Literary History 2018

• Formed around a group of about 6-8 sharers (shared in the profits and took on responsibilities) and a group of hired men and boys as well as stage hands and musicians.

• Men or boys took women’s parts

• Patronage: protection and maintenance / performance

• Each actor carried only his own part/s.

• Prompter: prompt book

• Most famous Elizabethan actors: Edward Alleyn (Admiral‘s Men) and Richard Burbage (Shakespeare‘s company)

• Costumes: modern and „historical“

The Queen’s Men

The Admiral’s Men

The Chamberlain’s Men

Dramatic parts of the Latin church service, e.g. visit to the Sepulchre on Easter morning (-> played out in church)

• Not bound to the liturgical calendar

• Beyond church and churchyard

• Mystery plays / Corpus Christi Plays / cycle plays:
based on the Old and New Testament stories, from Creation to Doomsday.

• Morality plays:
plays which dramatise the moral choices in a human life which lead to damnation or salvation.

• Miracles: lives of saints

NOTE: terms NOT used in the Middle Ages

1. Education: educating the laity in their language

2. Contemplation; compassion

3. Tourist attraction

4. Guilds show off their wares: Plays give religious meaning to their labours

REFORMATION: banning of religious plays

By 1581, Elizabeth I had prohibited the performance of mystery plays.

Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels (censor) had the power to oversee plays and playhouses

PURITANS closed the theatres (1642-60)

• A play dramatizing the moral choices in a human life that lead to their salvation or damnation.

• A central human figure is led astray by vices, who suggest that he should leave his responsibilities (study, work, etc.) and go out with them, before being converted to a better life by virtues (personified).

• Morality plays express the belief that humans have a certain amount of control over what would happen to them after their death while they were on earth

• Vice scenes often involve obscene jokes, foolery

• apron stage

• tiring house (mimorum aedes)

• tiring-house wall with gallery space (actors, musicians)

• discovery space

• Gallery & Lords’ Rooms

• Groundlings

• One entrance

• No fixed scenery or backdrops, but props

• "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude...in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions"
   
• Tragic flaw (hamartia)
   
• Shakespeare’s tragedies: diverse (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet)

• “Comedy is ... an imitation of inferior people” (Aristotle,Poetics)

• involves persons of low status

• Evokes laughter

• does not involve pain

Before Shakespeare’s death, only half of his plays had been published

• Foul papers

• (Fair copies)

• Prompt book

• Role books

• Quartos (good and bad)

• Folios

The Colonial Period in America and the Early Modern Period in England:
mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of a new Western world.

England’s fierce religious conflicts during the 16th and 17th centuries: -> Puritans left their country with the Mayflower ->  landed in November 1620 at Plymouth Bay, north of Virginia’s boundary in present-day Massachusetts.

1607–1775: 

This overall era, from the founding of the first settlement at Jamestown to the outbreak of the American Revolution, is often called the Colonial Period.
Writings were for the most part religious, practical, or historical.

English Migration, 1610-1660:

During the first phase of English transatlantic migration, more than half of the colonists settled in the West Indies.

Chesapeake Expansion, 1607-1700

Chesapeake colonies expanded slowly before midcentury.
By 1700, settlers, servants, and slaves had spread throughout the low-lying tidewater region.

European Colonization in the Middle and North Atlantic, Ca. 1650

North of Spanish Florida, Swedish, Dutch, English, and French colonizers competed for territory and trade with Native Americans.
By 1664, England had assumed control of the former Swedish and Dutch territories.

• “Transatlantic Studies”: a recent branch of American Studies

• The United States’ embeddedness within transnational and transcultural forces rather than the reaffirmations of its splendid isolation from them

• transcendence of a nationalist paradigm

• focus on transatlantic ties between England and the New England colonies: from the beginning, aesthetic, intellectual, moral and educational questions were settled via the Atlantic

“Early Modern Period”; “Renaissance”; “Elizabethan Period” 1558-1603; “Jacobean Age”: the reign of James I 1603-1625, which followed that of Queen Elizabeth

Major transformations of 16th and 17th-century England:

1. the emergence of humanism
--> ad fontes
--> da Vinci, Copernicus,

2. Reformation

3. Neoplatonism
combined Platonic ideas with oriental mysticism and which was concerned, above all, with truth, beauty, and goodness (Augustine)

4. printing press.

• the universe: four elements, earth, water, air and fire

• human beings: made of four corresponding bodily ‘humours’ (i.e. thin liquids), melancholy, phlegm, blood and choler

• ‘Great Chain of Being’ (Lovejoy): correspondences

• the Elizabethan world picture: universal, extremely hierarchical frame of order, founded in the Christian belief
  --> ruling principle: DEGREE.

• the individual character of every single human being

  - human pliability
  - early modern proto-subjectivity

The Arte of English Poesie (1589)

a treatise on poetics and rhetoric; an important record of Elizabethan taste and theory; offers prescriptive definitions of good poetry.

An Apology for Poetry / A Defence of Poetry
the programme for a patriotic, protestant and humanistic interest in the didactic functions of poetry (but didactic purposes combined with delight)

• the poet as ‘maker’, his business is ‘imitation’ (cf. Plato and Aristotle).
• the poet as alter deus, a prophet of divine truth, who as the “first light-giver to ignorance” is more important than a philosopher or a historian.
• English poetry = lack of liveliness, good poetry depends on lively, powerful, energetic ways of speaking.

