Maharashtra National Law University, Aurangabad

ENGLISH-I PROJECT
ELIZABETHAN AGE IN ENGLISH LIERATURE

Submitted by:
SOUMIKI GHOSH
Roll No: 10
B.A.LLB (Hons.) Semester -I
UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF

MS. MAHENAZ HAQUE

ASSISTANT PROFFESOR OF ENGLISH OCTOBER, 2018

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 INDEX

SR. NO TOPIC NAME PAGE NO

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. BACKGROUND 5

3. AUTHORS AND WRITINGS 7

4. THEMES AND 12
CHARACTERISTICS

5. CONCLUSION 13

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Introduction-

Many imitations of Chaucer, the father of literature, appeared in English literature after his
death in 1400, but only a few are of great interest. More than a century had to pass before any
further important English poetry was written. Queen Elizabeth ruled from 1558 to 1603 but
the great Elizabethan literary age is mostly not considered to be begun until 1579. Before that
year only some poets wrote works of value.

ELIZABEHAN AGE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--

 SPAN- 1588-1603

 PRECEDED BY- Old & Middle English Era

 SUCCEDED BY- Jacobean Era

The Elizabethan Era is the period of English history associated with the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I (1558-1603). However, many critics expand the term to include the changes that
started to take place in England and therefore in the English literature since the Renaissance,
precisely, from the death of Chaucer (1400) and continued until the death of Shakespeare, in
1616. Yet, the second half of the sixteen century was significant to the English literature, and
in the very particular sense of the word, to the Elizabethan era. The Elizabethan Era, which is
generally considered one of the golden ages in English literature, was a great boom in
literature, particularly in the area of the tragedy. William Shakespeare emerged from this
period as a poet and playwright never seen before. Other important writers of the era of
Elizabeth include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Edmund Spenser, Roger
Ascham, Richard Hooker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, who flourished during
this time. Sir Philip Sidney was an English poet, who is also remembered as one of the most
prominent figures of the Elizabethan Age. These great people are recognized as the most

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Famous Playwrights and Authors of Elizabethan period. It was at this time that the city
comedy genre developed. The era is characterized by vigorous intellectual thinking, an age
of adventure and discovery, and a time in which new ideas and new experiences were
sought after. The period revolutionized many aspects of English life, most significantly
literature. The era is also considered the era of sonnets. The works of writers such as
Shakespeare, Wyatt and Thomas Campion became very popular as printed literature and
was widely distributed in households. This was the period in which the sonnet was
popularized after its introduction by Thomas Wyatt early in the 16th century. Wyatt had
brought to attention the beauty and artfulness of the Petrarchan sonnet. Shakespeare made
significant changes to the Italian model and introduced his own style, now known as the
English (or Shakespearean) sonnet. The Elizabethan Age is considered the Golden Age of
English literature because English writers were intrigued and heavily influenced by Italian
Renaissance writing and readily adopted this model. This period saw the introduction of
another new genre in English theatre, the tragicomedy, which became very popular. Drama,
under Elizabeth's reign, became a unifying influence, drawing people of different social
classes together, since watching a play became a common experience and was not exclusively
restricted to the gentry or upper class. Commoners and royalty could enjoy the same
performance in each other's company, albeit in separate seating arrangements. It is probably
the most splendid age in the history of English literature. The epithet Elizabethan is merely a
chronological reference and does not describe any special characteristic of the writing. The
Elizabethan age, that saw the flowering of poetry (the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza,
dramatic blank verse), was a golden age of drama (especially for the plays of Shakespeare),
and inspired a wide variety of splendid prose (from historical chronicles, versions of the
Holy Scriptures, pamphlets, and literary criticism to the first English novels). From about
the beginning of the 17th century a sudden darkening of tone became noticeable in most
forms of literary expression, especially in drama, and the change more or less coincided with
the death of Elizabeth. English literature from 1603 to 1625 is properly called Jacobean, after
the new monarch, James I. But, insofar as 16th-century themes and patterns were carried
over into the 17th century, the writing from the earlier part of his reign, at least, is sometimes
referred to by the amalgam “Jacobethan.”

