mm^WmK

WMmm

T k e Early Seventeentk
Century
1603-1660
1603: Death of Elizabeth I; accession of James I, first Stuart king of
England
1605: The Gunpowder Plot, a failed effort by Catholic extremists to
blow up Parliament and the king
1607: Establishment of first permanent English colony in the New
World at Jamestown, Virginia
1625: Death of James I; accession of Charles I
1642: Outbreak of civil war; theaters closed
1649: Execution of Charles I; beginning of Commonwealth and Protec-
torate, known inclusively as the Interregnum (1649—60)
1660: End of the Protectorate; restoration of Charles II

Q u e e n Elizabeth died on M a r c h 24, 1603, after ruling England for more than
four decades. T h e Virgin Q u e e n had not, of course, produ ced a child to inherit
her throne, but her kinsman, the thirty-six-year old J a m e s Stuart, J a m e s VI of
Scotland, succeeded her as J a m e s I without the attempted coups that many
had feared. Many welcomed the accession of a m a n in the prime of life, sup-
posing that he would prove more decisive than his notoriously vacillating pre-
decessor. Worries over the succession, which had plagued the reigns of the
Tudor monarchs since Henry VIII, could finally subside: J a m e s already had
several children with his queen, Anne of Denmark. Writers and scholars jubi-
lantly noted that their new ruler had literary inclinations. He was the author
of treatises on government and witchcraft, and s o m e youthful efforts at poetry.
Nonetheless, there were grounds for disquiet. J a m e s had c o m e to maturity
in Scotland, in the seventeenth century a foreign land with a different church,
different customs, and different institutions of government. Two of his books,
The True Law of Free Monarchies ( 1 5 9 8 ) and Basilikon Doron ( 15 99) ,
expounded authoritarian theories of kingship: J a m e s ' s views seemed incom-
patible with the English tradition of "mixed" government, in which power was
shared by the monarch, the H o u s e of Lords, and the H o u s e of C o m m o n s . As
T h o m a s Howard wrote in 1611, while Elizabeth "did talk of her subjects' love
and good affection," J a m e s "talketh of his subjects' fear and subjection." J a m e s
liked to imagine himself as a modern version of the wise, peace-loving Roman
Augustus C a e s a r , who autocratically governed a vast empire. T h e R o m a n s had
deified their emperors, and while the Christian J a m e s could not expect the
same, he insisted on his closeness to divinity. Kings, he believed, derived their
powers from G o d rather than from the people. As God's specially chosen del-
egate, surely he deserved his subjects' reverent, unconditional obedience.

1235
1236 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Yet unlike the c h a r i s m a t i c Elizabeth, J a m e s w a s personally u n p r e p o s s e s s i n g .

O n e contemporary, Anthony W e l d o n , provides a b a r b e d description: "His
t o n g u e too large for his m o u t h , which ever m a d e him s p e a k full in the m o u t h ,
and drink very u n c o m e l y as if eating his drink . . . he never w a s h e d his h a n d s
. . . his walk was ever circular, his fingers ever in that walk fiddling abou t his
c o d p i e c e . " Unsurprisingly, J a m e s did not always inspire in his subjects the
deferential awe to which he thought himself entitled.
T h e relationship b e t w e e n the m o n a r c h a n d his p e o p l e and the relationship
between E n g l a n d a n d S c o t l a n d would be s o u r c e s of friction throughout
J a m e s ' s reign. J a m e s h a d h o p e d to unify his d o m a i n s as a single nation, "the
empi re of Britain." B u t the two realms' legal and ecclesiastical systems proved
difficult to reconcile, a n d the E n g l i s h Parliament, traditionally a sporadically
convened advisory body to the m o n a r c h , o f f e r e d robustly x e n o p h o b i c opposi-
tion. T h e failure of unification w a s only one of several c l a s h e s with the English
Parliament, especially with the H o u s e of C o m m o n s , which h a d authority over
taxation. After J a m e s died in 1 6 2 5 a n d his son, C h a r l e s I, s u c c e e d e d him,
tensions persisted a n d intensified. C h a r l e s , indeed, a t t e m p t e d to rule without
s u m m o n i n g Parl i ament at all b e t w e e n 1 6 2 9 a n d 1 6 3 8 . By 1 6 4 2 E n g l a n d was
up in arms, in a civil war b e t w e e n the king's f o r c e s a n d armies loyal to the
H o u s e o f C o m m o n s . T h e conflict e n d e d with C h a r l e s ' s d e f e a t a n d beheadi ng
in 1 6 4 9 .
Although in the early 1 6 5 0 s the m o n a r c h y as an institution s e e m e d as d e a d
as the m a n who had last worn the crown, an a d e q u a t e r e p l a c e m e n t proved
difficult to devise. Executive power devolved u p o n a " L o r d Protector," Oliver
Cromwell, former general of the parliamentary f o r c e s , who wielded power
nearly as autocratically as C h a r l e s h a d done. Yet without an institutionally
s a n c t i o n e d m e t h o d of transferring power u p o n Cromwell's death in 1 6 5 8 , the
attempt to f a s h i o n a c o m m o n w e a l t h without a hereditary m o n a r c h eventually
failed. In 1 6 6 0 Parl i ament invited the eldest son of the old king h o m e f r o m
exile. He s u c c e e d e d to the throne as King C h a r l e s II.
As J a m e s ' s a c c e s s i o n marks the beginning of "the early seventeenth cen-
tury," his grandson's marks the end. Literary periods o f t e n fail to correlate
neatly with the reigns of m o n a r c h s , a n d the period 1603—60 c a n s e e m espe-
cially arbitrary. M a n y of the m o s t i m p o r t a n t cultural trends in seventeenth-
century E u r o p e neither b e g a n nor e n d e d in t hese years but were in the p r o c e s s
of unfolding slowly, over several centuries. T h e Protestant R e f o r m a t i o n of the
sixteenth century was still ong oi ng in the seventeenth, a n d still p r o d u c i n g
turmoil. T h e printing press, invented in the fifteenth century, m a d e books ever
more widely available, contributing to an expansion of literacy and to a
c h a n g e d c o n c e p t i o n of authorship. A l t h o u g h the English e c o n o m y r e m a i n e d
primarily agrarian, its m a n u f a c t u r i n g a n d trade sectors were expanding rapidly.
E n g l a n d was beginning to establish itself as a colonial power and as a leading
maritime nation. F r o m 1 5 5 0 on, L o n d o n grew explosively as a center of pop-
ulation, trade, a n d literary endeavor. All t hese important d e v e l o p m e n t s got
under way before J a m e s c a m e to the throne, a n d m a n y of them would continue
after the 1 7 1 4 death of J a m e s ' s great-granddaughter Q u e e n Anne, the last of
the S t u a r t s to reign in E n g l a n d .
F r o m a literary point of view, 1 6 0 3 c a n s e e m a particularly capricious divid-
ing line b e c a u s e at the a c c e s s i o n of J a m e s I so m a n y writers h a p p e n e d to be
in midcareer. T h e p r o f e s s i o n a l lives of William S h a k e s p e a r e , B e n J o n s o n , J o h n
D o n n e , Francis B a c o n , Walter Ralegh, a n d m a n y less important writers—
 INTRODUCTION / 1237

T h o m a s Dekker, George C h a p m a n , Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and

T h o m a s Heywood, for instance—straddle the reigns of Elizabeth and James.
T h e Restoration of Charles II, with which this section ends, is likewise a more
significant political t h a n literary milestone: J o h n Milton completed Paradise
Lost and wrote two other m a j o r p o e m s in t h e 1660s. Nonetheless, recognizing
the years 1603—60 as a period sharpens our awareness of some important
political, intellectual, cultural, and stylistic currents that bear directly u p o n
literary production. It helps focus attention too u p o n the seismic shift in
national consciousness that, in 1649, could permit the formal trial, conviction,
and execution of an anointed king at the h a n d s of his f o r m e r subjects.

STATE AND C H U R C H , 1603-40

In James's reign, the m o s t pressing difficulties were apparently financial, but

money troubles were merely symptoms of deeper quandaries about the proper
relationship between the king and the people. C o m p a r e d to James's native
Scotland, England seemed a prosperous nation, but J a m e s was less wealthy
than he believed. Except in times of war, the C r o w n was supposed to f u n d the
government not through regular taxation but through its own extensive land
revenues and by exchanging Crown prerogatives, such as the collection of
taxes on luxury imports, in return for m o n e y or services. Yet t h e Crown's inde-
p e n d e n t i n c o m e h a d declined t h r o u g h o u t the sixteenth century as inflation
eroded the value of land rents. Meanwhile, innovations in military technology
and shipbuilding dramatically increased the expense of port security and other
defenses, a traditional Crown responsibility. Elizabeth had responded to strait-
ened finances with parsimony, transferring m u c h of the expense of her court,
for instance, onto wealthy subjects, w h o m she visited for extended periods on
her a n n u a l "progresses." She kept a tight lid on honorific titles too, creating
new knights or peers very rarely, even though the years of her reign saw con-
siderable upward social mobility. In c o n s e q u e n c e , by 1603 there was consid-
erable p e n t - u p pressure both for "honors" and for more tangible rewards for
government officials. As soon as James c a m e to power, he was immediately
besieged with supplicants.
James responded with w h a t s e e m e d to him appropriate royal munificence,
knighting and ennobling many of his courtiers and endowing t h e m with opu-
lent gifts. His expenses were unavoidably higher t h a n Elizabeth's, because he
had to maintain not only his own household, but also separate establishments
for his q u e e n and for the heir apparent, Prince Henry. Yet he quickly b e c a m e
notorious for his financial heedlessness. C o m p a r e d to Elizabeth's, his court
was disorderly and wasteful, marked by hard drinking, gluttonous feasting,
and a craze for h u n t i n g . "It is not possible for a king of England . . . to be rich
or safe, b u t by frugality," warned James's lord treasurer, Robert Cecil, but
James seemed unable to restrain himself. Soon he was deep in debt and unable
to convince Parliament to bankroll him by raising taxes.
T h e king's financial difficulties set his authoritarian assertions ab o u t the
m o n a r c h ' s supremacy at odds with Parliament's control over taxation. How
were his prerogatives as a ruler to coexist with the rights of his subjects?
Particularly disturbing to many was James's tendency to bestow high offices
upon favorites apparently chosen for good looks rather t h a n for good judg-
ment. James's openly romantic a t t a c h m e n t first to Robert Carr, Earl of Somer-
set, and then to George Villiers, D u k e of Ruckingham, gave rise to widespread
1238 / THE EARLY S E V E N T E E N T H CENTURY

