked for one of the heads of the Puritans. There’s evidence that he was a bit not powerful.
• He didn’t have a particular problem. He was even in the position to give shelter to whom?

• Long drawn out Carpe Diem thing.
• Puts in a nutshell what is going on.
• Atmosphere of Civil War. We do not have time for other things anymore, life is rough and agressive

• Son of a London businessman
• He was critical of kingship.
• He reads everything he could get his hands on. That’s his preparation for writing a national epic. He wants to produce an epic on this nation
• Latin secretary to the Commonwealth Government
• Takes on role of national poet like Spenser in planning a great epic
• Death of 2^nd wife and total blindness
• Brief imprisonment after Restoration

• Started dictating “Paradise Lost” after prison.

• This work consists of 12 books.
• Everything is written in blank verse (means regular metrical but unrhymed lines)

• Man’s first disobedience 

–> idea of rebellion in his mind, working it through in his head.

• Rebellion, disobedience, worked through text even though in a biblic story.
• Amazing power of his language, blank verse

• 1534 Act of Supremacy (King becomes head of church) Henry VIII wanted to divorce from his wife in order to marry another woman –> ignore the pope
• 1536 – 9 Abolition of monasteries, consolidation of power. Henry VIII takes the wealth and land of the “church” and redistributed land under his followers
• Although he had a great number of wives, he didn’t have a lot of sons.
• Amberlynne the second wife of Henry VIII has a child called Elizabeth (the future queen)

• Rule through Lord Protector Duke of Somerset (Protestant), because Edward was only 9 years old when he became King.
• Book of Common Prayer (Basis for protestant worship) was established –> to base their removal from Rome and Catholicism.
• Mary the first came to the throne there was a wave of prosecution of protestant. Because Mary was catholic. That’s why she’s also called Bloody Mary
• 1557 – 8 War with France, end of English rule on the Continent. They possessed an additional bit of land on the Europe continent in the war against France they lost –> lost their land on the Europe continent

• Golden age in English history, increase of science, culture, medical system is left behind more and more. Modern state features during Elizabethen rule.
• A state rule and state establishment was created.
  • Spying, secret service activities established at the time –> William Cecil, Lord Burleigh had an important role in government
• England wants to be part of the global economy in the late 16^th century
• Struggle between Spanish and English sea powers. They wanted to be part of the global and establishing
• Elizabeth I didn’t marry someone. Lords wanted her to marry protestants, were keen on position. The question about who would inherit the power would arise. She conducted prolonged negotiations about a possible marriage, but it never happened.
• Internally there were always contenders for the throne –> Mary Stuart
• 1587: Mary Stuart beheaded after being part of the ‘Babington plot’
• 1588: Victory over the Spanish Armada. –> England has become the sea power. Elizabeth I secured her seat on the throne.
• 1603: Death of Elizabeth, aged 69. The son of Mary Stuart became the King of England.
• 16^th Century Colonialization became a thing –> Walter Raleigh founds colony Virginia in 1585/6

• Sir Henry Unton (powerful influential nobleman), 1557- 96 Various stages of a noble man’s life in a picture, which works like a comic strip.
• Education: Oxford, Middle Temple
• Grand Tour of the continent. Aim as a young man : see a bit of the world
• Fighting in the Netherlands to fight the Spanish. There are pitched tents –> got promoted and  became sir.
• Ambassador in France.

     Represented England in France

• Life part is as big as the death part. Life and death are really in the balance. Unton is placed between life and death. There’s a circle of life shown.

• Dies on illness (big funeral because of his status as an ambassador)

• Soldier, courtier, philosopher, explorer and colonist, student of science and history, poet
• Introduced the potato and tobacco to Europe, directed the colonization of Virginia
• Elizabeth the first’s favourite –> he was therefore highly powered and influential
  • Raleigh married without the Queens consent. He fell out of Elizabeth’s favour! He was sent away first and later executed under King James. He died by unnatural causes. 

• Negative response to Marlowe’s poem, where he picks up all the symbols Marlowe had, but making them fall into pieces. He’s a sceptic, cynic writer. A creative dialogue develops because it’s a response to another poem.
• Vanitas motive
  • Life is short brief riddled with problems, illness, dangers.
• Principle of reality here
  •  every summer is followed by an autumn. After every spring of pleasure there’s always an autumn of unleasure
• He thinks that the court is deceptive, we cannot trust everyone, life itself is deceptive, so that’s why he cannot do what Marlowe suggests (enjoy every moment in life)
• Raleigh mentions the elements of the nymph’s clothes as lost and forgotten. He makes himself the cynic.

• He as the ocean, Cynthia as the virgin queen
• “the broken monument of my great desires” –> Poem to show how he suffers the present bad situation, former happiness, former bliss 
• He represents the ocean speaking to Cynthia. He says that this is a humble little exercise to express his woe. It is of course an understatement. The image of the seasons follow (prominent in this kind of literature). Poetic images of the seasons: genuine expression of anguish, psychological reflections. 

• Allegory. Pastoral inconjunction with courtly discourse.
  • Allegory: “cease the day, why wait for tomorrow”
• Carpe diem motive.
  • Lovely life
• Bucolica –> lowest form!