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BACKGROUND-

The new approach to things found its genesis in the Italian Renaissance and was also much
influenced by the development of intellectual thought in France and other European nations.
It was a time of discovery, when sailors journeyed far and wide and were introduced to many
new cultures and civilizations. All this impacted on the way people thought. The world, as it
were, had been 'opened up' to them. These influences had a marked effect on English
literature and many new styles of writing were introduced. Elizabeth I presided over a
vigorous culture that saw notable accomplishments in the arts, voyages of discovery, the
"Elizabethan Settlement" that created the Church of England, and the defeat of military
threats from Spain. During her reign a London-centred culture, both courtly and popular,
produced great poetry and drama. English playwrights combined the influence of
the Medieval theatre with the Renaissance's rediscovery of the Roman dramatists, Seneca, for
tragedy, and Plautus and Terence, for comedy. Many of the writers, thinkers and artists of
the day enjoyed the patronage of members of Elizabeth's court, and their works often
involved or referred to the great Queen; indeed, she was the symbol of the day. The
"Elizabethan Age," generally considered one of golden ages in English literature, was thus
appropriately named: these cultural achievements did not just happen to be created while
Elizabeth was on the throne; rather, Elizabeth's specific actions, her image, and the court
atmosphere she nurtured significantly influenced--even inspired--great works of literature.
Elizabeth, who liked to invite theatere companies to her place, wanted them to have fully
practiced their plays before bringing them to her. As a result, plays became more socially
respectable. In 1595, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed at
Greenwich palace during the marriage celebration of Burleigh's granddaughter. The play
contained several references to Elizabeth and her court, especially to the water-pageant
Leicester had put on for Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. Then at Christmastime while
Essex was gone on the campaign in Ireland, Elizabeth saw a performance of

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Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Edmund Spenser, whose patron was none other than Leicester
himself, often drew from the lives of the big celebrities of the day as subject matter for his
poems. In a 1579 poem, for instance, he subtly hints at Leicester's secret marriage to
Elizabeth's cousin, Lettice Knollys. Spenser's famous Faerie Queene contains multiple
references to Elizabeth, who appears allegorically as several characters, including the Faerie
Queene herself. Other international figures, including Philip II, Alencon, Mary Queen of
Scots, and Leicester are represented as well. Yet the middle class never warmed to the
theatre, and this gave playwrights a unique audience with which to contend: rather than
writing for people of a continuous spectrum of backgrounds, they were writing for two
groups separated by a huge gulf, the lower-class commoners and aristocracy. The plays thus
have plots that could be appreciated by the relatively unschooled "groundlings," (those who
could not afford real seats stood on the ground in front of the stage), but also are filled with
allusions and literary references to delight the well-educated aristocracy of Elizabeth's court.
This complexity of audience is part of the reason for the depth and complexity of the
Elizabethan plays. Edmund Spenser's poetry today seems a description of impossible fantasy
scenes. However, a major inspiration for these faerie realms was the glittering splendour he
saw in Elizabeth's court and his emphasis on knights and jousting is another manifestation of
fantasy; yet these, too, had their basis in Elizabeth's court: although gunpowder had put an
end to the era of armoured knights carrying lances on horseback in real battles, jousting and
tournaments were much alive as forms of entertainment for Elizabeth and her aristocracy.

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Authors & Writings-

ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE- Two of the most important Elizabethan

prose writers were John Lyly (1553 or 1554 – 1606) and Thomas Nashe (November 1567 –
c. 1601). Lyly is an English writer, poet, dramatist, playwright, and politician, best known for
his books Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580).
Lyly's mannered literary style, originating in his first books, is known as euphuism. Lyly
must also be considered and remembered as a primary influence on the plays of William
Shakespeare, and in particular the romantic comedies. Lyly's play Love's Metamorphosis is a
large influence on Love's Labour's Lost, and Gallathea is a possible source for other plays.
Nash is considered the greatest of the English Elizabethan pamphleteers. He was
a playwright, poet, and satirist, who is best known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller.