r u m o r s of homosexuality at court. T h e period h a d complex attitudes toward

same-sex relationships; on t h e one hand, "sodomy" was a capital crime (though
it was very rarely prosecuted); on the other h a n d , passionately intense male
friendship, sometimes s u f f u s e d with eroticism, constituted an important cul-
tural ideal. In James's case, at least, contemporaries considered his suscepti-
bility to lovely, expensive youths more a political t h a n a moral calamity. For
his critics, it crystallized w h a t was wrong with unlimited royal power: the ease
with which a king could c o n f u s e his own whim with a divine m a n d a t e .
Despite James's ungainly d e m e a n o r , his frictions with Parliament, and his
chronic problems of self-management, he was politically astute. O f t e n , like
Elizabeth, he succeeded not through decisiveness b u t through canny inaction.
C a u t i o u s by t e m p e r a m e n t , he characterized himself as a p eacemaker and, for
many years, successfully kept England out of the religious wars raging on the
C o n t i n e n t . His 1604 peace treaty with England's old enemy, Spain, m a d e the
Atlantic safe for English ships, a prerequisite for the colonization of the N e w
World and for regular long-distance trading expeditions into the Mediterra-
nean and down t h e African coast into the Indian O c e a n . During James's reign
the first p e r m a n e n t English settlements were established in N o r t h America,
first at Jamestown, then in B e r m u d a , at Plymouth, and in the Caribbean. In
1611 the East India C o m p a n y established England's first foothold in India.
Even w h e n expeditions ended disastrously, as did H e n r y Hudson's 1611
a t t e m p t to find the Northwest Passage and W a l t e r Ralegh's 1617 expedition
to Guiana, they often asserted territorial claims that England would exploit in
later decades.
Although the Crown's deliberate a t t e mp t s to m a n a g e the economy were
often misguided, its f r e q u e n t inattention or refusal to interfere had the unin-
tentional effect of stimulating growth. Early seventeenth-century entrepre-
neurs u n d e r t o o k a wide variety of s c h e m e s for industrial or agricultural
improvement. S o m e ventures were almost as loony as Sir Politic Would-be's
ridiculous moneymaking notions in Ben Jonson's Volpone (1606), b u t others
were serious, profitable enterprises. In the south, domestic industries began
m a n u f a c t u r i n g goods like pins and light woolens tha t h a d previously been
imported. In t h e north, newly developed coal mines provided fuel for England's
growing cities. In the east, landowners drained wetlands, producing more ara-
ble land to feed England's rapidly growing population. T h e s e endeavors gave
rise to a new respect for the practical arts, a faith in technology as a m e a n s of
improving h u m a n life, and a conviction that t h e f u t u r e might be better t h a n
t h e past: all important influences u p o n the scientific theories of Francis Bacon
and his seventeenth-century followers. Economic growth in this period owed
more to the initiative of individuals and small groups t h a n to government
policy, a factor that encouraged a reevaluation of the role of self-interest, the
profit motive, and the role of business contracts in the b e t t e r m e n t of the com-
munity. This reevaluation was a prerequisite for the secular, contractual polit-
ical theories proposed by T h o m a s H o b b e s and J o h n Locke later in the
seventeenth century.
On the vexations faced by the C h u r c h of England, J a m e s was likewise o f t e n
most successful w h e n he was least activist. Since religion c e m e n t e d sociopo-
litical order, it seemed necessary to English rulers that all of their subjects
belong to a single c h u r c h . Yet how could they do so w h e n the Reformation
had discredited many familiar religious practices and had bred disagreement
over many theological issues? Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English
 INTRODUCTION / 1239

people argued over many religious topics. H o w should public worship be con-
ducted, and w h a t sorts of qualifications should ministers possess? H o w should
Scripture be understood? H o w should people pray? W h a t did the sacrament
of C o m m u n i o n m e a n ? W h a t h a p p e n e d to people's souls after they died? Eliz-
abeth's government had needed to devise a c o m m o n religious practice w h e n
actual consensus was impossible. Sensibly, it sought a middle ground between
traditional a n d reformed views. Everyone was legally required to attend
C h u r c h of England services, and the f o r m of t h e services themselves was
m a n d a t e d in the Elizabethan Book of C o m m o n Prayer. Yet the Book of C o m -
m o n Prayer deliberately avoided addressing abstruse theological controversies.
T h e language of the English c h u r c h service was carefully c h o s e n to be open
to several interpretations a n d acceptable to both Protestant- and Catholic-
leaning subjects.
T h e Elizabethan compromise effectively t a m e d many of t h e Reformation's
divisive energies and proved acceptable to the majority of Elizabeth's subjects.
To s t a u n c h Catholics on one side and ardent Protestants on the other, how-
ever, t h e Elizabethan c h u r c h seemed to have sacrificed t r u t h to political expe-
diency. Catholics wanted to return England to the R o m a n fold; while some of
t h e m were loyal subjects of the q u e e n , others advocated invasion by a foreign
Catholic power. Meanwhile the Puritans, as they were disparagingly called,
pressed for more thoroughgoing reformation in doctrine, ritual, and c h u r c h
government, urging the elimination of "popish" elements f r o m worship serv-
ices and "idolatrous" religious images f r o m c h u r c h e s . Some, t h e Presbyterians,
wanted to separate lay and clerical power in the national c h u r c h , so that
c h u r c h leaders would be appointed by other ministers, not by secular author-
ities. Others, the separatists, advocated a b a n d o n i n g a national c h u r c h in favor
of small congregations of the "elect."
T h e resistance of religious minorities to Elizabeth's established c h u r c h
opened t h e m to state persecution. In the 1580s and 1590s, Catholic priests
and the laypeople w h o harbored t h e m were executed for treason, and radical
Protestants for heresy. Roth groups greeted James's accession enthusiastically;
his mother had been the Catholic Mary, Q u e e n of Scots, while his upbringing
had been in the strict Reformed tradition of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk.
James began his reign with a c o n f e r e n c e at H a m p t o n Court, one of his
palaces, at which advocates of a variety of religious views could openly debate
them. Yet the Puritans failed to p e r s u a d e him to make any substantive reforms.
Practically speaking, the Puritan belief that congregations should choose their
leaders diminished the monarch's power by stripping him of authority over
ecclesiastical appointments. M o r e generally, allowing people to choose their
leaders in any sphere of life t h r e a t e n e d to subvert the entire system of defer-
ence and hierarchy u p o n which the institution of m o n a r c h y itself seemed to
rest. "No bishop, no king," James famously remarked.
Nor did Catholics fare well in the n e w reign. Initially inclined to lift Eliza-
beth's sanctions against them, J a m e s hesitated w h e n he realized h o w
e n t r e n c h e d was t h e opposition to toleration. T h e n , in 1605, a small group of
disaffected Catholics packed a cellar adjacent to t h e Houses of Parliament
with gunpowder, intending to detonate it on the day that the king formally
opened Parliament, with Prince Henry, the Houses of Lords and C o m m o n s ,
and the leading justices in a t t e n d a n c e . T h e conspirators were arrested before
they could effect their plan. If the " G u n p o w d e r Plot" had succeeded, it would
have eliminated m u c h of England's ruling class in a single t r e m e n d o u s explo-
1240 / THE EARLY S EV EN TEEN TH CENTURY

sion, leaving the land vulnerable to invasion by a foreign, Catholic power. Not
surprisingly, t h e G u n p o w d e r Plot dramatically heightened anti-Catholic par-
anoia in England, and its apparently miraculous revelation was widely seen as
a sign of God's care for England's Protestant governors.
By and large, t h e n , James's ecclesiastical policies c o n t i n u e d along t h e lines
laid down by Elizabeth. By appointing bishops of varying doctrinal views, he
restrained any single faction f r o m controlling c h u r c h policy. T h e most impor-
tant religious event of James's reign was a newly commissioned translation of
the Bible. First published in 1611, it was a typically moderating d o c u m e n t . A
m u c h more graceful rendering t h a n its predecessor, t h e Geneva version pro-
duced by Puritan expatriates in t h e 1 550s, t h e King J a m e s Bible immediately
b e c a m e t h e standard English Scripture. Its impressive rhythms and memora-
ble phrasing would influence writers for centuries. On the one h a n d , the new
translation contributed to the Protestant aim of making the Bible widely avail-
able to every reader in t h e vernacular. On the other hand, unlike the Geneva
Bible, the King James Version translated controversial and ambiguous pas-
sages in ways that bolstered conservative preferences for a ceremonial c h u r c h
and for a hierarchically organized c h u r c h government.
James's moderation was not universally popular. Some Protestants yearned
for a more confrontational policy toward Catholic powers, particularly toward
Spain, England's old enemy. In the first decade of James's reign, this party
clustered a r o u n d James's eldest son and heir apparent, Prince Henry, w h o
cultivated a militantly Protestant persona. W h e n Henry died of typhoid fever
in 1612, those who favored his policies were forced to seek avenues of power
outside the royal court. By the 1620s, t h e H o u s e of C o m m o n s was developing
a vigorous sense of its own i n d e p e n d e n c e , debating policy agendas often quite
at odds with t h e Crown's and openly attempting to use its power to approve
taxation as a m e a n s of exacting concessions from the king.
James's second son, Prince Charles, c a m e to the throne u p o n James's death
in 1625. Unlike his father, Charles was not a theorist of royal absolutism, but
he acted on that principle with an inflexibility that his father had never been
able to muster. By 1629 he h a d dissolved Parliament three times in frustration
with its recalcitrance, a n d he t h e n began more t h a n a decade of "personal
rule" without Parliament. Charles was more p r u d e n t in some respects t h a n
his f a t h e r had b e e n — h e not only restrained the costs of his own court, but
paid off his father's staggering debts by the early 1630s. T h r o u g h o u t his reign,
he conscientiously applied himself to the business of government. Yet his
refusal to involve powerful individuals and factions in the workings of the state
inevitably alienated t h e m , even while it c u t him off dangerously f r o m impor-
tant channels of information ab o u t the reactions of his people. Money was a
constant problem, too. Even a relatively frugal king required some f u n d s for
ambitious government initiatives; b u t withou t parliamentary approval, any
taxes Charles imposed were widely perceived as illegal. As a result, even wise
policies, s u c h as Charles's effort to build up the English navy, spawned mis-
givings a m o n g m a n y of his subjects.
Religious conflicts intensified. Charles's q u e e n , t h e F r e n c h princess H e n -
rietta Maria, supported an entourage of Roman Catholic priests, protected
English Catholics, and encouraged several noblewomen in her court to convert
to the Catholic faith. While Charles r e m a i n e d a s t a u n c h m e m b e r of the
C h u r c h of England, he loved visual splendor and majestic ceremony in all
aspects of life, spiritual and otherwise—proclivities that led his Puritan sub-
 INTRODUCTION / 1241