• Imitation (Gr. mimesis; Lat. imitatio) = the central artistic/literary concept during the Elizabethan/Early Modern Period

• Its counter models novitas and ingenium were considered as dangerous. 

• Originality, except within the framework of clearly defined artistic conventions, is not desirable

• Aemulatio meant to make a free use of antique models by varying them with the narrow confines of good taste, while yet adapting them to new needs.

• Imitatio at its worst resulted in servile copies of ancient masterpieces void of life and relevance.

• in Greek, the art of speaking so as to persuade
• was from the first tied up with ethics (persuasion of what is true) and literature (use of language in order to please). 
• Until the 18th century rhetoric was an important part of the school syllabus. Literary rhetoric is concerned with

• the organization (inventio and dispositio)

• the embellishment (elocutio) of works.

• also memoria (the art of learning the speech by heart) and the art of presenting the talk in a lively way = pronuntiatio during delivery (actio).

• Elizabethan sonneteers: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser

• the vernacular poetry of the Italian poet Petrarch (1304- 1374): Canzoniere

• the basic Petrarchan formula of ardent poet-lover pursuing an aloof blonde lady to no avail

Shakespeare’s sonnets:

• love and desire
• early modern subjectivity
• mutability, the transitoriness of human life and beauty / remembrance
• the magical power of poetry

• problems: uncertainties of authorship, the circumstances of their composition, the exact dating of the single sonnets, their arrangement in the sequence and, finally, the identity of the speaker of the poems, the two addressees, the young man and the dark lady
• circulation of sonnets among friends for some years before publication in 1609 at a time when the vogue of Elizabethan sonneteering that characterized the 1580s and 1590s, was already over

• Horatian characterization of poetry as monumentum aere perennius
•  poetry = a more permanent monument than bronze and thus the ideal means of immortalization.
• Renaissance/Early Modern culture thought of itself as the rebirth of a former culture, namely classical antiquity
• memory and cultural memory are at its very centre of interest

• ‘metaphysical poetry’ =
  poetry written by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and other 17th- century English poets, distinguished by ingenuity, intellectuality, irony, paradoxes, and sometimes also obscurity; perplexing philosophical speculations and the use of conceits whose logic is ingenious.

• conceit = a particularly striking metaphor

pattern/shape poems

(e.g. by George Herbert: spiritual conflicts and difficulties in subjecting one’s own will to the will of God; the simple piety of Herbert’s poems was much admired in the 17th century, not least by Puritans.)

Dean of St Paul’s and one of the most celebrated preachers of his time; the holy sonnet “Batter My Heart”

• In the 16th and 17th centuries the term “emblem” was applied to a popular kind of woodcut or engraving accompanied by a motto and a short verse explanation of its meaning.

• emblem = enormously influential as an art form and a mode of allegorical thinking during the 16th and 17th centuries

• poets often drew upon such works for their verbal imagery which it shaped in poetry and literature in general.

• emblem = a memorable combination of texts and images into a composite picture:

  1) a short motto (lemma, inscriptio)

  2) a picture (icon, pictura)

  3) an epigram (subscriptio) or short prose text

  - didactic function: knowledge of truth in a brief yet compelling form
  - persuasion of the reader
  - memory

• 1607-1775: The Colonial Period

• 1775-1828: the Early National Period

• 1828-1865: Romantic Period in America, also known asAmerican Renaissance

  and the Age of Transcendentalism

• 1865-1900: Realistic Period

• 1900-1914: Naturalistic Period

• 1914-1939: Modernism

• 1939 to 1980s: Post-Modernism

• Contemporary period: Post-Postmodernism

Elegies (= “a formal and sustained lament in verse for the death of a particular person, usually ending in a consolation)

• personal loss and death in a colonial setting -> mutability and transitoriness
• reflection of the author’s spiritual state
• mourning of the deaths of grandchildren
• Bradstreet's elegies on her grandchildren “act out the pious mandate to accept tragedy as divine correction and to trust that Christ would someday put all things right”

Bradstreet “does not repudiate Puritan interiority but reconfirms it, voicing frank confessions of spiritual turmoil that were inseparable from the faith’s demands for honest self- scrutiny”

Bradstreet’s ultimate goal was then to translate “private events into consolatory lessons for readers whom she knew and loved”

Bradstreet’s writing = confessional and didactic; a testimony of her acts of pious self-examination.

• religious movement of the 16th century, aiming to reform the doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome, and ending in the establishment of the various Reformed or Protestant Churches of central and north-western Europe:

• Luther in Germany, Calvin in Geneva, Zwingli in Zurich, John Knox in Scotland

• Henry VIII: declaration of independence from papal overlordship

• Puritans left England with the Mayflower and landed in November 1620 at Plymouth Bay, north of Virginia’s boundary in present-day Massachusetts.

• Puritans are members of religious groups who in the 16th and 17th centuries wanted to make church ceremonies simpler. Puritans, for instance, rejected the hierarchy of bishops as not specifically authorized by the Bible. They also rejected other traditions of the Church on the grounds that they were not a safe guide to holy living.

• Puritans affirmed that the Bible was literally inspired and that God had given men ability to find in it a complete rule for all problems of life.

• Puritanism: a strict version of Protestantism.

• Puritans believed that self-control and hard work were important and that pleasure was wrong and unnecessary

• The Puritans believed in predestination:
  the elected few (conviction that God had chosen or predestined specific individuals to achieve salvation)