George Puttenham (1529–1590) was a 16th-century English writer and literary

critic. He is generally considered to be the author of the influential handbook on poetry and
rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie (1589)

The Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was

incorporated in 1557, and Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the
relationship of poet and audience by making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto
had circulated only among a courtly coterie.
Edmund Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to
advertise his talents. The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms”
and innate inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the
humanists Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke,
whose treatises on rhetoric, education, and even archery argued in favour of an
unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward linguistic borrowings. Their
stylistic ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational tract The

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Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on that particularly Elizabethan art, translation,
can be felt in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s Castiglione (1561)
and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch (1579). A further stimulus was the religious upheaval that
took place in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to address
as comprehensive an audience as possible—the bishop and the boy who follows the plough,
as William Tyndale put it—produced the first true classics of English prose: the reformed
Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559); John Foxe’s Acts and
Monuments (1563), which celebrates the martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism;
and the various English versions of the Bible, from Tyndale’s New Testament (1525), Miles
Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the Geneva Bible (1560) to the syncretism Authorized
Version (or King James’s Version, 1611). In verse, Tottel’s much
reprinted Miscellany generated a series of imitations and, by popularizing the lyrics of Sir
Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s the tastes of the early Tudor
court. The newer poets collected by Tottel and other anthologists include Nicholas Grimald,
Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe Googe, George Gascoigne, Sir John
Harington, and many others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The modern
preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation has eclipsed these poets, who
continued the tradition of plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves
to ethical and didactic themes and favouring the meditative lyric, satire, and epigram. But
their taste for economy, restraint, and aphoristic density was, in the verse of Donne and Ben
Jonson, to outlive the cult of elegance. The period’s major project was A Mirror for
Magistrates (1559; enlarged editions 1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments, by
several hands, purporting to be spoken by participants in the Wars of the Roses and preaching
the Tudor doctrine of obedience. The quality is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s “Induction”
and Thomas Churchyard’s “Legend of Shore’s Wife” are distinguished, and the
intermingling of history, tragedy, and political morality was to be influential on the drama.
With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly
began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of Poesie includes the first considered
account of the state of English letters. This quality of “forcibleness or energia” he himself
demonstrated in his sonnet sequence of unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582,
published 1591). His Arcadia, in its first version (written c. 1577–80), is a
pastoral romance in which courtiers disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing
delicate experimental verses. The revised version (written c. 1580–84, published 1590; the

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last three books of the first version were added in 1593), vastly expanded but abandoned in
mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of heroism in love and war, philosophical and political
discourses, and set pieces of aristocratic etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling and assured
innovator whose pioneering of new forms and stylistic melody was seminal for his
generation. The Shepherds Calendar (1579) covertly praised Archbishop Edmund Grindal,
who had been suspended by Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s
masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590–96), is an epic of Protestant nationalism in which
the villains are infidels or papists, the hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married
chastity. Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of public servants, and
the Calendar, an expertly crafted collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents
and announced his epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift that it reveals was voiced again in
the marriage poems Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With The Faerie
Queene he achieved the central poem of the Elizabethan period. Its form fuses
the medieval allegory with the Italian romantic epic; its purpose was “to fashion a gentleman
or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” life. The verse, a spacious and slow-
moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic language frequently rise to an unrivalled sensuousness.
In his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591) he voiced the fading of these
expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that remarkable failure
of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy.