jects to suspect him of popish sympathies. Charles's p r o f o u n d a t t a c h m e n t to

his wife, so different from James's neglect of Anne, only d e ep e n e d their
qualms. Like m a n y fellow Puritans, Lucy H u t c h i n s o n blamed the entire deba-
cle of Charles's reign on his wife's influence.
Charles's a p p o i n t m e n t of William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury, the
ecclesiastical h e a d of the English C h u r c h , f u r t h e r alienated Puritans. Laud
subscribed to a theology that most Puritans rejected. As followers of the
sixteenth-century reformer J o h n Calvin, Puritans held that salvation depended
upon faith in Christ, not "works." Works were meaningless because the deeds
of sinful h u m a n beings could not be sanctified in the absence of faith; more-
over, t h e Fall had so thoroughly corrupted h u m a n beings that they could not
m u s t e r this faith without the help of God's grace. God chose (or refused) to
extend grace to particular individuals on grounds that h u m a n beings were
incapable of comprehending, and his decision had been m ad e f r o m eternity,
before the individuals c o n c e r n e d were even born. In other words, Puritans
believed, God predestined people to be saved or d a m n e d , and Christ's redemp-
tive sacrifice was designed only for the saved group, the "elect." Laud, by
contrast, advocated the Arminian doctrine that through Christ, God m a d e
redemption freely available to all h u m a n beings. Individuals could choose
w h e t h e r or not to respond to God's grace, and they could work actively toward
their salvation by acts of charity, ritual devotion, and generosity to the c h u r c h .
Although Laud's theology appears more generously inclusive t h a n the Cal-
vinist alternative, his ecclesiastical policies were uncompromising. Stripping
many Puritan ministers of their posts, Laud aligned the doctrine and cere-
monies of the English c h u r c h with R o m a n Catholicism, which like Armini-
anism held works in high regard. In an ambitious project of c h u r c h renovation,
Laud installed religious paintings and images in c h u r c h e s ; he thought they
promoted reverence in worshippers, but the Puritans believed they encouraged
idolatry. He rebuilt and resituated altars, making t h e m more ornate and prom-
inent: a n o t h e r c h a n g e that dismayed Puritans, since it implied that the Eucha-
rist rather t h a n the sermon was t h e central element of a worship service. In
the 1630s t h o u s a n d s of Puritans departed for the N e w England colonies, but
many more remained at home, deeply discontented.
As the 1630s drew to a close, Archbishop Laud and Charles attempted to
impose a version of the English liturgy and episcopal organization upon Pres-
byterian Scotland. Unlike his father, Charles had little a c q u a i n t a n c e with his
n o r t h e r n realm, and he drastically u n d e r e s t i m a t e d the difficulties involved.
T h e Scots objected both on nationalist and on religious grounds, and they
were not shy ab o u t expressing their objections: the bishop of Rrechin, obliged
to c o n d u c t divine service in the prescribed English style, m o u n t e d the pulpit
armed with two pistols against his unruly congregation, while his wife, sta-
tioned on the floor below, backed him up with a blunderbuss. In the conflict
that followed, the Bishops' W a r s of 1639 and 1640, Charles's forces m e t with
abject defeat. Exacerbating the situation, Laud was simultaneously insisting
u p o n greater conformity within the English c h u r c h . Riots in t h e L o n d o n
streets and the Scots' occupation of several n o r t h e r n English cities forced
Charles to call the so-called Long Parliament, which would soon be managing
a revolution.
1242 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

LITERATURE AND C U L T U R E , 1603-40

Old Ideas and Nexv
In the first part of the seventeenth century, exciting new scientific theories
were in the air, but the older ways of thinking ab o u t the n a t u r e of things had
not yet been superseded. Writers such as J o h n D o n n e , Robert Burton, and
Ben Jonson o f t e n invoked an inherited body of concepts even though they
were aware that those concepts were being questioned or displaced. T h e Ptol-
emaic universe, with its fixed earth and circling sun, moon, planets, and stars,
was a rich source of poetic imagery. So were the four elements—fire, earth,
water, and air—that together were thought to comprise all matter, and the
four bodily h u m o r s — c h o l e r , blood, phlegm, and black bile—which were sup-
posed to d e t e r m i n e a person's t e m p e r a m e n t a n d to cause physical and mental
disease when out of balance. Late Elizabethans and Jacobeans (so called from
Jacobus, Latin for James) considered themselves especially prone to melan-
choly, an ailment of scholars and thinkers stemming from an excess of black
bile. Shakespeare's H a m l e t is melancholic, as is Bosola in J o h n Webster's
Duchess of Malfi and Milton's title figure in "II Penseroso" ("the serious-
minded one"). In his p a n o r a m i c Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton argued that
melancholy was universal.
Key concepts of the inherited system of knowledge were analogy and order.
D o n n e was especially f o n d of drawing parallels between the macrocosm, or
"big world," and the microcosm, or "little world," of the individual h u m a n
being. Also widespread were versions of the "chain of being" that linked and
ordered various kinds of beings in hierarchies. T h e order of nature, for
instance, put God above angels, angels above h u m a n beings, h u m a n beings
above animals, animals above plants, plants above rocks. T h e social order
installed the king over his nobles, nobles over the gentry, gentry over yeomen,
yeomen over c o m m o n laborers. T h e order of the family set h u s b a n d above
wife, parents above children, master and mistress above servants, the elderly
above the young. Each level had its peculiar f u n c t i o n , and each was c o n n e c t e d
to those above and b e n e a t h in a tight network of obligation and dependency.
Items that occupied similar positions in different hierarchies were related by
analogy: thus a m o n a r c h was like God, and he was also like a father, the h e a d
of the family, or like a lion, most majestic of beasts, or like the sun, the most
excellent of heavenly bodies. A medieval or Renaissance poet who calls a king
a sun or a lion, then, imagines himself not to be forging a m e t a p h o r in his
own creative imagination, b u t to be describing something like an obvious fact
of nature. Many Jacobean tragedies, Shakespeare's King Lear perhaps most
comprehensively, depict the catastrophes that e n s u e w h e n these hierarchies
rupture, and both the social order a n d the natural order disintegrate.
Yet this conceptual system was itself beginning to crumble. Francis Bacon
advocated rooting out of the mind all the intellectual predilections that had
made the old ideas so attractive: love of ingenious correlations, reverence for
tradition, and a priori assumptions about w h a t was possible in n a t u r e . Instead,
he argued, groups of collaborators ought to design controlled experiments to
find the t r u t h s of n a t u r e by empirical means. Even as Bacon was promoting
his views in The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, and The New
Atlantis, actual experiments and discoveries were calling the old verities into
question. From the far-flung territories England was beginning to colonize or
to trade with, collectors brought animal, plant, and ethnological novelties,
 INTRODUCTION / 1243

many of which were hard to s u b s u m e u n d e r old categories of understanding.

William Harvey's discovery that blood circulated in the body shook received
views on the f u n c t i o n of blood, casting doubt on the theory of the h u m o r s .
Galileo's telescope provided evidence confirming C o p e r n i c a n astronomical
theory, which dislodged the earth f r o m its stable central position in the cosmos
and, in defiance of all ordinary observation, set it whirling a r o u n d the sun.
Galileo f o u n d evidence as well of c h a n g e in t h e heavens, which were supposed
to be perfect and incorruptible above the level of the m o o n . D o n n e , like other
writers of his age, responded with a mixture of excitement and anxiety to such
novel ideas as these:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt:

The e l e m e n t of fire is quite p u t out;
The sun is lost, a n d t h e earth, a n d no m a n ' s wit
Can well direct him w h e r e to look for it.

Several decades later, however, Milton e m b r a c e d the new science, proudly

recalling a visit during his E u r o p e a n t o u r to "the f a m o u s Galileo, grown old,
a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise t h a n the
Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.'' In Paradise Lost, he would
make complex poetic use of the astronomical controversy, considering how,
and how far, h u m a n s should p u r s u e scientific knowledge.

Patrons, Printers, and Acting Companies

T h e social institutions, customs, and practices that h a d supported and regu-
lated writers in T u d o r times c h a n g e d only gradually before 1640. As it had
u n d e r Elizabeth, the c h u r c h p r o m o t e d writing of several kinds: devotional
treatises; guides to meditation; controversial tracts; "cases of conscience,"
which work out difficult moral issues in complex situations; and especially
sermons. Since everyone was required to attend c h u r c h , everyone heard ser-
mons at least once and o f t e n twice on Sunday, as well as on religious or
national holidays. T h e essence of a sermon, Protestants agreed, was the careful
exposition of Scripture, and its p u r p o s e was to instruct and to move. Yet styles
varied; while some preachers, like D o n n e , strove to enthrall their congrega-
tions with all the resources of artful rhetoric, others, especially many Puritans,
sought an undecorated style that would display God's word in its own splendor.
Printing m a d e it easy to circulate m a n y copies of sermons, blurring the line
between oral delivery and written text and e n h a n c i n g the role of printers and
booksellers in disseminating God's word.
Many writers of the period d e p e n d e d in one way or a n o t h e r u p o n literary
patronage. A J a c ob e a n or Caroline aristocrat, like his medieval forebears, was
expected to reward d e p e n d e n t s in r e t u rn for services and homage. Indeed, his
status was gauged partly on the size of his entourage (that is one reason why
in King Lear the hero experiences his daughters' attempts to dismiss his retain-
ers as so intensely humiliating). In the early seventeenth century, although
commercial relationships were rapidly replacing feudal ones, patronage per-
vaded all walks of life: governing relationships between landlords and tenants,
masters and servants, kings and courtiers. Writers were assimilated into this
system partly because their works reflected well on the patron, and partly
because their all-around intelligence m a d e t h e m useful m e m b e r s of a great
man's household. Important patrons of the time included the royal family—
especially Q u e e n Anne, who sponsored the court masques, and Prince
1244 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