• One poem replying to another
• Cultury audience is there
• Evidence of a creative dialogue.
• Ocean to Cynthia of Sir Walter Raleigh.
  • Is a poem to Elizabeth I. and trying to explain and apologies.
  • Cynthia is the virgin queen
  • Sir Walter Raleigh is the Water
  • His present situation is described. How the bliss of happiness has faded
  • The broken monuments of my… famous sentence.
  • All I have left are broken monuments.
• Level of Poems:
  • Bucolica –> pastoral coatry dealing with lowest kinds of people. The Shepherd belongs to this section
    • Very present in Elizabethen times!
  • Georgika –> the peasant is the figure important. About agriculture. More practical type of literature
  • Enit–> estabilishment of states, rules. The matter is ran 

• Organisation of space:
  • Great Hall: big room for official receptions
  • Presence chamber: reception of delegations
  • Privy chamber: private conversations and recreation
  • Royal bedchamber: most private space
    • The Court was A ring around the body of the queen.
    • Access to the queen was very regulated. Who could get close to the queen?
    • in the royal bedchamber there was also political matters discussed –> the further you got, the more you were involved in political matters
• Household
  • Different people for catering and servants, access to the Queen, entertainments
    • Master of Revels –> responsible for entertainment
• Power was concentrated in the court and the noble men
• Elizabeth to Parliament: “We princes, I tell you, are set on stages as it were in the sight and view of all the world duly observed.”
• Portraits of Elizabeth were all symbolic
  • Pelican portrait, phoenix portrait, armada portrait (hand on global)

• She could not fight with the men, but she held a speech in order to show her support
• She says that the body politic is male and that the king protects his land with his body. But she has the body of a female and therefore is unable to participate in the war (which is successful)

• Second largest city after Paris
• About 200’000 inhabitants. Quiet like basel and surrounding arias. That’s huge.
• Entertainment places, Tower of London and a prison.
• There were a lot of craftsmen organised in guilds. –> city with draft skills
• City was governed by Lord Mayor
• Here’s the centre of power in relation to the court as an institution

• Administrator in Ireland (not sure about that!)
• He began with the pastoral work e.g. the shepheardes Calendar (1579)
• National epic /chivalric romance e.g. The Faerie Queene
  • He constructs an epic consisting of 6 books 
  • As an allegoric work in an archaic language (1590/96)
  • Every virtue is aligned by a book
  •  At the beginning he talks about himself and explains that he changed his ”poetic  level”.
  •  
• Structure of his epic
  • 8 lines in iambic pentameter. The final line is an iambic hexameter –> one syllable more. Kind of prose effect, which gives kind of closure
• Renaissance started later than in Italy or France!

• Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374, Italian), Poet of Italian Renaissance
• Renaissance in England (late 15^th-17th) over a century later than in Italy (14^th-17^th) due to ongoing wars
• Petrarchism as first forms of Renaissance art in England
• Beginning of courtly love poetry in 11^th to 13^th century French troubadour poetry
  • Idealization of a distant noble lady as earthly representative of spiritual beauty
• Features (Sonnet):
  • Catalogue of physical perfections (hair, eyes, mouth, voice)
  • Petrarchan conceit: comparisons, metaphors, allegories to describe (lady’s hair like beaten gold)
  • Paradoxical description of psychological states (a poet (poem?) is in(?)
    • icy fire / I freeze / I live to die
• Most important subject the poet himself, his emotional control, development of subjectivity and interiority, poetic skill
• Structure
  • 14 lines
  • Octaves: abba abba (8 lines)
  • Volta (zesura) in the octave and the sestet, change of content
  • Sestet (cde cde) (6 lines)
• Rhetorical feature, which is always kind of argumentative
• The Petrarchan Sonnet is so popular in the 15^th century, because of the queen as the head of the monarchy

Francesco Petrarca: Canzoniere (collection of his poems to Laura, written over Period of 40 years, expressing the Poet’s love to Laura, first part when alive, 2^nd when dead)

• Praise of a lady (here Laura). An unreachable object of desire. Pangs (schmerzen) of unfulfilled love

Laura de Noves

• Poems were dedicated to her while she was alive and unreachable and afterwards when she was dead and literally unreachable

• Two poets started translating the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnets into English, drawing on Italian tradition, copying Italian sonnets (sometimes little changes in meter etc.)
  • Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 42) Ambassador and learned about continent traditions and took them back to England
  • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517 - 47)
• Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) – collection of verse (Wyatt, Howard, Surrey)
• Sonnet cycles
  • Place love poetry in a narrative context
  • Interspersed with songs
  • Play with Petrarchan conventions
• Soon they shift onto an “Anti-Petrarchan” view (i.e. Shakespeare)
  • Artificial idea of a devotion (Hingabe) over many years which is not reciprocated is no longer understood
    • Painting by Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man Among Roses (1588), Man leaning at tree, nature covering him (standing for so long at one point)
• View of making English better by going back to the tradition, traditional values (?)
• English language (and culture) seen to be less sophisticated, feeling of stepping it up
• First, they learn and copy a lot about/of Petrarchan. Later: development of style of writing (fed up)  
• New rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg (like Shakespearean Sonnet structure)
• Late 16^th century, Sonnet becomes fashion

• Contrasts
• Expressing extreme emotional states
• Paradoxical conceit is here peace and..
• Structure of a Sonnet
• Polish English language through copying Italian tradition 

• Sonnet with his 14 lines
• Argumentative structure of a sonnet, tends to have an argument: This is my situation, this is what I do, and therefore I have to do this in order to get that.
• Starting to experiment with rhyme scheme because translation from Italian is not always the same.

• Body contains a number of fluids that had to be in equality
  • Phlegm –> phlegmatic (träge, gleichgültig)
  • Black bile –> Melancholic
  • Yellow bile –> choleric
  • Blood –> Sanguing, energetic
• Melancholy didn’t mean something negative