 Elizabethan lyric

Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one
that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric
interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas
Lodge (notably in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like
It [c.1598–1600]), and in the theatres plays of every kind were diversified by songs both
popular and courtly. Fine examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George
Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by
Shakespeare’s). Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is
remarkable for the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the
smoothness and apparent spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered
and laboured artifice, attentive to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but
public pieces intended for singing and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight

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is a means of addressing the moral sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to
the discipline of reason and virtue. The lesser talents are well displayed in the
miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593), England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical
Rhapsody (1602).
 The sonnet sequence
The publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally extraordinary
vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidney’s principal imitators being Samuel Daniel, Michael
Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare; his lesser imitators were Henry
Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the Elder Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and
many more. Astrophel had re-created the Petrarchan world of proud beauty and despairing
lover in a single, brilliant stroke, though in English hands the preferred division of the sonnet
into three quatrains and a couplet gave Petrarch’s contemplative form a more forensic turn,
investing it with an argumentative terseness and epigrammatic sting. Daniel’s Delia (1592) is
eloquent and elegant, dignified and high-minded; Drayton’s Ideas Mirror (1594; much
revised by 1619) rises to a strongly imagined, passionate intensity;
Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates, unusually, fulfilled sexual love achieved within
marriage. Shakespeare’s sonnets (published 1609) present a different world altogether, the
conventions upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and treacherous, the loved one beyond
considerations of sexual possession because he is male. The sonnet tended to gravitate toward
correctness or politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical, in
its forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but, under the pressure of
Shakespeare’s urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and shifting and highly
charged ironies, the form’s conventional limits were exploded.

 Other poetic styles

Sonnet and lyric represent one tradition of verse within the period, that most
conventionally delineated as Elizabethan, but the picture is complicated by the coexistence of
other poetic styles in which ornament was distrusted or turned to different purposes; the
sonnet was even parodied by Sir John Davies in his Gulling Sonnets (c. 1594) and by the
Jesuit poet Robert Southwell. Richard Stanyhurst’s extraordinary Aeneid (1582), in
quantitative hexameter and littered with obscure or invented diction, and Sir John
Harington’s version of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1591), with its Byronic ease and
narrative fluency, to Christopher Marlowe’s verse rendering of Lucan’s First Book (published
1600), probably the finest Elizabethan translation. The genre to benefit most from translation

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was the epyllion, or little epic. This short narrative in verse was usually on a mythological
subject, taking most of its material from Ovid, either his Metamorphoses (English version by
Arthur Golding, 1565–67) or his Heroides (English version by Turberville, 1567). This form
flourished from Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) to Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis
and Hermaphroditus (1602) and is best represented by Marlowe’s Hero and
Leander (published 1598) and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). Ovid’s reputation
as an esoteric philosopher left its mark on George Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of
Sense (1595) and Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe (1595), in which the love of mortal for
goddess becomes a parable of wisdom. But Ovid’s real attraction was as an authority on the
erotic, and most epyllia treat physical love with sophistication and sympathy, unrelieved by
the gloss of allegory—a tendency culminating in John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of
Pigmalion’s Image (1598), a poem that has shocked tender sensibilities. Inevitably, the shift
of attitude had an effect on style: for Marlowe the experience of translating (inaccurately)
Ovid’s Amores meant a gain for Hero and Leander in terms of urbanity and, more important,
Greville was a friend of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, whose revolt against Elizabeth
ended in 1601 on the scaffold, and other poets on the edge of the Essex circle fuelled the taste
for aristocratic heroism and individualist ethics. Chapman’s masterpiece, his translation
of Homer (1598), is dedicated to Essex, and his original poems are intellectual and recondite,
often deliberately difficult and obscure; his abstruseness is a means of restricting his audience
to a worthy, understanding elite. Daniel, in his verse Epistles (1603) written to various
noblemen, strikes a mean between plainness and compliment; his Musophilus (1599),
dedicated to Greville, defends the worth of poetry but says there are too many frivolous wits
writing. The cast of Daniel’s mind is stoical, and his language is classically precise. His
major project was a verse history of The Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster
and York (1595–1609), and versified history is also strongly represented
in Drayton’s Legends (1593–1607), Barons’ Wars (1596, 1603), and England’s Heroical
Epistles (1597).