H e n r y — t h e m e m b e r s of the intermarried Sidney/Herbert family, a n d the

C o u n t e s s of Bedford, Q u e e n Anne's confidante.
Because the patronage relationship often took t h e form of an exchange of
favors rather t h a n a simple financial transaction, its terms were very variable
and are difficult to recover with any precision at this historical remove. A poet
might dedicate a poem or a work to a patron in t h e expectation of a simple
cash payment. But a patron might provide a wide range of other benefits: a
place to live; employment as a secretary, tutor, or household servant; or gifts
of clothing (textiles were valuable commodities). D o n n e , for instance, received
inexpensive lodging from the Drury family, for w h o m he wrote the Anniver-
saries; a suit of clerical attire f r o m Lucy Russell, C o u n t e s s of Bedford, when
he took orders in the C h u r c h of England; and a d v a n c e m e n t in the c h u r c h
from King James. Ben Jonson lived for several years at the country estates of
Lord Aubigny and of Robert Sidney, in whose h o n o r he wrote "To Penshurst";
he received a regular salary f r o m the king in r e t u rn for writing court masques;
and he served as c h ap e r o n e to Sir W a l t e r Ralegh's son on a C o n t i n e n t a l tour.
Aemilia Lanyer apparently resided for some time in the household of Margaret
Clifford, C o u n t e s s of C u m b e r l a n d . Andrew Marvell lived for two years with
T h o m a s Fairfax, tutored his daughter and wrote "Upon Appleton H o u s e " for
him. All these quite different relationships and forms of r e m u n e r a t i o n fall
u n d e r the rubric of patronage.
T h e patronage system required the poets involved to h o n e their skills at
eulogizing their patrons' generosity and moral excellence. Jonson's epigrams
and many of Lanyer's dedicatory p o e m s evoke communities of virtuous poets
and patrons joined by bonds of m u t u a l respect and affection. Like the line
between sycophantic flattery and t r u t h f u l depiction, the line between patron-
age and friendship could be a thin one. Literary manuscripts circulated a m o n g
circles of a c q u a i n t a n c e s and supporters, many of w h o m were, at least occa-
sionally, writers as well as readers. Jonson esteemed Mary W r o t h both as a
fellow poet and as a m e m b e r of the Sidney family to w h o m he owed so m u c h .
D o n n e b e c a m e part of a coterie a r o u n d Q u e e n Anne's closest confidante, Lucy
Russell, C o u n t e s s of Bedford, w h o was also an important patron for Ben Jon-
son, Michael Drayton, and Samuel Daniel. T h e countess evidently wrote
poems herself, although only one attributed to her has apparently survived.
Presenting a p o e m to a patron, or circulating it a m o n g t h e group of literary
people w h o s u r r o u n d e d the patron, did not require printing it. In early-
seventeenth-century England, the reading public for sophisticated literary
works was tiny and c o n c e n t r a t e d in a few social settings: the royal court, the
universities, and the Inns of Court, or law schools. In these circumstances,
manuscript circulation could be an effective way of reaching one's audience.
So a great deal of writing r e m a i n e d in m a n u s c r i p t in early-seventeenth-century
England. T h e collected works of many important writers of the p e r i o d — m o s t
notably J o h n D o n n e , George Herbert, William Shakespeare, and Andrew Mar-
vell—appeared in print only posthumously, in editions produced by friends or
admirers. O t h e r writers, like Robert Herrick, collected and printed their own
works long after they were written and (probably) circulated in manuscript.
In consequence, it is o f t e n difficult to date accurately the composition of a
seventeenth-century poem. In addition, w h e n authors do not participate in
the printing of their own works, editorial problems multiply—when, for
instance, the printed version of a p o e m is inconsistent with a surviving man-
uscript copy.
 INTRODUCTION / 1245

Nonetheless, t h e printing of all kinds of literary works was b ecoming more

c o m m o n . Writers s u c h as Francis Bacon or Robert Rurton, w h o hoped to
reach large n u m b e r s of readers with w h o m they were not acquainted, usually
arranged for the printing of their texts soon after they were composed. T h e
sense that t h e printing of lyric poetry, in particular, was a bit vulgar began to
fade w h e n t h e f a m o u s Ben Jonson collected his own works in a grand folio
edition.
Until 1640 t h e Stuart kings kept in place the strict controls over print pub-
lication originally instituted by Henry VIII, in response to the ideological threat
posed by the Reformation. King Henry had given the m e m b e r s of London's
Stationer's C o m p a n y a monopoly on all printing; in r e t u r n for their privilege,
they were supposed to submit texts to prepublication censorship. In the latter
part of the sixteenth century, presses associated with t h e universities at Oxford
and Cambridge would begin operation as well, b u t they were largely c o n c e r n e d
with scholarly and theological books. As a result, with a very few exceptions
(such as George Herbert's The Temple, published by Cambridge University
Press), almost all printed literary texts were produced in London. Most of t h e m
were sold there as well, in the booksellers' stalls set up outside St. Paul's
Cathedral.
T h e licensing system located not only primary responsibility for a printed
work, b u t its ownership, with t h e printer rather than with the author. Printers
typically paid writers a onetime fee for the use of their work, b u t the payment
was scanty, and the authors of popular texts realized no royalties f r o m the
many copies sold. As a result, no one could make a living as a writer in t h e
early seventeenth century by producing best sellers. T h e first writer formally
to arrange for royalties was apparently J o h n Milton, w h o received five p o u n d s
up front for Paradise Lost, and a n o t h e r five p o u n d s and two h u n d r e d copies
at the end of each of the first three impressions. Still, legal ownership of and
control over a printed work remained with the printer: authorial copyright
would not b e c o m e a reality until the early eighteenth century.
In monetary terms, a more promising outlet for writers was the commercial
theater, which provided the first literary market in English history. Profitable
and popular acting companies, established successfully in London in Eliza-
beth's time, continued to play a very imp ortant cultural role u n d e r J a m e s and
Charles. Recause t h e acting c o mp a n i e s staged a large n u m b e r of different
plays and paid for t h e m at a predictable, if not generous, rate, they enabled a
few hardworking writers to support themselves as full-time professionals. O n e
of t h e m , T h o m a s Dekker, c o m m e n t e d bemusedly on the novelty of being paid
for the m e r e products of one's imagination: "the theater," he wrote, "is your
poet's Royal Exchange upon which their m u s e s — t h a t are now t u r n e d to mer-
chants—meeting, barter away that light commodity of words." In James's
reign, Shakespeare was at t h e height of his powers: Othello, King Lear, Mac-
beth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and other impor-
tant plays were first staged during these years. So were Jonson's major
comedies: Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. T h e most
important new playwright was J o h n Webster, whose dark tragedies The White
Devil and The Duchess ofMalfi comb ined gothic horror with stunningly beau-
tiful poetry.
Just as printers were legally the owners of t h e texts they printed, so t h e a t e r
companies, not playwrights, were the owners of the texts they performed. Typ-
ically, companies guarded their scripts closely, permitting t h e m to be printed
1246 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

only in times of financial distress or w h e n they were so old that printing t h e m

seemed unlikely to reduce the paying audience. As a result, many J a c ob e a n
and Caroline plays are lost to us or available only in corrupt or p o s t h u m o u s
versions. For contemporaries, though, a play was "published" not by being
printed but by being performed. Aware of the dangerous potential of plays in
arousing the sentiments of large crowds of onlookers, the Stuarts, like the
Tudors before t h e m , instituted tight controls over dramatic performances. Act-
ing companies, like printers, were obliged to submit works to the censor before
public presentation.
Authors, printers, and acting companies w h o flouted the censorships laws
were subject to imprisonment, fines, or even bodily mutilation. Q u e e n Eliza-
beth cut off the h a n d of a m a n w h o disagreed in print with her marriage plans,
King Charles the ears of a m a n w h o inveighed against court masques. Jonson
and his collaborators f o u n d themselves in prison for ridiculing King James's
broad Scots accent in one of their comedies. T h e effects of censorship on
writers' o u t p u t were therefore far reaching across literary genres. Since overt
criticism or satire of the great was so dangerous, political writing was apt to
be oblique and allegorical. Writers o f t e n employed animal fables, tales of dis-
tant lands, or long-past historical events to c o m m e n t u p o n contemporary
issues.
While the commercial theaters were profitable businesses that m a d e most
of their money f r o m paying audiences, several factors combined to bring writ-
ing for the t h e a t e r closer to the Stuart court t h a n it had been in Elizabeth's
time. T h e Elizabethan t h e a t e r companies had been officially associated with
n o b l e m e n w h o guaranteed their legitimacy (in contrast to unsponsored trav-
eling players, who were subject to p u n i s h m e n t as vagrants). Early in his reign,
James brought the major theater companies u n d e r royal auspices. Shake-
speare's company, the most successful of the day, b e c a m e the King's M e n : it
p e r f o r m e d not only all of Shakespeare's plays but also Volpone and The Duch-
ess of Malfi. Q u e e n Anne, Prince Henry, Prince Charles, and Princess Eliza-
beth sponsored other companies of actors. Royal patronage, which brought
with it tangible rewards and regular court performances, naturally encouraged
the theater companies to pay more attention to courtly taste. Shakespeare's
Macbeth p u t onstage Scots history and witches, two of James's own interests;
in King Lear, the hero's disastrous division of his kingdom may reflect contro-
versies over t h e proposed union of Scotland and England. In the first four
decades of the seventeenth century, court-affiliated theater companies such
as the King's M e n increasingly cultivated audiences markedly more affluent
than the audiences they had sought in the 1580s and 1590s, performing in
intimate, expensive indoor theaters instead of, or as well as, in the cheap
popular amphitheaters. The Duchess of Malfi, for instance, was probably writ-
ten with the King's Men's indoor theater at Blackfriars in mind, because sev-
eral scenes depend for their effect u p o n a control over lighting that is
impossible outdoors. Partly because t h e commercial theaters seemed increas-
ingly to cater to the affluent and courtly elements of society, they attracted
the ire of the king's op p o n e n t s w h e n civil war broke out in t h e 1640s.

