ELIZABETHAN AND PURITAN PERIODS

DRAMATIC NARRATIVE AND LYRIC

During the sixteenth century English life experienced a tremendous expansion. After the long and exhausting Wars of the Roses and the religious struggles of the Reformation, the return of peace and the triumph of Protestantism under Elizabeth stimulated patriotism and opened the way for important cultural influences from without. The Elizabethan age was characterized by a thirst for knowledge of the Greek and Latin Classics, an appetite for adventure and discovery, a love of beauty, and a longing for unlimited self-expression. The desire to make Classical culture prevail is called Humanism; the general broadening of interest, the Renaissance. These aspects of life and thought are mirrored with fidelity in literature. The drama, the chief glory of Elizabethan literature, reflects both in form and in subject-matter the tendencies of the age. The new joy of living finds expression in a host of lyric poems scattered through the anthologies, plays, and prose romances that have survived, the remains doubtless of a larger number. Though preserving traces of the older native tradition, English lyric poetry of the Renaissance owes much to the love poetry of France and Italy, which had already taken up and elaborated the Classical conventions. Narrative verse, notably Spenser's Faerie Queene, also shows a blending of native elements with material derived from French, Italian, or directly from Classical sources. The English Renaissance was essentially a poetic age. In fact, much of the prose of Lyly, Sidney, and others is fundamentally poetic. Prose deals with more varied themes than formerly, and the style becomes less awkward as the English language increases in polish and flexibility. Elizabethan prose represents the highest development of the older tradition and is enriched by foreign devices in style, such as Euphuism, and in form, such as pastoralism.

Even during the Renaissance the strongly moral tone of the English character at times reacted against the unrestrained love of beauty in all its forms which marked the period, and although the rich and varied humanity of English life did not wholly disappear after the death of Elizabeth, the dominant note became more and more the serious and severe dignity of the Puritan, until the return of Charles II in 1660 inaugurated a new era. After 1600 the drama decays, and in 1642 the theaters are closed by act of Parliament. Lyric poetry falls more and more definitely into two groups religious, composed under the influence of the spirited controversies between the Anglicans and the Puritans; and profane, carrying on, often with artificial elaboration, the themes of the preceding generation. Narrative poetry consists generally of long and usually uninspired romances or epics insignificant predecessors of Milton's Paradise Lost. Prose abandons the worldly subjects popular during the reign of Elizabeth, and deals generally with various aspects of the Christian religion. In the hands of such writers as Sir Thomas Browne the form is more significant than the content, the style attaining a magnificence scarcely to be equalled elsewhere in English prose. Out of the prose of the Puritan age develop, especially in the side-current of journalism, the beginnings of modern prose, which were to take definite form during the Restoration.

RENAISSANCE

POETRY