The form that really set its face against Elizabethan politeness was the satire.
Satire was related to the complaint, of which there were notable examples by Daniel (The
Complaint of Rosamond, 1592) and Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece, 1594) that are
dignified and tragic laments in supple verse.

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Theme & Characteristics-

The socio-political life of the time was revitalized by the exploits of Renaissance and poetry
also reflected that. The classical texts were heavily relied on for inspiration and themes. Ideas
of patriotism, nationalism, freedom, free speech, humanism, dominated the literary space. In
stark contrast to Chaucer’s age, this age was embellished with the notions of grand
romances, exorbitant metaphors; experimentation and innovation. The aggrandizement of
love was the most visible notion that captivated he poets of the age like Ben Jonson’s To
Cecilia etc. The age also witnessed an amalgamation of classical myth like Greek etc and
English tales of elves and fairies. This gave a boost to popular fictional elements as well.
Other topics exploited by poets were political life, war and conflict, nature of life, the duality
of man etc. Blank verse was the meter of choice for adding more drama to the text. It freed
the poets from the clutches of making everything rhyme.

It was used profusely in drama as well by the likes of Shakespeare

and Christopher Marlowe and survived far beyond the Elizabethan era with the works like
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and William Wordsworth’s “Prelude.”

The language was rich with grand narratives and heroic tales. The writing was
evocative, palliative and flowery. Clever wordplay, alliteration and metaphors were
commonly deployed.

The age is renowned for its bewitching lyrics like Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophel and Stella or Shakespeare’s poems like Venus and Adonis. Double Entendres was
the most adored device of the Elizabethan poets.

It comprises of words or phrases with dual meanings, a benign explicit

meaning and an implicit secondary one which was more sensual. The use of grandiose
affectations like ‘conceit’ was also popular to add more intrigue and suspense to the
narrative. There was also a conscious appropriation of the past with the use of archaisms, old
syntax, and obscure spellings. This created a sense of old glory and classicalism.

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Conclusion-The Elizabethan age was rich in literary productions of all kinds. Singing is
impossible when one’s hearts undeclared & at any moment one may be laid prostrate. Not till
the accession of Queen Elizabeth, did a better state of things began to be. In the Elizabethan
age, pamphlets & treatises were freely written. The romantic quest is, for the remote, the
wonderful & the beautiful. All these desires were abundantly fed during the Elizabethan age,
which are the first & the greatest romantic epoch (period). According to Albert, “there was a
daring & resolute spirit of adventure in literary as well as the other regions, & most
important of these was an un-mistakable buoyancy & freshness in the strong wind of the
spirit. It was the ardent youth of English Literature & the achievement was worthy of it.”
In spite of borrowings from abroad, the authors of this age showed a spirit of
independence & creativeness. Shakespeare borrowed freely, but by the alembic of his
creative imaginations, he transformed the dross into gold. Spenser introduced the ‘Spenserian
Stanza’, & from his works, we got the impression of inventiveness & intrepidity. On the
whole, the outlook of the writers during the age was broad & independent. Shakespeare is the
reason why Elizabeth's reign is also referred to not only as the Elizabethan era but also as the
Golden Age of Elizabeth. The virgin queen was one of the most popular monarchs in English
history and loved the theatre. Shakespeare is often referred to as an Elizabethan playwright
and poet but one needs to remember that he still produced plays and poetry during the reign
of James I, who was the first monarch of England from the House of Stuart. We can conclude
with that the Elizabethan Era is one of the most glorious ages of English literature where
writers other than William Shakespeare also became successful in creating their own style
and made a statement through their writing. English literature reached its peak during this
time and even after 400 years we cannot but help borrowing themes and being influenced by
their writing. From theatre to literature to present day movies, shadow of the era is still very
much with us and not yet failed to leave a unique mark on our mind.

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