Jacobean Writers and Genres

T h e era saw important changes in poetic fashion. Some major Elizabethan
genres fell out of favor—long allegorical or mythological narratives, sonnet
sequences, and pastoral poems. T h e norm was coming to be short, c o n c e n -
trated, often witty poems. Poets and prose writers alike often preferred the
 INTRODUCTION / 1247

jagged rhythms of colloquial speech to t h e elaborate o r n a m e n t a t i o n and near-

musical orchestration of sound that m a n y Elizabethans had sought. T h e major
poets of these years, Jonson, D o n n e , and Herbert, led this shift and also pro-
moted a variety of "new" genres: love elegy and satire after the classical models
of Ovid and Horace, epigram, verse epistle, meditative religious lyric, and
country-house p o e m . Although these poets differed enormously f r o m one
another, all three exercised an important influence on the poets of the next
generation.
A native Londoner, Jonson first distinguished himself as an acute observer
of u r b a n m a n n e r s in a series of early, controversial satiric plays. Although he
wrote two of his most moving p o e m s to his dead children, Jonson focused
rather rarely on the dynamics of the family relationships that so profoundly
concerned his contemporary Shakespeare. W h e n generational and dynastic
matters do figure in his poetry, as they do at the end of "To P e n s h u r s t , " they
seem part of the agrarian, feudal order that Jonson may have romanticized but
that he suspected was rapidly disappearing. By and large, Jonson interested
himself in relationships that seemed to be negotiated by the participants, often
in a bustling urban or courtly world in which blood kinship no longer decisively
determined one's social place. Jonson's poems of praise celebrate and exem-
plify classical and h u m a n i s t ideals of friendship: like-minded m e n and w o m e n
elect to join in a c o m m u n i t y that fosters wisdom, generosity, civic responsi-
bility, and m u t u a l respect. In the plays and satiric poems, Jonson stages the
violation of those values with s u c h riotous comprehensiveness that the very
survival of such ideals seem endangered: the plays swarm with voracious swin-
dlers and their eager victims, social climbers both adroit and inept, and a
dizzying assortment of morons and misfits. In many of Jonson's plays, rogues
or wits collude to victimize others; their stormy, self-interested alliances,
apparently so different from the virtuous friendships of the p o e m s of praise,
in fact resemble t h e m in one respect: they are connections entered into by
choice, not by law, inheritance, or custom.
T h r o u g h o u t his life, Jonson earned his living entirely f r o m his writing, com-
posing plays for the public theater while also attracting patronage as a poet
and a writer of court masques. His a c u t e awareness of his audience was partly,
then, a sheerly practical matter. Yet Jonson's yearning for recognition ran far
beyond any desire for material reward. A gifted poet, Jonson argued, was a
society's proper judge and teacher, and he could only be effective if his audi-
ence understood and respected the poet's exalted role. Jonson set out una-
bashedly to create that audience and to m o n u m e n t a l i z e himself as a great
English author. In 1616 he took the u n u s u a l step, for his time, of collecting
his poems, plays, and m a s q u e s in an elegant folio volume.
Jonson's influence u p o n the next generation of writers, and through t h e m
into the Restoration and the eighteenth century, was an effect b o t h of his
poetic mastery of his chosen modes and of his powerful personal example.
Jonson mentored a group of younger poets, known as the Tribe, or Sons, of
Ben, meeting regularly with some of t h e m in the Apollo Room of t h e Devil
Tavern in London. Many of the royalist, or Cavalier, poets—Robert Herrick,
T h o m a s Carew, Richard Lovelace, Sir J o h n Suckling, E d m u n d Waller, Henry
Vaughan in his secular verse—proudly acknowledged their relationship to Jon-
son or gave some evidence of it in their verse. Most of t h e m absorbed too
Jonson's attitude toward print and in later decades supervised the publication
of their own poems.
Donne, like Jonson, spent most of his life in or near London, often in the
1248 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

company of other writers and intellectuals—indeed, in the company of many

of the same writers and intellectuals, since the two m e n were friends and
shared some of the same patrons. Yet, unlike Jonson's, most of Donne's poetry
concerns itself not with a crowded social panorama, but with a dyad—with
the relationship between the speaker and one single other being, a woman or
God—that in its intensity blots out the claims of lesser relationships. Love for
Donne encompasses an astonishing range of emotional experiences, from the
lusty impatience of "To His Mistress Going to Bed" to the cheerful promiscuity
of "The Indifferent" to the mysterious platonic telepathy of "Air and Angels,"
from the vengeful wit of "The Apparition" to the postcoital tranquility of "The
Good Morrow." While for Jonson the shared meal among friends often
becomes an emblem of communion, for Donne sexual consummation has
something of the same highly charged symbolic character, a m o m e n t in which
the isolated individual can, however temporarily, escape the boundaries of
selfhood in union with another:
T h e phoenix riddle h a t h more with
By us: we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

In the religious poems, where D o n n e both yearns for a physical relationship

with God and knows it is impossible, he does not abandon his characteristic
bodily metaphors. The doctrine of the Incarnation—God's taking material
form in the person of Jesus Christ—and the doctrine of the bodily resurrection
of the dead at the Last Day are Christian teachings that fascinate Donne, to
which he returns again and again in his poems, sermons, and devotional writ-
ings. While sexual and religious love had long shared a common vocabulary,
Donne delights in making that overlap seem new and shocking. He likens
conjoined lovers to saints; demands to be raped by God; speculates, after his
wife's death, that God killed her because He was jealous of Donne's divided
loyalty; imagines Christ encouraging his Bride, the church, to "open" herself
to as many m e n as possible.
Throughout Donne's life, his faith, like his intellect, was anything but quiet.
Born into a family of devout Roman Catholics just as the persecution of Cath-
olics was intensifying in Elizabethan England, Donne eventually became a
member of the C h u r c h of England. If "Satire 3" is any indication, the conver-
sion was attended by profound doubts and existential crisis. Donne's restless
mind can lead him in surprising and sometimes unorthodox directions, to a
qualified defense of suicide, for instance, in Biathanatos. At the same time,
overwhelmed with a sense of his own unworthiness, he courts God's punish-
ment, demanding to be spat upon, flogged, burnt, broken down, in the expec-
tation that suffering at God's hand will restore him to grace and favor.
In both style and content, Donne's poems were addressed to a select few
rather than to the public at large. His style is demanding, characterized by
learned terms, audaciously far-fetched analogies, and an intellectually sophis-
ticated play of ironies. Even Donne's sermons, attended by large crowds, share
the knotty difficulty of the poems, and something too of their quality of inti-
mate address. D o n n e circulated his poems in manuscript and largely avoided
print publication (most of his poems were printed after his death in 1631). By
some critics Donne has been regarded as the founder of a Metaphysical school
of poetry. We find echoes of Donne's style in many later poets: in Thomas
Carew, who praised D o n n e as a "monarch of wit," George Herbert, Richard
 INTRODUCTION / 1249

Crashaw, J o h n Cleveland, Sir J o h n Suckling, A b r a h a m Cowley, and Andrew

Marvell.
Herbert, the younger son of a wealthy, cultivated, and well-connected fam-
ily, seemed destined in early adulthood for a brilliant career as a diplomat or
government servant. Yet he t u r n e d his back on worldly greatness to be
ordained a priest in the C h u r c h of England. Moreover, eschewing a highly
visible career as an u r b a n preacher, he spent the remaining years of his short
life ministering to the tiny rural parish of Bemerton. Herbert's poetry is shot
through with the difficulty and joy of this renunciation, with all it entailed for
him. Literary ambition—pride in one's i n d e p e n d e n t creativity—appears to
H e r b e r t a temptation that m u s t be resisted, w h e t h e r it takes the form of Jon-
son's openly competitive aspiration for literary p r e e m i n e n c e or Donne's bril-
liantly ironic self-displaying p e r f o r m a n c e s . Instead, H e r b e r t seeks otKer
models for poetic agency: the secretary taking dictation f r o m a master, the
musician playing in h a r m o n i o u s consort with others, t h e m e m b e r of a c h u r c h
congregation w h o speaks with and for a community.
Herbert destroyed his secular verse in English and he t u r n e d his volume of
religious verse over to a friend only on his deathbed, desiring him to print it
if he thought it would be useful to "some dejected poor soul," b u t otherwise
to b u r n it. T h e 177 lyrics contained in that volume, The Temple, display a
complex religious sensibility and great artistic subtlety in an amazing variety
of stanza forms. Herbert was the major influence on the next generation of
religious lyric poets and was explicitly recognized as such by H e n r y Vaughan
and Richard Crashaw.
T h e Jacobean period also saw the emergence of w h a t would b e c o m e a major
prose genre, the familiar essay. T h e works of t h e F r e n c h inventor of t h e form,
Michel de Montaigne, appeared in English translation in 1603, influencing
Shakespeare as well as such later writers as Sir T h o m a s Rrowne. Yet the first
essays in English, the work of Francis Bacon, attorney general u n d e r Elizabeth
and eventually lord chancellor u n d e r James, bear little resemblance to M o n -
taigne's intimate, tentative, conversational pieces. Bacon's essays present
pithy, sententious, sometimes provocative claims in a tone of cool objectivity,
tempering moral counsel with an awareness of the i m p o r t a n c e of p r u d e n c e
and expediency in practical affairs. In Novum Organum Bacon adapts his
deliberately discontinuous m o d e of exposition to outline a new scientific
method, holding out the tantalizing prospect of eventual mastery over the
natural world and boldly articulating t h e ways in which science might improve
the h u m a n condition. In his fictional Utopia, described in Tlte New Atlantis,
Bacon imagines a society that realizes his dream of carefully orchestrated col-
laborative research, so different f r o m the erratic, uncoordinated efforts of
alchemists and a m a t e u r s in his own day. Bacon's philosophically revolutionary
approach to the natural world profoundly impacted scientifically m i n d e d peo-
ple over the next several generations. His writings influenced the materialist
philosophy of his erstwhile secretary, T h o m a s Hobbes, encouraged Oliver
Cromwell to attempt a large-scale overhaul of the university curriculum during
the 1650s, and inspired the formation of t h e Royal Society, an organization
of experimental scientists, after the Restoration.
T h e reigns of the first two Stuart kings m a r k t h e entry of Englishwomen, in
some numbers, into authorship and publication. Most female writers of the
period were f r o m the nobility or gentry; all were m u c h better e d u c a t e d than
most w o m e n of the period, many of w h o m remained illiterate. In 1611 Aemilia
1250 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Lanyer was the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original

poems. It contained poetic dedications, a long poem on Christ's passion, and
a country-house poem, all defending women's interests and importance. In
1613 Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, was the first Englishwoman to publish a
tragedy, Mariam, a closet d r a m a that probes the situation of a q u e e n subjected
to her h u sb a n d ' s domestic and political tyranny. In 1617 Rachel Speght, the
first female polemicist w h o can be securely identified, published a defense of
her sex in response to a notorious attack u p o n "Lewd, Idle, Froward, and
U n c o n s t a n t W o m e n " ; she was also the a u t h o r of a long dream-vision poem.
Lady Mary W r o t h , niece of Sir Philip Sidney and the C o u n t e s s of Pembroke,
wrote a long prose romance, Urania (1612), which presents a range of women's
experiences as lovers, rulers, counselors, scholars, storytellers, poets, and
seers. H e r P e t r a r c h a n s o n n e t s e q u e n c e Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, published
with Urania, gives poetic voice to the female in love.

T H E C A R O L I N E ERA, 1625-40

W h e n King Charles came to the t h r o n e in 1625, "the fools and bawds, mimics
and catamites of the f o r m e r court grew out of fashion," as the Puritan Lucy
H u t c h i n s o n recalled. T h e c h a n g e d style of the court directly affected the arts
and literature of the Caroline period (so called after Carolus, Latin for
Charles). Charles and his q u e e n , Henrietta Maria, were art collectors on a
large scale and patrons of such painters as Peter Paul R u b e n s and Sir Anthony
Van Dyke; the latter portrayed Charles as a heroic figure of knightly romance,
m o u n t e d on a splendid stallion. T h e c o n j u n c t i o n of chivalric virtue and divine
beauty or love, symbolized in the union of the royal couple, was the d o m i n a n t
t h e m e of Caroline court masques, which were even more extravagantly hyper-
bolic than their Jacobean predecessors. Even as Henrietta Maria encouraged
an artistic and literary cult of platonic love, several courtier-poets, such as
Carew and Suckling, wrote playful, sophisticated love lyrics that both alluded
to this fashion and sometimes urged a more licentiously physical alternative.
T h e religious tensions between the Caroline court's Laudian c h u r c h and
the Puritan opposition p r o d u c e d something of a culture war. In 1633 Charles
reissued the Book of Sports, originally published by his f a t h e r in 1618, pre-
scribing traditional holiday festivities and Sunday sports in every parish. Like
his father, he saw these recreations as the rural, downscale equivalent of the
court masque: harmless, healthy diversions for people who otherwise spent
most of their waking hours hard at work. Puritans regarded masques and rustic
dances alike as occasions for sin, t h e Maypole as a vestige of pagan phallus
worship, and Sunday sports as a profanation of the Sabbath. In 1632 William
Prynne staked out the most extreme Puritan position, publishing a tirade of
over one t h o u s a n d pages against stage plays, court masques, Maypoles, Lau-
dian c h u r c h rituals, stained-glass windows, mixed dancing, and other outrages,
all of which he associated with licentiousness, effeminacy, and the seduction
of popish idolatry. For this cultural critique, Prynne was stripped of his aca-
demic degrees, ejected from the legal profession, set in the pillory, sentenced
to life imprisonment, and had his books b u r n e d and his ears cut off. T h e
severity of the p u n i s h m e n t s indicates the perceived danger of the book and
the inextricability of literary and cultural affairs from politics.
Milton's astonishingly virtuosic early p o e m s also respond to the tensions of
the 1630s. Milton repudiated both courtly aesthetics and also Prynne's whole-
 INTRODUCTION / 125 1

sale prohibitions, developing reformed versions of pastoral, masque, and

hymn. In "On the M o r n i n g of Christ's Nativity," the birth of Christ coincides
with a casting out of idols and a flight of false gods, stanzas that suggest
contemporary P u r i t a n resistance to Archbishop Laud's policies. Milton's mag-
nificent f u n e r a l elegy "Lycidas" firmly rejects the poetic career of the Cavalier
poet, who disregards high artistic ambition to "sport with Amaryllis in the
shade / Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair." T h e poem also vehemently
d e n o u n c e s the establishment clergy, ignorant and greedy "blind m o u t h s " who
rob their flocks of spiritual n o u r i s h m e n t .

T H E R E V O L U T I O N A R Y ERA, 1640-60

Early in the morning on J a n u a r y 30, 1649, Charles Stuart, t h e d e t h r o n e d king

Charles I, set off across St. J a m e s Park for his execution, s u r r o u n d e d by a
heavy guard. He wore two shirts b e c a u s e the w e a t h e r was frigid, and he did
not w a n t to look as if he were shivering with fear to the t h o u s a n d s who had
gathered to watch him be b e h e a d e d . T h e black-draped scaffold had been
erected just outside James I's elegant Banqueting H o u s e , inside of which so
many court masques, in earlier decades, had celebrated the might of the Stuart
m o n a r c h s and assured t h e m of their people's love and gratitude. To those who
could not attend, newsbooks provided eyewitness a c c o u n t s of the dramatic
events of the execution, as they had of Charles's trial the week before. Andrew
Marvell also memorably describes the execution scene in "An Horatian Ode."
T h e execution of Charles I was understood at the time, and is still seen by
many historians today, as a watershed event in English history. H o w did it
come to pass? Historians do not agree over what caused "the English revolu-
tion," or, as it is alternatively called, the English civil war. O n e group argues
that long-term changes in English society and the English economy led to
rising social tensions and eventually to violent conflict. New capitalist modes
of production in agriculture, industry, and trade were o f t e n incompatible with
older feudal norms. T h e gentry, an affluent, highly e d u c a t e d class below the
nobility but above the artisans, mechanics, and yeomen, played an increasingly
important part in national affairs, as did the rich m e r c h a n t s in London; but
the traditional social hierarchies failed to grant t h e m the economic, political,
and religious f r e e d o m s they believed they deserved. Another group of histo-
rians, the "revisionists," emphasize instead short-term and avoidable causes of
the w a r — u n l u c k y chances, personal idiosyncrasies, and poor decisions m a d e
by a small group of individuals.
W h a t e v e r caused the outbreak of hostilities, there is no doubt that the
twenty-year period between 1640 and 1660 saw the e m e r g e n c e of concepts
central to bourgeois liberal thought for centuries to come: religious toleration,
separation of c h u r c h and state, f r e e d o m f r o m press censorship, and popular
sovereignty. These concepts developed out of bitter disputes centering on
three f u n d a m e n t a l questions: W h a t is the ultimate source of political power?
W h a t kind of c h u r c h government is laid down in Scripture, and therefore
ought to be settled in England? W h a t should be the relation between the
church and the state? T h e theories that evolved in response to these questions
contained the seeds of m u c h that is familiar in m o d e r n thought, mixed with
m u c h that is forbiddingly alien. It is vital to recognize that the participants in
the disputes were not haphazardly a t t e mp t i n g to predict the shape of m o d e r n
liberalism, but were responding powerfully to the most important problems of
1252 / THE EARLY S EV EN TEEN TH CENTURY

their day. T h e need to find right answers seemed particularly urgent for the
Millenarians a m o n g them, who, interpreting the upheavals of the time through
the lens of the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, believed that their day was very
near to being the last day of all.
W h e n the so-called Long Parliament convened in 1640, it did not plan to
execute a m o n a r c h or even to start a war. It did, however, want to secure its
rights in the face of King Charles's perceived absolutist tendencies. Refusing
merely to approve taxes and go h o m e , as Charles would have wished, Parlia-
m e n t insisted that it could remain in session until its m e m b e r s agreed to dis-
band. T h e n it set about abolishing extralegal taxes and courts, reining in the
bishops' powers, and arresting (and eventually trying and executing) the king's
ministers, the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud. T h e collapse of effective
royal government m e a n t that the m a c h i n e r y of press censorship, which had
been a C r o w n responsibility, no longer restrained the printing of explicit com-
mentary on contemporary affairs of state. As Parliament debated, therefore,
presses poured forth a flood of treatises arguing vociferously on all sides of
the questions ab o u t c h u r c h and state, creating a lively public f o r u m for polit-
ical discussion where n o n e had existed before. T h e suspension of censorship
permitted the development of weekly newsbooks that reported, and editorial-
ized on, c u r r e n t domestic events f r o m varying political and religious
perspectives.
As the rift widened between Parliament a n d t h e king in 1641, Charles
sought to arrest five m e m b e r s of Parliament for treason, and Londoners rose
in arms against him. T h e king fled to York, while the q u e e n escaped to t h e
C o n t i n e n t . Negotiations for compromise broke down over the issues that
would derail t h e m at every f u t u r e stage: control of the army and the c h u r c h .
On July 12, 1642, Parliament voted to raise an army, and on August 22 the
king stood before a force of two t h o u s a n d horse and foot at Nottingham,
u n f u r l e d his royal standard, and s u m m o n e d his liege m e n to his aid. Civil war
had begun. Regions of the country, cities, towns, social classes, and even
families f o u n d themselves painfully divided. T h e king set up court and an
alternative parliament in Oxford, to which m a n y in the H o u s e of Lords and
some in the H o u s e of C o m m o n s transferred their allegiance.
In the First Civil W a r (1642—46), Parliament and the Presbyterian clergy
that supported it had limited aims. They hoped to secure the rights of
the H o u s e of C o m m o n s , to limit the king's power over t h e army and the
c h u r c h — b u t not to depose h i m — a n d to settle Presbyterianism as the national
established c h u r c h . As Puritan armies moved through the country, fighting at
Edgehill, M a r s t o n Moor, Naseby, and elsewhere, they also u n d e r t o o k a cru-
sade to s t a m p out idolatry in English c h u r c h e s , smashing religious images and
stained-glass windows and lopping off the heads of statues as an earlier gen-
eration had done at the time of the English Reformation. Their ravages are
still visible in English c h u r c h e s and cathedrals.
T h e Puritans were not, however, a h o m o g e n e o u s group, as t h e 1643 Tol-
eration Controversy revealed. T h e Presbyterians w a n t e d a national Presbyte-
rian c h u r c h , with dissenters p u n i s h e d and silenced as before. But
Congregationalists, I n d ep e n d e n t s , Baptists, and other separatists opposed a
national c h u r c h and pressed for some m e a s u r e of toleration, for themselves
at least. T h e religious radical Roger Williams, just returned from N e w
England, argued that Christ m a n d a t e d the complete separation of c h u r c h and
state and the civic toleration of all religions, even R o m a n Catholics, Jews, and
 INTRODUCTION / 1253

Muslims. Yet to most people, the civil war itself seemed to confirm that people
of different faiths could not coexist peacefully. T h u s even as sects c o n t i n u e d
to proliferate—Seekers, Finders, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers,
Muggletonians, Ranters—even the most b road-minded of the age often
attempted to draw a line between w h a t was acceptable and w h a t was not.
Predictably, their lines failed to coincide. In Areopagitica (1644), J o h n Milton
argues vigorously against press censorship and for toleration of most Protes-
t a n t s — b u t for him, Catholics are beyond the pale. Robert Herrick and Sir
T h o m a s Rrowne regarded Catholic rites, a n d even some pagan ones, indul-
gently b u t could not stomach P u r i t a n zeal.
In 1648, after a period of negotiation and a brief Second Civil W a r , the
king's army was definitively defeated. His supporters were captured or fled
into exile, losing position and property. Yet Charles, imprisoned on the Isle of
Wight, remained a threat. He was a natural rallying point for those disillu-
sioned by parliamentary r u l e — m a n y people disliked Parliament's legal b u t
heavy taxes even m o r e than they had the king's illegal b u t lighter ones. Charles
repeatedly a t t e m p t e d to escape and was accused of trying to open the realm
to a foreign invasion. Some powerful leaders of the victorious N e w Model
Army took drastic action. They expelled royalists and Presbyterians, who still
wanted to c o me to an a c c o m m o d a t i o n with t h e king, f r o m the H o u s e of C o m -
m o n s and abolished the H o u s e of Lords. W i t h c o n s e n s u s assured by t h e pur-
gation of dissenting viewpoints, the army brought the king to trial for high
treason in t h e Great Hall of W e s t m i n s t e r .
After the king's execution, the R u m p Parliament, t h e part of the H o u s e of
C o m m o n s that had survived the purge, immediately established a n e w gov-
e r n m e n t "in the way of a republic, without king or H o u s e of Lords." T h e n e w
state was extremely fragile. Royalists and Presbyterians fiercely resented their
exclusion f r o m power and p r o n o u n c e d the execution of the king a sacrilege.
T h e R u m p Parliament and t h e army were at odds, with the army r a n k and file
arguing that voting rights ought not be restricted to m e n of property. T h e
Levelers, led by J o h n Lilburne, called for suffrage for all adult males. An asso-
ciated b u t more radical group, called the Diggers or T r u e Levelers, p u s h e d for
economic reforms to match t h e political ones. Their spokesman, Gerrard W i n -
stanley, wrote eloquent manifestos developing a Christian c o m m u n i s t pro-
gram. Meanwhile, Millenarians and Fifth M o n a r c h i s t s wanted political power
vested in the regenerate "saints" in preparation for t h e thousand-year reign of
Christ on earth foretold in the biblical Rook of Revelation. Quakers defied
both state and c h u r c h authority by refusing to take oaths and by preaching
incendiary sermons in open marketplaces. Most alarming of all, out of pro-
portion to their scant n u m b e r s , were the Ranters, who believed that b e c a u s e
God dwelt in t h e m n o n e of their acts could be sinful. Notorious for sexual
license and for public nudity, they got their n a m e f r o m their deliberate blas-
p h e m i n g and their p e n c h a n t for rambling prophecy. In addition to internal
disarray, the new state faced serious external threats. After Charles I s exe-
cution, the Scots and the Irish—who had not been consulted about the trial—
immediately proclaimed his eldest son, Prince Charles, t h e new king. T h e
prince, exiled on the C o n t i n e n t , was attempting to enlist the support of a major
European power for an invasion.
The formidable Oliver Cromwell, now u n d i s p u t e d leader of the army,
crushed external threats, suppressing rebellions in Ireland a n d Scotland. T h e
Irish war was especially bloody, as Cromwell's army massacred the Catholic
1254 / THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

natives in a frenzy of religious hatred. W h e n trade rivalries erupted with t h e

D u t c h over control of shipping lanes in the North Sea and the English C h a n -
nel, the new republic was again victorious. Yet the domestic situation
remained unstable. Given popular disaffection and the unresolved disputes
between Parliament and the army, the republic's leaders dared not call new
elections. In 1653 power effectively devolved u p o n Cromwell, who was sworn
in as Lord Protector for life u n d e r England's first written constitution. Many
property owners considered Cromwell the only hope for stability, while others,
including Milton, saw him as a c h a m p i o n of religious liberty. Although per-
secution of Quakers and Ranters continued, Cromwell sometimes intervened
to mitigate the lot of the Quakers. He also began a program to readmit Jews
to England, partly in the interests of trade but also to open the way for their
conversion, supposedly a precursor of the Last Day as prophesied in the Book
of Revelation.
T h e problem of succession remained unresolved, however. W h e n Oliver
Cromwell died in 1658, his son, Richard, was appointed in his place, but he
had inherited n o n e of his father's leadership qualities. In 1660 General George
M o n c k succeeded in calling elections for a new "full and free" parliament,
open to supporters of the m o n a r c h y as well as of the republic. T h e new Par-
liament immediately recalled the exiled prince, officially proclaiming him King
Charles II on May 8, 1660. T h e period that followed, therefore, is called the
Restoration: it saw the restoration of the m o n a r c h y and with it the royal court,
the established C h u r c h of England, and the professional theater.
Over the next few years, the new regime executed some of the regicides that
had participated in Charles I s trial a n d execution and harshly repressed rad-
ical Protestants (the Baptist J o h n Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress in prison).
Yet Charles II, who came to the t h r o n e at Parliament's invitation, could not
lay claim to absolute power as his f a t h e r had done. After his accession, Par-
liament retained its legislative supremacy and complete power over taxation,
and exercised some control over the king's choice of counselors. It assembled
by its own authority, not by the king's m a n d a t e . During the Restoration years,
the journalistic c o m m e n t a r y and political debates that had first flourished in
the 1640s r e m a i n e d forceful and open, and the first m o d e r n political parties
developed out of what had been the royalist and republican factions in the
civil war. In L o n d o n and in other cities, the m e r c h a n t classes, filled with
dissenters, retained their powerful economic leverage. Although the English
revolution was apparently dismantled in 1660, its long-term effects profoundly
changed English institutions and English society.

LITERATURE AND C U L T U R E , 1640-60

T h e English civil war was disastrous for the English theater. O n e of Parlia-
ment's first acts after hostilities began in 1642 was to abolish public plays and
sports, as "too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity." S o m e drama
continued to be written and published, b u t p e r f o r m a n c e s were rare and would-
be theatrical e n t r e p r e n e u r s had to exploit loopholes in the prohibitions by
describing their works as "operas" or presenting their productions in semipri-
vate circumstances.
As the king's government collapsed, the patronage relationships centered
upon the court likewise disintegrated. M a n y leading poets were s t a u n c h roy-
alists, or Cavaliers, who suffered considerably in the war years. Robert Herrick
 INTRODUCTION / 1255

lost his position; Richard Lovelace was imprisoned; Margaret Cavendish went
into exile. W i t h their usual networks of m a n u s c r ip t circulation disrupted,
many royalist writers printed their verse. Volumes of poetry by T h o m a s Carew,
J o h n D e n h a m , J o h n Suckling, J a m e s Shirley, Richard Lovelace, and Robert
Herrick appeared in the 1640s. Their poems, some dating from the 1620s or
1630s, celebrate the courtly ideal of the good life: good food, plenty of wine,
good verse, hospitality, and high-spirited loyalty, especially to the king. O n e
characteristic genre is the elegant love lyric, often with a carpe diem t h e m e .
In Herrick's case especially, apparent ease and frivolity masks a frankly polit-
ical subtext. T h e Puritans excoriated May Day celebrations, harvest-home fes-
tivities, and other time-honored holidays and "sports" as unscriptural,
idolatrous, or frankly pagan. For Herrick, they sustained a c o m m u n i t y that
strove neither for ascetic perfection nor for equality a m o n g social classes, but
that knew the value of pleasure in c e m e n t i n g social h a r m o n y and that incor-
porated everyone—rich and poor, unlettered and learned—as the established
c h u r c h had traditionally tried to do.
During the 1 640s and 1650s, as they faced defeat, the Cavaliers wrote mov-
ingly of the relationship between love and honor, of fidelity u n d e r duress, of
like-minded friends sustaining one a n o t h e r in a hostile environment. They
presented themselves as amateurs, writing verse in the midst of a life devoted
to more important matters: war, love, the king's service, the e n d u r a n c e of loss.
Rejecting the radical Protestant emphasis on the "inner light," which they
considered merely a pretext for p r e s u m p t u o u s n e s s and violence, the Cavalier
poets often cultivated a deliberately unidiosyncratic, even self-deprecating
poetic persona. T h u s the p o e m s of Richard Lovelace memorably express sen-
timents that he represents not as the u n i q u e insights of an isolated genius,
but as principles easily grasped by all honorable m e n . W h e n in "The Vine"
Herrick relates a wet dream, he not only laughs at himself but at those who
mistake their own fantasies for divine inspiration.
During the 1650s, royalists wrote lyric poems in places far removed from
the hostile centers of parliamentary power. In Wales, Henry Vaughan wrote
religious verse expressing his intense longing for past eras of i n n o c e n c e and
for the perfection of heaven or the millennium. Also in Wales, Katherine Phil-
ips wrote and circulated in m a n u s c r ip t poems that celebrate female friends in
terms normally reserved for male friendships. T h e publication of her p o e m s
after the Restoration brought Philips some celebrity as "the Matchless
Orinda." Richard Crashaw, an exile in Paris and Rome and a convert to Roman
Catholicism, wrote lush religious poetry that a t t e m p t e d to reveal the spiritual
by stimulating the senses. Margaret Cavendish, also in exile, with the q u e e n
in Paris, published two collections of lyrics when she r e t u r n e d to England in
1653; after the Restoration she published several dramas and a remarkable
Utopian romance, The Blazing World.
Several prose works by royalist sympathizers have b e c o m e classics in their
respective genres. T h o m a s Hobbes, the most important English philosopher
of the period, a n o t h e r exile in Paris, developed his materialist philosophy and
psychology there and, in Leviathan (1651), his unflinching d e f e n s e of absolute
sovereignty based on a theory of social contract. Some royalist writing seems
to have little to do with the contemporary scene, but in fact carries a political
charge. In Religio Medici (1642—43), Sir T h o m a s Rrowne presents himself as
a genial, speculative doctor who loves ritual and ceremony not for complicated
theological reasons, but because they move him emotionally. While he can
1256 / THE EARLY S EV EN TEEN TH CENTURY

sympathize with all Christians, even R o m a n Catholics, and while he recog-

nizes in himself many idiosyncratic views, he willingly submits his j u d g m e n t
to the C h u r c h of England, in sharp contrast to Puritans bent on ridding the
c h u r c h of its errors. Izaak Walton's treatise on fishing, The Complete Angler
(1653), presents a dialogue between Walton's persona, Piscator the angler,
and Venator the h u n t e r . Piscator, speaking like many Cavalier poets for t h e
values of w a r m h e a r t e d n e s s , charity, and inclusiveness, converts the busy, war-
like Venator, a figure for the Puritan, to the tranquil and contemplative pursuit
of fishing.
T h e revolutionary era gave new imp etus to women's writing. T h e circum-
stances of war placed w o m e n in novel, occasionally dangerous situations, giv-
ing t h e m u n u s u a l events to describe and prompting self-discovery. T h e
autobiographies of royalists Lady A n n e Halkett and Margaret Cavendish,
D u c h e s s of Newcastle, published after the Restoration, report their experi-
ences and their sometimes daring activities during those trying days. Lucy
H u t c h i n s o n ' s memoir of her h u s b a n d , Colonel J o h n H u t c h i n s o n , first pub-
lished in 1806, narrates m u c h of the history of the times f r o m a republican
point of view. Leveler w o m e n offered petitions and manifestos in support of
their cause and of their imprisoned h u s b a n d s . T h e widespread belief that the
Holy Spirit was moving in unexpected ways encouraged a n u m b e r of female
prophets: A n n a T r a p n e l , Mary Cary, and Lady Eleanor Davies. Their published
prophecies often carried a strong political critique of Charles or of Cromwell.
Q u a k e r w o m e n c a m e into their own as preachers and sometimes as writers of
tracts, authorized by the Q u a k e r belief in the spiritual equality of w o m e n and
men, and by the conviction that all persons should testify to whatever the
inner light c o m m u n i c a t e s to t h e m . M a n y of their memoirs, such as Dorothy
W a u g h ' s "Relation," were originally published both to call attention to their
sufferings and to inspire other Q u a k e r s to similar feats of moral fortitude.
While most writers during this period were royalists, two of the best, Andrew
Marvell and J o h n Milton, sided with the republic. Marvell wrote most of the
poems for which he is still r e m e m b e r e d while at N u n a p p l e t o n in the early
1650s, tutoring the daughter of the retired parliamentary general T h o m a s Fair-
fax; in 1657 he joined his friend Milton in the office of Cromwell's Latin
Secretariat. In Marvell's love p o e m s and pastorals, older convictions about
ordered h a r m o n y give way to wittily unresolved or unresolvable oppositions,
some playful, some painful. Marvell's conflictual worldview seems unmistak-
ably the p r o d u c t of the unsettled civil war decades. In his country-house poem
"Upon Appleton House," even agricultural practices associated with regular
changes of the season, like the flooding of fallow fields, b e c o m e emb lems of
unpredictability, reversal, and category confusion. In other poems Marvell
eschews an authoritative poetic persona in favor of speakers that seem limited
or even a bit unbalanced: a mower who argues for the values of pastoral with
disconcerting belligerence, a n y m p h w h o seems to exemplify virginal inno-
cence b u t also i m m a t u r e self-absorption and possibly u n c o n s c i o u s sexual per-
versity. Marvell's finest political poem, "An Horatian O d e u p o n Cromwell's
Return f r o m Ireland," celebrates Cromwell's providential victories even while
inviting sympathy for the executed king and warning ab o u t the potential dan-
gers of Cromwell's meteoric rise to power.
A promising, prolific young poet in the 1630s, Milton committed himself to
the English republic as soon as the conflict between the king and Parliament
began to take shape. His loyalty to the revolution remained unwavering despite
 INTRODUCTION / 1257

his disillusion w h e n it failed to realize his ideals: religious toleration for all
Protestants and the f r e e circulation of ideas without prior censorship. First as
a self-appointed adviser to the state, t h e n as its official defender, he addressed
the great issues at stake in the 1640s a n d the 1650s. In a series of treatises
he argued for c h u r c h disestablishment a n d for the removal of bishops, for a
republican government based on natural law and popular sovereignty, for the
right of the people to dismiss f r o m office and even execute their rulers, and,
most controversial even to his usual allies, in favor of divorce on the grounds
of incompatibility. Milton was a Puritan, b u t both his theological heterodoxies
and his poetic vision mark him as a distinctly u n u s u a l one.
During his years as a political polemicist, Milton also wrote several sonnets,
revising that small, love-centered genre to a c c o m m o d a t e large private and pub-
lic topics: a Catholic massacre of proto-Protestants in t h e foothills of Italy,
the agonizing questions posed by his blindness, various threats to intellectual
and religious liberty. In 1645 he published his collected English and Latin
poems as a c o u n t e r s t a t e m e n t to the royalist volumes of the 1640s. Yet his
most ambitious poetry remained to be written. Milton probably wrote some
part of Paradise Lost in the late 1650s and completed it after t h e Restoration,
encompassing in it all he had thought, read, and experienced of tyranny, polit-
ical controversy, evil, deception, love, and the need for companionship. This
cosmic blank-verse epic assimilates and critiques t h e epic tradition and Mil-
ton's entire intellectual and literary heritage, classical and Christian. Yet it
centers not on martial heroes b u t on a domestic couple who m u s t discover
how to live a good life day by day, in E d e n and later in t h e fallen world, amid
intense emotional pressures and the seductions of evil.
Seventeenth-century poetry, prose, and d r a m a retains its hold on readers
because so m u c h of it is so very good, fusing intellectual power, emotional
passion, a n d extraordinary linguistic artfulness. Poetry in this period ranges
over an astonishing variety of topics and modes: highly erotic celebrations of
sexual desire, passionate declarations of faith and doubt, lavishly embroidered
paeans to friends a n d benefactors, tough-minded assessments of social a n d
political institutions. English dramatists were at the height of their powers,
situating characters of u n p r e c e d e n t e d complexity in plays sometimes remorse-
lessly satiric, sometimes achingly moving. In these years English prose
becomes a highly flexible i n s t r u m e n t , suited to informal essays, scientific trea-
tises, religious meditation, political polemic, biography and autobiography,
and journalistic reportage. Literary forms evolve for the exquisitely m o d u l a t e d
representation of the self: dramatic monologues, memoirs, spiritual autobi-
ographies, sermons in which the p r e a c h e r takes himself for an example.
Finally, we have in Milton an epic poet w h o a s s u m e d the role of inspired
prophet, envisioning a world created by God b u t shaped by h u m a n choice and
imagination.

Additional information about the Early Seventeenth Century, including

primary texts and images, is available at N o r t o n Literature Online
(wwnorton.com/literature). Online topics are

• Gender, Family, H o u s e h o l d
• Paradise Lost in Context
• Civil W a r s of Ideas
• Emigrants and Settlers
 T H E EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

TEXTS CONTEXTS

1603 James I, Basililzon Doron reissued 1603 Death of Elizabeth I; accession of

James I. Plague
1604 William Shakespeare, Othello
J 605 Shakespeare, King Lear. Ben Jonson, 1605 Gunpowder Plot, failed effort by
The Masque of Blackness. Francis Bacon, Roman Catholic extremists to blow up
The Advancement of Learning Parliament
1606 Jonson, Volpone. Shakespeare,
Macbeth
1607 Founding of Jamestown colony in
Virginia

1609 Shakespeare, Sonnets 1609 Galileo begins observing the heavens

with a telescope

1611 "King James" Bible (Authorized

Version). Shakespeare, The Tempest. John
Donne, The First Anniversary 1. Aemilia
Lanyer, Salve Dens Rex Judaeorum

1612 Donne, The Second Anniversary 1 1612 Death of Prince Henry

1613 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of

Mariam
1614 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
1616 Jonson, Works. James I, Worlzs 1616 Death of Shakespeare

1618 Beginning of the Thirty Years War

1619 First African slaves in North

America exchanged by Dutch frigate for
food and supplies at Jamestown
1620 Bacon, Novum Organum 1620 Pilgrims land at Plymouth
1621 Mary Wroth, The Countess of 1621 Donne appointed dean of St. Paul's
Montgomery 's Urania and Pamphilia to Cathedral
Amphilanthus. Robert Burton, The Anatomy
of Melancholy
1623 Shakespeare, First Folio
1625 Bacon, Essays 1625 Death of James 1; accession of
Charles I; Charles I marries Henrietta Maria
1629 Charles 1 dissolves Parliament

1633 Donne, Poems. George Herbert, The 1633 Galileo forced by the Inquisition to
Temple recant the Copernican theory
1637 John Milton, "Lycidas"

1640 Thomas Carew, Poems 1640 Long Parliament called (1640-53).

Archbishop Laud impeached

1642 Thomas Browne, Religio Medici. 1642 First Civil War begins (1642-46).
Milton, The Reason of Church Gox'ernment Parliament closes the theaters

1643 Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline 1643 Accession of Louis XIV of France
of Divorce

1258
 TEXTS CONTEXTS

1644 Milton, Areopagitica

1645 Milton, Poems. Edmund Waller, 1645 Archbishop Laud executed. Royalists
Poems defeated at Naseby

1648. Robert Herrick, Hesperides and 1648 Second Civil War. "Pride's Purge" of
Noble Numbers Parliament

1649 Milton, The Tenure of Kings and 1649 Trial and execution of Charles I.
Magistrates and Eikonoklastes Republic declared. Milton becomes Latin
Secretary (1649-59)

1650 Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans

(Part II, 1655)

1651 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Andrew

Marvell, "Upon Appleton House"
(unpublished)
1652 Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54)
1653 Cromwell made Lord Protector

1658 Death of Cromwell; his son Richard

made Protector

1 6 6 0 Milton, Ready and Easy Way to 1660 Restoration of Charles II to throne.

Establish a Free Commonwealth Royal Society founded

1662 Charles II marries Catherine of

Rraganza

1665 The Great Plague

1666 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing 1666 The Great Fire

World
1667 Milton, Paradise Lost (in ten books).
Katherine Philips, Collected Poems. John
Dryden, Annus Mirabilis -

1671 Milton, Paradise Regained and

Samson Agonistes
1674 Milton, Paradise Lost (in twelve 1674 Death of Milton
books)

1681 Marvell, Poems, published

posthumously

1259